The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1842-07-22 00:00:00

highway

A flock of geese did on

save th,

Roman capitol; but we should as little expect to hear
of a tribe of donkeys being taught to bray most mu-
sically by WiThem's system as to see the intricacies of
the present disastrous condition of England unravelled
by such stilted or muddy philosophers.
Seven years ago we revelled in prosperity—commer-
cial, manufacturing, and monetary. We projected
railways, which have since absorbed seventy millions of
capital. We threw away millions more, with the
recklessness of madmen, in foreign mines, in joint
stock schemes at home and abroad, of every imagina-
ble degree of folly. We lent our millions to every
bankrupt state throughout the old world and the new.
At home, loom was added to loom, factory to factory,
chimney to chimney, until we dwelt at length " in a
murky, simmering tophet of copperas fumes, cotton
fuz, gin, riot, wrath, and toil"; and called this reck-
less gambling, squandering, and improvidence—PßO-
SPEßlTY ! The markets of the world were opened
to us. India, America, China, the East and the West,
cried out to us, or were said to cry, for our products.
We satisfied their craving importunity. We could at
the rate we then progressed have satisfied by this the
craving of THREE WORLDS SUCH AS OUR OWN !
We shook the paper rags of our joint stock banks in
the face of the wondering states of Europe ; and, in
our drunken frenzy, we told them that these, which
had made every petty owner of a loom-shoop into the
lord of a factory—which had made petty retailers of
soap and candles into foreign merchants—which had
raised scheming attorneys or beggared tradesmen into
bank, mine, or railway directors—which had promoted
men of cotton and calico from fried bacon and pota-
toes to turtle and venison—from buttermilk or beer to
claret and champagne--from a cottage in the back
lanes of Bolton or the smoke canopied streets of Man-
chester to a villa or a place, and, how often ! to a
HALL in some embowered retreat where they could
" babble of green fields ;—these paper rags, under
whose magical influence nothing that is ignorant, vul-
gar, and beggarly

" But did suffer a rare change
Into something rich and strange,"

we held up in the face of the world, and with idiot
laughter proclaimed the belief that they would enable
us to carpet its green face with our productions, and
hang calicoes and Manchester prints upon every tree
in every clime to which the winds could waft them !

We were PROSPEROUS then—so at least we were
told by the very gentlemen who clamour now so loudly
upon the subject of distress which has come upon us,—
by the Liberals, par excellence,—by corn law agita-
tors,—by philosophers, who have a panacea ready for
the radical cure of those very evils which seven years,
aye, and less than seven years ago, they could not even
foresee ! We enjoyed then, at least, MANUFACTURING
PROSPERITY. We spun, wove, dyed, and printed for
the whole world. We undersold every competitor in
every market. The Potters, the Cobdens, the Ash-
worths, the Brookses, et hoc genus omne, raked toge-
ther gold in spadesful ; sprung from their dunghills
into the seats of the aristocracy of our land; scram-
bled into parliament ; hung around the Board of Trade
for sops with all the earnestness of veteran placemen ;
badgered the doors of the Home-office for dignities,
to gild withal the rotten materials from which their
greatness had been patched together. These men'could
not see that their boasted prosperity was but a cheat-
ing dream. Yet these are the men, we are told, who
alone are politically wise ! These men, in their day of
fancied success, saw in the poor workman from whose
toil, in the factory or the loom-shop, the mine or the
print-works, their state was pampered, the mere ma-
chine for whose regulation in working order and due
subjection a coarser kind of food, a new poor law,
union bastiles, a Bens-d'armerie, must be provided ; yet
it is they who are now the exclusive friends of the
working man ! By these men it was that, one week af-
ter it was proved to the satisfaction of a committee of
parliament that, in the midst of manufacturing prospe-
rity, the hand-loom weavers of Lancashire were in a
state bordering upon starvation, the INFAMOUS SUG-
GESTION was made to the poor law commission to de-
luge the whole manufacturing districts with the PAUPER
LABOUR of the south of England!—(Edmund Ash-
worth, of Bolton, stand forward and answer this
charge !); and yet such men, who in their very pros-
perity—in the very midst of their money getting—put
into operation the giant energies of the Somerset-house
despotism, to reduce the cost of manufacturing labour,
are at this moment the foremost in their disgusting,
canting, hypocritical professions of sympathy Nvith the
wretched people whom their own grasping avarice has
ruined! WHIG SYMPATHY WITH POPULAR SUF-
FERING ! The sympathy of the vampire with the
writhing of the half breathing form whose blood it has
just drained.

It is not surely from such men that England in her
day of tribulation will accept advice or aid. Venal,
selfish, treacherous are they all. The very measures
which they seek, in the hour of his great necessity, to
impose upon the judgment of the poor man, are de-
vised in treachery and fraud—for the benefit of the
liberal merchant and the liberal millocrat, and not for
that of the suffering people whom they gull at their
gatherings, and strive to stimulate to frenzy and out-
rage. The repeal of the corn laws—the Alpha and
Omega of their political wisdom—what is it but a hol-
low scheme to bring about a few years more of the
same description of PROSPERITY (!) which visited us
seven years ago—to enable a few more Cobdens and
other fungi to grow up amongst us and strengthen
until the odour of the soil from which they have
arisen is rendered imperceptible by a covering of gold
—when the vast fabric will again be prostrated, and
ruin and desolation, wider and deeper than even now
they are, with a social earthquake to darken their hor-
rors, must be precipitated upon our heads ? No-
thing! The whole course of remedy propounded by
Whig philosophy we pledge ourselves to prove at once
SELFISH, FRAUDULENT AND REVOLUTIONARY !