The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1842-04-29 00:00:00

actual income only

Nothing, certainly, in the course of this debate, was
advanced from the ministerial benches which at all al-
ters our views with respect to the justice of the claims
put forward for a modification of the machinery of the
bill to meet the objections urged. It is replete with
injustice in its present shape; and we do trust, and,
from his language, we almost hope, that, upon recon-
sideration, Sir Robert Peel will be induced to deviate
in this instance, which is one of mere detail, from the
inflexibility with which he has maintained the general
principle of the measure. There is no reason why
mere machinery of collection should be strained so ri-
gidly as to involve the perpetration of wrong; and we
cannot at all discover the immense difficulty of effect-
ing its adaptation, without impairing the general prin-
ciple, to every case which can possibly arise.

Our contemporary the Liverpool Times, when greatly
moved, is in the habit—a most unphilosophical one—
of indicating the soreness of his mind by an immediate
resort to bad languge, as ragged urchins in the street
resort to the nearest kennel for their missiles. We did
but remark in our last—with that extreme good temper

which we always use towards the sage of Castle-street—

upon the mingled absurdity and malice of his continual
attacks upon the excellent members for this borough;
and for so doing our contemporary forthwith attempts
to smother us with a volley of twaddle and abuse, to
which the explosion of an enraged fishwife would have
been calmness itself. We did but express our pro-
found pity for the statesmen and the party upon whom
the advocacy of the Times is inflicted; and forthwith

our contemporary nibs his pen, turns up his cuffs,
rummages amongst the incongruous materials—the
odds and ends—which constitute his store of available
knowledge, and exhausts upon our devoted heads a
perfect flood of the choicest Billingsgate, with scraps

of all the political economists, jumbled together, like
the contents of a beggarman's wallet, and well nigh as

savoury

We have really, if even we possessed any ability in
that line, no desire to fight our contemporary with the
description of weapons of which he is so enamoured.
" Fine words," they say, " butter no parsnips ;" and
hard ones we know, by experience, break no heads.
We shall not therefore retort that the Times is either

so " ignorant,"

so " senseless," so " indiscreet," or
so " brazen" as he has declared ourselves to be ; but
we must, nevertheless, hint to him, again, our own pri-
vate impression that, with all his pretension, and with
all the malice combined with it, which he undoubtedly
possesses, he is, nevertheless, except to those whose
cause and whose measures he undertakes to advocate,
as harmless and as very a twaddler as is at this moment
to be found in the entire " liberal" ranks—and that is
saying no smi]l thing.

Upon the occasion which called for those remarks
from us, which have so disquieted our serene contem-
porary, Lord Sandon had maintained, in his place in
the House of Commons, that the modification of the
corn and sugar duties, proposed by Lord John Rus-
sell's immortal budget, could not he depended upon to
produce revenue. In very cheap seasons, his lordship
contended, a fixed duty of Bs. upon wheat would pro-
duce no revenue, because importation would not take
place. If we mistake not, the very same doctrine was
maintained by the supporters themselves of the ex-
ministerial measures ; and it was by them contended
that when wheat was cheap and importations ceased,
(as they would cease if the Bs. duty was, as it was said
to be, a protection to the farmer from the reduction of
prices below the cost of production,) the loss thus sus-
tained would be made up from the increase upon other
branches of the revenue. Lord John's very discreet
advocate, however, was not content to stand upon his
own patron's ground ; but in his senseless hostility to
the noble representative for the borough of Liverpool,
like all bungling partizans, he tripped up the heels of
the small trickster whose ally he aspired to become, by
blurting out the unwelcome admission that even in the
case of the most plentiful harvest, the price of foreign
corn was always 15s. or 20s. below the cost of produc-
tion to the British farmer. Surely Lord John Rus-
sell, who maintains that an Bs. duty is a protection to
the home grower, in such states of the market, or the
Times, who thus proves that it is none, must be wrong ;
and Lord Sandon may very well be pardoned for
thinking even his little lordship's authority better than
that of our contemporary. The public, at all events,
are of this opinion.

We shall not attempt to analyse the twaddle by
which the Times attempts to substantiate the correct-
ness of his unfortunate blunder, but proceed to his
wriggling effort to get out of his denial that Lord John
Russell himself actually contemplated the abortiveness
of the attempt to levy any duty when high prices ren-
der the admission of foreign corn really a boon to
the consumer. Our contemporary says that the asser-
tion made by us, that such was his lordship's admis-
sion, "is absolutely untrue." We shall abstain from
remarking upon the extreme politfness of the language
in which this brazen and reckless denial is made. The
fact is notorious that, during this very session of par-
liament, his lordship has deliberately recorded his opi-
nion that such remission must take place, and fixed
the point at which it must take place ! It is not, how-
ever, worth our while now to wade through the volu-
minous rubbish uttered upon this subject since the
opening of parliament, to find the precise occasion on
which the admission in question was made; but we
shall at once prove this " absolutely untrue assertion"
of ours to be absolutely the reverse, upon our contem-
porary's own shewing. In the very next sentence to
the piece of insolence which we have quoted, the
Times himself admits that " Lord John Russell did
undoubtedly propose to give the Government the
power of remitting the duty in ' extreme cases,' "
which extreme cases are just those in which we main-
tained that he had proposed that they should possess it.
But enough, and more than enough, in reply to this
shallow partizan. Before we part from him, however,
let us recommend to our contemporary, if he will be
occasionally offensive, to imitate the patient endurance,
under chastisement, of the inoffensive quadruped whose
bray he so sedulously imitates. In place of the prac-
tice of resorting to the Billingsgate vocabulary, we
would strongly recommend him, on every occasion
when we or any other persons are so unhappy as to
offend his sensitive feelings, the employment of a he-
rald—(a newsboy with a tin horn, or the town bell-
man)—whose duty it should be to announce to all the
lieges, not that " the King drinks to Hamlet," but—
that " the Times is ill at ease, has quarrelled with his
gruel, and is dangerous ! "

At a late special meeting of the Council our readers
will remember that a resolution of the Watch Com-
mittee to establish an
experimental haymarket in Mo-
nument-place, London-road, was postponed for the
consideration of the Council at their next monthly
meeting. On Wednesday, we are informed, a motion
will be brought forward by Mr. Bushell to negative the
proposition altogether ; and we certainly do hope that
the majority of our local legislators will not for a mo-
ment hesitate in giving to that motion their decided
support, and thus protect from wanton deterioration
the mass of valuable property, certain to be severely
affected by the carrying out of a scheme which is
crotchety and uncalled for, if it is no worse.
What weighty arguments, in favour of the establish-
ment of a market in this particular locality, can be
urged we are yet to learn. The neighbourhood of the
Monument is certainly not the position for a southern
inarket, to supersede that which has so recently been

established and proved an utter failure. If the inha-
bitants of the south end of the town will not come to
the present market, they will scarcely be disposed to go
further north to Monument-place. As a substitute,
then, for the neglected south market, this experimental
affair is a somewhat singular one; and we cannot but
suspect that there is something insidious lurking in
the background of the proposition. Has a certain
worthy alderman one of his favourite projects in pre-
paration ? Is the present merely a prelude to a bolder
and more sweeping innovation ? If it is, let the people
of Liverpool be indulged with the whole truth—with
the plans, details and cost, which we are informed this
eminent schemer has ready cut-and-dry in his pocket—
and not thus be drawn blindfold into the ulterior
adoption of an expensive scheme which its concocter
is ashamed or afraid to offer for their deliberate exami-