The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1842-12-09 00:00:00

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• XPN,

plates solely the exchange of manufactures for corn ; '
and by so doing necessarily limits the advantages to
be derived by the exporter. But is this the view of
the free trade manufacturer ? No : a wider prospect
of advantage is before his vision. He sees, in the
opening of British ports to the corn of the foreigner,
the means of bearing down, by means of cheapness of
production, the foreign manufacturer. With this aid,
he hopes to strike at his competitor over the wall of
protection with which he has striven to shield himself.
He will be able to meet the French, the Swiss, the
German, and the Saxon, not only in neutral markets
but in their own; and may almost hope to engross, as
the result, the commerce of the world.

And is not this, it will be asked, a prospect, for the
realisation of which we ought to pray ? Will you re-
fuse a measure which will set in motion every factory,
every loom, every forge, every branch of manufacturing
industry, throughout the length and breadth of the
land ? Will you refuse a measure which will cover
the seas with British shipping, and bear the name and
the power of `our country to every port in every
foreign clime, until the wealth of the whole world flows
into her lap ? We would not oppose a measure which
would have such results, if we did not see that it was
pregnant with evils infinitely more to be dreaded than
the premised good is to be prized. This magnificent
dream of avarice is to be realised, remember, by the
pauperising of the labouring classes. The wealth, of
the world is to glitter in the hands of the rich factory
lord, whilst the slaves who toil for it are sunk in
squalid misery. This expansion of trade is to be
achieved by means of cheap production; it is to be
achieved by the prostration of a portion, at least, of
the agricultural population, to the drudgery of the
manufacturing towns, or to a workhouse prison ; it is
to be achieved by the destruction of an aristocracy
such as few lands can boast of ; and, above all, it is to
be achieved by the absorption of our present graduated
form of society into one vast volcanic mass of human
passion and misery, whose eruption, in some wild hour,
will sweep away the very wealth they have stooped to
a worse than African bondage to create.
With such a conviction in our mind, that such a
state of things will inevitably be the one produced by
the realisation of the views of the free traders, we un-
hesitatingly say " NO" to their demands; and we say
it the more readily because we know the men who make
them !

We never anticipated that the Albion would address
itself to a solution of the question which, last week,
we put to him, and inform the world upon what
grounds he can justify impunity being conceded to the
efforts of the League to convert the recent outbreaks
in the manufacturing districts into a demonstration in
favour of the repeal of the corn-laws, when the effort
to convert those outbreaks into a demonstration in
favour of the charter is to be punished as sedition.
Our contemporary is wonderfully witty, as the world
is ready to acknowledge ; and we are perhaps as
" ponderous" as he chooses to consider us. if our
contemporary is emulous of being the "flibbertigibbet"
of the local press of Liverpool, we care not if we
occupy the character of " Wayland Smith." Our
contemporary may choose to laugh his way through
the world; we shall endeavour to advance the cause of
truth and justice : and perhaps our laughing philoso-
pher may be made to see, in the reward meted out to
ns, the-ultimate triumph of the "utile et dulce" over
the overweening and ridiculous.
On the present occasion we shall not be laughed
aside from our course. We challenged our contem-
porary to show us how the Government of Sir Robert
Peel, or any other government, could punish the
O'Connors and Scholefields for a breach of the law, in
endeavouring to use the turnout weavers of Ashton,
Staley-bridge, and Manchester, as instruments to ad-
vance the Chartist agitation, when the " ministers of
all denominations" are to be excused their plotting for
the purpose of using the same parties as instruments
of agitating for free trade in corn. If the Albion will
accept our challenge, and meet it, we pledge ourselves
to prove that, taking the effort to direct declared
insurrection to the carrying out of a political end to be
illegal, the reverend "ministers of all denominations"
are equally guilty with the worst of the Chartist agi-
tators ! If he will not meet us upon this question, the
public will draw their own conclusion.
The Albion remarks, somewhat boastfully, upon the
amount of his circulation, as compared with our own;
and assumes that we are splenetic whilst viewing our
inferiority in this respect. Our contemporary is too
good a judge, however, to conclude that circulation and
influence upon the public mind are synonymous,—
otherwise how is it that Whiggery, with such shining
and largely-radiating lights as the Albion and the
Mercury, is so wofully in the minority upon all public
questions agitated amongst our townsmen ? Men may
be amused with the twaddle of the Albion, who are
little moved by his arguments; and though we do, as
yet—owing to the hard fight which we have had to
encounter, and of which no one is better aware than
our contemporary—lag somewhat in his rear as to cir-
culation, yet we have to thank our Conservative
friends and the goodness of our cause, that, as an organ
of public opinion, the LIVERPOOL STANDARD is in-
creasing daily in power, in circulation, and in its com-
parative standing with the competing organs by which
it is surrounded.

As it is, we dare speak out honestly upon any public
question. We hold the candle to no party. We
never take refuge behind a sneer or a giggle from the
assaults of an opponent whom we cannot meet upon
the broad ground of truthful argument. When the
Albion can say this, we and the public shall place more
faith in his opinions, and the sincerity with which they
are entertained, than we, or they, can do now.

We are compelled to postpone until Tuesday any
remarks upon the important debate which occupies so
much of our space to-day, hut we will endeavour then
to do full justice to the subject, and the various gen-
tlemen who addressed themselves to it.