The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser. — 1838-09-07 (Liverpool, Merseyside, England)

MURDERER. We go no farther. 'We should  think special pleading after this a mockery upon the common sense of the public. But the point upon which he erects the whole superstructure of tirade against us is at once a lamentable proof of the weakness of his cause and the shallowness of his judgment. Garrick, he says, was no monk,—he was an impostor,—the supposition was upon his own assertion. Be itso. We are glad of it; for it puts beyond question or cavil every syllable of what we gave expression to on the subject. We care not whether he wore cowl or bat, cassock or broadcloth—whether he were in or out of orders—so we  have the fact, that he had power to palm himself upon the credulity of an ignorant and superstitious people as a religious character—as an individual who bound himself by vow and profession to the service and ministry of the Most High—and who, by the sanctity and veneration attached by a hood• winked people to such attributes, was enabled to drive a long and successful trade of villany and fraud upon their gullibi lity and blindness—so we have this fact, and we have all we contended for in our former article; and so far from having crippled us in the least by his industry in proving his " hail fellow, well met" Garrick an impostor, swindler, or what he wills, the more he strengthens and corroborates the very meaning and purpose of our observations. The deduction which we sought to draw from the act (and we sincerely thank the Albion for enabling us thus to recur to it) was as to the state of ignorance, superstition, and moral, as well as physical debasement, of the majority of the people of Ireland, which thus/nakes them the prey and dupes of every unprincipled knave who gets up a religious or political aritifice with which to swindle them. From O'Connell down to the lowest village demagogue—from the insolent and imperious APHale down to the murderer Garrick—the staple commodity of their successful jugglery and craft lies in the mental prostration and imbecility of the people- It is thus that it matters not that we know O'Connell and his base swarm of agitators to be knaves and hypocrites, or that time has tested 1114-lale and his crew to be impostors and vagabonds, neither the one nor the other of them would find their calling so profitable or so enduring as it is, unless the great body of the people, upon whom they feed and fatten, were so kept and tied down in the debasement of unqualified ignorance and vicious superstition as to leave them incapable of making one exertion to shake off the vermin. And another deduc• tion we sought to make was this—" the peril to the people of England of such neighbours and fellow-subjects"—the danger of the spread of such pestilential notions of governments, and liberty, and right, which would grow up from such mushroom beds as those. We may be honest and virtuous; but if we live in communication with profligacy and vice, we hazard the name of the one and corrupt the- integrity of the other. We say again—no matter what may be the characters of the men who lead and mislead the misguided population of Ireland—the misery and the mischief of the thing is found in the intellectual darkness of the majority ; and no matter whether the imposition•display itself in sedition, treason, disaffection, and conspiracv, on the one band, or delusion, profligacy, and blood on the other, it arises from the same cause, and  is perpetrated by the same means, while the eventual peril is not to that country but to this Ireland can scarce be worse, but England may. Let us attentively gaze upon the horizon of coming events, and we shall see enough there to startle and to warn us.