The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser. — 1843-09-05 (Liverpool, Merseyside, England)

THE MERCURY ON THE MINISTRY.  Our contemporary of Friday has had a fit of such unusual liveliness upon him this week, that we have been able, not only to read his lucubrations,—a task of no small magnitude—but to read them without yawning! With one or two portions indeed of an article, in which the measures of the past session of parliament are reviewed, we have been so amused that we cannot resist giving to our readers a specimen or two. Speaking of the condition of Ireland, the Mercury sagely, and with a gravity peculiar to him, remarks :  " The course which Mr. O'Connell is pursuing will very soon force the alternative upon every man in the kingdom, of choosing between a whig government and civil war.' Sad choice between two evils! The choice of a whig ministry, which the mass of the Irish people would reject with contempt and aversion, as " base, bloody, and brutal,—which the Demagogue himself would either treat as his abject slaves, or spurn with his foot from the path of his bad ambition ;—a whig ministry which would foster rebellion, fatten and feed traitors, unloose the prison doors of murderers and felons of all degrees of criminality, or—CIVIL WAR, most wise contemporary ? Not so—not so ! To hurry forward such a catastrophe a whig ministry would be the best of all appliances! With so imbecile a thing to contend against, rebellion would soon indeed throw off its mask, and rush to the field and to bloodshed. The alternatives, which we have to choose between, are vigorous measures and civil war; a whig ministry might retard the latter, but would render its advent inevitable, and its success decisive !  But with respect to the Trish arms bill, our contemporary is still more rich and rare in his absurdity. " The Irish arms bill," he remarks, " was a disgraceful proof of the unpopularity of Sir Robert Peel's government in Ireland." Of what were the various arms bills passed in the days of whig supremacy proof? " A whig government," he continues, " could have a fforded (!) to relinquish that bill if opposed." We don't know, by the bye, what a whig government could not afford to relinquish if opposed, or what they would not relinquish to secure place and pay. But the reason assigned for such relinquishment is most rich of all. Under a whig ministry " the arms used would lam been used for legitimate or insignificant purposes"—(are assassination and midnight robbery of arms insignificant ?; ;—" but the Tory government could not do so, because they flared that an armed nation might start up against them, like the volunteers of 1782." Of course a whig government has no such difficulty—no such fears. The rising of "an armed nation" would not be necessary against a government prepared to concede all that faction or treason could demand. An armed nation, rising to coerce a whig government, would be about as utter an absurdity as a levy en masse of all the men, women, boys, cats, and dogs of the empire, to kill a poor score of blue-bottles, entangled amongst the sweets of a treacle pot ! Poor Mercury . with what zeal he endeavaurs to forget, and to fancy that the world forgets, the history of whig misrule in Ireland—its arms bills and coercion bills—and the scorching contempt which has been levelled against its wretched imbecility, and glaring and desperate corruptness, by the very man, and the very people, whom he now assumes to be anxious to accept of that miserable effigy of a government—that pitiful and paltry scarecrow— that empty and hollow mockery—A