The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser. — 1846-03-10 (Liverpool, Merseyside, England)

ISAAC BUCIIAD:AN  P.S.—I communicate a copy of this, and all my other letters, to the Government in London, for NOW IS THE TIME ; and we have especially to meet with stern contempt Mr. Ilume's motion "with the view of making the colonies of some use hereafter to England, as they had been none in the past!" This iz meant ju-t to try to frighten us from resistance to Sir Robert Peel's suicidal • measure. I. B.  It must strike_our readers as tolerably plain, from the expression of such sentiments by a gentleman holding the distinguished station and possessing the influence which Mr. Buchanan exercises in the country of his adoption, that, so far as Canada is concerned, the loss to Great Britain of the usefulness in the first instance, and ultimately of the allegiance, of those noble possessions must be the inevitable result of the carrying out in full of the Free-trade policy, upon which we have fatally embarked. Vast enough are the evils which must attend the cession of that colony. We thus extirpate the last remnant of well-regulated monarchical institutions in the American continent ; and virtually proclaim to the miserable in every state of Europe that such institutions are fit only for them—are fit only for countries whose industry is steeped in wretchedness. But we resign more than this, great as is the sacrifice. We proclaim as worthless and untenable the tie which binds together this country and her whole colonial empire, We throw from us the only markets in exchange for whose valuable products we can rely upon furnishing returns, of which British labour is the greatest component part. In Canada we give away boundless tracts of virgin soil in the healthiest climate in the world; and in our tropical possessions we resign, wickedly and wantonly, opportunities and instruments which an Almighty Creator appears to have bestowed upon us for the purpose of working out the great problem of the cultivation of the soil of such climes and the gathering in of their riches, unsoiled by human blood, and uncursed with the taint of slavery. _ _ _  In resigning, moreover, to their fate our possessions in temperate climes—in Canada, in Australia, and other lands for whose cultivation the constitution of British subjects is fitted—we give up the only patrimony of the poor of our own count ry ; we break many a hope which looks forward from penury and suffering, as the reward of their unremitting toil at home, to comfort and competence in those far off lands, whither friends and relatives have gone before them and are thriving beneath the fostering care and protection of British laws. To the inmates of many a sad and desolate cottage in these realms, who are, at this moment, pining and struggling to realise that hope, and to transport their labour into these fertile possessions, the news of this direful change in our policy, will be a blow which must prostrate all their bright anticipations, and fall upon their stricken hearts with a weight which can only be withdrawn when the kind hand of death releases the immortal portion of their being from the dross which binds it to earth.