The cotton famine,
an important letter from Europe.
The following letter is from-the regular London correspondent of the New York Times.
As bear pig upon the question of European intervention, and coming from a source avoidably hostile to the cause of the Confederacy, it cannot be regarded otherwise than important:
London, Tuesday May 20, 1862.
The surrender of New Orleans and the evacuation of Yorktown have fallen upon the British public likewise very heavy claps of thunder.
The first event is a mystery no one pretend to explain.
We wait for further particulars.
As it now appears it is pregnant with alarm.
If gunboats can pass shore batteries and harbor defence, what city in the world is safe.
An iron-clad gunboat could ascend the Thames any day, and lying in the pool below London bridge, reduce the great metropolis to submission or to ashes.
But the same is true of New York, and of every city which lies upon the sea are navigable river.
There is a general giving up here, so far as military operations are concerned.
Mr. Spence holds out, but the Times surrenders.
The power of the North is too great to be resisted — the South must sooner or later be conquered.
The question now is, will they be subdued?
Will they give up a struggle so hopeless and accept such terms as their conqueror's may offer?
If so, there will soon be peace, commerce and cotton.
But what if the South still resist — burn cotton and tobacco — fall back ito the interior, and carry on the war as the Colonies did in 1776-78?
This is what Europe dreads, and must, if possible take measures to prevent.
If Southern ports be opened, and the planters will sell their cotton and bay goods, they may do as they please about the restoration of the Union.--There is sympathy with the South, but it is useless.
There is hatred of the North, but it determines no action.
Interest and interest alone will govern.--And what is that interest?
One-third of the cotton mills in England are idle, and more than another third are working short-handed or short time.--Short time means two or three days in a week.--The India cotton, which they are obliged to use, is so full of trash and waste, and so short in staple, that the extra time required to work it still further reduces the wages of the operatives.
More than a hundred thousand people in Lancashire are paupers.
Three times that number are on the verge of starvation.
The distress extends to the collieries, the shopkeepers, and every branch of trade.
Some have died of starvation; others are too far gone for help.
Insanity and horrible murder have begun their work in Manchester.
A father, driven to despair, killed his three children last week, and then murdered the landlord's agent, who had stripped him of his household furniture.
Meetings of working men began to be held.
A meeting of 6,000 at Ashton, a few days ago, demanded intervention.--And this demand will grow louder and louder, unless there is a prospect of peace and cotton.
And cotton there must be. Every promise of supply has been deceptive.
Loss cotton is on the way from India than there was years ago. China sends none. The supply from all other sources is but a drop in the bucket.
Day by day the small stock diminishes.
Day by day the want, the hunger, the wide-spread misery increases.
America feeds an army of more than half a million, but England has a still larger army, which the war has brought into conflict with a more terrible foe than the Southern Confederacy--hunger.
England is rich, but she cannot long bear the burdens thrown upon her. England has a wonderful power of almsgiving, but what aims are sufficient for such a calamity.
Private benevolence is over- tasked.
The war in America is costing England more money and more suffering than many a war of her own. What can you expect, then, when feeling and interest are alike against it. If it do not end in thirty days, there will be measures when to bring it to a close.--Your Washington correspondent, whose letter on the visit of M. Mercier to Richmond is copied in the Times. believes that France has called upon the Confederacy to surrender.
It is not credited here that the Emperor would give such advice.
It is very generally believed, and confidently stated, that his feelings would lead him to wish for a very different termination.
The English people look new with some hope for a speedy end of the war by a result they have all along declared impossible — the conquest of the South.
They are also looking for a tremendous financial crisis in the North.
The people of Europe cannot understand the manner in which a Government can go on month after month with the most lavish and enormous expenditures without revenue or taxation.
They predicted a failure of the war months ago, for the lack of means.
They do not see how it can go on and when stocks rise, and the public credit grows stronger, they compare it to the South Sea bubble and the railway mania and are looking for the crash then they think must inevitably follow.
But all calculations have failed and all expectations been disappointed.
I can make no claim to infallibility; but I have been to Lancashire and looked upon its suffering and distress.
It is heartrending in its character and appalling in its extent.
No one can tell what may be the result.
The Government may be forced to action which it does not now contemplate.
Half a million of people reduced to starvation is a volcano that may burst into eruption.
The Irish starved peacefully, because it is said, they were used to starvation.
The operatives of Lancashire have not been accustomed to it. They know that the Government could give them relief — the only relief they desire — labor.
It would not be strange if they should demand help in a manner that no Government could resist.
The first sign of action will be a change of administration unless the present Government chooses to avoid such a change by a change of policy.
But it cannot escape your observation that the only organs of public opinion here favorable to the North have been the extreme liberal papers, while the entire moderate conservative and Tory press has been in sympathy with the South, and the more violently and decidedly Tory the paper, the stronger has been its opposition to the Union.
Intervention on the American Continent has commenced in Mexico.
According to present appearances, England and Spain have withdrawn from the field, and left the Emperor free to establish an Austrian monarchy on the Southern border of the United States.
There is some jealousy and mortification here, but England puts the best face she can upon it, for it is useless to complain.
But intervention, on the part of France, has become a habit.
When a man places himself at the head of civilization, and believes that he has a mission to regulate the universe, what can you expect?
It will be some days before this reaches you. I cannot tell what has happened in the ten days past, nor what will be done in the ten days to comes in America, before this comes to hand; but I shall be much surprised if the action of M. Mercier do not prove to be but the prelude to some further and more important action.
It is said that the Emperor has been very much annoyed at the consequence given to the young scions of the House of Orleans by our Government, and their position on the staff of the late Commander-in-Chief of the American armies.
Perhaps it did not strike Mrs. Lincoln as an indelicate proceeding; but if it had been done by any European Power it would have been an insult.
How would Victor Emanuel like to see the Ex-King of Naples occupying a similar position in the French army?
There is a story that the Emperor expressed his dissatisfaction in this matter to Archbishop Hughes in no equivocal terms.
It is to be hoped that the amiable prelate was able to make a satisfactory explanation.
The international Exhibition feels the pressure of the times.
The receipts of last week were less than one-half these of the corresponding week of the Exhibition of 1861.
It opens slowly, and will not be fully in order until the 1st of June, when the great body of the people will be invited to come for a shilling.
In ordinary times there would be crowded excursions from the manufacturing districts.
This year they cannot be looked for. They will have hard work in all the North to keep from dying from hunger.
All eyes are turned to America.
The Pope.
Victor Emanuel, and all European interests, are forgotten.
Prosperity or adversity, peace or war, life or death, depend upon the events now taking place in Virginia and the Southwest.
If the North is to conquer, it must be soon.
England cannot bear a protracted struggle.
There will be interaction if there is not peace. Monadnock.
