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Importance of cotton to England.

Of 8,651,000 bales delivered for European consumption in 1859, the Southern States supplied 2,880,000 bales. The total English consumption was 2,294,000, of which 1,907,000 was from the United States. Notwithstanding these large deliveries the stock on hand at the close of the year did not increase.

The London Cotton-Supply Reporter states that upwards of half a million workers are now employed in the English Cotton Factories, and it is estimated that at least four million persons in the country are dependant on the cotton trade for subsistence. Lancashire which, a century ago, contained a population of only 300,000, now numbers 2,300,000, an increase which exceeds that of any other equal surface of the globe in the same time, and is entirely owing to the development of the cotton trade. Says the Reporter: "If a war should at any time break out between England and America, a general servile insurrection take place, or the cotton crop fall short in quantity, our mills would be stopped for want of cotton, employers would be ruined, and famine would stalk abroad among the hundreds and thousands of working people who are at present fortunately well employed. Railways would cease to pay, and our ships would lie rotting in their ports, should a scarcity of the raw material for manufacture overtake us."

The London Times, commenting on a speech of Lord Beorgham, in the House of Lords, says: "The importation of cotton into this country has, since the import duty was abolished, increased sixteen fold. Having been 63,000,000 pounds, it is now 1,000,000,000 pounds. This is one of those giant facts which stand head and shoulders higher than the crowd — so high and so broad that we can neither overlook it nor affect not to see it. It proves the existence of a thousand smaller facts that must stand under its shadow. It tells of sixteen times as many mills, sixteen times as many English families living by working those mills, sixteen times as much profit derived from sixteen times as much capital engaged in this manufacture. It carries after it sequences of increased quantity of freights and insurances, and necessities for sixteen times the amount of customers to consume, to our profit, the immense amount of produce we are turning out. There are not many such facts as these, arising in the quiet routine of industrial history. It is so large and so steady that we can steer our national policy by it."

"If France should take to manufacturing on a large scale," adds the Times, "the present supply will not be enough. France will be competing with us in the foreign cotton markets, stimulating still further the produce of Georgia and South Carolina. The jump which the consumption of cotton in England has just made is but a single leap, which may be repeated indefinitely. There are a thousand millions of mankind upon the globe, all of whom can be most comfortably clad in cotton. Every year new tribes and new nations are added to the category of cotton wearers.--There is every reason to believe that the supply of this universal necessity will for many years yet to come fail to keep pace with the demand, and, in the interest of that large class of our countrymen to whom cotton is bread, we must continue to hope that the United States will be able to supply us in years to come with twice as much as we bought of them in years past. 'Let us raise up another market,' say the anti-slavery people. So say we all. We know very well that the possibility of growing cotton is not confined to the New World. The plains of Bengal grew cotton before Columbus was born, and we with our mechanical advantages, can actually afford to take the Bengal cotton from the growers and send it back to them in yarns and pieces cheaper than they can make it up. So, also, thousands of square miles in China are covered by the cotton plant, and some day we may perhaps repeat the same process there. Africa, too, promises us cotton. Dr.Livingstone found a country in which the growth was indigenous, and where the chiefs were very anxious to be taught how to cultivate it for a European market. There is no lack of lands and climate where cotton could be produced. It is said of gold that no substance in nature is more widely diffused and more omnipresent; but, unfortunately, it is diffused under conditions which make it seldom possible to win it with a profit. So it is with cotton. The conditions under which it becomes available for our markets are not often present in the wild cotton which our travelers discover; nor are they to be immediately supplied. Remember the efforts which the French have made to produce cotton in Algeria, the enormous prizes they offered, the prices at which they bought up all the produce, the care with which fabrics were prepared from these cottons at Rouen and exhibited at the Paris Exhibition, and then note the miserable result after so many years of artificial protection."

Let the reader observe these statements — all from English authorities — and ask if the man is not a sheer lunatic who supposes Great Britain will sit still and see the southern ports blockaded, and her supply of cotton cut off for a single month. The Black Republicans of both countries may talk of a cotton supply possible at some future time, in some undiscovered country, from free labor, but we ask in the language of the London Times, will they pretend that such a supply can be procured, ‘"within any reasonable time, to drive out of culture the slave-grown cotton of America?"’ That is precisely the question which they have now to face. At this moment, the storehouses of England have only a two months supply. Is England going to permit the Northern States to prevent that supply from reaching her shores? No! not for a month — not for one day nor one hour.

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