To meet this state of things, COTTON IS KING was written. The mad folly of the Burns' case, at Boston, in 1854, proved, conclusively, that white men, by the thousand, stood prepared to provoke a collision between the North and the South. The eight hundred men who volunteered at Worcester, and proceeded to Boston, on that occasion, with banner flying, showed that such a condition of public sentiment prevailed; while, at the same time, the sudden dispersion of that valorous army, by a single officer of the general government, who, unaided, captured their leader and bore off their banner, proved, as conclusively, that such philanthropists are not soldiers--that promiscuous crowds of undisciplined men are wholly unreliable in the hour of danger. The author would here repeat, then, that the main object he had in view, in the preparation of COTTON IS KING, was to convince the abolitionists of the utter failure of their plans, and that the policy they had adopted was productive of results, the opposite of what they wished to effect;--that British and American abolitionists, in destroying tropical cultivation by emancipation in the West Indies, and opposing its promotion in Africa by Colonization, had given to slavery in the United States its prosperity and its power;--that the institution was no longer to be controlled by moral or physical force, but had become wholly subject to the laws of Political Economy;--and that, therefore, labor in tropical countries, to supply tropical products to commerce, and not insurrection in the United States, was the agency to be employed by those who would successfully oppose the extension of American Slavery: for, just as long as the hands of the free should persist in refusing to supply the demands of commerce for cotton, just so long it would continue to be obtained from those of the slave. It will be seen in the perusal of the present edition, that Great Britain, in her efforts to promote cotton cultivation in India and Africa, now acts upon this principle, and that she thereby acknowledges the truth of the views which the author has advanced. It will be seen also, that to check American slavery and prevent a renewal of the slave trade by American planters, she has even determined to employ the slaves of Africa in the production of cotton: that is to say, the slavery of America is to be opposed by arraying against it the slavery of Africa--the petty chiefs there being required to force their slaves to the cotton patches, that the masters here may find a diminishing market for the products of their plantations.