Save the sovereign herself, there was no woman in England whose death would have affected the whole country so deeply. Statesmen recalled the days when the Duchess of Kent was left alone in a strange land, without means, disliked by the reigning king, and weighed down by the responsibility of educating a child to stand at the head of the nation. In the character of their sovereign, they saw proof of the able, devoted, conscientious manner in which this sacred duty had been performed; and the address of sympathy sent by Parliament to the sorrowing Queen was as sincere as if it had been written by a personal friend, and not by a body of lawmakers. "It is a great sorrow to me not to have Feodore with me now," wrote the Queen to King Leopold; but neither he nor the Princess Hohenlohe was able to be present at the last services. "I cannot imagine life without her," said the Queen sadly; but nevertheless, life had to go on. Others may sometimes stop to mourn, but the duties of a sovereign may not be neglected even for sorrow. A new cause of anxiety had arisen that came nearer home than even the sufferings of the Crimean soldiers. War had broken out in the United States, and the supply of cotton to England was rapidly diminishing. If the cotton supply failed entirely, the mills of England would have to stop; many thousands of spinners and weavers would have no work; and the sufferings of the manufacturing districts would be intense. The government made an earnest effort to increase the amount of cotton imported to England from India; but the emergency was so sudden that even during the first few months of the war, there were many honest, hard-working people in England who were sorely in need.