‘The dreary totals which Mr. Gladstone’s eloquence illuminates, and the rolling numerals of the National Debt, become almost insignificant beside the figures which this statement (the statistics of the cotton trade) involves. Arithmetic itself grows dizzy as it approaches the returns of the cotton trade for 1860. One hundred years back, and the cotton manufactures of England had been valued at £200,000 a year. Had not French, American, and Russian wars--had not railways and telegraphs, had their part and lot in this century, surely it would be known as the Cotton Age. This year, 1860, was the _annus mirabilis_ of King Cotton. In this year his dependents were most numerous and his throne most wide. There was no Daniel at hand to interpret to him the handwriting on the wall, which within twelve months should be read by all who ran, in letters of blood. What cared he? An argosy of ships bore him across every sea and into every port. He listened to the humming of his spindles and to the rattle of his looms; he drank of the fulness of his power and was satisfied, for he was great--yes, very great.... The total value of their (the manufacturers’) exports for the year amounted to £52,012,380. If figures can ever be magnificent--if naked totals ever reach to the sublime--surely the British cotton trade for the year 1860 claims our admiration. Its production for this single year equalled in value £76,012,380, or nearly six millions more than the gross revenue of the kingdom for the same period.’ Surely the land which was the chief home of this monster trade deserved the title of ‘The Land of Plenty,’ and such it was--‘a goodly land,’ in fact, if not in outward show, ‘a land flowing with milk and honey,’ or at least their modern English equivalents--a land where wealth was profuse--where masters and men vied with each other in pride of bearing and dogged independence of spirit. Such was that rough, dark land at the end of 1860; such it was still at the end of August 1861; what it was in August 1862 only those know who dwelt in it, and saw its thousands of perishing children, and noted their stoic endurance of their sufferings. Even now, even in this month of August 1861, rumours were gaining ground that the war in America would not soon be over. The price of cotton was beginning to go up; the days were hastening towards that month of October when prices sprang up, mounting daily higher and higher, and factories began to close--not in ones and twos as heretofore, not to run short time, or half-time, or even quarter-time, but to close bodily, in dozens and scores, with no prospect of their opening again for an indefinite period of want and woe. It was a vast, dark, pitiless cloud, that which was even now rolling up from the West, bearing in its huge womb lamentation, and mourning, and woe.