The reader who carefully reflects over the passage just quoted may well think that the extravagant profit pictured savors more of Mulberry Sellers than of a cool-headed statesman; but if the war price of cotton be recalled he readily agrees that under the plan proposed the south could easily have got a fleet of the best ironclads. Such a fleet would have kept the southern ports open. The advantage of which would have been very great. It would have held the Mississippi from the first, or have recovered it after the capture of New Orleans. It would have cleared the gunboats out of all the navigable rivers in the south. And we must not forget how it might have ravaged the northern coast, perhaps capturing New York, and forcing an early peace. I must make you see the greatness of cotton as a resource. There has been from soon after the invention of the gin a steadily increasing world demand for it, and the south has practically monopolized its production. I can think of no other product of the soil except wine and liquor that is as imperishable. But wine and liquor spill, leak, and evaporate, while cotton does neither. If you but safe it against fire it will not deteriorate by age. In 1884 I was told of a sale just made of some cotton for which the owner had refused the famine price in 1865. It brought the market price of the day, and experts said it sampled as well as new cotton. It was at least 19 years old. Wine and liquor cannot be compressed, but the same weight of raw cotton becomes less and less bulky every year. By reason of the foregoing, cotton is always the equivalent of cash in hand. Now add the effect of the steadily growing war scarcity, and remember how easy it was during the first two years of the war to carry out cotton in spite of the blockade. The European purchasing agent of the Confederate States government says "it possessed a latent purchasing power such as probably no other ... in history ever had."[114] He means cotton. There were several million bales of it in the confederacy, all of which could be had for the taking--much of it for merely the asking. And there were a legion of carriers eager to run the blockade. I cannot understand how Professor Brown could have ever written, "The government had not the means either to buy the cotton or to transport it."[115] Surely the government could have seized the cotton as easily as it did all the men of military age, and collected the tithes in kind.