The comparative failure of the Erlanger loan marks the downfall of King Cotton. He was an exploded superstition. He was unable, despite the cotton famine, to coerce the English workingmen into siding with a country which they regarded, because of its support of slavery, as inimical to their interests. At home, the Government confessed the powerlessness of King Cotton by a change of its attitude toward export. During the latter part of the war, the Government secured the meager funds at its disposal abroad by rushing cotton in swift ships through the blockade. So important did this traffic become that the Confederacy passed stringent laws to keep the control in its own hands. One more cause of friction between the Confederate and the State authorities was thus developed: the Confederate navigation laws prevented the States from running the blockade on their own account. The effects of the blockade were felt at the ends of the earth. India became an exporter of cotton. Egypt also entered the competition. That singular dreamer, Ismail Pasha, whose reign made Egypt briefly an exotic nation, neither eastern nor western, found one of his opportunities in the American War and the failure of the cotton supply. CHAPTER IV. The Reaction Against Richmond A popular revulsion of feeling preceded and followed the great period of Confederate history--these six months of Titanic effort which embraced between March and September, 1862, splendid success along with catastrophes. But there was a marked difference between the two tides of popular emotion. The wave of alarm which swept over the South after the surrender of Fort Donelson was quickly translated into such a high passion for battle that the march of events until the day of Antietam resounded like an epic. The failure of the triple offensive which closed this period was followed in very many minds by the appearance of a new temper, often as valiant as the old but far more grim and deeply seamed with distrust. And how is this distrust, of which the Confederate Administration was the object, to be accounted for?