They cheered him lustily. And when they had quieted down he began to talk to them about cotton. He talked to them of the cotton piled high on the docks of Liverpool and how it got there. He talked to them of black hands picking cotton and blood soaking into soil around the cotton stalks. “Because British manufacturers need cotton, American slavery can defy the opinions of the civilized world and block Abolitionists in America and England. If England bought free cotton from some other part of the world, if she stopped buying slave-grown cotton, American slavery would die out.” Graphically, he added up the horrors of slavery. He told how the labor of the slave in chains cheapened and degraded labor everywhere. They listened, leaning forward in their seats, their eyes fixed. “Cotton can be grown by free labor, at a fair cost and in far greater abundance, in India. England, as a matter of self-interest as well as on the score of humanity, should without delay redress the wrongs of India, give protection and encouragement to its oppressed and suffering population, and thus obtain a permanent and abundant supply of free cotton produced by free men.” * * * * * “A powerful speech, sir!” Nevins reported the next morning. The Colonial Secretary looked at his man with some impatience. “Well, really, Nevins! Let’s be a bit more specific. A black make a powerful speech--something of an exaggeration, surely!” “He’s not really a black, sir,” Nevins answered surprisingly. “Good Lord! What is he then?” “I couldn’t rightly say, sir.” There was a dogged stubbornness about Nevins this morning. The Colonial Secretary shrugged his shoulders. “Well, well. What did he talk about?” A lucid thought flashed across Nevins’ mind. “He talked about cotton, sir.” “About cotton?” The Colonial Secretary stared. “What on earth did he say about cotton?” “He said that better cotton could be raised in India than in America.” The lucid moment passed, and Nevins could tell no more. But the young Colonial Secretary saw the newspaper accounts of Douglass’s talk before he returned to London. He took out his notebook and on a clean, fresh page he wrote a name, “Frederick Douglass.” Then he thoughtfully drew a circle around it. William Gladstone’s mind had projected itself into the future, when there might be no more cheap cotton coming from America. The Colonial Secretary was a solid young man with no nonsense about him. * * * * * Across the narrow strip of water, in Dublin, Daniel O’Connell sat in a ruby-brick house off Rutland Square, while the dusk of a September evening closed about him. He held a letter in his hand--a letter he had been re-reading while he waited. From far-off America his friend, William Lloyd Garrison, had written: