BEFORE THE STORM.
‘And I will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for
many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry.’
It was August of the year 1861--the year succeeding that which might
almost be called the apotheosis of the cotton trade. The goods of
Lancashire were piled in every port; her merchants were a byword
for riches and prosperity. ‘Cotton lords’--the aristocracy of the
land--that grimy, smutty, dingy, golden land, whose sceptre was swayed
by King Cotton.
Day after day the goodly ships had borne their load across the
Atlantic, from New Orleans and the other cotton ports; day after day
those Liverpool cotton lords had received that load upon their docks,
and those Manchester cotton lords had bartered with them and bought
it; and it had been borne slowly along, piled up on great lorries, or
it had been whirled along the iron road, and unloaded, and carried to
a thousand factories in Manchester, and Bolton, and Oldham--the giant
consumers; in Rochdale, and Bury, and Burnley; Blackburn and Wigan, and
Ashton and Stockport; to the great, young, growing towns; to strange
moorland villages, younger sisters of the towns; and there thickset
spikes had whirled it about, and combs had smoothed it out; revolving
spindles had spun it into the thickest or the most fairy threads; rows
and rows of shining looms had received it, and woven it into every
conceivable variety of texture and colour, and breadth, and length,
and pattern. Skilled workmen and workwomen, deft-handed, lissome,
soft-fingered craftsmen and craftswomen had stood by their wooden and
metal fellow-workers, and fed their untiring jaws; then it had gone to
the white-looking warehouses, to be piled in great masses, like little
mountains for height and solidity, and from thence removed to ships
again, and borne over the seas to India, and China, and America, and to
every town in Europe where men and women needed clothing and had money
to buy it.
The glory of King Cotton at this period of his reign, and the splendour
of him, cannot be better summed up than in the graphic words of one who
has thought and written on that great subject:--
‘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.
But still Lancashire was the land of plenty and of hospitality; still
her generous fires burnt merrily upon her ample hearths, making the
stranger forget her murky skies, and the smoke-dimmed countenance
of her landscapes. Her work-people still got the largest wages,
her masters still made the greatest fortunes of any masters and
work-people, taken collectively, in England; and nothing was said about
the over-production of the last plethoric year, nor of the piled-up
goods in the overstocked warehouses.