have acted, I am entitled to ask your time for a few moments, to show
you what has been not so much done as attempted to be done to improve
this state of things; and what has been the systematic opposition that
we have had to contend with. In the year 1847, I moved for that
Committee, in a speech from which I shall read one short extract. I said
that, 'We ought not to forget that the whole of the cotton grown in
America is produced by slave labour, and this, I think, all will admit,--
that, no matter as to the period in which slavery may have existed,
abolished it will ultimately be, either by peaceable means or by violent
means. Whether it comes to an end by peaceable means or otherwise, there
will in all probability be an interruption to the production of cotton,
and the calamity which must in consequence fall upon a part of the
American Union will be felt throughout the manufacturing districts of
this country.'
The committee was not refused;--Governments do not always refuse
committees; they do not much fear them on matters of this kind; they put
as many men on as the mover of the committee does, and sometimes more,
and they often consider a committee, as my honourable Colleague will
tell you, rather a convenient way of burying an unpleasant question, at
least for another session. The committee sat during the session of 1848,
and it made a report, from which I shall quote, not an extract, but the
sense of an extract. The evidence was very extensive, very complete, and
entirely condemnatory of the whole system of the Indian Government with
regard to the land and agricultural produce, and one might have hoped
that something would have arisen from it, and probably something has
arisen from it, but so slowly that you have no fruit,--nothing on which
you can calculate, even up to this hour.
Well, in 1850, as nothing more was done, I thought it time to take
another step, and I gave notice of a motion for the appointment of a
Royal Commission to go to India for the express purpose of ascertaining
the truth of this matter, I moved, 'That a Royal Commission proceed to
India to inquire into the obstacles which prevent the increased growth
of cotton in India, and to report upon any circumstance which may
injuriously affect the economical and industrial condition of the native
population, being cultivators of the soil, within the Presidencies of
Madras and Bombay.'
Now I shall read you one extract from my speech on that occasion, which
refers to this question of peril in America. I said, 'But there is
another point, that, whilst the production of cotton in the United
States results from slave labour, whether we approve of any particular
mode of abolishing slavery in any country or not, we are all convinced
that it will be impossible in any country, and most of all in America,
to keep between two and three millions of the population permanently in
a state of bondage. By whatever means that system is to be abolished,
whether by insurrection,--which I should deplore,--or by some great
measure of justice from the Government,--one thing is certain, that the
production of cotton must be interfered with for a considerable time
after such an event has taken place; and it may happen that the greatest
measure of freedom that has ever been conceded may be a measure the
consequence of which will inflict mischief upon the greatest industrial
pursuit that engages the labour of the operative population of this
country.'
Now, it was not likely the Government could pay much attention to this,
for at that precise moment the Foreign Office--then presided over by
Lord Palmerston--was engaged with an English fleet in the waters of
Greece, in collecting a bad debt for one Don Pacifico, a Jew, who made a
fraudulent demand on the Greek Government for injuries said to have been
committed upon him in Greece. Notwithstanding this, I called upon Lord
John Russell, who was then the Prime Minister, and asked him whether he
would grant the Commission I was going to move for. I will say this for
him, he appeared to agree with me that it was a reasonable thing. I
believe he saw the peril, and that my proposition was a proper one, but
he said he wished he could communicate with Lord Dalhousie. But it was
in the month of June, and he could not do that, and hear from him again
before the close of the session. He told me that Sir John Hobhouse, then
President of the India Board, was very much against it; and I answered,
'Doubtless he is, because he speaks as the mouthpiece of the East India
Company, against whom I am bringing this inquiry.'
Well, my proposition came before the House, and, as some of you may
recollect, it was opposed by the President of the India Board, and the
Commission was consequently not granted. I had seen Sir Robert Peel,--
this was only ten days before his death,--I had seen Sir Robert Peel,
acquainted as he was with Lancashire interests, and had endeavoured to
enlist him in my support. He cordially and entirely approved of my
motion, and he remained in the House during the whole of the time I was
speaking; but when Sir John Hobhouse rose to resist the motion, and he
found the Government would not consent to it, he then left his seat, and
left the House. The night after, or two nights after, he met me in the
lobby; and he said he thought it was but right he should explain why he
left the House after the conversation he had held with me on this
question before. He said he had hoped the Government would agree to the
motion, but when he found they would not, his position was so delicate
with regard to them and his own old party, that he was most anxious that
nothing should induce him, unless under the pressure of some great
extremity, to appear even to oppose them on any matter before the House.
Therefore, from a very delicate sense of honour, he did not say what I
am sure he would have been glad to have said, and the proposition did
not receive from him that help which, if it had received it, would have
surmounted all obstacles.
To show the sort of men who are made ministers--Sir John Hobhouse had on
these occasions always a speech of the same sort. He said this: 'With
respect to the peculiar urgency of the time, he could not say the
honourable Gentleman had made out his case; for he found that the
importation of cotton from all countries showed an immense increase
during the last three years.' We know that the importation of cotton has
shown an 'immense increase' almost every three years for the last fifty
years. But it was because that increase was entirely, or nearly so, from
one source, and that source one of extreme peril, that I asked for the
inquiry for which I moved. He said he had a letter in his hand--and he
shook it at me--from the Secretary of the Commercial Association of
Manchester, in which the directors of that body declared by special
resolution that my proposition was not necessary, that an inquiry might
do harm, and that they were abundantly satisfied with everything that
these lords of Leadenhall-street were doing. He said, 'Such was the
letter of the Secretary of the Association, and it was a complete answer
to the hon. Gentleman who had brought forward this motion.'
At this moment one of these gentlemen to whom I have referred, then
President of the Board of Control, Governor of India, author, as he told
a committee on which I sat, of the Affghan war, is now decorated with a
Norman title--for our masters even after a lapse of eight hundred years
ape the Norman style--sits in the House of Peers, and legislates for
you, having neglected in regard to India every great duty which
appertained to his high office; and to show that it is not only cabinets
and monarchs who thus distribute honours and rewards, the President of
that Commercial Association through whose instigation that letter was
written is now one of the representatives of Manchester, the great
centre of that manufacture whose very foundation is now crumbling into
ruin.
But I was not, although discouraged, baffled. I went down to the Chamber
of Commerce in Manchester, and along with Mr. Bazley, then the President
of the Chamber, I believe, and Mr. Henry Ashworth, who is now the
President of that Chamber, and many others, we determined to have a
Commission of Inquiry of our own. We raised a subscription of more than
2,000_l_.; we selected a gentleman--Mr. Alexander Mackay, the
author of one of the very best books ever written by an Englishman upon
America, _The Western World_--and we invited him to become our
Commissioner, and, unfortunately for him, he accepted the office. He
went to India, he made many inquiries, he wrote many interesting
reports; but, like many others who go to India, his health declined; he
returned from Bombay, but he did not live to reach home.
We were greatly disappointed at this on public grounds, besides our
regret for the loss of one of so much private worth. Some of us, Mr.
Bazley particularly, undertook the charge of publishing these reports,
and a friend of Mr. Mackay's, now no longer living, undertook the
editorship of them, and they were published in a volume called
_Western India_; and that volume received such circulation as a
work of that nature is likely to have.
In the year 1853 there came the proposition for the renewal of the East
India Company's charter. I opposed that to the utmost of my power in the
House of Commons, and some of you will recollect I came down here with
Mr. Danby Seymour, the Member for Poole, a gentleman well acquainted
with Indian affairs, and attended a meeting in this very hall, to
denounce the policy of conferring the government of that great country
for another twenty years upon a Company which had so entirely neglected
every duty belonging to it except one--the duty of collecting taxes. In
1854, Colonel Cotton--now Sir Arthur Cotton, one of the most
distinguished engineers in India--came down to Manchester. We had a
meeting at the Town Hall, and he gave an address on the subject of
opening the Godavery River, in order that it might form a mode of
transit, cheap and expeditious, from the cotton districts to the north
of that river; and it was proposed to form a joint-stock company to do
it, but unfortunately the Russian war came on and disturbed all
commercial projects, and made it impossible to raise money for any--as
some might call it--speculative purpose, like that of opening an Indian
river.
Well, in 1857 there came the mutiny. What did our rulers do then? Sir
Charles Wood, in 1538, had made a speech five hours long, most of it in
praise of the government of the East India Company. In 1858--at the
opening of the session in 1858, I think--the Government brought in a
Bill to abolish that Company, and to establish a new form of government
for India. That was exactly what we asked them to do in 1853; but, as in
everything else, nothing is done until there comes an overwhelming
calamity, when the most obtuse and perverse is driven from his position.
In 1858 that Bill passed, under the auspices of Lord Stanley. It was not
a Bill such as I think Lord Stanley approved when he was not a Minister;
it was not a Bill such as I believe he would have brought in if he had
been permitted by the House and the Cabinet to have brought in a better
Bill. It abolished the East India Company, established a new Council,
and left things to a great extent much in the same state as they were.
During the discussion of that Bill, I made a speech on Indian affairs,
which I believe goes to the root of the matter. I protested then as now
against the notion of governing one hundred and fifty millions of
people--twenty different nations, with twenty different languages--from
a little coterie of rulers in the city of Calcutta. I proposed that the
country should be divided into five or six separate, and, as regards
each other, independent Presidencies of equal rank, with a governor and
council in each, and each government corresponding with, and dependent
upon, and responsible to, a Secretary of State in this country. I am of
opinion that if such a Government were established, one in each
Presidency, and if there was a first-class engineer, with an efficient
staff, whose business should be to determine what public works should be
carried on, some by the Government and some by private companies--I
believe that ten years of such judicious labours would work an entire
revolution in the condition of India; and if it had been done when I
first began to move in this question, I have not the smallest doubt we
might have had at this moment any quantity of cotton whatever that the
mills of Lancashire require.
Well, after this, I am afraid some of my friends may feel, and my
opponents will say, that it is very egotistical in me to have entered
into these details. But I think, after this recapitulation, I am at
liberty to say I am guiltless of that calamity which has fallen upon us.
And I may mention that some friends of mine--Mr. John Dickinson, now
Chairman of the Indian Reform Association, Mr. Bazley, one of the
members for Manchester, Mr. Ashworth, the President of the Chamber of
Commerce of Manchester, and Mr. John Benjamin Smith, the Member for
Stockport--present themselves at this moment to my eyes as those who
have been largely instrumental in calling the attention of Parliament
and of the country to this great question of the reform of our
Government in India.
But I have been asked twenty, fifty times during the last twelve months,
'Why do you not come out and say something? Why can you not tell us
something in this time of our great need?' Well, I reply, 'I told you
something when speaking was of use; all I can say now is this, or nearly
all, that a hundred years of crime against the negro in America, and a
hundred years of crime against the docile natives of our Indian empire,
are not to be washed away by the penitence and the suffering of an
hour.'
But what is our position? for you who are subscribing your money here
have a right to know. I believe the quantity of cotton in the United
States is at this moment much less than many people here believe, and
that it is in no condition to be forwarded and exported. And I suspect
that it is far more probable than otherwise, notwithstanding some of the
strange theories of my honourable Colleague, that there never will again
be in America a crop of cotton grown by slave labour. You will
understand--I hope so, at least--that I am not undertaking the office of
prophet, I am not predicting; I know that everything which is not
absolutely impossible may happen, and therefore things may happen wholly
different to the course which appears to me to be likely. But I say,
taking the facts as they are before us--with that most limited vision
which is given to mortals--the high probability is that there will never
be another considerable crop, or one available for our manufactories,
from slave labour in the United States.
We read the American papers, or the quotations from them in our own
papers, but I believe we can form no adequate conception of the
disorganization and chaos that now prevail throughout a great portion of
the Southern States. It is natural to a state of war under the
circumstances of society in that region. But then we may be asked, What
are our sources of supply, putting aside India? There is the colony of
Queensland, where enthusiastic persons tell you cotton can be grown
worth 3_s_. a pound. True enough; but when labour is probably worth
10_s_. a-day, I am not sure you are likely to get any large supply
of that material we so much want, at a rate so cheap that we shall be
likely to use it. Africa is pointed to by a very zealous friend of mine;
but Africa is a land of savages, and with its climate so much against
European constitutions, I should not entertain the hope that any great
relief at any early period can be had from that continent. Egypt will
send us 30,000 or 40,000 bales more than last year; in all probability
Syria and Brazil, with these high prices, will increase their production
to some considerable extent; but I believe there is no country at
present from which you can derive any very large supply, except you can
get it from your own dependencies in India. Now if there be no more
cotton to be grown for two, or three, or four years in America, for our
supply, we shall require, considering the smallness of the bales and the
loss in working up the cotton--we shall require nearly 6,000,000 of
additional bales to be supplied from some source.
I want to put to you one question. It has taken the United States twenty
years, from 1840 up to 1860, to increase their growth of cotton from
2,000,000 bales to 4,000,000. How long will it take any other country,
with comparatively little capital, with a thousand disadvantages which
America did not suffer from--how long will it take any other country, or
all other countries, to give us 5,000,000 or 6,000,000 additional bales
of cotton? There is one stimulus--the only one that I know of; and
although I have not recommended it to the Government, and I know not
precisely what sacrifice it would entail, yet I shall mention it, and I
do it on the authority of a gentleman to whom I have before referred,
who is thoroughly acquainted with Indian agriculture, and whose family
have been landowners and cultivators in India for sixty years. He says
there is only one mode by which you can rapidly stimulate the growth of
cotton in India, except that stimulus coming from the high prices for
the time being,--he says that, if the Government would make a public
declaration that for five years they would exempt from land-tax all land
which during that time shall grow cotton, there would be the most
extraordinary increase in the growth of that article which has ever been
seen in regard to any branch of agriculture in the world.
I do not know how far that would act, but I believe the stimulus would
be enormous,--the loss to the Government in revenue would be something,
but the deliverance to the industry of Lancashire, if it succeeded, as
my friend thinks, would of course be speedy, and perhaps complete. Short
of this, I look upon the restoration of the prosperity of Lancashire as
distant. I believe this misfortune may entail ruin upon the whole
working population, and that it may gradually engulf the smaller traders
and those possessing the least capital. I do not say it will, because,
as I have said, what is not impossible may happen,--but it may for years
make the whole factory property of Lancashire almost entirely worthless.
Well, this is a very dismal look-out for a great many persons in this
country; but it comes, as I have said,--it comes from that utter neglect
of their opportunities and their duties which has distinguished the
Government of India.
Now, Sir, before I sit down I shall ask you to listen to me for a few
moments on the other branch of this great question, which refers to that
sad tragedy which is passing before our eyes in the United States of
America. I shall not, in consequence of anything you have heard from my
hon. Friend, conceal from you any of the opinions which I hold, and
which I proposed to lay before you if he had not spoken. Having given to
him, notwithstanding some diversity of opinion, a fair and candid
hearing, I presume that I shall receive the same favour from those who
may differ from me. If I had known that my hon. Friend was going to make
an elaborate speech on this occasion, one of two things I should have
done: I should either have prepared myself entirely to answer him, or I
should have decided not to attend a meeting where there could by any
possibility of chance have been anything like discord between so many--
his friends and my friends--in this room.
Since I have been Member for Birmingham, Mr. Scholefield has treated me
with the kindness of a brother. Nothing could possibly be more generous
and more disinterested in every way than his conduct towards me during
these several years, and therefore I would much rather--far rather--that
I lost any opportunity like this of speaking on this question, than I
would have come here and appeared to be at variance with him. But I am
happy to say that this great question does not depend upon the opinion
of any man in Birmingham, or in England, or anywhere else. And therefore
I could--anxious always, unless imperative duty requires, to avoid even
a semblance of difference--I could with a clear conscience have
abstained from coming to and speaking at this meeting.
But I observe that my hon. Friend endeavoured to avoid committing
himself to what is called sympathy with the South. He takes a political
view of this great question,--is disposed to deal with the matter as he
would have dealt with the case of a colony of Spain or Portugal
revolting in South America, or of Greece revolting from Turkey. I should
like to state here what I once said to an eminent American. He asked me
if I could give him an idea of the course of public opinion in this
country from the moment we heard of the secession of the Cotton States;
and I endeavoured to trace it in this way,--and I ask you to say whether
it is a fair and full description.
I said--and my hon. Friend has admitted this--that when the revolt or
secession was first announced, people here were generally against the
South. Nobody thought then that the South had any cause for breaking up
the integrity of that great nation. Their opinion was, and what people
said, according to their different politics in this country was, 'They
have a Government which is mild, and not in any degree oppressive; they
have not what some people love very much, and what some people dislike,--
they have not a costly monarchy, and an aristocracy, creating and
living on patronage. They have not an expensive foreign policy; a great
army; a great navy; and they have no suffering millions discontented and
endeavouring to overthrow their Government;--all which things have been
said against Governments in this country and in Europe a hundred times
within our own hearing,'--and therefore, they said, 'Why should these
men revolt?'
But for a moment the Washington Government appeared paralyzed. It had no
army and no navy; everybody was traitor to it. It was paralyzed and
apparently helpless; and in the hour when the government was transferred
from President Buchanan to President Lincoln, many people--such was the
unprepared state of the North, such was the apparent paralysis of
everything there--thought there would be no war; and men shook hands
with each other pleasantly, and congratulated themselves that the
disaster of a great strife, and the mischief to our own trade, might be
avoided. That was the opinion at that moment, so far as I can recollect,
and could gather at the time, with my opportunities of gathering such
opinion. They thought the North would acquiesce in the rending of the
Republic, and that there would be no war.
Well, but there was another reason. They were told by certain public
writers in this country that the contest was entirely hopeless, as they
have been told lately by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. I am very
happy that, though the Chancellor of the Exchequer is able to decide to
a penny what shall be the amount of taxes to meet public expenditure in
England, he cannot decide what shall be the fate of a whole continent.
It was said that the contest was hopeless, and why should the North
continue a contest at so much loss of blood and treasure, and at so
great a loss to the commerce of the whole world? If a man thought--if a
man believed in his heart that the contest was absolutely hopeless--no
man in this country had probably any right to form a positive opinion
one way or the other--but if he had formed that opinion, he might think,
'Well, the North can never be successful; it would be much better that
they should not carry on the war at all; and therefore I am rather glad
that the South should have success, for by that the war will be the
sooner put an end to.' I think this was a feeling that was abroad.