were slipping from the hands--the too feeble hands--of Mr. Buchanan into
the grasp of President Lincoln, there was a moment when men thought that
we were about to see the wonderful example of a great question, which in
all other countries would have involved a war, settled perhaps by
moderation--some moderation on one side, and some concession on the
other; and so long as men believed that there would be no war, so long
everybody condemned the South. We were afraid of a war in America,
because we knew that one of the great industries of our country depended
upon the continuous reception of its raw material from the Southern
States. But it was a folly--it was a gross absurdity--for any man to
believe, with the history of the world before him, that the people, of
the Northern States, twenty millions, with their free Government, would
for one moment sit down satisfied with the dismemberment of their
country, and make no answer to the war which had been commenced by the
South.
I speak not in justification of war. I am only treating this question
upon principles which are almost universally acknowledged throughout the
world, and by an overwhelming majority even of those men who accept the
Christian religion; and it is only upon those principles, so almost
universally acknowledged, and acknowledged as much in this country as
anywhere else--it is only just that we should judge the United States
upon those principles upon which we in this country would be likely to
act.
But the North did not yield to the dismemberment of their country, and
they did not allow a conspiracy of Southern politicians and slaveholders
to seize their forts and arsenals without preparing for resistance.
Then, when the people of England found that the North were about to
resist, and that war was inevitable, they turned their eyes from the
South, which was the beginner of the war, and looked to the North,
saying that, if the North would not resist, there could be no war, and
that we should get our cotton, and trade would go on as before; and
therefore, from that hour to this, not a few persons in this country,
who at first condemned the South, have been incessant in their
condemnation of the North.
Now, I believe this is a fair statement of the feeling which prevailed
when the first news of secession arrived, and of the change of opinion
which took place in a few weeks, when it was found that, by the
resolution of the North to maintain the integrity of their country, war,
and civil war, was unavoidable. The trade interests of the country
affected our opinion; and I fear did then prevent, and have since
prevented, our doing justice to the people of the North.
Now I am going to transport you, in mind, to Lancashire, and the
interests of Lancashire, which, after all, are the interests of the
whole United Kingdom, and clearly of not a few in this metropolis. What
was the condition of our greatest manufacturing industry before the war,
and before secession had been practically attempted? It was this: that
almost ninety per cent. of all our cotton came from the Southern States
of the American Union, and was, at least nine-tenths of it, the produce
of the uncompensated labour of the negro.
Everybody knew that we were carrying on a prodigious industry upon a
most insecure foundation; and it was the commonest thing in the world
for men who were discussing the present and the future of the cotton
trade, whether in Parliament or out of it, to point to the existence of
slavery in the United States of America as the one dangerous thing in
connection with that great trade; and it was one of the reasons which
stimulated me on several occasions to urge upon the Government of this
country to improve the Government of India, and to give us a chance of
receiving a considerable portion of our supply from India, so that we
might not be left in absolute want when the calamity occurred, which all
thoughtful men knew must some day come, in the United States.
Now, I maintain that with a supply of cotton mainly derived from the
Southern States, and raised by slave labour, two things are
indisputable: first, that the supply must always be insufficient; and
second, that it must always be insecure. Perhaps many of you are not
aware that in the United States--I am speaking of the Slave States, and
the cotton-growing States--the quantity of land which is cultivated for
cotton is a mere garden, a mere plot, in comparison with the whole of
the cotton region. I speak from the authority of a report lately
presented to the Boston Chamber of Commerce, containing much important
information on this question; and I believe that the whole acreage, or
the whole breadth of the land on which cotton is grown in America, does
not exceed ten thousand square miles--that is, a space one hundred miles
long and one hundred miles broad, or the size of two of our largest
counties in England; but the land of the ten chief cotton-producing
States is sixty times as much as that, being, I believe, about twelve
times the size of England and Wales.
It cannot be, therefore, because there has not been land enough that we
have not in former years had cotton enough; it cannot be that there has
not been a demand for the produce of the land, for the demand has
constantly outstripped the supply; it has not been because the price has
not been sufficient, for, as is well known, the price has been much
higher of late years, and the profit to the planter much greater; and
yet, notwithstanding the land and the demand, and the price and the
profit, the supply of cotton has not been sufficient for the wants of
the spinners and the manufacturers of the world, and for the wants of
civilization.
The particular facts with regard to this I need not, perhaps, enter
into; but I find, if I compare the prices of cotton in Liverpool from
1856 to 1860 with the prices from 1841 to 1845, that every pound of
cotton brought from America and sold in Liverpool fetched in the last
five years more than twenty per cent in excess of what it did in the
former five years, notwithstanding that we were every year in greater
difficulties through finding our supply of cotton insufficient.
But what was the reason that we did not get enough? It was because there
was not labour enough in the Southern States. You see every day in the
newspapers that there are four millions of slaves, but of those four
millions of slaves some are growing tobacco, some rice, and some sugar;
a very large number are employed in domestic servitude, and a large
number in factories, mechanical operations, and business in towns; and
there remain only about one million negroes, or only one-quarter of the
whole number, who are regularly engaged in the cultivation of cotton.
Now, you will see that the production of cotton and its continued
increase must depend upon the constantly increasing productiveness of
the labour of those one million negroes, and on the natural increase of
population from them. Well, the increase of the population of the slaves
in the United States is rather less than two and a-half per cent, per
annum, and the increase on the million will be about twenty-five
thousand a-year; and the increased production of cotton from that
increased amount of labour consisting of twenty-five thousand more
negroes every year will probably never exceed--I believe it has not
reached--one hundred and fifty thousand bales per annum. The exact facts
with regard to this are these: that in the ten years from 1841 to 1850
the average crop was 2,173,000 bales, and in the ten years from 1851 to
1860 it was 3,252,000, being an increase of 1,079,000 bales in the ten
years, or only about 100,000 bales of increase per annum.
I have shown that the increase of production must depend upon the
increase of labour, because every other element is in abundance--soil,
climate, and so forth. (A Voice: 'How about sugar?') A Gentleman asks
about sugar. If in any particular year there was an extravagant profit
upon cotton, there might be, and there probably would be, some
abstraction of labour from the cultivation of tobacco, and rice, and
sugar, in order to apply it to cotton, and a larger temporary increase,
of growth might take place; but I have given you the facts with regard
to the last twenty years, and I think you will see that my statement is
correct. Now, can this be remedied under slavery? I will show you how it
cannot. And first of all, everybody who is acquainted with American
affairs knows that there is not very much migration of the population of
the Northern States into the Southern States to engage in the ordinary
occupations of agricultural labour. Labour is not honourable and is not
honoured in the South; and therefore free labourers from the North are
not likely to go South. Again, of all the emigration from this country--
amounting as it did, in the fifteen years from 1846 to 1860, to two
millions five hundred thousand persons, being equal to the whole of the
population of this great city--a mere trifle went South and settled
there to pursue the occupation of agriculture; they remained in the
North, where labour is honourable and honoured.
Whence, then, could the planters of the South receive their increasing
labour? Only from the slave-ship and the coast of Africa. But,
fortunately for the world, the United States Government has never yet
become so prostrate under the heel of the slave-owner as to consent to
the reopening of the slave-trade. Therefore the Southern planter was in
this unfortunate position: he could not tempt, perhaps he did not want,
free labourers from the North; he could not tempt, perhaps he did not
want, free labourers from Europe; and if he did want, he was not
permitted to fetch slave labour from Africa. Well, that being so, we
arrive at this conclusion--that whilst the cultivation of cotton was
performed by slave labour, you were shut up for your hope of increased
growth to the small increase that was possible with the increase of two
and a half per cent per annum in the population of the slaves, about one
million in number, that have been regularly employed in the cultivation
of cotton.
Then, if the growth was thus insufficient--and I as one connected with
the trade can speak very clearly upon that point--I ask you whether the
production and the supply were not necessarily insecure by reason of the
institution of slavery? It was perilous within the Union. In this
country we made one mistake in our forecast of this question: we did not
believe that the South would commit suicide; we thought it possible that
the slaves might revolt. They might revolt, but their subjugation was
inevitable, because the whole power of the Union was pledged to the
maintenance of order in every part of its dominions.
But if there be men who think that the cotton trade would be safer if
the South were an independent State, with slavery established there in
permanence, they greatly mistake; because, whatever was the danger of
revolt in the Southern States whilst the Union was complete, the
possibility of revolt and the possibility of success would surely be
greatly increased if the North were separate from the South, and the
negro had only his Southern master, and not the Northern power, to
contend against.
But I believe there is little danger of revolt, and no possibility of
success. When the revolt took place in the island of St. Domingo, the
blacks were far superior in numbers to the whites. In the Southern
States it is not so. Ignorant, degraded, without organization, without
arms, and scarcely with any faint hope of freedom for ever, except the
enthusiastic hope which they have when they believe that God will some
day stretch out His arm for their deliverance--I say that under these
circumstances, to my mind, there was no reasonable expectation of
revolt, and that they had no expectation whatever of success in any
attempt to gain their liberty by force of arms.
But now we are in a different position. Slavery itself has chosen its
own issue, and has chosen its own field. Slavery--and when I say
slavery, I mean the slave power--has not trusted to the future; but it
has rushed into the battle-field to settle this great question; and
having chosen war, it is from day to day sinking to inevitable ruin
under it. Now, if we are agreed--and I am keeping you still to
Lancashire and to its interests for a moment longer--that this vast
industry with all its interests of capital and labour has been standing
on a menacing volcano, is it not possible that hereafter it may be
placed upon a rock which nothing--can disturb?
Imagine--what of course some people will say I have no right to imagine--
imagine the war over, the Union restored and slavery abolished--does
any man suppose that there would afterwards be in the South one single
negro fewer than there are at present? On the contrary, I believe there
would be more. I believe there is many a negro in the Northern States,
and even in Canada, who, if the lash, and the chain, and the branding-
iron, and the despotism against which even he dared not complain, were
abolished for ever, would turn his face to the sunny lands of the South,
and would find himself happier and more useful there than he can be in a
more Northern clime.
More than this, there would be a migration from the North to the South.
You do not suppose that those beautiful States, those regions than which
earth offers nothing to man more fertile and more lovely, are shunned by
the enterprising population of the North because they like the rigours
of a Northern winter and the greater changeableness, of the Northern
seasons? Once abolish slavery in the South, and the whole of the
country will be open to the enterprise and to the industry of all. And
more than that, when you find that, only the other day, not fewer than
four thousand emigrants, most of them from the United Kingdom, landed in
one day in the city of New York, do you suppose that all those men would
go north and west at once? Would not some of them turn their faces
southwards, and seek the clime of the sun, which is so grateful to all
men; where they would find a soil more fertile, rivers more abundant,
and everything that Nature offers more profusely given, but from which
they are now shut out by the accursed power which slavery exerts? With
freedom you would have a gradual filling up of the wildernesses of the
Southern States; you would have there, not population only, but capital,
and industry, and roads, and schools, and everything which tends to
produce growth, and wealth, and prosperity.
I maintain--and I believe my opinion will be supported by all those men
who are most conversant with American affairs--that, with slavery
abolished, with freedom firmly established in the South, you would find
in ten years to come a rapid increase in the growth of cotton; and not
only would its growth be rapid, but its permanent increase would be
secured.
I said that I was interested in this great question of cotton. I come
from the midst of the great cotton industry of Lancashire; much the
largest portion of anything I have in the world depends upon it; not a
little of it is now utterly valueless, during the continuance of this
war. My neighbours, by thousands and scores of thousands, are suffering,
more or less, as I am suffering; and many of them, as you know--more
than a quarter of a million of them--have been driven from a subsistence
gained by their honourable labour to the extremest poverty, and to a
dependence upon the charity of their fellow-countrymen. My interest is
the interest of all the population.
My interest is against a mere enthusiasm, a mere sentiment, a mere
visionary fancy of freedom as against slavery. I am speaking now as a
matter of business. I am glad when matters of business go straight with
matters of high sentiment and morality, and from this platform I declare
my solemn conviction that there is no greater enemy to Lancashire, to
its capital and to its labour, than the man who wishes the cotton
agriculture of the Southern States to be continued under the conditions
of slave labour.
One word more upon another branch of the question, and I have done. I
would turn for a moment from commerce to politics. I believe that our
true commercial interests in this country are very much in harmony with
what I think ought to be our true political sympathies. There is no
people in the world, I think, that more fully and entirely accepts the
theory that one nation acts very much upon the character and upon the
career of another, than England; for our newspapers and our statesmen,
our writers and our speakers of every class, are constantly telling us
of the wonderful influence which English constitutional government and
English freedom have on the position and career of every nation in
Europe. I am not about to deny that some such influence, and
occasionally, I believe, a beneficent influence, is thus exerted; but if
we exert any influence upon Europe--and we pride ourselves upon it--
perhaps it will not be a humiliation to admit that we feel some
influence exerted upon us by the great American Republic. American
freedom acts upon England, and there is nothing that is better known, at
the west end of this great city--from which I have just come--than the
influence that has been, and nothing more feared than the influence that
may be, exerted by the United States upon this country.
We all of us know that there has been a great effect produced in England
by the career of the United States. An emigration of three or four
millions of persons from the United Kingdom, during the last forty
years, has bound us to them by thousands of family ties, and therefore
it follows that whatever there is that is good, and whatever there is
that is free in America, which we have not, we know something about, and
gradually may begin to wish for, and some day may insist upon having.
And when I speak of 'us,' I mean the people of this country. When I am
asserting the fact that the people of England have a great interest in
the well-being of the American Republic, I mean the people of England. I
do not speak of the wearers of crowns or of coronets, but of the twenty
millions of people in this country who live on their labour, and who,
having no votes, are not counted in our political census, but without
whom there could be no British nation at all. I say that these have an
interest, almost as great and direct as though they were living in
Massachusetts or New York, in the tremendous struggle for freedom which
is now shaking the whole North American Continent.
During the last two years there has been much said, and much written,
and some things done in this country, which are calculated to gain us
the hate of both sections of the American Union. I believe that a course
of policy might have been taken by the English press, and by the English
Government, and by what are called the influential classes in England,
that would have bound them to our hearts and us to their hearts. I speak
of the twenty millions of the Free North. I believe we might have been
so thoroughly united with that people, that all remembrance of the war
of the Revolution and of the war of 1812 would have been obliterated,
and we should have been in heart and spirit for all time forth but one
nation.
I can only hope that, as time passes, and our people become better
informed, they will be more just, and that ill feeling of every kind
will pass away; that in future all who love freedom here will hold
converse with all who love freedom there, and that the two nations,
separated as they are by the ocean, come as they are, notwithstanding,
of one stock, may be in future time united in soul, and may work
together for the advancement of the liberties and the happiness of
mankind.
* * * * *
AMERICA.
IV.
MR. ROEBUCK'S MOTION FOR RECOGNITION OF THE
SOUTHERN CONFEDERACY.
HOUSE OF COMMONS, JUNE 30, 1863.
I will not attempt to follow the noble Lord in the laboured attack which
he has made upon the Treasury Bench, for these two reasons:--that he did
not appear to me very much to understand what it was he was condemning
them for; and, again, I am not in the habit of defending Gentlemen who
sit on that bench. I will address myself to the question before the
House, which I think the House generally feels to be very important,
although I am quite satisfied that they do not feel it to be a practical
one. Neither do I think that the House will be disposed to take any
course in support of the hon. Gentleman who introduced the resolution
now before us.
We sometimes are engaged in discussions, and have great difficulty to
know what we are about; but the hon. Gentleman left us in no kind of
doubt when he sat down. He proposed a resolution, in words which, under
certain circumstances and addressed to certain parties, might end in
offensive or injurious consequences. Taken in connection with his
character, and with the speech he has made tonight, and with the speech
he has recently made elsewhere on this subject, I may say that he would
have come to about the same conclusion if he had proposed to address the
Crown inviting the Queen to declare war against the United States of
America. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, who is known not to be very
zealous in the particular line of opinion that I have adopted, addressed
the hon. Gentleman in the smoothest language possible, but still he was
obliged to charge him with the tone of bitter hostility which marked his
speech.
On a recent occasion the hon. Member addressed some members of his
constituency--I do not mean in his last speech, I mean in the speech in
August last year--in which he entered upon a course of prophecy which,
like most prophecies in our day, does not happen to come true. But he
said then what he said to-night, that the American people and Government
were overbearing. He did not tell his constituents that the Government
of the United States had, almost during the whole of his lifetime, been
conducted by his friends of the South. He said that, if they were
divided, they would not be able to bully the whole world; and he made
use of these expressions: 'The North will never be our friends; of the
South you can make friends,--they are Englishmen,--they are not the scum
and refuse of the world.'
Mr. Roebuck: 'Allow me to correct that statement. What I said I now
state to the House, that the men of the South were Englishmen, but that
the army of the North was composed of the scum of Europe.'
Mr. Bright: I take, of course, that explanation of the hon. and learned
Gentleman, with this explanation from me, that there is not, so far as I
can find, any mention near that paragraph, and I think there is not in
the speech a single word, about the army.
Mr. Roebuck: 'I assure you I said that.'
Mr. Bright: Then I take it for granted that the hon. and learned
Gentleman said that, or that if he said what I have read he greatly
regrets it.
Mr. Roebuck: 'No, I did not say it.'
Mr. Bright: The hon. and learned Gentleman in his resolution speaks of
other powers. But he has unceremoniously got rid of all the powers but
France, and he comes here to-night with a story of an interview with a
man whom he describes as the great ruler of France--tells us of a
conversation with him--asks us to accept the lead of the Emperor of the
French on, I will undertake to say, one of the greatest questions that
ever was submitted to the British Parliament. But it is not long since
the hon. and learned Gentleman held very different language. I recollect
in this House, only about two years ago, that the hon. and learned
Gentleman said: 'I hope I may be permitted to express in respectful
terms my opinion, even though it should affect so great a potentate as
the Emperor of the French. I have no faith in the Emperor of the
French.' On another occasion the hon. and learned Gentleman said,--not,
I believe, in this House,--'I am still of opinion that we have nothing
but animosity and bad faith to look for from the French Emperor.' And he
went on to say that still, though he had been laughed at, he adopted the
patriotic character of 'Tear-'em,' and was still at his post.
And when the hon. and learned Gentleman came back, I think from his
expedition to Cherbourg, does the House recollect the language he used
on that occasion--language which, if it expressed the sentiments which
he felt, at least I think he might have been content to have withheld?
If I am not mistaken, referring to the salutation between the Emperor of
the French and the Queen of these kingdoms, he said, 'When I saw his
perjured lips touch that hallowed cheek.' And now, Sir, the hon. and
learned Gentleman has been to Paris, introduced there by the hon. Member
for Sunderland, and he has sought to become as it were in the palace of
the French Emperor a co-conspirator with him to drag this country into a
policy which I maintain is as hostile to its interests as it would be
degrading to its honour.