. The production of cotton
was halved. The Northern navy blockaded the exit of cotton ships from
the Southern ports. English ships hung around the Southern shores trying
in vain to find access, hoping to run the gauntlet and obtain a cargo of
cotton. One by one the great English mills shut down for want of raw
material, and when two winters had passed, and the autumn of 1863 had
come, and the English working people fronted a third winter, the
spectacle became pathetic and terrible. Gaunt Famine stalked the land.
The skeleton Want stood in the shadow of the poor man's house. But the
courage and fidelity of the English cotton spinners held out for two
years. The poor always love the poor. The classes have always been
wrong, the masses have always been right. Luxury puts wax into the ears
of the aristocrats, but want makes the hearing of the poor very
sensitive to a sob of pain. The sympathy of the cotton spinner was with
the Northern working man. An English working man did not want to be put
in the same class with a Southern slave. He saw that any law that
riveted fetters on black slaves in the South helped forge a manacle for
the cotton spinner's wrist in the mother land. These poor English folk
believed in the dignity of labour, in the right to a good wage, and in
the necessity for all working people standing together.

But the mill-owner wanted raw cotton. The banker wanted the mill-owner
to have his cotton that his loans might be paid. The ship-builders
wanted Southern cotton that their industry might thrive. Investors who
for two years had had no interest on their Southern loans sympathized
with the South; the politicians, controlled by their financial
interests, wanted the South to succeed. In that hour of temptation
Avarice drew near and choked Justice. Greed offered bribes to
Conscience. Old England's ruling classes, with the full sympathy of men
like Gladstone and hundreds of others, favoured the speedy recognition
of the Southern Confederacy in the hope that that would end the war and
restore England's prosperity.

In a word, the situation was this: The North had to fight the South, and
England with her influence as well. For here was the North, struggling
for the principles of the Pilgrim Fathers, for liberty, for democracy
and for the slaves, and just in the darkest hour of the struggle, when
she was burying her dead and the whole North was hung with funeral
crape, England, with ships on every sea, England, s