ect result of the President's liberating
proclamation.

The vital and momentous question of cotton production, manufacture, and
exportation, is involved in this subject. Shall we continue to supply
the markets of the world with this indispensable commodity, the raw
material and the manufactured products; or shall we become importers of
the greatly inferior article from the East Indies at prices largely
enhanced, with the consequent destruction of our manufactures and the
loss of eight millions of exports of American goods with all the
prospective increase of this important branch of the national industry?
The annihilation of the cotton trade in the United States would change
the face of the world. It would diminish the power and importance of our
country among the nations to an incredible extent; and it would
seriously affect the relations of other powers among themselves. The
attitude of France and England toward us, at this moment, gives but a
faint indication of what we should suffer at their hands if the
organization of labor at the South should be so utterly destroyed as to
prevent the cultivation of the great staple which that favored region is
so preeminently fitted to produce. It is the influence imparted by this
production which the South has endeavored to use as its most formidable
weapon, against us in this gigantic rebellion; and whatever countenance
the rebels have received, or hereafter expect to receive from abroad, is
the result solely of their command of this indispensable production. It
is this which supplies them with arms and munitions of war at home, and
which builds the piratical ships with which they prey upon our commerce
on the high seas. Indeed, but for this all-powerful product of their
soil and labor, stimulating them and their foreign allies with the hope
of liberating the vast supplies now on hand, the war would, in all
probability, have been long since determined. But motives of still wider
scope and bearing instigate the unfriendly acts of England and France.
It is a question with these powers, whether they shall hold the
rebellious States by such obligations as shall make them a virtual
dependency for their own advantage, as the record shows they attempted
to do in the case of Texas in 1844; or whether these factious and
ambitious fragments of the Union shall be subdued by our own Government
and brought back to their true allegiance, with the effect of
reinstating our envied and dreaded