rice, tobacco and naval stores command the world; and
we have sense enough to know it, and are sufficiently Teutonic to carry
it out successfully[657]."

These quotations indicative of Southern faith in cotton might be
amplified and repeated from a hundred sources.

Moreover this faith in the possession of ultimate power went hand in
hand with the conviction that the South, more than any other quarter of
the world, produced to the benefit of mankind. "In the three million
bags of cotton," said a writer in _De Bow's Review_, "the slave-labour
annually throws upon the world for the poor and naked, we are doing more
to advance civilization ... than all the canting philanthropists of New
England and Old England will do in centuries. Slavery is the backbone of
the Northern commercial as it is of the British manufacturing
system[658]...." Nor was this idea unfamiliar to Englishmen. Before the
Civil War was under way Charles Greville wrote to Clarendon:

"Any war will be almost sure to interfere with the cotton
crops, and this is really what affects us and what we care
about. With all our virulent abuse of slavery and
slave-owners, and our continual self-laudation on that
subject, we are just as anxious for, and as much interested
in, the prosperity of the slavery interest in the Southern
States as the Carolinan and Georgian planters themselves, and
all Lancashire would deplore a successful insurrection of the
slaves, if such a thing were possible[659]."

On December 20, 1860, South Carolina led the march in secession.
Fifteen days earlier the British consul at Charleston, Bunch, reported a
conversation with Rhett, long a leader of the Southern cause and now a
consistent advocate of secession, in which Rhett developed a plan of
close commercial alliance with England as the most favoured nation,
postulating the dependence of Great Britain on the South for
cotton--"upon which supposed axiom, I would remark," wrote Bunch, "all
their calculations are based[660]." Such was, indeed, Southern
calculation. In January, 1861, _De Bow's Review_ contained an article
declaring that "the first demonstration of blockade of the Southern
ports would be swept away by the English fleets of observation hovering
on the Southern coasts, to protect English commerce, and especially the
free flow of cotton to English and French factories.... A stoppage of
the raw material ... would produce the most disa