Today, as fifteen years ago, England faces a catastrophe that threatens to strike at the root of her entire economic system. As is known, the potato formed the exclusive food of Ireland and a not inconsiderable section of the English working people when the potato blight of 1845 and 1846 struck the root of Irish life with decay. The results of this great catastrophe are known. The Irish population declined by two million, of whom one part died of starvation and the other fled across the Atlantic Ocean. At the same time, this dreadful misfortune helped the English Free Trade party to triumph; the English landed aristocracy was compelled to sacrifice one of its most lucrative monopolies, and the abolition of the Corn Laws(1) assured a broader and sounder basis for the reproduction and maintenance of the working millions.
What the potato was to Irish agriculture, cotton is to the dominant branch of Great Britain's industry. On its manufacture depends the subsistence of a mass of people greater than the total number of inhabitants of Scotland and than two-thirds of the present number of inhabitants of Ireland. For according to the census of 1861, the population of Scotland consisted of 3,061,117 persons, that of Ireland now only 5,764,543,(2) whilst more than four millions in England and Scotland live directly or indirectly by the cotton industry. Now the cotton plant is not, indeed, diseased. Just as little is its production the monopoly of a few regions of the earth. On the contrary, no other plant that yields clothing material thrives in equally extensive areas of America, Asia and Africa. The cotton monopoly of the slave states of the American Union is not a natural, but an historical monopoly. It grew and developed simultaneously with the monopoly of the English cotton industry on the world market. In the year 1793, shortly after the time of the great mechanical inventions in England, a Quaker[71] of Connecticut, Ely Whitney, invented the cotton gin,(3) a machine for cleaning cotton, which separates the cotton fibre from the cotton seed. Prior to this invention, a day of a Negro's most intensive labour barely sufficed to separate a pound of cotton fibre from the cotton seed. After the invention of the cotton gin, an old Negrowoman could comfortably supply fifty pounds of cotton daily, and gradual improvements have subsequently doubled the efficiency of the machine. The fetters on the cultivation of cotton in the United States were now burst asunder. Hand in hand with the English cotton industry, it grew swiftly to a great commercial power. Now and then in the course of development, England seemed to take fright at the monopoly of American cotton, as at a spectre that threatened danger. Such a moment occurred, for example, at the time when the emancipation of the Negroes in the English colonies was purchased for £20,000,000.[72] It was a matter for misgiving that the industry in Lancashire and Yorkshire should rest on the sovereignty of the slave-whip in Georgia and Alabama, whilst the English nation imposed on itself so great a sacrifice to abolish slavery in its own colonies. Philanthropy, however, does not make history, least of all commercial history. Similar doubts arose as often as a cotton crop failure occurred in the United States and as, in addition, such a natural phenomenon was exploited by the slaveholders to artificially raise the price of cotton still higher through combination. The English cotton spinners and weavers then threatened rebellion against "King Cotton". Manifold projects for procuring cotton from Asiatic and African sources came to light. This was the case, for example, in 1850.(4) However, the following good crop in the United States triumphantly dispelled such yearnings for emancipation. Indeed, in the last few years the American cotton monopoly attained dimensions scarcely dreamt of before, partly in consequence of the free trade legislation, which repealed the hitherto existing differential tariff on the cotton grown by slaves; partly in consequence of the simultaneous giant strides made by the English cotton industry and American cotton cultivation during the last decade. In the year 1857 the consumption of cotton in England already amounted to nearly 1,500 million pounds.
Now, all of a sudden, the American Civil War menaces this great pillar of English industry. Whilst the Union blockades the harbours of the Southern states, in order to cut off the secessionists' chief source of income by preventing the export of their cotton crop of this year, the Confederacy lends compelling force to this blockade with the decision not to export a bale of cotton of its own accord, but rather to compel England to come and fetch her cotton from the Southern harbours herself. England is to be driven to the point of forcibly breaking through the blockade, of then declaring war on the Union and so of throwing her sword into the scale of the slave states.
From the beginning of the American Civil War the price of cotton in England rose continuously; for a considerable time, however, to a less degree than was to be expected. On the whole, the English commercial world appeared to look down very phlegmatically on the American crisis. The cause of this cold-blooded way of viewing things was unmistakable. The whole of the last American crop was long ago in Europe. The yield of a new crop is never shipped before the end of November, and this shipment seldom attains considerable dimensions before the end of December. Till then, therefore, it remained pretty much a matter of indifference whether the cotton bales were held back on the plantations or forwarded to the harbours of the South immediately after their packing. Should the blockade cease at any time before the end of the year, England could safely count on receiving her customary cotton imports in March or April, quite as if the blockade had never taken place. The English commercial world, in large measure misled by the English press, succumbed, however, to the delusion that a spectacle of about six months' war would end with recognition of the Confederacy by the United States. But at the end of August, North Americans appeared in the market of Liverpool to buy cotton, partly for speculation in Europe, partly for reshipment to North America. This unheard-of event opened the eyes of the English. They began to understand the seriousness of the situation. The Liverpool cotton market has since, been in a state of feverish excitement; the prices of cotton were soon driven 100 per cent above their average level; the speculation in cotton assumed the same wild features that characterised the speculation in railways in 1845.[73] The spinning and weaving mills in Lancashire and other seats of the British cotton industry limited their labour time to three days a week; a number of mills stopped their machines altogether; the disastrous reaction on other branches of industry was not wanting, and at this moment all England trembles at the approach of the greatest economic catastrophe that has yet threatened her.
The consumption of Indian cotton is naturally increasing, and the rising prices will ensure further increase of importation from the ancient home of cotton. Nevertheless, it remains impossible radically to change the conditions of production and the course of trade at, so to speak, a few months' notice. England is, in fact, now expiating her long mismanagement of India. Her present spasmodic attempts to replace American cotton by Indian encounter two great obstacles: the lack of means of communication and transport in India, and the miserable condition of the Indian peasant, which prevents him from taking advantage of the momentarily favourable circumstances. But, apart from this, apart from the process of improvement that Indian cotton has still to go through to be able to take the place of American, even under the most favourable circumstances it will be years before India can produce for export the requisite quantity of cotton. It is statistically established, however, that in four months the stocks of cotton in Liverpool will be exhausted. They will hold out even as long as this only if the limitation of the labour time to three days a week and the complete stoppage of a part of the machinery is effected by the British cotton spinners and weavers to a still greater extent than hitherto. Such a procedure is already exposing the factory districts to the greatest social sufferings. But if the American blockade continues over January! What then?
Written about November 1, 1861 First published in Die Presse No. 305, November 6, 1861
Endnotes
[70] First published in English in: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Civil War in the United States, New York, 1937, London, 1937, pp. 83-87.
[71] Quakers (or Society of Friends) — a religious sect founded in England during the seventeenth-century revolution and later widespread in North America. Thev rejected the FLstablished Church with its rites, preached pacifist ideas and were noted for simple living.
[72] See Note 69.
[73] 7:5 In 1844, Parliament passed an Act for the regulation of railways, which placed railway companies under government control, and an Act for the registration, incorporation and regulation of joint-stock companies, which made railway projects liable to registration by the Railway Department of the Board of Trade and endorsement by Parliament. The Acts intensified competition among railway companies, causing a veritable "railway mania", with the number of projects more than trebling within a short time. To complete the drawings on time, companies lured away draftsmen and lithographers from each other, imported them by the hundred and made them work practically round the clock. Special clerks spied on rival companies and interfered with the deliver) of their documents, hiring away and hiding horses and denying the competitors railway carriage. On the last day of registration, November 30, 1845, hundreds of clerks besieged the Railway Department of the Board of Trade, even throwing documents in through the windows. As a result, more than 600 projects had been deposited by midday, when registration ceased.