to admit that I was more than half right.

But it is most satisfactory of all to know that the best of the British
abolitionists are now acting, promptly and efficiently, in accordance
with those views, and are determined to develop the resources of the
British empire for the production of cotton by free labor. The thing is
practicable, and not of very difficult accomplishment. It is furthermore
absolutely essential to the success of the antislavery cause; for now
the great practical leading argument for slavery is, _Without slavery
you can have no cotton, and cotton you must and will have_. The latest
work that I have read in defence of slavery (Uncle Tom in Paris,
Baltimore, 1854) says, (pp. 56-7,) "_Of the cotton which supplies the
wants of the civilized world, the south produces 86 per cent.; and
without slave labor experience has shown that the cotton plant cannot be
cultivated_."

How the matter is viewed by sagacious and practical minds in Britain, is
clear from the following sentences, taken from the National Era:--

"COTTON is KING.--Charles Dickens, in a late number of his Household
Words, after enumerating the striking facts of cotton, says,--

"'Let any social or physical convulsion visit the United States, and
England would feel the shock from Land's End to John o'Groat's. The
lives of nearly two millions of our countrymen are dependent upon the
cotton crops of America; their destiny may be said, without any sort of
hyperbole, to hang upon a thread.

"'Should any dire calamity befall the land of cotton, a thousand of our
merchant ships would rot idly in dock; ten thousand mills must stop