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An unofficial stipulation, with the President, and a peremptory order to Anderson, secured beyond chance the safe and early secession of South Carolina, and the easy seizure of the Government property. The representatives of foreign governments were already secretly coquetting for the favor of a free port and an advantageous cotton-market.
The Royal Exchange is a massive structure in the Italian style, with a fine portico, dome, and towers; the hall within is said to be probably the largest room in England, having a width of ceiling, without supports, of one hundred and twenty feet. Here on cotton-market days assemble the buyers and sellers from all the towns in Lancashire, and they do an enormous traffic.
That a small minority of Southern men may make money without earning it, that a few thousand individuals may monopolize the cotton-market of the world, what a suppression and destruction of intelligence it perpetrates I what consuming of spiritual possibilities! what mental wreck and waste! Whites, too, suffer equally with blacks. Less oppressed, they are perhaps even more demoralized.
I refer to these manifold dispatches, detailing the latest news of the Liverpool cotton-market, by the fraudulent possession of which on the part of somebody, a client of mine, Captain Grant of Waltham, was cheated out of a small fortune. Perhaps Mr. Dartmouth knows who went to Waltham one morning to close a bargain before the telegraph-news should transpire.
Certainly these figures show the small amount of accumulated capital among the Negroes, and the consequent large dependence of their property on temporary prosperity. They have little to tide over a few years of economic depression, and are at the mercy of the cotton-market far more than the whites.
Out of the hard economic conditions of this portion of the Black Belt, only six per cent of the population have succeeded in emerging into peasant proprietorship; and these are not all firmly fixed, but grow and shrink in number with the wavering of the cotton-market. Fully ninety-four per cent have struggled for land and failed, and half of them sit in hopeless serfdom.
Waiting in one of the little "meals-at-all-hours" saloons till he heard the churning of the press-engines, he sallied out and bought of the overloaded carriers the earliest copies of the morning papers, and made himself sure that the foreign news did not disclose any change of the cotton-market.
Giving the black door a vigorous push, he entered, and by the gas-burner on the first landing discovered that the postcript in his possession gave the state of the Liverpool cotton-market a day later than the body of the dispatch, which had already gone into type, and, what was more to the purpose, announced a rise of a penny-and-a-half on the pound.
He was walking about the yard, as silent as usual, but he was holding his spectacles in his hand, and that was with him a sign of great good-humor. We could always tell the state of the cotton-market by the position of Uncle David's spectacles; and, as Mrs. Gargery tied on her apron when upon a "rampage," so uncle jammed his spectacles close to his eyes when things were very much out of joint.
Owing to a variety of circumstances, the cotton-market had for some months been in a very perturbed condition; and I, who had closely scrutinized its aspects, felt sure that before long there would be some decided movement that would make itself felt to all the financial centres. This movement I resolved to profit by, in order to achieve riches at a single stroke.
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