retended, from the cheapness of labor, would be able to sell their
grass and corn cheaper in the London market than themselves, and would
thereby reduce their rents and ruin their cultivation." The great
economist significantly adds,--"Their rents, however, have risen, and
their cultivation has been improved, since that time." Finally, to-day,
would the cultivation of cereals in the Northwest be improved, if made
a monopoly? would its inhabitants be richer? would their economy be
better? Certainly not. Yet to-day they undersell the world, and, in
spite of competition, are far richer, far more contented and prosperous,
than their fellow-citizens in the South in the full enjoyment of their
boasted dynasty of Cotton.

"Here," said Wellington, on the Eton football ground, "we won the battle
of Waterloo." Not in angry declamation and wordy debate, in threats of
secession and cries for coercion, amid the clash of party-politics, the
windy declamation of blatant politicians, or the dirty scramble for
office, is the destruction of the dynasty of King Cotton to be looked
for. The laws of trade must be the great teacher; and here, as
elsewhere, England, the noble nation of shopkeepers, must be the agent
for the fulfilment of those laws. It is safe to-day to say, that,
through the agency of England, and, in accordance with those laws, under
a continuance of the present profit on that staple, the dynasty of King
Cotton is doomed,--the monopoly which is now the basis of his power will
be a monopoly no more. If saved at all from the blight of this
monopoly, the South will be saved, not in New York or Boston, but in
Liverpool,--not by the thinkers of America, but by the merchants of
England. The real danger of the Cotton dynasty lies not in the hostility
of the North, but in the exigencies of the market abroad; they struggle
not against the varying fortunes of political warfare, but against the
irreversible decrees of Fate. It is the old story of the Rutulian hero;
and now, in the very crisis and agony of the battle, while the Cotton
King is summoning all his resources and straining every nerve to cope
successfully with its more apparent, but less formidable adversary, in
the noisy struggle for temporary power, if it would listen for a moment
to the voice of reason, and observe the still working of the laws of our
being, it, too, might see cause to abandon the contest, with the
angry lament, that, not by its opponent was it vanquished,