CHAPTER II.
BEFORE THE STORM.
‘And I will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry.’
It was August of the year 1861—the year succeeding that which might almost be called the apotheosis of the cotton trade. The goods of Lancashire were piled in every port; her merchants were a byword for riches and prosperity. ‘Cotton lords’—the aristocracy of the land—that grimy, smutty, dingy, golden land, whose sceptre was swayed by King Cotton.
Day after day the goodly ships had borne their load across the Atlantic, from New Orleans and the other cotton ports; day after day those Liverpool cotton lords had received that load upon their docks, and those Manchester cotton lords had bartered with them and bought it; and it had been borne slowly along, piled up on great lorries, or it had been whirled along the iron road, and unloaded, and carried to a thousand factories in Manchester, and Bolton, and Oldham—the giant consumers; in Rochdale, and Bury, and Burnley; Blackburn and Wigan, and Ashton and Stockport; to the great, young, growing towns; to strange moorland villages, younger sisters of the towns; and there thickset spikes had whirled it about, and combs had smoothed it out; revolving spindles had spun it into the thickest or the most fairy threads; rows and rows of shining looms had received it, and woven it into every conceivable variety of texture and colour, and breadth, and length, and pattern. Skilled workmen and workwomen, deft-handed, lissome, soft-fingered craftsmen and craftswomen had stood by their wooden and metal fellow-workers, and fed their untiring jaws; then it had gone to the white-looking warehouses, to be piled in great masses, like little mountains for height and solidity, and from thence removed to ships again, and borne over the seas to India, and China, and America, and to every town in Europe where men and women needed clothing and had money to buy it.
The glory of King Cotton at this period of his reign, and the splendour of him, cannot be better summed up than in the graphic words of one who has thought and written on that great subject:—
‘The dreary totals which Mr. Gladstone’s eloquence illuminates, and the rolling numerals of the National Debt, become almost insignificant beside the figures which this statement (the statistics of the cotton trade) involves. Arithmetic itself grows dizzy as it approaches the returns of the cotton trade for 1860. One hundred years back, and the cotton manufactures of England had been valued at £200,000 a year. Had not French, American, and Russian wars—had not railways and telegraphs, had their part and lot in this century, surely it would be known as the Cotton Age. This year, 1860, was the annus mirabilis of King Cotton. In this year his dependents were most numerous and his throne most wide. There was no Daniel at hand to interpret to him the handwriting on the wall, which within twelve months should be read by all who ran, in letters of blood. What cared he? An argosy of ships bore him across every sea and into every port. He listened to the humming of his spindles and to the rattle of his looms; he drank of the fulness of his power and was satisfied, for he was great—yes, very great.... The total value of their (the manufacturers’) exports for the year amounted to £52,012,380. If figures can ever be magnificent—if naked totals ever reach to the sublime—surely the British cotton trade for the year 1860 claims our admiration. Its production for this single year equalled in value £76,012,380, or nearly six millions more than the gross revenue of the kingdom for the same period.’
Surely the land which was the chief home of this monster trade deserved the title of ‘The Land of Plenty,’ and such it was—‘a goodly land,’ in fact, if not in outward show, ‘a land flowing with milk and honey,’ or at least their modern English equivalents—a land where wealth was profuse—where masters and men vied with each other in pride of bearing and dogged independence of spirit. Such was that rough, dark land at the end of 1860; such it was still at the end of August 1861; what it was in August 1862 only those know who dwelt in it, and saw its thousands of perishing children, and noted their stoic endurance of their sufferings.
Even now, even in this month of August 1861, rumours were gaining ground that the war in America would not soon be over. The price of cotton was beginning to go up; the days were hastening towards that month of October when prices sprang up, mounting daily higher and higher, and factories began to close—not in ones and twos as heretofore, not to run short time, or half-time, or even quarter-time, but to close bodily, in dozens and scores, with no prospect of their opening again for an indefinite period of want and woe. It was a vast, dark, pitiless cloud, that which was even now rolling up from the West, bearing in its huge womb lamentation, and mourning, and woe.
But still Lancashire was the land of plenty and of hospitality; still her generous fires burnt merrily upon her ample hearths, making the stranger forget her murky skies, and the smoke-dimmed countenance of her landscapes. Her work-people still got the largest wages, her masters still made the greatest fortunes of any masters and work-people, taken collectively, in England; and nothing was said about the over-production of the last plethoric year, nor of the piled-up goods in the overstocked warehouses.