628 The King of Commerce. 
her interior, could not, by reason of the great cost of trans- 
port, until influenced by high prices, be sent to market; 
and India, like most countries, when the difficulties in 
America commenced, was so surfeited with cotton goods, 
the production of European looms, that she was enabled to 
part with more than her usual proportion of new crops of 
cotton. Her supplies, too, of British cotton fabrics, were 
well kept up, owing to the fact that the speculative transac- 
tions in the raw material made it dearer than the manu- 
factured article. It therefore became profitable to sell 
cotton, and to buy goods. Egypt, in a lesser degree, was 
in the same position as India, with respect to cotton and 
cotton goods. But there was a healthy demand for the 
long-stapled cotton of Egypt, to mix with the short-staple 
of India, and cultivation was forced and encouraged in 
every way in Egypt, even to an extent that caused that 
country to become short of food. Her largest crop of 
cotton, however, in comparison with the largest crop of the 
Southern States, as accurately ascertained, was very small, 
the yield of those States in 1859, without being stimulated 
by high prices, having been nearly eight times greater than 
the yield of Egypt in 1865, when incited by extreme quo- 
tations. With the exception of Brazil, all the other cotton- 
producing countries weigh but a feather in the scale. 
Cotton has performed during the century a more im- 
portant part in political as well as financial and commercial 
history than is usually recognised. It fostered slavery in 
the American States when that system of labour was on 
the wane, and it indirectly caused emancipation when the 
“institution” had developed its greatest strength. The 
peace of 1783 found the Americans with a superabundance 
of negro slaves, and the then average value of those slaves 
did not entail upon their masters a cost for interest on the 
capitalised labour of more than two pounds sterling per 
head. Commercially, this was as near freedom as could 
well be reached without the destruction of the political 
system of slavery. But the treaty of 1783 was a treaty of 
peace, and not a treaty of commerce, and Great Britain, 
acting upon the same policy as all the European powers at 
the time, would not permit “foreigners” to hold commercial 
intercourse with the people of her distant possessions, except 
by the circuitous method of traffic through her own home 
ports. The Americans, as a consequence of their successful 
revolution, had become “ foreigners,’ and they therefore 
were debarred from trading, as in their colonial days, with 
