16 unnoticeable privacy is henceforward his best success. With his coronet unjewelled and lustreless, his choicest hope must be, that the world may please to forget him. A third mistake which buttressed this bold rebellion, was the persuasion on the part of the South that their great product, cotton, was so indispensable to the manufacturing nations of Europe, that rather than lose it, they would make common cause with the rebellion and ensure its success. To their minds the royal ships of state in Europe had all cast their anchors in South Carolina; they were held to their moorings by the one stout cable of cotton, and if this were stranded and broken, the empires would drift disastrously upon a lee shore. The very poor would starve for want of labor in cotton, the middle classes would sympathize and rebel ; the aristocracy, instinctively hostile to our republic, would coalesce. The governments under such stress would be compelled into a Southern alliance, and under this partnership of empires, the success of the rebellion would be easy and complete. All this .was to be accomplished by virtue of that one self-same vegetable, cotton, which was deemed so indispensable to the world, that it might almost seem to be the necessary clothing of the universal humanity, the raw material of the human cuticle, so that without it the race would be not only naked but skinless.
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