"In the three million bags of cotton," said a writer in _De Bow's Review_, "the slave-labour annually throws upon the world for the poor and naked, we are doing more to advance civilization ...

than all the canting philanthropists of New England and Old England will do in centuries.

Slavery is the backbone of the Northern commercial as it is of the British manufacturing system[658]...." Nor was this idea unfamiliar to Englishmen.

Before the Civil War was under way Charles Greville wrote to Clarendon: "Any war will be almost sure to interfere with the cotton crops, and this is really what affects us and what we care about.

With all our virulent abuse of slavery and slave-owners, and our continual self-laudation on that subject, we are just as anxious for, and as much interested in, the prosperity of the slavery interest in the Southern States as the Carolinan and Georgian planters themselves, and all Lancashire would deplore a successful insurrection of the slaves, if such a thing were possible[659]." On December 20, 1860, South Carolina led the march in secession.
Fifteen days earlier the British consul at Charleston, Bunch, reported a conversation with Rhett, long a leader of the Southern cause and now a consistent advocate of secession, in which Rhett developed a plan of close commercial alliance with England as the most favoured nation, postulating the dependence of Great Britain on the South for cotton--"upon which supposed axiom, I would remark," wrote Bunch, "all their calculations are based[660]." Such was, indeed, Southern calculation.