Set for October 31, great efforts were made to picture this meeting as an outburst of indignation from the unemployed.

Summoned by handbills headed "_The Crisis! The Crisis! The Crisis!_" there gathered, according to _The Index_ correspondent, a meeting "of between 5,000 and 6,000 wretched paupers, many of whom were women with children in their arms, who, starved apparently in body and spirit as in raiment, had met together to exchange miseries, and ask one another what was to be done." Desperate speeches were made, the people "almost threatening violence," but finally adopting a resolution now become so hackneyed as to seem ridiculous after a description intended to portray the misery and the revolutionary character of the meeting: "That in consequence of the widespread distress that now prevails in the cotton districts by the continuance of the war in America, this meeting is desirous that Her Majesty's Government should use their influence, together with France and other European powers, to bring both belligerents together in order to put a stop to the vast destruction of life and property that is now going on in that unhappy country[1246]." No doubt this spectacular meeting was organized for effect, but in truth it must have overshot the mark, for by October, 1864, the distress in Lancashire was largely alleviated and the public knew it, while elsewhere in the cotton districts the mass of operative feeling was with the North.

Even in Ireland petitions were being circulated for signature among the working men, appealing to Irishmen in America to stand by the administration of Lincoln and to enlist in the Northern armies on the ground of emancipation[1247].

Here, indeed, was the insuperable barrier, in the fall of 1864, to public support of the South.

Deny as he might the presence of the "foul blot" in Southern society, Hotze, of _The Index_, could not counteract that phrase.