Before continuing the story of Parliamentary and private efforts by the friends of the South it is here necessary to review the cotton situation--now rapidly becoming a matter of anxious concern to both friend and foe of the North and in less degree to the Ministry itself.
"King Cotton" had long been a boast with the South.

"Perhaps no great revolution," says Bancroft, "was ever begun with such convenient and soothing theories as those that were expounded and believed at the time of the organization of the Confederacy....

In any case, hostilities could not last long, for France and Great Britain must have what the Confederacy alone could supply, and therefore they could be forced to aid the South, as a condition precedent to relief from the terrible distress that was sure to follow a blockade[654]." This confidence was no new development.

For ten years past whenever Southern threats of secession had been indulged in, the writers and politicians of that section had expanded upon cotton as the one great wealth-producing industry of America and as the one product which would compel European acquiescence in American policy, whether of the Union, before 1860, or of the South if she should secede.

In the financial depression that swept the Northern States in 1857 _De Bow's Review_, the leading financial journal of the South, declared: "The wealth of the South is permanent and real, that of the North fugitive and fictitious.