The _Summary_ consistently includes Liverpool, and fluctuates violently for that city whenever weather conditions interfered with the ordinary business of the port.

It is a striking illustration of the narrow margin of living wages among the dockers of Liverpool that an annotation at the foot of a column of statistics should explain an increase in one week of 21,000 persons thrown on poor relief to the "prevalence of a strong east wind" which prevented vessels from getting up to the docks.] [Footnote 681: Trevelyan, _Bright_, p.309.To Sumner, Dec.

6, 1862.] [Footnote 682: The historians who see only economic causes have misinterpreted the effects on policy of the "cotton famine." Recently, also, there has been advanced an argument that "wheat defeated cotton"-- an idea put forward indeed in England itself during the war by pro-Northern friends who pointed to the great flow of wheat from the North as essential in a short-crop situation in Great Britain.

Mr.
Schmidt in "The Influence of Wheat and Cotton on Anglo-American Relations during the Civil War," a paper read before the American Historical Association, Dec.

1917, and since published in the _Iowa Journal of History and Politics_, July, 1918, presents with much care all the important statistics for both commodities, but his conclusions seem to me wholly erroneous.