These employed 500,000 operatives and consumed a thousand million pounds of cotton each year[667].

An editorial in the _Times_, September 19, 1861, stated that one-fifth of the entire English population was held to be dependent, either directly or indirectly, on the prosperity of the cotton districts[668], and therefore also dependent on the source of supply, the Confederate South, since statistics, though varying, showed that the raw cotton supplied from America constituted anywhere from 78 to 84 per cent.

of the total English importation[669].
The American crop of 1860 was the largest on record, nearly 4,000,000 bales, and the foreign shipments, without question hurried because of the storm-cloud rising at home, had been practically completed by April, 1861.

Of the 3,500,000 bales sent abroad, Liverpool, as usual, received the larger portion[670].

There was, then, no immediate shortage of supply when war came in America, rather an unusual accumulation of raw stocks, even permitting some reshipment to the Northern manufacturing centres of America where the scarcity then brought high prices.