to the ground, cursed, by a monopoly.  A fertile country of magnificent resources, inhabited by a great race, of inexhaustible energy, is abandoned to one pursuit;—­the very riches of their position are as a pestilence to their prosperity.  In the presence of their great monopoly, science, art, manufactures, mining, agriculture,—­word, all the myriad branches of industry essential to the true prosperity of a state,—­wither and die, that sanded cotton may be produced by the most costly of labor.  For love of cotton, the very intelligence of the community, the life-blood of their polity, is disregarded and forgotten.  Hence it is that the marble and freestone quarries of New England alone are far more important sources of revenue than all the subterranean deposits of the Servile States.  Thus the monopoly which is the apparent source of their wealth is in reality their greatest curse; for it blinds them to the fact, that, with nations as with individuals, a healthy competition is the one essential to all true economy and real excellence.  Monopolists are always blind, always practise a false economy.  Adam Smith tells us that “it is not more than fifty years ago that some of the counties in the neighborhood of London petitioned the Parliament against the extension of the turnpike roads into the remoter counties.  Those remoter counties, they pretended, from the cheapness of labor, would be able to sell their grass and corn cheaper in the London market than themselves, and would thereby reduce their rents and ruin their cultivation.”  The great economist significantly adds,—­“Their rents, however, have risen, and their cultivation has been improved, since that time.”  Finally, to-day, would the cultivation of cereals in the Northwest be improved, if made a monopoly? would its inhabitants be richer? would their economy be better?  Certainly not.  Yet to-day they undersell the world, and, in spite of competition, are far richer, far more contented and prosperous, than their fellow-citizens in the South in the full enjoyment of their boasted dynasty of Cotton.

“Here,” said Wellington, on the Eton football ground, “we won the battle of Waterloo.”  Not in angry declamation and wordy debate, in threats of secession and cries for coercion, amid the clash of party-politics, the windy declamation of blatant politicians, or the dirty scramble for office, is the destruction of the dynasty of King Cotton to be looked for.  The laws of trade must be the great teacher; and here, as elsewhere, England, the noble nation of shopkeepers, must be the agent for the fulfilment of those laws.  It is safe to-day to say, that, through the agency of England, and, in accordance with those laws, under a continuance of the present profit on that staple, the dynasty of King Cotton is doomed,—­the monopoly which is now the basis of his power will be a monopoly no more.  If saved at all from the blight of this monopoly, the South will be saved, not in New York or Boston, but in Liverpool,—­not