“But a blockade may be clearly as effective a means of warfare as a cannonade.  If you can cut off your enemy from all that he gives and all that he gets from without, you have taken the first great step in war.  Unless he can supply himself, he must presently surrender or perish.  For war is brute force.  It is a process of terrible compulsion.  ‘Do this,’ says War, ’or you shall burn, and starve, and hunger, and be shot, and die.’

“The point to be settled between the two combatants is, which can stand starving and shooting longest.  If one of them depends for his food upon the sale to others of what he makes, and depends for what he makes upon what he can get from others, it is easy enough to see, that, if the other is self-supporting, his victory is sure, if he have only the means to cut off supplies.  England is at the mercy of a skilful and effective blockade.  No wonder her shrewdest statesman implores her to see it.

“‘My dear John Bull,’ says Cobden, ’an honorable member of your Parliament, a miller and grain-merchant, estimates that the food imported into England between September of last year and June of this year was equal to the sustenance of between three and four millions of people for a twelve-month; and his remark to me was, that, if that food had not been brought from America, all the money in Lombard Street could not have purchased it elsewhere, because elsewhere it did not exist.’

“That is the position of a nation with the hand of another upon its throat.—­Do I tire you?” ticked my watch.

“Not at all.  I am listening intently, and trying to see what you are coming to,” I answered.

“We are coming, and very rapidly, to West Newton and the Waltham Watch-Factory,” ticked my companion.

“I hope so.  It was where I understood you to invite me to go,” said I.

“Courage, my friend!  Before we get to the factory, let us understand the reason of it.  Let me finish showing you why I have a national pride in my ancestral halls, and why I think that the American flag floats over that building as appropriately as over Fort Adams or Monroe.”

“I have always trusted you implicitly,” I answered.

“Well, then, England is a nation whose mill grinds at the will of a neighbor.  Is it wonderful that so sagacious a statesman as Cobden says that the blockade is a terrible thing for a commercial people?  Take the estimate of his authority, and imagine the supply of food from this country into England stopped, and the bumptious little island necklaced with Monitors to cut off the Continental supply.  Do we not hold one of her hands with our grain, and the other with our cotton?  The grain she gets, but the cotton is substantially stopped; what is the consequence?  Listen to Mr. Cobden.  The case, he says, ’is so grave, so alarming, and presents itself to those who reflect upon what may be the state of things six months hence in such a hideous aspect, that it is apt to beget thoughts of some violent remedy.’  He computes that by Christmas the Government must come to the aid of the pauper operatives, of whom there are now seven hundred and fifty thousand, a number which will then have increased to nearly a million.