There are strong indications that England will very soon recognize the independence of the Confederate States. The debates in Parliament, the declarations of her ministers and the tone of her press, all point to that conclusion. Her manufacturing districts will be driven into rebellion from starvation, if her supply of cotton is cut off. This her statesmen and legislators well know. Hence they will not stand by quietly and submit to a blockade that threatens to deprive them of the product which feeds her operatives and gives life to her commerce. She will not witness general bankruptcy among her people for the sake of gratifying Northern cupidity and revenge. The London Morning Chronicle thus refers to the subject :
To put down federal privateers would, we need scarcely say, be an act of war against the federal government: but not to do so threatens an alternative still more disastrous than even such a war. This is the dilemma into which Lord John Russet’s American policy has brought himself and the country. If cotton is not to be got by fair means we must not scruple to use foul means, or the daily bread of four or five millions of the working population will be at once stopped. To blockade the cotton ports is to destroy the British cotton trade, to involve, not in remote, but in immediate destitution several millions of the British people.
Nashville Union and American, Nashville, TN