The Express.
London, England, 1861-12-19 00:00:00

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W NDON, THURSDAY, DEC 19.

We are daily told that war with the United
States could insure an immediate supply of cotton
to the stinted looms of Lancashire. Cotton is the
forbidden fruit which manufacturing industry is
tempted to snatch at any risk of consequences.
It looks fair to the eye and good for food ; why
not clutch at what hangs rich and ripe within our
grasp, reckless of mere moral obligations T It is
the uld story : the dazzling lure is held out in the
form of instant and tangible gratification, in the
hope that the dictates of self-restraint may be
forgotten. Aand what if the lure be itself no better
than a is ?

Is it eertain after all that the friends of slavery,
who were so anxious to commit us to a quarrel with
the Free States of the North, could make good
their loud premix) of cotton supply 1 We ourselves
look with incredulity at the contingeneyof war—we
shall never believe that the Republic will refuse todo
us justice, in the matter of the captured rebel
emissaries. We trust they will be, as they ought
to be, liberated ; or, at worst, that the question
may assume a form in which it may be properly
left to arbitration. Those who wish fur war,
on this side of the ocean, try Ito beguile a
portion of the great industrial community into
complicity with their selfish and sanguinary pur-
pose by the bribe of cheap and abundant cotton.
Yet it is doubtful whether an increased supply
of the raw material in Liverpool would set more
mills working full time at Manchester, for some
months to come. Close and calm observers of the
market for manufactured goods are of opinion that
had there been no blockade of the Slave States,
the factories of Lancashire would now have been
working short time. Waiving this calculation,
however, let us ask plainly how do we know
that England's alliance with a slave-hold-
ing Confederacy would secure the safe
transportation, from the plantations to the sea-
ports and from the seaports to this country, of the
cotton crop of 1861, now lying in up-country
stores, unsold and unsaleable ? Such an alliance
would be a declaration of war to the knife against
the United States. It would justify, because it
would necessitate, measures which President LlN-
in his Message to Congress, declares it is his
earnest desire to avoid. But with a rebel army
menacing Washington, and an English fleet menac-
ing New York, will anyone say what sort of expe-
dient the exigency of the case would not dictate 1
In the midst of the enemy lies a combustible mass,
unorganized indeed and inarticulate, mute and
motionless, but of a destructive capability terrible
to think upon. What man of intellect or con-
science who knows anything about the matter will
dare to talk loosely or lightly about the
iguitability of this fearful mass, ignorant, impul-
sive, reckless, and resentful? For years the tan-
talizing whisper of freedom has been among these
millions the password by which hope deferred has
contrived to dissuade them from premature con-
spiracy. Let the long-listened-for knell of
" Emsmcirsrws " ring out from Washington, and
who will say how far its reverberating echoes will
reach, or what its effect will be Our pro-slavery

contemporaries remind us daily that up to the
present time theru has been no revolt of the
coloured race against their Secessionist masters,
and that but a few thousands of fugitives have
come into the Federal lines. Our only wonder is,
that so many should have come, considering the
scrupulous abstinence of tho Government and its
generals from saying or doing anything calculated
to encourage the hope that the war was waged for
Abolition. The negroes may be bad logician. ;
but they are not so much below the brutes to
whose condition the advocates of a Southern
alliance would eternally consign them, as not to
know when they are beckoned to, and when they
are bidden to be gone. Let the significant words—
" Now or never "—be uttered along the whole
line of contest simultaneously, and who will venture
to say what the issue may be ?

To persons living in a state of society like our
own, it is difficult to make intelligible a feet which
line at the core of this fearful question. Wherever
multitudes are held in subjection by a dominant
class, there exists a marvellous power of communi-
cating intelligence from distant point to point
which ham always baffled the most watchful
scrutiny, and tilled with perplexity and fear the
most sagacious system of oppression. There is not
a misgoverned country in Europe where the cipher
of diplomacy and the signals of police have not
frequently been anticipated by the spontaneous
telegraph of stilled discontent ; and there is not a
minister of misrule who has not frequently
been startled at the magical identity of
popular expressions in places the meet remote,
testifying their knowledge of facts and circum-
stances which he would have fain concealed.
And will any wise, humane, or Christian man
presume to say what the consequences of a call to
insurrection would be 1 We look upon the possible
prospect with no other fee,ings than those of the
gravest apprehension and dread ; and we should
be sorry to give utterance to all we fear on
account of both oppressor and oppressed, helot and
master; but we put this question to all thinking
men, whatever their opinions or prejudices may
be—what chance would the piled-up produce of
slavery have of escape from destruction in the
first frenzied outbreak of the slaves 1 We speak
not ben with reference to negro calculations ea to
how medial bondage might be most prevented in
future ; nnr do we venture to guess what wild
dreams of agrarianism might prevail in the first
delirium of hisiration. Only this we ask, and bid
men ask themselves who wish to look unpre-
sumptuously whither events are tending—what