The Northern Daily Times.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1857-01-15 00:00:00

THE PRICE OF COTTON.

Our friends on the ether side of the Atlantic will find,
some of these days, that the screw so conveniently applied
by the Bank of England to depress the price of their foreign
importations to compensate it for the withdrawal of bullion
to meet the profitable operations of its own government and
people, will not answer so far as American products are
concerned, and can only operate to the prejudice and injury
of its own merchants exclusively. This truth has been
abundantly demonstrated in the article of cotton this season,
in regard to which the increase of the rate of interest, in
olden times so disastrous to its market value, has not in the
United States either affected prices or excited attention.
This is attributable to two causes; first, the prudent for-
bearance of our planters in withholding their crops from
market, which we have many times recommended them to
do, when the Bank of England unfairly, if not dishonestly,
undertook to make money dear; and, secondly, to the very
important fact that no interest in this or any other country
is now so stable, so solvent, so independent of pecuniary
accommodations as the agricultural of these States. So long
as our planters were under weighty accommodations from
their merchants, had acceptances maturing, and open
accounts to meet, it was useless or worse to point out the
wisdom of withholding their crops to counteract the move-
ments of the Bank of England, and it was absurd to expect
fietora to hold for them here, as to do s required resources
far beyond their means, or the money capacity of merchants
anywhere. Now, however, the tables are turned ; and
whether the Bank of England puts discount up to seven per
cent., or charges a higher rate for money, neither affects
this market, nor causes a particle of uneasiness. It is quite
nonsensical, then, to wait, as British buyers very often do,
for days after receipt of telegraphic news of the bank's
having advanced its rates for money, in the hope of a decline
of price here corresponding to that advance, for so little is
its monetary operations felt, except as a matter of specula-
tion, and of gratulation, too, that the old hero Jackson had
emancipated this country from such an agent of mischief and
disturbance as the British national bank, nobody deems its
conduct worth an instant's consideration. Every day we
are becoming more and more independent of foreign
populations, that is, non-slaveholding populations, and
although we are unfortunate in not having a commercial
body in the South as identified with its fortunes and its
success as its agricultural is, yet in the course of time it is
reasonable to hope that that great ble.sing may also be
realized. Some years amo, not very many either, a failure
of the sugar crop to the extent it has this season would have
produced a panic here, and had we been afflicted with a
national bank branch, like our English and French friend?,
exchange would be unsaleab'e unless upon the terms it
should think proper to dictate, discounts would only reach
the favoured few, and bankruptcy would be the fate of
hundreds. Instead of that we have the utmost confidence
not only in the sugar factors of our city, but in the stability
of the planting interest on which their ability to sustain
themselves is based, and although the crop is scarcely a
third of a good average one, nobody is anxious or feverish,
exchange is in our favour, accommodations are accessible to
alt worthy of them, without partiality or favouritism, and
money is readily prccurable in bank or out of it on easy
terms by solvent and honest borrowers. It is then, we
repeat, in the last degree ridicu'ous for any one to expect
ever again to see our markets affected by British, French or
other European necessities, either natural or factitious, and
although it may be some time yet before the wise men in
the parlour of the Bank of England awake to a full con-
sciousness of this important fact, sooner or, later they must
do so; meantime, European buyers in this market will do
well to exhibit more intelligence, and regulate their
purchases rather to meet the manufacturing exigencies of
their friends than the versatile and erratic policy of the
British Bank.—New Orleans Picayune.