ABSTRACT
The cotton mill labourers made the millowners’ palaces and wealth possible but they saw no reward for this wealth-production. This chapter romanticises England’s patriotism in the face of the purported selfishness of the American South while also pointing out how people all over the world and all over England sent charitable donations to the relief efforts, a curious sign that Britain could and would not take care of its own. The habit of poor-law guardians is to criticise keenly all the sources of an applicant’s income, and to apply unpleasant tests to keep away as many as possible, and so to economise the expenditure of the rates. The advisers of the Southern States of North America knew that the arrangements of modern society had rendered cotton almost as important and necessary to the well being of Lancashire as even corn itself.
