British Commerce, November 23 (1861)

Published as a correspondence dated London, November 2, 1861 (“From an Occasional Correspondent”), in the New-York Daily Tribune, No. 6440, November 23, 1861, p. 6; attributed to Karl Marx by MEW (vol. 15), since the corresponding volume of MEGA² (I/19) has not yet been published. Text from the original newspaper (Library of Congress, Chronicling America). The date in the title distinguishes it from other articles of the same name. Traducción al español.

London, Nov. 2, 1861.

The English Board of Trade Returns for the nine months ending Sept. 30, 1861, show in exports a large diminution, and in imports a still larger increase. A comparison between the export lists of the last three years gives the following general result:

Value of Exports for the nine months ending Sept. 30.

Consequently the exports of this year, if compared to the corresponding period of 1860, have decreased by £7,929,014; of which total decrease the by far larger portion, viz.: £5,671,730, is accounted for by the sudden contraction of the American trade. The rates in which the general loss derived from this source has affected the different branches of British industry may be seen from the annexed table:

Value of Exports to the United States in the nine months ending Sept. 30.

Beyond the diminution due to the decrease of the American trade, the general exports show, moreover, a decline of £2,257,284. The greater part of this loss was incurred during the month of September, when the high price of cotton, and the consequent rise in cotton manufactures and yarns, had begun to powerfully react on the markets of British North America, East India, and Australia. During the whole period of nine months ended September, 1861, Turkey and Germany were, next to the United States, the countries foremost in restraining their absorption of British merchandise. The export trade to France has not grown in any observable degree, the only striking instance of increase being limited to an agricultural article, viz., sheeps’ and lambs’ wool. During the first nine months of 1860, England exported to France 4,735,150 pounds of wool, worth £345,047. During the corresponding period of this year, that export has risen to 8,716,083 pounds, valued at £642,468. The only other remarkable feature in the export returns refers to Italy. British exports to the new kingdom are evidently enlarging, which fact will go a great length in accounting for English sympathies with Italian liberty. Thus, for instance, the export of British cottons to Sardinia, Tuscany, Naples, and Sicily, has increased from £656,892 in 1860, to £1,304,380 in 1861; the export of cotton yarns from £348,158 in 1860 to £583,373 in 1861; the export of flour from £120,807 in 1860, to £160,912 in 1861.

The import tables extend only to the first eight months of the current year. Their general result is shown by the subsequent figures:

Real Value of Imports.

The principal part of that increase of imports is due to a large addition in the purchase of foreign wheat, which, from £6,796,131 in the first eight months of 1860, had risen to £13,431,487 in the corresponding period of 1861. As to raw cotton, the quantity imported had, during the period referred to, only slightly fallen off, while the price of the article had largely increased, as will be seen from the annexed figures:

Quantity of Cotton imported (during the first eight months).

There exist no general politics at the present moment in England. Everything and everybody are absorbed in the industrial question and the American crisis. I called your attention in a former letter to the feverish state of the Liverpool cotton market. For the last two weeks it has exhibited, in fact, all the symptoms of the railway mania in 1845. Surgeons, dentists, physicians, barristers, cooks, workingmen, clerks and lords, comedians and parsons, soldiers and sailors, newspaper writers and boarding-school mistresses, males and females, all were speculating in cotton. Many of the lots purchased, sold and resold, amounted to only one, two, three, or four bales. More considerable quantities remained in the same warehouses, although changing their proprietors twenty times. One who had purchased cotton at 10 o’clock offered it for sale at 11 o’clock, and realized a profit of ½d. on one pound. Many lots circulated in this way through several hands in 12 hours. This week, however, a sort of reaction has taken place, due to the single circumstance that a shilling is a round number, being composed of 12d., and that most people had resolved upon selling out so soon as the price of the pound of cotton should have been pushed to one shilling; consequently, there set in suddenly a great increase in the offers of cotton, and hence a reaction in its price. This, however, can be only transitory.

The British mind once become familiar with the idea that a pound of cotton may cost 15d., the temporary barrier to speculation will break down, and the speculating mania reappear with redoubled fury. There is one thing favorable to the United States in this movement. It is hostile to the breaking-of-blockade party. Already there have been published protests on the part of the speculators, in which it is reasonably said that any warlike movement by the British Government would be an act of direct injustice to those merchants who, on the faith of the British Government’s adherence to its recognized and avowed principle of non-interference, had made their calculations, speculated at home, sent out their orders abroad and purchased cotton on an estimate of the price which it would reach under the operation of natural, probable and foreseeable courses.

This day’s Economist publishes a very foolish article, in which, from statistics given as to the population and the area of the United States, he arrives at the conclusion that there would be room enough for the establishment of at least seven vast empires, and that, consequently, “the dream of universal dominion” ought to be banished from the hearts of the Unionists. The only rational inference which The Economist might have drawn from its own statistical statements, viz., that the Northerners, even if they liked to do so, could not desist from their claims without sacrificing to Slavery the vast States and Territories “in which Slavery still lingers, but cannot maintain itself as a permanent institution”—this only rational conclusion he successfully contrives not even to touch upon.

Apart from its own commercial difficulties, England is simultaneously bothered by the critical state of the French finances. The maneuvers of the Bank of France to stay the bullion drain to England by accommodation bills, obtained from the Rothschilds and other great firms, have, as was to be foreseen, resulted in a but temporary mitigation of her embarrassments. She has now successively applied for succor to the banks at Berlin, Hamburg, and St. Petersburg; but all these tentatives, instead of procuring relief, have only betrayed despair. The straits to which the French Government is actually put appear from two measures recurred to in the course of a fortnight. The interest on the Treasury bills, in order to keep them afloat, had to be raised to 7½ per cent, while Victor Emanuel was commanded to partially postpone the installments of the new Italian loan, of which French capitalists hold a very large amount. He, of course, acceded to the application of his patron.

In the Tuileries there are now two opposite influences, proposing two opposite nostrums for the temporary cure of the financial disease. The real Bonapartists, Persigny, and the Crédit Mobilier, cherish a project by which to subject the Bank of France to the direct and complete control of the Government, to convert her into a mere dependency on the Treasury, and to use the power thus obtained for the unrestricted emission of inconvertible State paper money. The other party, represented by Fould, and other renegades of former regimes, propose a new loan, whose amount is variously estimated by the most modest at £16,000,000, by the more daring at £30,000,000.