Mr. Adams to Mr. Seward.
Sir: I have to acknowledge the reception of despatches from the department, numbered from 399 to 407, inclusive, with the exception of No. 404; also despatch No. 396, noted as missing last week.
Little has taken place here worthy of note since the date of my last. Public attention has been much drawn to the state of affairs on the continent, the effect of which is to divert it in a corresponding degree from America. * * * So far events must be considered as looking favorably for the United States. There is less appearance of a desire to intermeddle with our differences. The distress in the manufacturing districts has gradually reached a height sufficient [Page 14] to bring out a corresponding effort to provide for it. It is more than likely that from this time it will become less and less burdensome. Such engagements have been entered into for a prospective supply of cotton from other sources than the United States that a probability of a sudden reopening of our ports is beginning to be viewed with quite as much of apprehension as desire. The chief event that is looked for is the moment when the price of the manufactured product will have risen so high as to render a resumption of labor, under the ruling price of the raw material, profitable. Thus far it is notorious here that all the markets of the world, to which the English have access, had been, prior to the troubles, so much glutted with their cotton goods as, in spite of the subsequent cessation of manufacture, not yet to have recovered their equilibrium. But the passage of each day now contributes to restore it. And though it may be yet a great while before the manufacture will return to its pristine proportions, there is strong reason to believe that it will not be long before an expansion will take the place of the contraction of industry. This commercial revolution, like the political one now going on in America, has reached such a pass that it seems for the interest of the whole world that there should be no falling back into it hereafter. The establishment of various sources of supply of cotton, by other than slave labor, is now rendered in the highest degree likely. The restriction upon the exportation of it from America is not then to be regarded as by any means an unmixed evil. Rather is it to be considered as likely out of evil to educe a greater good. Had the rebels been as successful in their labors of destruction of their own property as they at one time pretended, I am not at all sure that they would not have done everybody but themselves a most essential service.
I only fear the extent of their failure of performance. For, even at this moment, any restoration of their old system of labor in producing this commodity of cotton is to be regarded as one of the events the most to be deprecated by all the highest interests of humanity everywhere on the globe. It was an overweening confidence in the power of an apparent monopoly which precipitated these misguided men into the abyss into which they find themselves plunged. To extricate them, with the retention of any means of reviving in them their former delusion, would be no true charity to them, whilst it would endanger the peace and happiness of everybody else.
I have the honor to be, sir, your obedient servant,
Hon. William H. Seward, Secretary of State, Washington.