past, the monsoon has arrived, and nothing in the way of combined effort is done. Men go on investing their wealth in all sorts of foreign schemes, under all manner of risks, while a Cotton Importing Association, which can honestly hold out a profit of from twenty to forty per cent., has to go a-begging for support. And Manchester talks pedantically about demand and supply, and division of labour, unshaken by the very convincing facts before her eyes; and some would throw the work of getting cotton on Government, and some would leave it to chance, while the last thing that occurs to the general company of enriched employers is to invest their own money and pains in the work.
The sooner they see their duty as others see it, the better. What others see is, first, that we are all under a stringent obligation to carry the four millions of sufferers through their adversity, in health, and with spirits unbroken. This obligation presses everywhere; in London and in Launceston, as in Lancaster. Next, there is for the mill-owners the further duty of trying every rational method of obtaining supplies of the raw material, to set their manufacture going again. Proposals are before them for this object. Their country requires of these fortunate citizens that they shall adopt such proposals or frame others. The one thing which will never be forgiven or forgotten will be their persisting in doing nothing,—waiting while their stocks are increasing in value every day on their shelves, from the very scarcity of raw material which is starving their work-people. The time has long been past for any pretence of expecting a supply from America: the question now asked, more and more loudly, is what the manufacturers are about, not to carry their demand up to the sources of supply, in the remote recesses of native life in India.
If the duty of the manufacturers is twofold, the rest of us have a single duty so plain and urgent that we must look to ourselves that we do it. The plain duty of sustaining our cotton-operatives may, however, have many forms. The easiest is giving money. It should be largely, and may be best perhaps in instalments, when the sum is considerable. There are several agencies through which it may be dispensed, either in aid of the parish payment, or to keep families off the parish, or to sustain them by loans, or otherwise in their position of respectability till the mills open again. Again, there is Emigration going forward. There will be plenty of workers left for any work likely to accrue for years to come, however many of the young people make their escape now to a land of plenty. Let the lads and lasses be assisted to Queensland and British Columbia, to send us cotton, or make comfortable homes in the colonies; and their parents and brothers at home will suffice for the manufacture when it revives. Then, there are the sewing-rooms, where the young women earn something, and learn what they most need to be taught. Then, there are swarms of children wanting to be fed and taught:—how can we open our schools to the greatest number of them? Then, not a few of our kindly English matrons have contrived to take a Lancashire girl into their houses, to train for service, or in domestic arts which will be useful to her for life. This can hardly be expected of middle-class housekeepers whose establishments are compact and economical: but we hear of success where it has been tried. There are probably more farms and warehouses where an extra youth can be taken on for training and service. There may be other ways, and not a few. The one certain thing is that every one of us can do something. Assuming this, I will only further ask my readers to try to represent to themselves what four millions of persons of all ages are like. Let them then think of that multitude as active, high-spirited, hitherto beholden to nobody, but now hungry, restless in idleness, fretting about their rent, ashamed to appear in the streets, wistfully inquiring about the chances of better times, hating to borrow, and hating worse to take parish pay,—and, in the midst of all this, steadily refusing to ask the Government to interfere in America, so as to cut off the negro slave’s chance of freedom;—let our countrymen and countrywomen look on this noble company of suffering fellow-citizens, and say whether they shall endure one pang that we can prevent.
From the Mountain.
MEDUSA AND HER LOCKS.
Along the sandy shores at low water may be seen in the summer months numbers of round, flattish, gelatinous-looking bodies, scientifically called Medusæ, going popularly by the expressive though scarcely euphemious titles of slobs, slobbers, stingers, and stangers, and called jelly fishes by the inland public, though the creatures are not fishes at all, and have no jelly in their composition.
As these Medusæ lie on the beach they present anything but agreeable spectacles to the casual observer; and, as a general fact, rather excite disgust than admiration; and it is not until they are swimming, in the free enjoyment of liberty, that they are viewed with any degree of complacency by an unpractised eye. Yet, even in their present helpless and apparently lifeless condition, sunken partially in the sand, and without a movement to show that animation still holds its place in the tissues, there is something worthy of observation and by no means devoid of interest.
In the first place, be it noted that all the Medusæ lie in their normal attitudes; and, in spite of their apparently helpless nature, which causes them to be carried about almost at random by the waves or currents, they, in so far, bid defiance to the powers of the sea, that they are not tossed about in all sorts of positions as is usually the case with creatures that are thrown upon the beach, but die, like Caesar, decently, with their mantles wrapped round them.
Looking closer at the Medusæ, the observer will find that the substance is by no means homogeneous, but that it is traversed by numerous veinings something like the nervures of a leaf. These marks indicate the almost inconceivably delicate tissues of which the real animated portion of the creature is composed, and which form a network of cells, that enclose a vast proportionate