And the cotton we'll have, and to work we will set
Every Lancashire hand, every Manchester mill.
We're recruiting to do it—we'll make no mistakes:
There's a place they call India just over the way;
There we're raising a force which, Jerusalem, snakes!
Will clean catawampus your cruisers, C. J.
"Distressed Millionaires"
Events entirely failed to justify these truculent words. A year later the cotton famine was at its height, and an appeal for funds is headed "Welly Clamming," with the explanation, "Everywhere we hear this, the Lancashire Doric for 'nearly starving.'" Punch applauds the zeal of the Quakers in relieving the distress caused by famine, fever and frost, and simultaneously reproduces this extraordinary advertisement from the Manchester Guardian:—
Travel: A gentleman, whose son, aged 17, is thrown out of occupation by the Cotton Famine, would be glad to meet with one or two other young gentlemen to accompany his son on a Tour, for five or six months, in the Mediterranean or elsewhere.
Address F. 127 at the Printers.
The advertiser, according to Punch, appears to be "one of those distressed millionaires who, because their mills have ceased working, declare themselves destitute mill-owners, and devolve on the squires and farmers and the British public the duty of rescuing their unemployed workpeople from starvation."