In the spring of 1866, Europe, and especially Western Europe, which had always been the center of the world, was facing an unprecedented crisis.

In fact, as early as eight or nine years ago, an economic crisis swept through the entire Western world from the United States.

In the first ten years of 1858, more than 30,000 kilometers of railways were built in the United States, more than the entire European and other countries combined. However, the railroad in the United States has developed rapidly, but there has been little progress in the iron mining industry, and the rails, locomotives and other cotton cloth needed are imported from Britain, because of excessive investment, the debt crisis in the United States and the real industry does not match it, the crisis broke out, and a large number of financial companies and industrial enterprises such as banks in the United States collapsed. However, the frenzied westward expansion movement caused the United States to overproduce grain, food prices and grain exports fell, and many free farmers went bankrupt.

Because of this, the United States suffered a civil war between the North and the South, which is now divided into three countries, and the United Kingdom, which has the closest relationship with the United States, also suffered the most losses because it was involved in the most investments, and it became implicated and triggered a serious financial crisis. However, due to the rebellion in India, the rebellion in Ireland, and the impact of events such as independence, these crises were temporarily set aside. These crises have not been completely eliminated, but have been postponed and slowly consumed.

However, with the fiasco of Britain's two successive expeditions to China, Britain's influence in the world was greatly reduced, and the vast majority of overseas colonies were seized by the Chinese Empire, the most fundamental independence of Ireland and the loss of Indian colonies, especially the Indian colonies, although not completely occupied by the Chinese Empire, but the main part of them began to become independent, forming the Sikh Kingdom and the Bengal Sultanate and a large number of Indian princely forces, and the loss of Indian colonies made Britain suffer heavy losses. The outbreak of the American Civil War, and the eventual intervention of the Chinese Empire, an external power, invaded the entire area west of the Mississippi River and became a colony of the Eastern Empire.

Not only did the loss of these colonies cost Britain dearly, but more importantly, British foreign investment, along with the loss of these colonies, as well as the division of the American Federation and the occupation of the area west of the Mississippi River, also lost most of it.

And, due to the lack of suppliers of these raw materials, such as overseas colonies and the United States, most of these markets have also been lost.

Especially because of the civil war and economic crisis in the United States, the demand for industrial goods was greatly reduced, and even the area west of the Mississippi River in the United States, where the demand was most intense, came to a near standstill after the occupation of the Chinese Empire.

The lack of a market and the emergence of a large number of competing goods suddenly put the British economy, which has always been mainly based on exports, into a difficult situation. There is a huge backlog of goods produced in the UK that cannot be dumped. Industry-based finance collapsed earlier, and banks collapsed. After that, a large number of industrial and commercial enterprises went bankrupt, production plummeted, and the market was very depressed. With the surge in the number of unemployed, the living standards of the people in major industrial cities such as London and Birmingham have seriously declined, and it is often one person who works to support a large family, and the main workers who have jobs are also afraid of being fired because they are always afraid of being fired, and their wages are reduced again and again and they do not dare to resign, and the resentment in their hearts is difficult to resolve.

And the local farmers are no better. On the outskirts of industrial cities, many people have fled from the cities to the countryside to help farmers grow crops, resulting in a bumper harvest in agriculture. Especially in neighboring Ireland, because of the independence from England, the people were given a share of the land, and the harvest increased greatly. In particular, the grain brought from the damned East and the Hexi region of the United States was dumped in Europe and other places, and the excessive supply of agricultural products caused its prices to drop significantly, and although it saved many poor urban unemployed workers to a certain extent, it also hurt British farmers and farmers, many of whom were on the verge of bankruptcy despite the bumper harvest.

By the summer of 1866, the whole of Western Europe was unusually arid. However, people were surprised to find several reports in succession in the Times, the largest newspaper in Europe:

In view of the fact that the price of food in London and Western Europe as a whole is too low, which has already caused losses, from last month, the supply of food from foreign enemies in the Black Sea, the Mediterranean and the Baltic Sea, the North Sea, etc., will be stopped.

In Ireland and Sweden, because grain prices were too low last year, many peasant households gave up growing grain and went to the cities to work, or to plant cotton and other crops.

Due to the civil strife in Tsarist Russia, many fields in the Eastern European Plain, the largest grain producing area in Europe, were abandoned and abandoned, and many Russian serfs fled into the Moscow region to become a blind stream, and most of the rest were old people, women and children, so that Tsarist Russia will usher in the largest reduction in grain production in a century. In the Black Sea coastal areas, where the fields were partially barren due to war, grain production was already reduced, and these areas were under the control of the Ottoman Turkish and Austrian armies, so many grain incidents were plundered and looted last year, and the local residents did not dare to reclaim more farmland and let it be abandoned.

The same is true of places such as Poland and Lithuania in the Baltic Sea. The reduction of grain production in the former Tsarist regions has become a foregone conclusion.

Prussia and other countries of the Federal Republic of Germany, as well as France, also had the problem of labor shortage, and although grain production was not reduced too much, because of the large populations of the two countries, the original grain supply was relatively consistent with the population, and the volume that could be sold for export was not large.

The only thing that could maintain a normal level of grain was probably the Austrian Empire and the Ottoman Turkey, but the grain of these two countries has always been controlled by the British grain merchants. Among them, Mr. Merck, a large grain supplier in London, England, is one of them. Today, the Times openly reported that Mr. Merck, a big grain merchant, poured all the milk produced by more than 3,000 dairy cows on his farm into the Thames River, and burned all the more than 500 tons of wheat and grain that were harvested last year and put them in the grain depot.

According to the reasoning of Mr. Tolley, a special commentator for The Times, it is suspected that it is not that Mr. Merck is mentally ill, but that Mr. Merck is too shrewd, because there is a surplus of food in the London market, and wants to reduce the food supply in this way in order to increase the price of food.

Mr. Tolley introduced to the reader that although Mr. Merck is the largest grain producer in the Greater London area, he is also the largest food supplier to London, Liverpool, Glasgow and other British Isles, and his food supply is not only grown on local farms, but also imported from Turkey and the original Crimean peninsula to London for resale. Taking wheat as an example, the UK now imports nearly 45% of its wheat every year from abroad, and 40% of other cattle, sheep, pork and butter. Therefore, it can be said that Mr. Merck, who controls the import channels, can control half of the food supply of the whole of London and a third of the whole of the British mainland, and there is reason to suspect that this move of Mr. Merck will lead to a sharp increase in food prices!

Mr. Tolley had a group of supporters who, after reading the issue of the newspaper, rushed to the grain store to buy and hoard food, but most of the people were unimpressed.

Regardless, a day after the Times news was published, while the public was still skeptical, food prices were already visibly starting to rise.

Early on the morning of the third day, the Times, which has always reported only on political and military affairs, reported the news in the cracks for the first time: Yesterday the price of flour produced in Marc Street rose by 9 shillings per bag, and the price of wheat per quart rose from 60 shillings to 68 shillings overnight, an increase of more than 13 per cent overnight!

The news caused concern and consternation among the people of London. But when it became clear that the newspaper commentator named Tolly was telling the truth, panic spread, and the whole of London rushed to the grocery stores to buy food in a frenzy. By the afternoon of the same day, the flour had risen by 30 shillings per bag. The frightened people rushed to buy wheat further upstream, but the wheat also rose to the point of 82 shillings per quart.

By the evening of the same day, the main grain supply stores in London, the major grain supply mark, had been sold out of flour and other finished grains. And the price of unprocessed wheat has risen to 95 shillings per quart!

On the fourth day, there was no need for newspaper claims, and the news of the sharp rise in food prices was known to the whole of the British Isles, in addition to Greater London, and even Glasgow, far northwest.