Читать книгу Liberalism at Large - Alexander Zevin - Страница 8

The 1830s and 1840s were the most tumultuous decades in the history of modern Britain: during this period, a social order forged in the seventeenth century came closer to being overturned than at any subsequent point. Yet in the end it bequeathed that order, albeit in modified form, to the present. Pressures bubbled during the Napoleonic Wars, and nearly boiled over after 1815, as twenty years of rising prices gave way to sharp trade depressions, deflation and discontent, amidst the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution. From 1816 to 1819, protest spread in waves through northern manufacturing towns and rural parishes, with the smashing of power-looms and threshing machines, and bread riots involving laid-off operatives and farm labourers. The famous clash at St Peters Field on 16 August 1819 showed how quickly tensions in the country became political: reformers called a rally to demand parliamentary representation for the large towns and votes for working men, and more than 60,000 people packed into the centre of Manchester. Peterloo was the name given to the killings that followed, an ironic nod to the brave hussars who charged an unarmed crowd.

A decade later dissent once more assumed an organized form, this time briefly uniting the middle and working classes in urban political unions, just as agricultural workers were exploding into riot throughout the south of England. For the aristocracy that dominated the House of Commons, the three years from 1829 threatened an upheaval whose terrors it associated with the French Revolution. In 1832 a Reform Bill was passed whose purpose was to reconcile a rising middle class, ‘the intelligent and independent portion of the community’, with an oligarchic system and so divert it from any alliance with the masses below.¹ In this at least it succeeded. Radical MPs from the industrial towns trickled into the Commons, which continued to divide along the same Whig-Tory party lines.

But electoral concessions did not stop pressures for reform, even if those who were aggrieved now pursued their goals separately, and as often at odds with each other. Agitation revived at the onset of the economic crisis of 1837, with the almost simultaneous birth of Chartism and the Anti-Corn Law League. The Chartists focused popular anger into six demands, including universal male suffrage and the ballot; what Engels called the ‘first proletarian party’ mobilized new factory workers and once skilled craftsmen now threatened by penury behind it. But the strikes it bred were swiftly repressed, and its petitions fizzled out.² Based in the manufacturing middle-class, the Anti-Corn Law League was both more ‘respectable’ and far more effective. Avoiding any broader issues, what it demanded was the repeal of the laws that British landowners had imposed in 1815 to keep foreign competition in wheat out of the country, and domestic prices high. This aristocratic tariff squeezed the industrial cotton masters of Lancashire during a severe depression, and obstructed their pursuit of export markets. In the League they created a formidable machine to overturn agrarian protection and move Britain toward unilateral free trade. If its programme was much narrower than that of Chartism, its organizing capacity – drawing in not only manufacturers, merchants and middle-class professionals, but a good many workers too, attracted by its promise of cheaper bread – greatly outstripped it.

Between 1839 and 1843 the League petitioned parliament over 16,000 times, collecting nearly six million signatures. From a Manchester warehouse it shipped 9 million pamphlets, posters, newspapers, almanacs and every other kind of printed matter in 1843 alone. Lecturers fanned out to hundreds of local chapters across the country. There were banquets, balls, conventions, tea parties, bazaars – precursors to the great exhibitions, whose celebrations of technical progress drew hundreds of thousands of visitors. In 1845 Covent Garden was dressed up as a Gothic hall, with industrial displays, libraries, raffles, puppet shows, and stands selling Anti-Corn Law-themed crockery, tablecloths, thimbles, handkerchiefs, scarves, razors and stickers to seal letters at the post office: ‘Free communication with all parts of the empire is good: free trade with all parts of the world will be still better.’ The money involved was staggering: a budget of £25,000 in the first three years, £50,000 in 1842–1843, £100,000 in both 1844 and 1845, with a goal of £250,000 (or £29 million in today’s money) for 1846.³ By then a pressure group seeded in a single chamber of commerce, controlled by factory owners in search of lower labour costs at home and new markets abroad, had convinced much of the rest of the country that repeal was vitally in its interest too, as a master-key to general prosperity. It had also shown how far the issue of free trade could travel, and the passions it aroused. Consciously echoing earlier agitation against the slave trade, and its dissenting and evangelical overtones, the League built links abroad – including to American free-traders, who nonetheless remained a minority in the US well into the twentieth century.⁴ In no other country would the forces that came together under the banner of the League prove so successful, or enduring, as in Britain.⁵

Credit for repeal of the Corn Laws, when it came in 1846, went to one League leader above all, Richard Cobden. A calico printer turned politician, Cobden had risen from a clerk in a City of London warehouse to the smoggy heights of Manchester’s cottonopolis: in 1836, five years after moving from commission to factory production, his firm had £150,000 in turnover, with profits of £23,000, a hint of the sums to be made from textiles in flush times.⁶ John Bright was the other outspoken leader of the League, born, unlike Cobden, to a prosperous family of Quaker cotton spinners in the town of Rochdale in Lancashire. Both were eloquent and tireless proponents of free trade, though in each case – untypically – their radicalism reached past the Corn Laws, to electoral and land reform, an end to primogeniture, and religious disestablishment. ‘The colonies, army, navy and church are, with the Corn Laws, merely accessories to aristocratic government’, wrote Cobden in 1836. ‘John Bull has his work cut out for the next fifty years to purge his house of those impurities!’⁷ Long before victory over the Corn Laws was in sight, however, Cobden and Bright met James Wilson, a Scottish hat manufacturer and author, whose powerful vision of a free trade world, first set out in 1839, gave their campaign its winning argument.

James Wilson’s Winning Argument

Wilson was born in Hawick, a busy town in the Scottish Borders, whose River Teviot powered the textile mills that sprang up along its banks in the 1700s. His father, William, a devout Quaker, owned one of these establishments and secured from it a very respectable livelihood. His mother, Elizabeth, died giving birth for the fifteenth time in 1815, leaving five surviving daughters and five sons, of whom James, born in 1805, was the fourth. His education was brief. For four years he attended a school run by the Society of Friends in Ackworth where, an aunt recalled, he was ‘exceedingly clever … but never excelled in play’. The austerity there agreed with him: at fifteen he wanted to become a schoolmaster, though he soon thought better of it. After a year at an Essex seminary he wrote home to his parents, ‘I would rather be the most menial servant in my father’s mill than be a teacher.’ He and his older brother were apprenticed instead to a hatmaker, a business their father eventually bought them.

It was during this period, from ages sixteen to nineteen, that Wilson seems to have read most of the authors on whom he would later draw as editor. Adam Smith, James Mill, Thomas Tooke, David Ricardo and the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Say supplied a mix of moral philosophy and political economy.⁸ The title he later chose for his paper indicates how far these fields of inquiry overlapped. ‘Economist’ had yet to acquire its modern meaning; its sense was ‘the economizer’, he who does not waste money and manages resources efficiently. Wilson was a talented economizer. Walter Bagehot described his approach to intellectual matters in a memorial. ‘For some years at least he was in the habit of reading a good deal, very often till late at night. It was indeed then that he acquired most of the knowledge of books he ever possessed. In later life he was much too busy to be a regular reader, and he never acquired the habit of catching easily the contents of books or even of articles in the interstices of other occupations. Whatever he did, he did thoroughly. He would not read even an article in a newspaper if he could well help doing so.’

These habits may seem strange in someone Bagehot also described as a ‘great belief producer’, but were in fact the precondition for his passionate faith. ‘He was not an intolerant person but the qualities he tolerated least easily were flightiness and inconsistency of purpose. He had furnished his mind, so to say, with fixed principles, and he hated the notion of a mind which was unfurnished.’⁹ Wilson was already a busy, practical man of affairs before his twentieth birthday, with all the theoretical knowledge about political economy he considered useful. In 1824 he and his brother left Hawick to set up Wilson, Erwin and Wilson in London, each with a further £2,000 of paternal capital in pocket. His father must have been extremely wealthy to give such generous gifts – the equivalent today of around £400,000 – to just two of his sons. In 1831 Wilson bought out his partners, renaming the hatter James Wilson & Co, and the following year Wilson married Elizabeth Preston and so into a line of Yorkshire gentry then living in Newcastle, members of the Church of England. His conversion to Anglicanism opened the way for his nuptials and a career in politics. Four years later Wilson and his new family moved from a house near the factory in Southwark to a mansion in Dulwich Place. By 1837 Wilson had amassed a fortune of £25,000. But, in a sign of the speculative financial turn his business interests were taking, that year he lost most of his wealth betting on the price of indigo, which fell when he had expected it to rise. The firm was on the line: in a global financial panic, with unlimited liability, he rushed to satisfy his creditors. This he managed to do, though the manner in which he mortgaged certain assets to raise capital raised awkward questions later on.¹⁰

Wilson refused to despair over this setback. Instead he began to investigate what he saw as their general cause, publishing his first pamphlet in 1839, Influences of the Corn Laws as Affecting All Classes of the Community, and Particularly the Landed Interests. Cobden and Bright were impressed with this text, which also marked a turning point in the repeal debate, in arguing that free trade would usher in an organic harmony of all economic interests. The aim and effect of repeal was not to remove the advantages of the landed interests, as both those who were for and those who were against it had been saying since at least 1815. ‘We cannot too much lament and deprecate the spirit of violence and exaggeration with which this subject has always been approached.’ Rather it was protection – a flawed, unnatural system of government interference with commerce – that was the enemy, ‘prejudicial to all classes of the community’.¹¹ It was not a matter for ‘class enmity … the interest of all classes was the same’, and Wilson spoke privately, on this score, of ‘the rubbish they have been talking at Manchester’.¹² It is unlikely Cobden and Bright were ever won over to this line of thinking, so different from their broadsides against the parasitism of rent-seeking aristocrats. Cobden even ventured a small criticism at the time. ‘I think you have lost sight of one gain to the aristocratic land-lords … the political power arising out of the present state of their tenantry – and political power in this country has been pecuniary gain.’¹³

Whatever its flaws, however, the pamphlet proved strategically invaluable. The League and the Leeds Mercury (a leading voice of provincial Whiggism) reprinted it. Cobden praised Wilson for ‘labouring to prove to the Landlords that they may safely do justice to others without endangering their own interests.’¹⁴ J. R. McCulloch, the chief disciple of David Ricardo, called it ‘one of the best and most reasonable of the late tracts in favour of unconditional repeal’.¹⁵ It was even quoted by certain Tories, then the party of protection, including the prime minister Sir Robert Peel. Such was its power to transform debate and attract formerly committed foes of free trade in the countryside that, for a time, even Cobden adopted its language. ‘I am afraid, if we must confess the truth, that most of us entered upon this struggle with the belief that we had some distinct class interest in the question, and that we should carry it by a manifestation of our will’, he told a Manchester crowd in 1843. ‘If there is one thing which more than another has elevated and dignified and ennobled this agitation, it is, we have found, that every interest and every object which every part of the community can justly seek, harmonize perfectly with the views of the Anti-Corn Law League.’¹⁶ In Wilson the League discovered that in pursuing its own class interests it was pursuing those of all classes.

Yet it is just as easy to see the appeal his early tracts against protection held out to enterprising landowners. In Influences, his clearest point was conveyed in statistical tables which claimed to show that production costs in England were competitive with Europe; given other variables, like soil conditions and cost of transport, foreign grain was unlikely to flood the home market.¹⁷ Still more significant, however, were the theoretical foundations for this claim. In contrast to Ricardo and Thomas Malthus he did not see class conflict as an inherent fact of economic life: from the former he discarded or modified the theory of marginal rents and wages, and from the latter the pessimistic forecast that population always outpaces food supply. Ricardo suggested that landed capital gained at the expense of industrial capital, and Malthus that working-class wages tended towards the bare minimum necessary for survival. Wilson favoured a model of rapid growth, in which rent, profits and wages all rose in tandem – provided that a free trade system was in place, allowing Britain to exchange its finished goods for the raw materials of less advanced nations. The less advanced nations could then buy even more from Britain. Given such a system, Ricardo had written, ‘it is difficult to say where the limit is at which you could cease to accumulate wealth and to derive profit from its exploit’.¹⁸ If this blueprint for growth owed much to Ricardo, however, the universal identity of class interests it presaged belonged to Adam Smith.

Wilson posited a theory of price fluctuations to explain a status quo that only appeared to benefit agriculture at the expense of capital and labour. High grain prices ensured by protective tariffs encouraged farmers to over-cultivate during good times, only to see their surplus grain mouldering during subsequent crashes. Worse, falling prices meant a reverse cycle of abandoned fields and diminishing investment. As prices began to rise again the home grower had little to sell; foreign wheat was then called in and it reaped the profits. Landowners suffered nearly as much, faced with the unpalatable options of accepting steeply reduced rents, ruining their tenants without being able to find new ones, or taking over the fields themselves.¹⁹ Manufacturing would also be served by reform, though not in the way many Leaguers assumed. Repeal was not going to lower the price of provisions or labour. Quite the contrary, since prices were bound to climb in step with the general prosperity attendant upon a more productive application of labour and capital and the rise in exports. What of the workers? Price swings were, finally, most regrettable for their effect on ‘the moral and political condition of the labouring population of all kinds.’ No one could forget the terror which swept the countryside during the last crisis: ‘the awful and mysterious midnight fires … anonymous letters; secret societies to fan and inflame the worst passions; highway robberies and personal attacks.’ And all this carried out by the indigent peasants whose miseries ‘were really much more apt to excite our pity than our blame’. Factory workers were even more cruelly used, lulled by ‘the temporary possession of comforts and luxuries far beyond what their average condition will enable them to support’.²⁰

Backing the Economist: Wilson and the Whig Grandees

Armed with such arguments Wilson became a regular speaker at meetings of the League, where Archibald Prentice of the Manchester Times remembered him as ‘relying more upon statistical figures than on figures of speech, and trusting more to facts and reasoning than to rhetorical flourishes.’ Yet his audience ‘had come to learn and not to be excited by flashes of oratory’, listening with ‘deep interest for three quarters of an hour’.²¹ Wilson for his part preferred the pen to the podium, and continued publishing, with Fluctuations of Currency, Commerce, and Manufactures: Referable to the Corn Laws in 1840. The assemblies were noisy and drew too many ‘Manchester School extremists’. After a meeting at the Drury Lane Theatre in London, in which Cobden, Bright and Daniel O’Connell took front stage, he confided to his family that this was ‘not to his taste, and he would be sorry to see other political questions settled that way’.²²

Wilson was aware that his voice carried farther than the theatre pits of the capital. His writings had caught the attention of a group of Whig politicians sympathetic to the goals of the League, if not to its noisy proceedings. In 1839, lordly letters began to stream into Dulwich Place. Charles Villiers, the radical MP for Wolverhampton, asked for help in drafting his annual motion for repeal in the House of Commons, a solitary ritual, usually voted down by a margin of several hundred. Would Wilson, he added, be kind enough to call on his brother George, fourth Earl of Clarendon, at the Athenaeum Club? William Pleydell-Bouverie, third Earl of Radnor, wrote from Longford Castle requesting anti-Corn Law arguments he could use against the surrounding squires in Wiltshire.²³ Radnor, who took an almost fatherly interest in Wilson – nominating him to the Reform Club in 1842, and helping him take his first steps into politics – prided himself on being the most radical of all grandees. At the age of ten a terrified witness of the French Revolution, Radnor later became convinced (after repairing to Edinburgh and Oxford and studies of Smith, Blackstone and Montesquieu) that progress was possible without reliving those scenes of democratic chaos: the cause of individual liberty was best served by laissez-faire economics coupled with the political rule of an enlightened aristocracy.²⁴ On a visit to Radnor’s vast demesne near Salisbury, built up on investments in the Levant trade, the French statesman Alexis de Tocqueville observed that the Radnor family embodied the eminently commercial character of the English nobility.²⁵

One drawing room after another, in town and country, opened its doors to Wilson, who passed through them to find the backers he would need to start the Economist. His message was that complete free trade would mean an end to the trade cycle itself, a thesis whose utopian flavour is evident in all his major works between 1839 and 1841 – from Influences and Fluctuations to The Revenue; or What Should the Chancellor Do?²⁶ The idea of starting a newspaper arose soon after the last of these pamphlets appeared, for it was clear that neither corn nor the League offered sufficient scope for Wilson to develop his unique vision. ‘There never was a time when an independent organ was more required,’ Villiers insisted in the spring of 1843. Meeting at his club, Wilson found him ‘very fond of the thing, – but from what he said I fear we shall have some difficulty with the League – it appears they are extremely jealous of their importance and will want it a League Paper, and as such I will have nothing to do with it.’ Cobden was meanwhile reporting to Bright that ‘James Wilson has a plan for starting a weekly Free Trader by himself and his friends’. The two tried to persuade him to edit the Anti-Bread Tax Circular instead. Newspapers, Cobden informed Wilson, were ‘graves de fortunes in London … have you made up your mind to a great and continuous pecuniary loss?’ To Bright he wrote in slight bemusement, ‘Wilson has a notion that a paper would do more good if it were not the organ of the League but merely their independent support.’²⁷ Still, he noted, Wilson was reluctant to act without their approval.

Wilson desperately needed the League for its subscribers and distribution networks and so tried to explain his reasoning at a meeting with Bright and George Wilson, chairman of the League, to which he also invited Radnor. To his Anti-Corn Law colleagues he promised new and more influential converts than could be reached by any journal bearing the direct imprint of the League. His intended audience, he told Cobden in June, in what was probably his most compelling pitch, was ‘the higher circles of the landed and monied interests’.²⁸ Wilson’s other partners came from just these social heights, and they wanted a moderate journal free of the faintest traces of populism. From Radnor he obtained £500, while the League, with the aim of winning both the City of London and the countryside, agreed to order 20,000 copies.²⁹ For Cobden the journal would be another means of putting pressure on opinion within parliament – and of altering its composition, since a crucial by-election pitting a free-trader against a protectionist was coming up in the City.³⁰

To ensure the success of his venture Wilson imposed some drastic personal economies. He rented out one of his homes, and ordered a halt to pineapples in the hothouses. By shipping his wife and six daughters to Boulogne to take the waters and dismissing all servants – save nurse, maid, housekeeper and errand boy – he raised a further £800. In a letter to his wife in France, Wilson confided another reason for his drive for independence: ‘no question will ever arise as to the property, or to whom the benefit of the paper will belong after it shall have risen to a good circulation which I hope it may do in time.’ From the start the Economist was a business and had to make money.³¹

Yet its founding was also a milestone in political and economic thought, a bugle blast of the first age of global capitalism. Wilson and his newspaper became more than mouthpieces for the Manchester school: they developed and disseminated the doctrine it embodied – laissez-faire liberalism – in its clearest and most consistent form. It was with this aim in mind that Wilson refused to work for the League. ‘My paper would not do for that purpose … mine must be perfectly philosophical, steady and moderate; nothing but pure principles.’³² Thus a footnote in the history of the Anti-Corn Law movement quickly eclipsed it: of the millions who now read the Economist how many have heard of the forces that made it possible, or the principles by which it found distinction?

The Original Cast of the Economist

The economic historian Scott Gordon thought he saw the force of an idea, steady if not moderate, in a portrait of Wilson painted a year before his death:

He sits stolidly in his chair, his hands folded in finality. His round face is benevolent, but there is the unmistakable mark of doctrine in the eyes, close set and steady, and there is that thin, firm mouth. ‘There is no nonsense about me,’ they say. ‘I know what is right, I work hard, and I do my duty.’ ‘What is this man’s passion?’ one wonders, for surely he has one: good portraits do not lie about that. Is it Temperance? Abolition of slavery? Prevention of cruelty to animals? Education? It is all of these things and many more, for it is the one thing, the one principle, which will make the whole world a harmonious and beneficent order. It is laissez-faire.³³

Wilson controlled the Economist and wrote much of its content. ‘He worked on it indefatigably,’ remembered Herbert Spencer, sub-editor from 1848 to 1853, ‘and, being a man of good business judgment, sufficient literary faculty, and extensive knowledge of commercial and financial matters, soon made it an organ of the mercantile world, and, in course of a relatively short time, a valuable property.’³⁴ His collaborators were perhaps the only men whose doctrinal commitments exceeded his own. Thomas Hodgskin was the most influential editor between 1844 and 1857, followed by Spencer and William Rathbone Greg, a leader-writer starting in 1847. Several other distinguished individuals made occasional contributions, including Charles Villiers’s brother-in-law Sir George Cornewall Lewis, Poor Law Commissioner and later Chancellor of the Exchequer in Palmerston’s first government, for whom Wilson worked as financial secretary. Lewis was also a classicist, linguist, philologist and political theorist, whose key public service had been to extend the English Poor Law of 1834 to Ireland – condemning claimants of state assistance to workhouses, to be made as unpleasant as possible to teach their inmates self-reliance. Nassau Senior, the main author of the Poor Law and one of the most eminent economists of his day, was another contributor; for Wilson he seems to have written on foreign affairs.³⁵ Together they extended laissez-faire in every conceivable direction, embellishing and amending it in the process. These were the original voices hidden behind the anonymous, imperious judgments for which the Economist would become famous.

Hodgskin may seem oddly out of place among them, given his reputation as a Ricardian socialist and radical anarchist, whose texts from the 1820s so inspired Marx. When Wilson met Hodgskin, however, he was no longer arguing that capital and labour were locked in a battle to the death, or explaining that the labour theory of value showed how the former shamelessly cheated the latter of its moral right to the whole of what it produced.³⁶ By 1843 Hodgskin had retreated from such attacks on capital, and the Ricardian reading of class conflict that fired them. What remained was an anarchic individualism: a profound distrust of all government and legislation, no matter how enlightened, and a deistic faith in natural law. That year he published a free trade tract praising the League in terms that would have made sense to Wilson; repeal of the Corn Laws, it argued, was merely a first step in beating back the Leviathan of the state, ‘a huge system of injustice, all of which must be removed’.³⁷ Even as a young man Hodgskin had distinguished himself from other socialists in seeing the free market, not mutual aid, as the only way for workers to secure the full fruits of their labours. In the 1830s he no longer imagined that this would come about as a result of victory over the middle classes, but by workers being absorbed into its ranks.

Now we find, in consequence of the respect for the natural rights of property, that a large middle class, completely emancipated from the bondage of destitution which the law … sought to perpetuate, has grown up in every part of Europe, uniting in their own persons the character both of labourers and capitalists. They are fast increasing in numbers; and we may hope, as the beautiful inventions of art gradually supersede unskilled labour, that they, reducing the whole society to equal and free men, will gradually extinguish all that yet remains of slavery and oppression.³⁸

‘All these changes have been effected in spite of the law,’ he added, driving home his point that the middle class, if left alone, could achieve what no earthly government could. Hodgskin wrote book reviews as well as leaders, rebutting social reformers on everything from the Poor Law and Factory Acts to health and sanitation committees, and questions of crime and penal law.³⁹

Herbert Spencer was twenty-eight in 1848. He had yet to formulate his famous theories of social evolution but was groping towards them, and Wilson was favourably impressed by his first efforts, a series of letters to the Nonconformist published as the pamphlet The Proper Sphere of Government in 1843. In it Spencer argued that the state was originally designed to do almost nothing, except ‘defend the natural rights of man – to protect person and property’. Its proper sphere was definitely ‘not to regulate commerce; not to educate the people; not to teach religion; not to administer charity; not to make roads and railways’.⁴⁰ He put the Economist together each week, working and sleeping at the Strand offices, where he sometimes dined with Hodgskin.⁴¹ He contributed little of his own writing. But he did soak up the atmosphere, even if he preferred going to the Royal Italian Opera, or crossing the street to see Westminster Review editor John Chapman. Through Chapman he met the leading radical thinkers of the day, and a publisher for his first book in 1850.

Social Statics owed more to his Economist colleagues than his new friends, however. Both in its hostility to Utilitarian concepts of law and morality and style, direct and flippant, Spencer’s book was exactly like an Economist leader. The visible hand of the state was slippery: what began with ‘tax paid teachers’ was bound to end in doctors and scientists, ‘government funerals’, and things so absurd only the French could have dreamt of them, ‘public ball rooms, gratis concerts, cheap theatres, with state-paid actors, musicians, masters of ceremonies’. Meddling with the marketplace was far from a laughing matter, however. It had truly dire consequences, upsetting a natural process of adaptation on which all material progress depended: ‘principles that show themselves alike in the self-adjustment of planetary perturbations and in the healing of a scratched finger – in the balance of social systems and the increased hearing in a blind man’s ear – in the adaptation of prices to produce and the acclimatization of a plant.’⁴² A strong utopian element was evident. Spencer maintained that out of these harsh and slightly mysterious mechanisms of adjustment would emerge a perfect society of sexual equality, intellectual cultivation, and an end to private ownership of land.

This last point went too far for Hodgskin, who noted, in an otherwise glowing review in the Economist, ‘the right of each individual is not to use the land … but each to use his own faculties’.⁴³ Laissez-faire nevertheless received an important new justification in Spencer, who, as one historian has argued, wished to show that ‘the individualistic competitive society of Victorian England had been ordained by nature and was the sole guarantor of progress’.⁴⁴ If some elements of his positivist social philosophy postdate his time at the Economist – for example, his juxtaposition of Lamarckian evolution and Darwinian natural selection after 1859, when he coined ‘survival of the fittest’ – these would be taken up with growing frequency in its pages.

One conduit for social evolutionary theories in the Economist was William Rathbone Greg, who came up with his own applications of them. In fact, Greg had met Darwin before Spencer, when, as classmates at the University of Edinburgh, both Darwin and Greg joined the freethinking Plinian Society. Where Spencer stressed the internal, class dynamics of Social Darwinism – the struggle for survival in nature applied to economic competition between individuals in the nation – Greg pushed it in other directions: to the competition between races and nations and even sexes. It was this version, very often opposed to that of Spencer, which had a major impact on the next editor, Walter Bagehot.

Greg authored some of the paper’s most ardent laissez-faire positions, applied indiscriminately to the Irish, the Gospels, the working class and women. Like Wilson he was the son of a mill-owner turned publicist for the League, winning its praise for his 1842 essay Agriculture and the Corn Laws. He was even more socially conservative, while indulging in more Victorian symptoms and mystic fads than Wilson would have thought decent. A mesmerist, he also claimed to be able to magnetize livestock, and experienced melancholia, dyspepsia, neuralgia and vapours. He claimed to abhor fornication, especially in women. Under similar psychological pressures his wife and brother went mad.⁴⁵ Greg soldiered on, consoled that these and other traits could be discerned from inspection of the human skull – something he was glad to do at parties as a practising phrenologist. He also found time to write books and articles for the Economist, the North British Review, Westminster Review and Edinburgh Review.

Greg seems to have fallen out with most of the women he met in these liberal circles – a fact linked not only to his hobbies but his influence on the paper. One reason may have been an 1862 article entitled ‘Why Are Women Redundant?’, which argued that unmarried British women – all 1.5 million – should be asked to emigrate. ‘He is very pleasing,’ wrote his Westminster Review editor George Eliot, ‘but somehow he frightens me dreadfully’. She praised his temperament and brain. ‘But when you see him across a room, you are unpleasantly impressed, and can’t believe he wrote his own books.’⁴⁶ The popular political economist and writer Harriet Martineau was more forthright. Greg was insolent, his mind unbalanced. She condemned his view of blacks as inherently inferior, and suspected him of writing Economist pieces with ‘mistakes of the grossest kind on the American constitution … always on the slaveholding side’. Despite all contrary evidence, she added later, ‘he will go on supposing the Negro to be always sucking cane sugar in the sun … one might easily show him and Carlyle negroes considerably less “savage” than themselves.’ At least Thomas Carlyle was a ‘gentleman’ where women were concerned. Greg ‘philanders vulgarly & on the other hand unconsciously regards them insultingly’.⁴⁷

After Wilson, Hodgskin and Greg, one of the most important early contributors to the Economist was a foreigner who never actually worked there – Frédéric Bastiat, the leading advocate of free trade in France. Bastiat was a French complement to Wilson, whom he met alongside other leaders of the Anti-Corn Law League on his trips to England in the 1840s. The Economist reported on his Association pour la Liberté des Echanges (modelled on the League), quoted from its journal, Le Libre-Echange, reviewed his books – Harmonies Economiques was a special favourite. Dubbed ‘the Cobden of France’, Bastiat’s ability to distil laissez-faire principles into epigrams surpassed that of anyone in England. ‘The state’, he wrote in a style that captivated Wilson, ‘is the great fiction by which everybody tries to live at the expense of everybody else’.⁴⁸ Bastiat considered the Economist a model. ‘There never was a periodical in which all the questions of political economy were treated with so much depth and impartiality. It is a precious collection of facts, doctrine and experience mutually support each other in its columns: its diffusion on the continent would have excellent effects.’⁴⁹ On his death the paper returned the compliment, devoting an entire leader to ‘the most consistent and sturdiest opponent of Government action who has appeared in our time, or, perhaps, has ever appeared in the world’.⁵⁰

The Belief Producer: ‘Free trade principles most rigidly applied’

Such was the intellectual universe of some of the main characters: what did their efforts look like in the Economist, which first appeared as a prospectus and preliminary number in August 1843? In it, Wilson promised ‘original leading articles in which free-trade principles will be most rigidly applied to all the important questions of the day’. His language conjures up images of a crusade more readily than a business journal. Abroad he saw ‘within the range of our commercial intercourse whole continents and islands, on which the light of civilization has scarce yet dawned’; at home, ‘ignorance, depravity, immorality and irreligion, abounding to an extent disgraceful to a civilized country’. In both cases the civilizing medium was free trade, which ‘we seriously believe will do more than any other visible agent to extend civilization and morality – yes, to extinguish slavery itself’. ‘We have no party or class interests or motives’, he continued, in the spirit of his pamphlets, ‘we are of no class, or rather of every class: we are of the landowning class: we are of the commercial class interested in our colonies, foreign trade, and manufactures’. One day, finally, it would be as difficult to understand the case for protection ‘as it is now to conceive how the mild, inoffensive spirit of Christianity could ever have been converted into the plea of persecution and martyrdom, or how poor old wrinkled women, with a little eccentricity, were burned by our forefathers for witchcraft.’ This was free trade as a mission, a worldview, which the Economist promised to serve and spread.⁵¹

In its first two years the fledgling paper was true to its word, examining the deleterious effects of tariffs on the supply, quality and cost of sugar, wool, wheat, wine, iron, corn, cochineal, silk, fish, lace, coal, coffee, wages, currency, tailors, slaves and French linen. Information was conveyed in two densely packed columns, beneath the ornate Gothic letterhead, The Economist: or the Political, Commercial, Agricultural, and Free Trade Journal. The paper gradually put on weight: sixteen pages the first year, twenty-four the next, and twenty-eight for two decades afterwards. These contained new sections, responding to reader requests and business trends: banking and railway reports, a monthly trade supplement, followed eventually by the first wholesale price index, statistical data on the terms of foreign trade, industrial profits, shipping rates, insurance shares, capital issues, and anything else that could be measured. Wilson altered the subtitle after less than two years to the Weekly Commercial Times, Bankers’ Gazette and Railway Monitor, a Political, Literary, and General Newspaper – a signal of his constant search for wider horizons, outside and beyond the League. Around that time a small notice began to appear, making the same point. ‘The Economist from its extensive and increasing circulation among Members of Parliament, Bankers, Merchants, Capitalists, and the Trading Community, is well adapted as the medium for advertisements intended to meet the attention of those numerous and respectable classes.’ Civil servants and professionals could have been added to the list. By the 1850s circulation was around 3,000 – small, even by contemporary standards, but held in the most powerful hands in the country and already sent to capitals in Europe and North and South America.⁵²

The Economist addressed itself to the same social transformations that had given rise to Chartism – ‘this great national leprosy … want and pauperism and hunger’. Yet in contrast to these other agitations it declared itself above class. It alone could speak disinterestedly, and it implored readers – the very ones with the power to do so – not to interfere with a divine order: ‘personal experience has shown us in the manufacturing districts the people want no acts of parliament to coerce education or induce moral improvement … we look far beyond the power of acts … and the efforts of the philanthropist or charitable.’⁵³ From its point of view the danger was never just the protectionists in parliament but the quorum there of gentle souls totally ignorant of the laws of political economy.

The Economist considered it a duty to instruct the latter, starting with the abolitionists, ‘that body of truly great philanthropists’, of the unintended consequences of their campaign to end slavery. The boycott they proposed of all goods made using slave labour would hurt British consumers and punish slaves. It would decimate foreign trade: half was in textiles, most spun from slave cotton, and must logically extend to gold, silver and copper imports from Brazil; rice, indigo, cochineal and tobacco from the US, Mexico and Guatemala; and sugar and coffee from Cuba. To really help slaves, and encourage masters to offer them wages, the answer was free trade, which would demonstrate to slave owners that free labour was in fact cheaper than the bonded kind. Britain could do its part by ending special treatment for its own West Indian colonies, which practically forced others to use slaves as a way to stay competitive. ‘That is a very doubtful humanity’, it concluded, which ‘seeks to inflict certain punishment upon poorer neighbours … for some speculative advantage on the slaves of Brazil’.⁵⁴

Almost all the social reform movements of the Victorian era, intent on actively improving the lot of the lower classes at home, received this sober going-over from the Economist. The editorial reaction to the railway and factory legislation is indicative, though by no means exhaustive. In obliging companies to provide once a day a third tier of service for working-class passengers, who had formerly to travel in exposed freight cars, the 1844 Railway Act meddled in a problem best left to market competition. ‘Where the most profit is made, the public is best served … limit the profit, and you limit the exertion of ingenuity in a thousand ways.’⁵⁵ That same year a Factory Bill limiting the workday for women to twelve hours, the same amount as for teenagers, was denounced as confused, illogical, harmful; proof that ‘no consistent medium between perfect freedom of capital and labour, and that principle which would regulate wages, profits, and the whole relations of life by acts of legislation – between perfect independent self-reliance and regulated socialism – between Adam Smith and Robert Owen’, was possible. As if that were not emphatic enough the next week it declared, ‘the more it is investigated, the more we are compelled to acknowledge that in any interference with industry and capital, the law is powerful only for evil, but utterly powerless for good.’⁵⁶

The movement for a ten-hour day for adult males was therefore little less than criminally insane, abetted by demagogues, and sentimental old Tories like Lord Ashley, who in fact favoured a more modest measure aimed only at women and children. This caveat made no difference. The result would be to reduce the supply of labour, raise wages, increase the cost of manufactures, undercut British goods in foreign markets, and ultimately destroy all employment and industry. As Lord Ashley’s Ten-Hours Bill was taken up in 1846 the Economist reminded workers their interests were identical with those of their employers, and asked them to refrain from sniping about greed, for it ‘must be remembered that the capitalists of England are exposed to a keen competition, not only among themselves, from which no individual can escape – and that capitalist is sure to go to the wall who is less sharp and exacting than his fellows – but also to a similar competition with the capitalists of other countries.’⁵⁷ The Economist attacked the bill long after it had passed into law: for the factory inspectorate it created – ‘busybodies’ who treated businessmen like ‘thieves and vagabonds’ – and for infringing on the rights of women and children to spend as many hours as they wanted working, in whatever way, be it at night or in relays.⁵⁸ The paper’s influential tirades helped opponents in parliament water down this and similar measures.

Marx, a dedicated reader of the Economist, mocked its editor mercilessly for his apocalyptic predictions about the effects of these industrial regulations. In Capital, ‘James Wilson, an economic mandarin of high standing’, had simply rehashed the old shibboleths of Nassau Senior in 1836, among them the notion that ‘if children under 18 years of age, instead of being kept the full 12 hours in the warm and pure moral atmosphere of the factory, are turned out an hour sooner into the heartless and frivolous outer world, they will be deprived, owing to idleness and vice, of all hope of salvation for their souls.’⁵⁹ A reduction in the working day for children under nine had not, Marx added, forced cotton mills to run at a loss. If Wilson and his writers applied the same kind of logic to every legislative demand, even to those from which its readers stood to benefit – the Economist was against patent law, copyright protection or funding for scientific research, and for a time against what is now considered basic company and banking law⁶⁰ – it was measures to alleviate the lot of the worst off that attracted its most ferocious objections.

In 1847 the newspaper opposed the creation of a board of health. ‘We quite agree as to the evils’, went a leader, listing common urban plights such as narrow lanes, fetid pools of waste, and dingy and badly ventilated housing, ‘but the principle of laissez-faire compels us to disagree with those who promote Lord Morpeth’s Board of Health Bill as the remedy’.⁶¹ As the regulatory zeal of the Board intensified, so did the hostility of the Economist, which accused it of ‘lapsing into protection’ when it sought to merge the water companies of London or require new sewer systems in large towns. ‘Water is as much food as bread, and if the government must control the supply of the one, why not the other?’ Recent cholera epidemics were but ‘momentary terrors’, and should not be allowed to ‘suppress all the moral convictions which have been tangibly the experience of ages’.⁶² A book review criticized ‘the sanitary movement’ for its ‘shallow philosophy’, bound to aggravate the two main causes of disease. If the first was poverty (for which the remedy was free trade),

the second is that the people have never been allowed to take care of themselves. They have always been treated as serfs and children, and they have to a great extent become with respect to those objects government has undertaken to perform for them, imbecile … Besides, it makes them demand things from government – such as regulation for labour, for rates and wages – which no government can possibly accomplish. There is a worse evil than typhus or cholera or impure water, and that is mental imbecility.⁶³

Some wondered if there was a role for central or local authorities to play in the disposal of ‘town guano’. ‘Certainly not. We are now agreed that it should not feed the people: why should it clear away their dirt? Every man is bound to remove his own refuse.’⁶⁴ Attacks against public health officials and doctors grew violent and no one aroused such ire as the commissioner of the Board of Health, Edwin Chadwick, ‘a man of sincere benevolence’, but with ‘one mental peculiarity that utterly disqualifies him for the executive services of his country … he is essentially a despot and a bureaucrat’. The Economist rejoiced when he was forced to resign in 1854, but felt ‘free-born Britons’ were unsafe from his ‘frightful pertinacity’ so long as he remained in the country. The solution was to send him to Russia, as a gift, ‘to preside over and reform her corrupt but far stretching bureaucracy’.⁶⁵

The Economist was not only opposed to public education of any kind. It even objected to charity schools which, by providing for children, removed all restraint on the appetites of their parents, who begat more of them. In London alone, 80,000 clogged the streets. ‘The houseless, deserted children have benevolence to thank for tempting their parents from the path of duty’, the paper opined. Alms and the state were poor substitutes for nature and reason; the truly compassionate were advised to let the struggle for survival run its course.

The whole history of the poor – weekly doles of loaves and soup; labour rate acts; the whole vast scheme of protecting their industry; charitable education, as well as alms-giving in the streets; factory acts; visiting the poor in their abodes; plans of emigration, and plans of penal reformation, have all in time been intended to promote the wellbeing of the poor, and have all ended in producing the population, which, according to Lord Ashley’s description, is about the most degraded in Europe.⁶⁶

The Economist reiterated this position, even as pressure mounted in parliament for some form of national education bill in 1850 and 1851. ‘To be successful education must be sought from self-interest, and obtained by self-exertion.’ Common people should be ‘left to provide education as they provide food for themselves’.⁶⁷

Editorials often went beyond denouncing particular laws as misguided: they also laid out grand theoretical statements, as in a series of articles asking, ‘Who is to Blame for the Condition of Society?’ After weighing in turn the role of the lower classes, the capitalists, the landowners and the state, the Economist found that the first and last shared responsibility – but unevenly. For in a world in which ‘each man is responsible to nature for his own actions’, and for learning from them, the poor were fully culpable for their misery, wasting wages and free time on sex, drink and gambling instead of practising thrift and self- improvement. ‘Looking to their habits, to their ignorance, to their deference to false friends, to their unshaken confidence in a long succession of charlatan leaders, we cannot exonerate them. Nature makes them responsible for their conduct – why should not we? We find them suffering, and we pronounce them at fault.’ The capitalists and landlords, taken together, were selfish, but so much the better, ‘for the larger their income, the greater is the quantity of net produce provided for the food of the community, and the greater is the quantity of employment and the amount of wages for the labouring classes.’ As for the state, it was simply unable to comprehend this complex social organism, and by attempting to enact laws whose effects no one could predict in advance, undertook a task ‘rather fit for God than man’. The reality was that ‘the desire for happiness, or what is called self-interest is universal. It is not confined to man – it pervades the whole animal kingdom. It is the law of nature, and if the pursuit of self-interest, left equally free for all, does not lead to the general welfare, no system of government can accomplish it.’ A more total and radical justification of individual responsibility in a market society is hard to imagine.

That all of these prescriptions could seem unfeeling the Economist was aware. But that they were anything other than absolutely true and ultimately humane was out of the question. Political economy was a science and so certain was the newspaper that its laws had been discovered, and by whom, that it argued repeatedly for changing its very name.

The application of the adjective political to the science of ‘The Wealth of Nations’ is of French origin; and never was an epithet more misapplied; for the distinguishing feature of Smith’s science is the proof it continually supplies that all policy – unless laissez-faire, or standing idle and religiously refraining from interfering, can be called a policy – is erroneous, injurious to the production of wealth, and repudiated by the science.

Political economy was a contradiction in terms because economics was the absence of political interference as such. ‘All matters connected with politics being but tradition, guess-work, assumption, fancy, usurpation, or expediency, there is no other science in politics but political economy.’ A review, penned by Hodgskin, of Cornewall Lewis’s Treatise on the Methods of Reasoning and Observation in Politics, criticized Lewis for accepting the very term, for ‘the principles of the science of the production of wealth may altogether be contrary, as we know they are in many cases, to the practices of political society, and, far from being subservient to it, may be destined to subvert it.’⁶⁸

Free Trade’s Triumph, Ireland’s Tragedy

Despite holding to this essential antagonism between politics and economics, and the primacy of the second over the first, Wilson followed leaders of the League into parliament. Stockport, just outside Manchester, returned Cobden to the House in 1841, the year Sir Robert Peel formed a Tory government after a decade of Whig rule under Lords Melbourne and Grey. Bright joined from Durham, farther north, in 1843. Together they made the lower chamber echo with free trade motions, though both were surprised by the speed of their triumph, as well as its instrument. Peel split the cabinet and shocked and angered his own party with a bill to phase out the Corn Laws in 1846. What had caused this volte-face? In his last speech as prime minister, Peel gave the credit to Cobden, ‘the name which ought to be, and which will be associated with the success of these measures’. Cobden was more modest, reckoning that ‘despite all the expenditure on public instruction, the League would not have carried the repeal of the Corn Laws when they did, if it had not been for the Irish famine’.⁶⁹ For Peel, the immediate impetus was indeed Ireland, England’s oldest and longest-suffering colony. Here the appearance of an unknown, virulent fungus, which quickly turned healthy potatoes into black decaying mush, was set to expose the failings of English rule – imposed over three centuries of conquest and colonization, to the benefit of a ruthless Protestant elite. By November 1845 it was clear that at least half the crop of potatoes in Ireland was infected, ‘either destroyed or unfit for the food of man’, that the same would hold next year, and that this spelled doom for Irish peasants, who unlike the English or Scottish relied almost entirely on potatoes for food. On the brink of a major crisis and with all the accumulated arguments in its favour, the pressure to allow the free entry of grain into Ireland had been enormous.

To pass his repeal of Corn Laws, Peel had relied on support from the Whigs, almost as angry with him for stealing their signature issue as the Tories were for his somersault on it. Both parties conspired to topple him the next year. The Whigs won the election that followed, and Wilson was among the new arrivals: sent from Westbury in Wiltshire, a constituency Radnor had found him, in which he beat the West Indian planter Matthew Higgins by 21 votes. Months later Wilson was appointed to the India Board. The Economist was now edited from the heart of government, just as the new Whig regime faced full-scale famine in Ireland. What role did the Economist play in the official response to it? In accordance with the laissez-faire outlook of the ministers in charge of the emergency, cheap provisions were expected to flow from the act of repeal straight into Ireland.⁷⁰ Would these suffice? Late in November 1847 the Economist grew alarmed at rumours that a grant of £3 million was about to be made to Ireland to allow it to buy food, urging its countrymen to reflect that this would increase the price of grain, not the supply, causing hardship in England to alleviate it in Ireland. ‘Charity was a natural English error.’ But it could be corrected. The only ways to mitigate scarcity were ‘to procure more food or eat less’. Or to at last throw open the ports, in which case, ‘any supply that America could afford would then be brought hither by the regular course of trade, and employment – not eleemosynary aid – would enable people to purchase it.’⁷¹ The result of following the Economist’s prescriptions was a utopian social experiment on par with the better-known holocausts of the twentieth century.⁷² During the worst of the famine years of 1845–1849, one and a half million people died out of a population of 8 million, and another million fled.

The British government showed its commitment to the invisible hand of the market throughout, with the Economist critical of even the smallest departure from its rigours. In 1845–1846 Peel had shown insufficient firmness. He had ordered small batches of Indian corn to be bought discreetly by Baring Brothers in North America, as a reserve to keep prices in check; but the severity of the famine forced him to release small dribbles at select government depots. In 1846–47 the Russell administration, in which Wilson served, announced that it would buy no more foreign grain: Charles Wood, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Charles Trevelyan, Assistant Secretary, blamed Peel’s purchases the year before for paralysing trade by deterring dealers and merchants from importing adequate supplies on their own.⁷³ No forgiveness was to be shown to small tenants unable to pay rent, or who faced starvation if they did. Under no circumstances were exports to be restricted, as some in Ireland were demanding. True, even as people scrounged for nettles, thousands of tons of wheat, oats, cattle, pigs, eggs and butter were sailing out of the country. Yet this was all for the best. For in a free trade world the high prices these articles obtained abroad would allow merchants to buy and import cheap food to make up the lost potatoes.⁷⁴ In practice what private enterprise there was in Ireland never imported enough, or at prices most could afford.

The correspondence between high officials was laden with nostrums lifted from the Economist, as the paper itself acknowledged when reviewing a parliamentary selection of them in 1847. But this only spurred it to attack compromises made on humanitarian grounds, in full knowledge of the errors committed. ‘We totally deny that what is wrong in principle can be right in practice. If a principle be true there can be no exception to its application, and least of all can it be abandoned or neglected in an extreme case.’⁷⁵ The paper was aware that Adam Smith had sanctioned public works in like situations. But it doubted if he would still approve, and defended him from a hostile pamphlet, The True Cure for Ireland, which called it ‘perfect folly to be dancing a Will-o’-the-wisp dance, after the abstract principles of political economy, as laid down by Adam Smith, for it ought to be remembered he wrote for a country advanced in social position and high civilization.’ On the contrary, retorted the Economist, ‘Smith wrote for all time, and of all time’.⁷⁶

Wilson not only ensured that his paper constantly firmed up civil servants and politicians over Ireland: he soon enlisted them to craft the Economist itself. George Villiers, the fourth Earl of Clarendon, and one of his original backers, was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in the spring of 1847. He was in constant touch with Wilson, feeding him data on the famine – from potato yields to confidential reports on Irish Poor Law returns intended for cabinet eyes only. On taking up his post in relatively optimistic mood, Clarendon asked for Economist articles on landlord-tenant relations. Did Wilson have ‘any hints’ on the ideal form of lease? A few months later he asked him to ‘prepare the public mind’ for his plans to effect large scale emigration out of Ireland. As one ostensibly liberal policy after another failed to do any good, however, both began to despair of the whole race. A crackdown was needed.⁷⁷

When a number of landlords were assassinated in the winter of 1847, Clarendon became convinced an armed insurrection was brewing and threatened to resign unless he was given extraordinary powers to protect life and property. The Economist supported him: the ‘special duty’ of government in such a country was not to tamper with the labour or money markets but to counter the turbulence that ‘had driven away capital’; ‘the more dangerous the state of society becomes the more necessary it is that order and security should be enforced.’⁷⁸ A Coercion Bill received the royal assent in December, and as Engels observed, ‘the Lord Lieutenant was not slow in taking advantage of the despotic powers with which this new law invests him.’⁷⁹ In the summer of 1848, Clarendon wrote to Wilson that the bill was a ‘complete success’, thanking him for articles ‘exhibiting your accurate knowledge of Ireland and friendly feeling towards myself’. As for the country he was ruling, he felt ‘like the governor of an ill-guarded jail … they have been made a nation of political gossips instead of agricultural labourers, and as they sow idleness so they reap misery’.⁸⁰

When an uprising did occur that summer it was not the work of the starving masses, as officials had feared, but of a small band of intellectuals in Tipperary calling themselves Young Ireland, easily subdued by local constables. They were ‘the laughing stock of the world’, jeered the Economist. Still, the precautions taken by government – suspending habeas corpus, dispatching an extra 15,000 troops and ordering the fleet to patrol the coast – were sensible.⁸¹ The Economist urged their extension for twelve months and that martial law be declared. Trials by jury should be cancelled: military tribunals alone could be relied on to punish rebels. ‘It is liberty, not despotism, which acts as an irritant to the Irish constitution. It simply, as doctors say, does not agree with it. The oriental element – mental prostration before power – is paramount.’ ‘Powerful, resolute, but just repression’ would render the Irishman ‘not only submissive, but content’. It continued:

These suggestions will sound strange in English and in liberal ears. But it is time the truth should be spoken boldly out that the ideal of equal laws for England and Ireland is a delusion, a mockery and a mischief … not till Ireland has been trained and inured to respect and obey the law by years of rigid and severe enforcement, will she have learnt those lessons of justice, honesty, truth, and subordination, which can alone entitle her, by sharing English virtues, to share English liberties and English institutions.⁸²

This was enough to make even Clarendon hesitate: ‘I would like to hear how your articles have been received by the middle classes in England, and whether they are prepared to go your lengths. Pray let me know this as it may to a certain extent guide my proceedings.’ Clarendon had earlier voiced doubts about the lengths to which Wilson was taking laissez-faire in Ireland, feeling that repression must be coupled with relief, and by 1849 he implored Russell not to leave the Irish, in Trevelyan’s phrase, to ‘the operation of natural causes’.⁸³

Revolutionary disturbances were not confined to Ireland in 1848, as upheavals swept across Europe, threatening not just continental monarchies but alarming even the crown-in-parliament in Britain, where Chartism saw a brief, unnerving revival. The Economist could find no words harsh enough to describe ‘a movement around which are aggregated all the turbulence, all the rapscallionism, all the demagogic ambition of the nation’. Its demands would hand power to the ‘one class exclusively, the most open to corruption and deception … partial, unfair, fatal, despotic’. Editorials argued that electoral reform would only infantilize the lower orders yet further: ‘it unteaches the people the great lesson of self-dependence; it encourages them to look to government rather than themselves, both for the causes and the remedies of their sufferings’. Political leadership belonged to the middle classes. They paid the most tax and practised the virtues, ‘frugality, industry and forethought’, on which the prosperity of all other classes depended.⁸⁴

The appalling tumult in European capitals, on the other hand, put these domestic troubles in perspective. If there was some hope in Germany, since the revolution there was ‘led by the nobles, and consecrated by the priests’, France was lost: it had too many state employees, no respect for property (or credit: deposits had been frozen), and was obsessed by the wrong kind of freedom, ‘equality … without the slightest care for personal liberty … the right of unfettered action and speech’. Compared to the Irish or the French, the English were relatively safe: ‘order is beloved; property is sacred; we respect the rights of others.’ In private Wilson was even more scathing about the French, ‘a weak, puerile and despicable race … the only thing that will do them any good is the iron grasp of a sturdy but wise despot’.⁸⁵

City, State, Empire: Joining the Gentlemanly Capitalists

The Economist’s influence grew in lockstep with that of its editor. Wilson sat on the parliamentary committees – Commercial Distress, Banking, Currency, Life Insurance – crafting the policies on which his paper pronounced each week. His aristocratic colleagues, a little unsure about the rudiments of political economy, leant on him. The ageing Duke of Wellington, victor of Waterloo and a monument to Tory reaction, required a private tutorial before agreeing to let repeal of the Navigation Laws pass through the upper chamber. The Whig imperialist Lord Palmerston took his lessons on early morning strolls back from Whitehall; his amusing banter more than making up for his ‘belligerent propensities’.⁸⁶ Lord Grey, grudging sponsor of electoral reform in 1832, passed colonial news – Guiana, the Cape, a lecture by Lord Elgin on the progress of Upper Canada – to the paper. The diplomat Lord Howden paid a visit before setting sail for Argentina and Brazil to negotiate lower sugar duties, promising news of his progress.⁸⁷ Wilson carried these intimacies into the countryside, first in Wiltshire, then in Somerset, with hunting, ponies for the girls, gentlemanly pursuits – judging sheep contests – rounding out the days.

This change in status was accompanied by a shift in interest from industry, where his father had given him his start, to finance – destined in the framework of the British Empire to benefit from free trade to a greater extent than any other branch of commerce. In 1852, during a brief interlude of Tory rule under Lord Derby, Wilson went to work on a new venture, which he must have partially funded from Economist profits: the following year the Banker’s Gazette section of the paper announced the founding of a Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China, initial capital £1 million, prospects ‘unrivalled’, success ‘beyond doubt’.⁸⁸ Wilson’s pieces for the Economist on the 1847 financial crisis – published as Capital, Currency and Banking the same year – pointed out, in the wake of so many bank failures, a field for profitable investment in the Far East, and lessons on avoiding a similar fate there. For the official historian of Standard and Chartered Bank, this explains a charter initially restricting its exchange activities. Wilson showed ‘grave caution’, and emphasized that the note issue would be covered by ‘public securities and bullion on the same principle as was observed by the Bank of England’.⁸⁹ Wilson insisted the bank be pan-Asian and include India, a case he made directly to Gladstone in a letter lobbying for a royal charter over the objections of the East India Company and the Board of Control.⁹⁰ In the next few years the Chartered Bank expanded rapidly, driven by the growth of trade within Asia, most importantly in Indian opium, for the sake of which Britain would fight a second war with China.

At almost the same moment, Wilson was promoted to high government office in the Peelite-Whig coalition headed by Lord Aberdeen. As Financial Secretary to the Treasury until 1857, he assisted Gladstone in drafting his first budgets. To these landmarks in fiscal minimalism he contributed consolidation of customs duties, reducing or ending levies on soap, tea and apples, and cutting and simplifying all other import rules, a long-standing demand of City merchants whose realization Wilson viewed as a capstone of the free trade movement in England.⁹¹ In 1855 Cornewall Lewis succeeded Gladstone as Chancellor, making the Treasury an Economist stronghold. An academician whose delivery was described by a contemporary as ‘enough to dishearten any political assembly … nearly inaudible, monotonous, halting’, which yet ‘covered very powerful resources of argument, humour and illustration’,⁹² he once told his friend: ‘You see, Wilson, you are an animal, I am only a vegetable.’⁹³ The self-deprecation was not to be taken seriously: Wilson held him in high regard, and with Lewis’s help was about to stamp his ideas on the map of the world.

Now ensconced at the pinnacle of the state, Wilson was in a position to survey the empire it had acquired, and was continuing to expand. A series of wars to defend and augment its borders, secure bases, trading rights and routes, and check the progress of rivals, coincided with his new vantage point. British imperial power started to become central to the liberal worldview of the Economist in ways it had not been before. In the 1840s the paper had viewed even white settler colonies like Canada either as burdens that cost more to defend than they were worth, or as simple outlets for trade and investment, over which it was unnecessary to exert direct control. (In this spirit, it once wanted to dismiss the entire diplomatic corps and replace it with merchants, who ‘may feel petty slights in intercourse with foreigners’ but never got so worked up as to risk their lives, while ‘inflated representatives excite strife and bloodshed on account of dignity’.)⁹⁴ This was a position that could draw on Adam Smith and the Physiocrats, for whom colonies were among the most misguided and pernicious forms of protection. To their anti-mercantilist agenda, the Economist of these years added its theory of natural harmony, according to which free trade meant peace and goodwill not just at home between classes, but among the nations of the world as well.

Once Wilson was in government, however, the Economist revised this earlier vision of laissez-faire. Where imperial interests were at stake, war could become an absolute necessity, to be embraced. This conversion split the free traders of the 1840s, escalating into an epic confrontation with the most profound consequences for the Economist and the liberalism it embodied, which played out over a run of interconnected imperial conflicts from 1853 to 1860. Wars against Russia and China, and conflicts in India, rocked British liberalism at home and recast it abroad. Since then, the Economist has rarely wavered from the view that laissez-faire may best be furthered through the barrel of a gun.

Crimean Turning Point: Liberals Fall Out

Though little remembered today, the Crimean War was by far the largest armed conflict in the century between 1815 and 1914, involving pitched battles between the major powers in Russia and the Balkans, and naval clashes from the Black Sea to the Baltic and the Arctic to the Pacific. The war was ostensibly triggered by religious quarrels in Ottoman-controlled Palestine, and at stake was the fate of the Ottoman Empire itself – a large part of which still stood in south-eastern Europe – and which of the rival predators would dominate or dismember it: Russia in the East, or Britain and France in the West. War fever took hold of the British press late in 1853, when news reached London of the destruction of the Ottoman fleet at Sinope on the Black Sea, after a surprise naval bombardment by Russia. The Economist, however, had been clamouring for an armed solution to the ‘Eastern Question’ – i.e. war with Russia – a year prior to the ‘disgraceful and melancholy butchery’ at Sinope: before, that is, much of the press – from the Westminster Review and the Spectator to the Times – took up the same cry.

Its editorialists dismissed the religious dimension of the question: disputes between the Russian Orthodox, French Catholic and Protestant Churches over control of holy places in Jerusalem and Bethlehem were an excuse for their respective nations ‘to peck at the unfortunate carcass of the Porte’. The issue lay elsewhere. If Britain failed to intervene to prop up the Ottomans against the Russians, its own empire in the Near East was in danger:

Russia will have command of Constantinople and the Dardanelles … she will be closer to the Levant than ourselves … her command over the Ottoman Court might at any time induce it to close off the Isthmus of Suez to us, or oblige us to engage in war to prevent such a catastrophe. It is perfectly obvious that our interest imperatively require either that Egypt shall be in our own hands, or in those of a naturally friendly and really independent power.⁹⁵

In building its case for war the Economist blazoned its break with those who held that free trade automatically meant peace, or counselled the ‘hideous and shallow doctrine’ of non-interference in foreign affairs, even in the face of ‘barbarous sovereigns oppressing their subjects, or powerful states bullying and partitioning their weaker neighbours’. Ethical and commercial justifications for war with Russia were one. ‘Turkish independence’, ‘territorial integrity’, ‘justice, honour and national existence’ appeared side by side with warnings to British businessmen of the consequences of letting Tsar Nicolas take Constantinople.

That anyone who values India and is prepared to maintain and defend it, who regards England as a great empire and not as a little workshop, and who knows how much even of our safety depends upon our naval and especially our Mediterranean supremacy, should profess willingness to permit Russia to plant herself on the Bosporus and the Aegean, and regard it as a matter of indifference whether the key of our Eastern communication be held by a harmless friend or by a formidable rival – this, we confess, passes our powers of comprehension.⁹⁶

The sooner war broke out the better, for a ‘precarious and ill-conceived peace is almost as fatal and discouraging to commerce as actual hostilities’.⁹⁷

By the turn of 1854 Palmerston and his war party in parliament and the press had pushed a cautious cabinet headed by Aberdeen into striking an ambitious blow against Russia, with a scheme to shore up British interests in the Near East by offering swathes of the Baltic to Prussia, of the Balkans to Austria, and of the Caucasus to Turkey. Britain and France fought as allies, each loath to see the other benefit by the outcome, Britain eyeing with particular suspicion France’s competing claims in the Levant. The elderly British commander, Lord Raglan, who had lost his right arm at Waterloo, sometimes confused the French and Russians.⁹⁸ From beginning to end the joint expedition was a disaster. French and British soldiers arrived in the pestilential Danube Delta in summer, and were sent on to the Crimea without maps, proper kit, food or medicine; they froze at the onset of winter. The battles of the Alma and Balaclava were beset by tactical errors; the siege of Sebastopol became the longest at that time in recorded history. The same papers that had bellowed for war now sent back, for the first time, horrifying images and stories from the front line.

The Economist, however, was not among them. ‘Our Gallant Army in the Crimea’ depicted a dying Maréchal Saint-Arnaud, deeply stirred by the behaviour of his British opposite number at the Alma. ‘The bravery of Lord Raglan’, he said, before breathing his last, ‘rivals that of antiquity. The rest of this item was a dispatch from … Lord Raglan.’⁹⁹ As expectations of a quick victory dissolved, its coverage attempted to rally public opinion behind a Homeric struggle which ‘may task all our endurance … the commencement of that great conflict between liberty and despotism which Canning and Napoleon alike predicted as inevitable’. It reminded readers of the nature of the enemy, ‘whom we know to be the resolute, instinctive, conscientious foe of all that we hold dearest and most sacred – of human rights, civil liberty, enlightened progress’. Worse still, ‘freedom of trade, freedom of movement, freedom of thought, freedom of worship – all are proscribed as deadly sins in the Decalogue of Muscovy’. Giving thanks to the country’s ally, it explained: ‘France and England alone venture to make head against the terrible Colossus’, which, but for their courage, ‘would reign over Europe from the Ural Mountains to the Alps and Apennines, if not to the Pyrenees, without a rival and without check’.¹⁰⁰

Diplomatic efforts for a negotiated peace were shot down from the beginning. The Economist sided with Palmerston, now prime minister, who wished to keep France in the war at all costs – with 310,000 men-in-arms compared to 98,000 for Britain, France’s will to fight started to flag earlier – and to expand operations, fielding an army to attack Russia through the Baltic. ‘Peace at any price or war at any cost?’ This was the wrong way of looking at the problem. ‘The correct mode is to inquire whether the objects we aim at be just? If they be, they must be fought for to the last drop of our blood and the last sovereign in our coffers.’¹⁰¹ Around this time the Economist finally acknowledged that cholera and typhus were killing more soldiers than the Russians. Yet the paper found Britain, at least, ‘was never served by abler or more zealous or more honest men’, and with the benefit of hindsight was even able to pull some lessons from the wreckage.¹⁰² Thanks to ‘the unimpaired resources of empire’, it declared in February 1856, shortly before the Peace of Paris was signed with its grudging assent, ‘never was there a year of greater or more uniform prosperity’.¹⁰³ In the end, 21,000 British soldiers died, 16,000 from disease, exposure or starvation, along with 100,000 Frenchmen, 120,000 Turks and 450,000 Russians.¹⁰⁴

Some of the Economist’s bellicosity can be explained by the fact that Wilson and Greg were government agents, making the paper a scrapbook of their wartime service. Setting aside previous scruples, Wilson defended Cornewall Lewis even when the latter caused an outcry among free traders for raising duties on sugar, spirits, coffee and tea in 1855.¹⁰⁵ A £5 million loan to Turkey was needed, which Wilson helped to negotiate. He sprinkled lead articles with details of his meetings in Paris with Lord Cowley, ambassador to France, and Achille Fould, French finance minister. He secured the post of Commissioner of the Customs for Greg – also in Paris, transcribing his chats with the former premier François Guizot. Wartime London was a similar whirlwind of Allied loans and socializing, with Wilson near the centre: balls in honour of Louis-Napoleon, medal ceremonies for crippled heroes, and dinner parties; at one Ferdinand de Lesseps pitched his plans for the Suez Canal to Wilson over pudding as the poet Matthew Arnold, another guest, looked over the proposal.¹⁰⁶

Neither Wilson’s editorial interventions nor his social life passed unnoticed in the wider liberal world, with which he had sometimes disagreed on foreign policy as early as 1850.¹⁰⁷ Cobden and Bright furiously opposed the Crimean War, and had savage things to say about former brothers-in-arms who lent it support. Wilson was in a class apart, however; his betrayal was both personal, in light of the help they had given him to found the Economist, and political. All three had once shared a view of empire as a feudal residue. In Cobden’s early pamphlets free trade was perhaps less pronounced a theme even than the evils of foreign wars. England, Ireland and America, written in 1835 when he was thirty-one, summed up his position, which did not change. Trade was ‘the grand panacea’, the only thing, in stark contrast to misguided meddling abroad, likely to spread liberal institutions: ‘not a bale of merchandise leaves our shores, but it bears the seeds of intelligence … to the members of some less enlightened community; not a merchant visits our manufacturing industry, but he returns to his own country the missionary of freedom, peace and good government’.¹⁰⁸ In the Economist’s early years Wilson devoted countless leaders to demonstrating how this process worked in practice. In the House of Commons, Cobden aimed to cut defence budgets; outside, he became an active member of the Peace Society. Free trade, peace and goodwill was his motto – the first naturally fostering the second, and vice versa. The idea that one country might force another to trade freely, let alone be free, never appealed to Cobden. Calling on the Royal Navy to pry open foreign markets or protect trade routes and lines of communication struck him as outrageous and hypocritical; now, though, the very liberals with whom he had fought against the Corn Laws were taking up this call. That Wilson was among them, formerly the most rigid expositor of laissez-faire principles imaginable, was a shock.

For Cobden the language used by the Economist and the rest of the hawkish press – ‘integrity of the Turkish Empire, balance of power’ – were ‘words without meaning, mere echoes of the past, suited for the mouths of senile Whiggery’.¹⁰⁹ Wilson was a ‘Whig valet’, his defection symptomatic of a general desertion of wealthy Leaguers.¹¹⁰ Asked if he had read the latest Economist, which had backed a belligerent ultimatum to Russia, in December 1855, Cobden replied, ‘I never see the Economist though I have it on my conscience that I was mainly concerned in starting it. It was always a dull stupid paper even when it was honest. But to read sophistical arguments in no better style than Wilson’s is a task I would not condemn a dog to.’¹¹¹ Writing to Bright, he asked: ‘Have you heard Greg has got a commissionership of the Customs, given him by Wilson, worth I suppose £1200 a yr., & nothing to interfere with his literary pursuits? The state into which our press has fallen is scandalous, dangerous to all sound public opinion, & it ought to be ripped up with the tomahawk of exposure.’¹¹²

For its part the Economist battered Cobden and Bright week after week. When Cobden published a letter in the Leeds Mercury maintaining that the war was as unpopular as it was badly run, the paper commented, ‘Few idols have ever so grieved or disappointed their worshippers as the member for West Riding … Cobden is becoming disingenuous … an ordinary demagogue.’¹¹³ In 1853 it had welcomed his pamphlet criticizing Britain’s annexation of Burma, ‘How Wars are Got Up in India’. Now, in 1856, much the same stance applied to Crimea in ‘What Next – and Next?’ was ‘irrational, feeble, and flagitious’.¹¹⁴ As for Bright and his ‘immoral moralizing’, it was in danger of running out of epithets – he was ‘the tool and sycophant of the Great Disturber of the peace’, the ‘intrepid advocate and reckless ally of the Czar’ and ‘worth a dozen regiments’.¹¹⁵ When a lead article in the paper fulminated against his and Cobden’s acts of deceit against the nation in arms – the article was entitled ‘The Enemies of Free Institutions’ – Bright directly addressed the Economist in the House of Commons, in a speech attacking the Turkish loan that Gladstone and Wilson had arranged behind the backs of parliament. ‘It is understood by the occupants of the Treasury bench, that when the country is at war the House of Commons is to be a shadow.’ Mocking the editorial anonymity behind which Wilson hid, he remarked:

If you want to know the opinions of Gentlemen upon the Treasury bench on this subject, I will give it you from a journal of great influence, which is supposed to be under the control of an hon. and very able Gentleman who sits upon that bench. Here is a paragraph which appeared in a leading article of that paper upon the 30th of December, 1854, and, of course, things are worse now – ‘It is difficult to say whether the leaders of the Radicals or the leaders of the Tories – whether Lord Derby, Mr. Bright, or Mr. Disraeli – have done most to awaken us to a perception how mischievous, at critical conjunctures, free legislative assemblies may become. The plain truth is, that Parliamentary government is, in time of war, an embarrassment, a danger, and an anomaly, and we have to thank the advocates of an extended suffrage and the supporters of rotten boroughs for making it so plain. Legislative bodies are needed for legislation and control. They are not needed, and they are not fitted for executive action, especially in moments of peril and difficulty. The seldomer Parliament meets, and the shorter time it sits during actual hostilities, the better for the country which it represents, and the better for its own dignity and influence.’ Now, that is a paragraph from the Economist newspaper.¹¹⁶

Bright had little doubt where the loan to fund an unjust war would end up. The money raised would not be given to the Turks directly, he noted, but to a French and English commission:

If we could by possibility, with the knowledge which we possess of the history of the past, conceive ourselves in the Ottoman Empire and subject to its rule, with two of the Powers of the West coming and, under the pretence of defending us from an enemy, taking first the revenues of Egypt, then that of Syria, then that of Smyrna, the inlet and outlet of their commerce, and then appointing a commission to sit in our capital city to expend the money necessary to defray the expenses of our army, should we not say, the glory of the nation had departed, and with it the last shadow of our independence? Should we not say, that the nations pretending to assist us were but treacherous friends … ? ¹¹⁷

Bright felt sure that behind the rhetoric of friendship lurked the desire for profit and territory, and he predicted that it would not be long before Britain and France made expansionist moves in the Near East. There he was wrong. The two allies in the Crimea turned their gaze instead to the Far East, where another backward and despotic empire was in need of liberal lessons in free trade.

The Second Opium War

The signal for the Second Opium War was given in October 1856, when Chinese police arrested the Chinese crew of the Arrow, a lorcha (a type of junk) in Canton accused of piracy. The British consul claimed, falsely, that the vessel was flying the Union Jack, that it was registered in Hong Kong, and so based on a treaty signed in 1843 (in the wake of the First Opium War) the Chinese had no right to detain anyone on board. Sir John Bowring, the plenipotentiary, chief superintendent of trade, governor, commander-in-chief and vice-admiral of Hong Kong, then sent a fleet to bomb Canton into submission – despite the fact that its governor had already released the captives and agreed to his terms, refusing only to apologize, since, as Governor Yeh stated, the Arrow was Chinese. For this, three weeks of fire rained down on Canton, followed by a four-year invasion ending in the sacking of Beijing. Thus was China opened to Western trade and culture.¹¹⁸ France, Russia and the US joined in the attack, but Britain and its special interest in one commodity gave the war its name. British revenue from opium was so vast at the time that it not only kept afloat the state machine in India, where most of the opium was grown, but turned a trade deficit with Asia in silk, tea and ceramics into an overall surplus.¹¹⁹ Chinese opium addicts were in demand, their supply limited by the ban the Qing dynasty had imposed on this powerful narcotic.

The pretext for invasion, and a widespread suspicion that the drug trade stood to benefit, sparked an uproar when news of the ‘Arrow incident’ reached London in 1857. The Conservative opposition leader Lord Derby brought forward a motion on 24 February condemning British behaviour as ‘the arrogant demands of overweening, self-styled civilization’, which was narrowly rejected in the upper house.¹²⁰ Richard Bethell, Attorney General, privately advised ministers, ‘a very serious case against us on the points of international law could be, and probably would be, made in the Commons’.¹²¹ Cobden stepped in with a censure motion days later; carried by sixteen votes in a marathon debate, it toppled Lord Palmerston’s government, and an election was called.

Behind the scenes Cobden exhorted his press contacts to expose not only the illegality of British actions but also the free trade arguments with which some justified them. ‘There is no great empire where our trade is a quarter as free’, Cobden wrote, comparing the low duties charged in China favourably with Europe, and rounding on those close to Wilson, from Clarendon to Porter. Cobden denounced all groups backing war, from ‘Manchester fire-eaters’ and ‘the Liverpool China Association’ to the intrigues of Paris, London and Washington and the missionaries in league with them. ‘God help the Christians who think of making their religion acceptable in the rear of an opium war’, he wrote, ‘for surely nothing but an interruption of the laws of human nature by especial divine interposition could ever have that result!’¹²²

This time the liberal backlash against any criticism of Britain’s action abroad was still more venomous than over Crimea. Bowring, the official at the centre of events, was a liberal intellectual of high standing, onetime editor of the Westminster Review, disciple and literary executor of Bentham, a member of the League and the Peace Society, a non-conformist, ex-radical MP, who once exclaimed to a crowd in Bolton, ‘Jesus Christ is Free Trade, and Free Trade is Jesus Christ.’ He had also been a close friend of Cobden and Bright.¹²³ The Economist defended Bowring.¹²⁴ He had acted a little ‘precipitously’, but it would only sow mischief to reprimand or recall him: besides, even if he had been in error, and his actions were technically illegal, and even if, ‘as regards that illicit trade our hands are not clean’ – an allusion to opium – ‘all declare that satisfactory, safe, and dignified intercourse with those arrogant and cruel people is impossible till they have met with severe chastisement’. The paper did not fear for Europeans resident in China, ‘for the same mail that carries out this news will carry out such reinforcements as will put opposition and danger at defiance’.¹²⁵ In retrospect, there was a thread that ran between the wars in Crimea and Canton. ‘Trade is as much a necessity of society as air or food or clothing or heat.’ Interventions were therefore akin to humanitarian operations.

We may regret war … but we cannot deny that great advantages have followed in its wake. As the improvement both of Turkey and Russia will be consequent on the war now happily at an end; so any war with China that results in bringing her people more completely into trade communication with all other nations … relieving them from the temptation to put infants to death, to allow the aged to die for want of food, and to exterminate great numbers from their standing in each other’s way.¹²⁶

The Economist and its allies prevailed, so far as public opinion was concerned, despite Cobden’s victory over Palmerston in the House. In the ensuing election, Palmerston took his campaign to the country, with an endlessly reprinted manifesto that ran, ‘An insolent barbarian wielding authority in Canton has violated the British flag.’ Virtually the entire ‘peace party’ was swept from office – Cobden, Bright and Thomas Milner Gibson among them.¹²⁷ The Economist was exultant. Here was proof of who really represented the middle classes; not Manchester relics ‘extinguished’ by their pacifism, but the new Liberal Party. Bright ought to reflect on the ‘unrepented sin’ of his ‘disregard of all patriotic feeling and decorum’, rather than blaming electors who were just as interested in Peace, Retrenchment and Reform as ever, but stood firm for the flag. Ten years on from the repeal of the Corn Laws it was not they, but Bright who had changed. He did not understand the real men of Manchester, and the Economist endeavoured to educate him.

As a body wealth is not their sole pursuit, they are patriots as well as manufacturers. They think that there are higher objects both for men and citizens to strive for than mere material well-being. They did not grudge their hundred or thousand pounds subscription to the League for the defeat of Protection, and they were not likely to grudge their hundred or thousand pounds to the National Treasury for repelling Russian aggression. They did not like to be held up to the scorn and odium of the world as men who had no idea and no aim beyond their ledgers – as the incarnation of cold, hard, and narrow selfishness.¹²⁸

Cobden drew more radical lessons from his defeat than Bright, and he advised the latter to take a break from politics and abandon his seat in Manchester. ‘The great capitalist class formed an excellent basis for the Anti-Corn-Law movement, for they had inexhaustible purses, which they opened freely in a contest where not only their pecuniary interests but their pride as “an order” was at stake’, Cobden reflected. ‘But I very much doubt whether such a state of society is favourable to a democratic political movement.’¹²⁹ In another letter he complained bitterly of what the Economist had become, and of its role in pushing the government line on the war.

Jemmy Wilson wrote dull pamphlets and made duller speeches, but still he showed some Scotch pertinacity in keeping alive the agitation in the metropolis. When we dissolved our organization, a lithographed circular was sent to all its subscribers recommending them to support the Economist. This was the foundation of Wilson’s fortune, which was in a sickly state previously … [it] became the stepping stone to Office … What so natural as that the paper should be the obsequious servant of the government, or the Economist’s pages should be employed in assailing the two men who laid the foundation of all this success, if they happen no longer to be in favour with the dispensers of patronage?¹³⁰

Bright ignored the Economist, and only partly listened to Cobden, agreeing a few months later to stand for a vacant seat in Birmingham – as news reached Britain in 1857 of a bloody uprising in India.¹³¹

India and the Indian Mutiny

In the climate of fear and vengeance that reports of the Indian Mutiny produced, criticisms of empire risked becoming still more unpopular, jeopardizing Bright’s chances of re-election, and Cobden urged him to moderate his tone, at least in public. In private, both condemned ‘the depraved, unhappy state of opinion’, Cobden wondering what point there was in taking to the stump: ‘I consider that we as a nation are little better than brigands, murderers, and poisoners in our dealings at this moment with half the population of the globe.’¹³² Once back in parliament, however, Bright grew bolder, informing his Birmingham constituents that the Empire ‘is a positive loss to the people’ and ‘neither more nor less than a gigantic system of outdoor relief for the aristocracy of Great Britain’. The rationale for fighting Russia and China, ‘introducing cotton cloth with cannon balls’, were ‘vain, foolish and wretched excuses for war’. India, moreover, was a ‘country we do not know how to govern’, and Indians were justified in rebelling against British rule in the subcontinent, where the conquest of Oudh, ‘with which our Government had but recently entered into a solemn treaty’ was ‘a great immorality and a great crime, and we have reaped an almost instantaneous retribution in the most gigantic and sanguinary revolt which probably any nation ever made against its conquerors’.¹³³

Wilson found this last strophe on India so alarming that when he saw Bright in the Commons a few months later he obtained assurances from him that he had been ‘carried away much further than he intended’. Wilson relayed these assurances to Cornewall Lewis, who wanted to know if Bright would cooperate on electoral reform should the Tories be turned out and a new Liberal ministry formed – inevitably including Palmerston or Russell, the very men Bright was castigating for criminal misconduct in imperial and foreign affairs.¹³⁴

From 1857 the Economist was as fixated as the rest of the press on the horror stories pouring out of British India – where a mutiny of Indian soldiers, or sepoys, against their European officers in Meerut rapidly grew into a full-fledged rebellion against the British East India Company. By this time the quasi-private company, founded under Elizabeth I, ruled about two-thirds of the Indian subcontinent, in exchange for a £630,000 annuity to London on the revenue the land under its control generated. Three separate armies marched under its banners, one for each of the presidencies into which India was subdivided: Bengal, Bombay and Madras, totalling 232,000 Indians and 45,000 Europeans. The first of these was the largest and most homogeneous, recruited since the mid-seventeenth century from Hindu peasants in Bengal, Oudh, Bihar and Benares. These men mutinied in far greater numbers than anywhere else; a fact contemporaries attributed to an unwitting religious insult, infantry in Meerut – it was said – refusing to bite cartridges greased with cow and pig fat, offensive to Muslims and Hindus alike. In reality, their grievances were structural: both in the army – low pay, poor living conditions, an inability to rise through the ranks, in which the most senior Indian officer was obliged to obey the most junior European – and in the surrounding society, whose once formidable textile economy had collapsed under the onslaught of British manufactured cloth, while being subjected to an East India Company business model based on the predatory chase after new revenues and territories.¹³⁵

The Economist was just as ruthless with Indians as with the Irish or Chinese. As Elgin ordered troops en route to China to double back to Calcutta, the paper looked forward to swift justice being meted out to the mutineers for their treachery in ‘undiscriminating destruction of hospitals and barracks, of helpless women and children’, which it contemptuously attributed to the ‘native character … half child, half savage, actuated by sudden and unreasoning impulses’ more than to any coherent motivation or design.¹³⁶ It thought the worst was probably over by mid-July when the fall of Delhi to the rebels failed to ignite a general uprising. ‘Three-fourths of the Bengal army – the whole of the Madras and Bombay – and the entire non-military population from Cape Comorin to the Himalayas, have stayed aloof … could there be stronger evidence that, in spite of numerous errors, British rule is regarded by the natives of India as a blessing rather than a curse?’¹³⁷

Even the ‘barbarous and treacherous massacre of the garrison at Cawnpore’, which, unlike the Times it declined to describe in detail, scarcely troubled its confidence in the future of empire.¹³⁸ In fact, the mutiny was soon viewed as little less than a blessing in disguise. A month later, it offered ‘The Bright Side of the Picture’ in a tone of elated Benthamite optimism. The English character perhaps required such a shock to ‘startle and energize us’ – ‘a Crimean winter to convince us of the defects in our military administration, and a universal mutiny to open our eyes in India’. The sheer scale of the disaster gave British statesmen that rare thing, ‘carte blanche – an unencumbered field … we are free to act as on the first day of our Imperial existence’.¹³⁹ This notion became the refrain of the Economist. ‘No event less horrible could have strengthened our hands so powerfully.’ If the sepoys had only committed garden-variety cruelties, ‘the Government would have been assailed at once by a strong party likening the revolt to that of the American colonies, and recommending the nation not to resist a patriotic movement … Eloquent voices would have been raised as Mr Bright’s was formerly, to warn the nation that a due retribution had come upon them for a selfish feeling of grasping ambition.’

Yet now all these doubts and fears are absolutely stilled … Every Englishman knows that to abandon India, would be to commit a far worse sin against the millions of Hindoos than against our own nation … to the horrors of a military anarchy compared with which the reign of terror in the French revolution was a model of justice and mercy … In Europe too they see how helpless are the Indian races to restrain their own superstitions and their own passions – that no reverence for law, and civil order, and social obligations, adequate for the rudest form of self-government is yet written on their minds … Commerce with India would be at an end were English power withdrawn.¹⁴⁰

British forces regained the initiative at the turn of 1858, with the active help or acquiescence of princely states in upper and central India, and the diversion of regiments from Crimea, Persia and China. Imperial troops, reconquering or relieving besieged cities – in Delhi, Cawnpore, Lucknow and elsewhere – exacted terrible revenge on whole populations deemed guilty of aiding rebels. The Economist noted with approval ‘the stern vigour afforded by daily executions of mutineers of every rank’ – some were shot from the mouths of cannons – but wondered whether journalists and officers calling for the head of every sepoy in a mutinous regiment, even those who had committed no violence, had thought through the domestic reaction that might ensue: ‘it is at least worthy of consideration’, it submitted, ‘whether the deliberate execution of 35,000 men or more is a measure which the people and Government of England are prepared for’.¹⁴¹ When the East India Company itself failed to survive the uprising, London henceforward assuming direct control of the new British Raj, the Economist gave the change a warm welcome.

Noblesse Oblige: Wilson in India

One reason why the Economist embraced the new model of government for India became clear a month after a state of peace was declared. ‘James Wilson’, the Times announced on 5 August 1859, had consented to become ‘Chancellor of the Indian Exchequer’, tasked with mopping up the cost of the mutiny. As in Crimea this had exceeded Economist estimates, with the death toll from the disproportionate British retaliation against Indian troops and civilians in the hundreds of thousands.¹⁴² The new appointee, the Times opined, ‘will carry with him habits of business and financial ability hitherto but too rarely exhibited on the banks of the Hooghly, and if he succeeds in making India solvent, and in proving that she can pay her own way, he will have rendered a public service which cannot be too highly appreciated.’¹⁴³ Wilson went on a farewell tour. He appeared with Bowring at a banquet given by the mayor of Liverpool. The Cotton Supply Association met with him in Manchester. Bradford’s Chamber of Commerce asked him to induce the Indians to clip their sheep only once in nine months for finer fabrics. And after thirty-five years he returned to Hawick. Around ‘70 Scotch gentlemen’ were there to toast him, and amidst their cheers he summed up his work since leaving home. ‘We have at last solved that great problem in politics – that the real interests of society, well understood, were common to all alike.’ In India – whose interests were also ‘to an extent, identical’ with those of Britain – he promised to raise revenues and cut the cost of the army, which had more than doubled from £11,000,000 in 1855. ‘I say if you cannot govern the country and keep the internal peace for less than £21,000,000 you must abandon it altogether.’¹⁴⁴

During his valedictions Wilson gave effusive thanks to Palmerston, who had interceded on his behalf many times since 1848. Confessing that he had initially declined the offer of a position as secretary at the Board of Control, a parliamentary body that supervised the East India Company, he reported that ‘the noble Lord begged that I reconsider’ telling him that ‘a man who enters public life must not confine himself to those few questions of which he considers himself master’. In 1856, Queen Victoria had blocked Wilson from a governorship in Australia, considering it bad form for a commoner to run a place bearing her name. But in 1859 Palmerston, now prime minister, made him vice-president of the Board of Trade, before offering him such an exalted post in India – sweetened with promises of a title and cabinet place within five years.¹⁴⁵ Yet it was his time on the India Board, Wilson reflected, without which ‘I could not have assumed the duty which has now devolved upon me’.

In that earlier stint in the Commons Wilson had indeed pushed for the kind of economic development the East India Company had been slow or unwilling to pursue. Railway construction was his main concern, sharing the view of Bright and other Manchester men that this would open the vast interior to British industrial goods and ease extraction of raw materials like flax, wool, indigo, sugar and above all cotton, where Britain was too reliant on the American South. His daughter Emilie remembered her father ‘planning these Indian lines of railway on the dining-room table – lines over which eleven years later he himself was destined to travel’.¹⁴⁶ He pressed administrators to open the port of Karachi, hoping to tempt ‘native dealers from Kabul’, and personally carried wool and cotton samples to factories in Leeds. But to these goals Wilson added another, a direct extension of his concerns as editor and proprietor of the Economist, and now Chancellor of India: security of investment.¹⁴⁷

‘Wilson believed that he originally suggested’, Bagehot – his successor at the Economist – would record, ‘the peculiar form of state guarantee upon the faith of which so many millions of English capital have been sent to develop the industry of India.’¹⁴⁸ Peculiar because, as Wilson realized even before his arrival there, and with no less an authority than Mill to back him up, for liberal outcomes a compromise with liberal principles might be needed – at least when it came to what were commonly considered backward races.¹⁴⁹ Bagehot, who was even more alive to this problem, praised Wilson for his pragmatism: ‘the necessity on the one hand, in an Asiatic country where the state is the sole motive power, of the Government’s doing something – and the danger on the other of interfering with private enterprise, by its doing, or attempting to do, too much’.¹⁵⁰ Wilson took leave of Britain telling his audiences, ‘I am one of those who believe that what is right in one part of the world cannot be wrong in another’, for ‘human nature is human nature the world over’.¹⁵¹ In practice, however, he behaved as though India required very different measures to springboard capitalist development.

Wilson arrived in Calcutta in November 1859 with his wife and three eldest daughters, before setting out to meet the new viceroy of India, Lord Canning, on a tour of the Upper Provinces. He soon got to work, seeking to apply in under one year policies that had taken decades to enact in England. His first budget – with its dual task of raising revenue and keeping order – included policies Wilson had once opposed. He proposed a paper currency, for example, modelled on Peel’s Act of 1844. Income tax would also be assessed, starting at 200 rupees, even as millions of pounds in spending were slashed. ‘I am putting the screw on very strongly’, he admitted.¹⁵² He sought to do so with tact. Recycling his strategy from Influences of the Corn Laws, he tried to show Hindus that being taxed was as one with their own ancient laws, codified in the Manu-Samhita.¹⁵³ In the army he aimed to reduce the ratio of native Indians by shifting some to ‘a great police system of semi-military organization’, which, he claimed, would be ‘cheaper by half a million’, and safer for Europeans.¹⁵⁴ Finally, he set up an English system of public accounts, with estimates, annual budgets, and a national audit.

It is no coincidence that these moves all tended to increase the confidence of overseas investors. Wilson was such an investor, and that was his intention. As if to underscore the byways between empire and finance, Wilson arrived in India even as his Chartered Bank was opening branches in Calcutta, Bombay, Shanghai and Hong Kong, buoyed by the opium pouring into China, as well as those more benign-sounding commodities, which in contrast it actually named in its prospectus, circulating between China, Java, Ceylon, India, Manila, Australia and the rest of the region.¹⁵⁵

His reforms did more than incorporate India into the formal structure of empire: they made it into that structure’s financial cornerstone. Without the Indian Army, and the Indian revenues that paid for it, Britain could not have projected its power in Africa and the Middle East, let alone Central, South and East Asia. Nor could the international system of multilateral settlements and payments that emerged after 1858 have looked nearly as favourable to the City.¹⁵⁶ A stabilized British Raj pulled in capital from London: £286 million, or 18 per cent of the total invested in the empire from 1865 to 1914. The presence of so much foreign capital, in turn, made it crucial to maintain stability, and therewith investor confidence. India was expected above all to ‘keep faith’ with its creditors. Between 1858 and 1898 remittances averaged nearly half of exports, with 20 per cent alone going to debt service and Home Charges, an ingenious system by which Britain debited India for the cost of exploiting it. Meanwhile, the trade surplus India ran with much of the rest of the world allowed it to settle its trade deficit with Britain; and for Britain, in turn, to settle around two-fifths of its own trade deficit, mainly with Europe and North America.¹⁵⁷

If his special mission concerned finance, Wilson was far from indifferent to the trappings of empire this brought with it. He was excited by the challenge of India, and his own power to act there, in contrast to London. He described the ‘increased capacity of the mind when removed to a new scene of action … I cannot tell you with what ease one determines the largest and gravest question here compared with in England’, exulting that ‘the Indian Exchequer is a huge machine. The English Treasury is nothing to it for complexity, diversity and remoteness of the points of action.’¹⁵⁸ Taking to his new imperial role with gusto, he relished the subtleties of frontier diplomacy as much as he enjoyed the dusty chaos of the financial files before him:

It is a most unwieldy Empire to be governed on the principle of forcing civilisation at every point of it. One day it is the frontier of Scinde and a quarrel with our native chiefs which our Resident must check: another, it is an intrigue between Heraut and Cabul, with a report of Russian forces in the background: the next, there is a raid upon our Punjab frontiers to be chastised: then come some accounts of coolness, or misunderstanding, or unreasonable demands from our ally in Nepaul: then follow some inroads from the savage tribes which inhabit the mountains to the rear of Assam and up the Burrampootra: then we have reported brawls in Burmah and Pegu, and disputes among the hill tribes whose relations to the British and the Burmah Governments are ill defined: then we have Central India, with our loyal chiefs Cindiah and Holkar, independent princes with most turbulent populations, which could not be kept in order a day without the presence of British troops and of the Governor-General’s Agent.¹⁵⁹

On his departure for India, Wilson relinquished nominal control of the Economist first to Greg, and then to Bagehot’s best friend, Graham Hutton, who stayed on as editor during his absence in Calcutta. In reality, the paper served the ambitions of its founder and owner till the end. When controversy arose over his first budget, Hutton and Bagehot leapt to defend it, attacking Charles Trevelyan, now Governor of Madras, who publicly objected to its steep spending cuts, tax rises and large procurements for the army.¹⁶⁰ Wilson was outraged at this attempt to undermine his authority, but he scolded his surrogates, accusing them in one of his last letters of hurting his chances by going overboard in the dispute.

Trevelyan was recalled for insubordination, yet the budget was swept further into the political storm. In London, Bright and Sir Charles Wood, secretary of state for India, backed the recalled governor. All three put some blame for the mutiny on an overly centralized bureaucracy and in Wilson’s budget they saw those tendencies exacerbated. Trevelyan had been the official most in charge of ‘relief efforts’ during the Irish famine, and later Wilson’s colleague at the Treasury, where both had preached the purest laissez-faire. Yet personally they did not get along. To Trevelyan, Wilson was an unscrupulous climber whose sole aim in India was to become Chancellor of the Exchequer back in Britain. ‘Ordering a salute and giving him a sort of public reception would be funny’, he wrote to Wood, anticipating Wilson’s arrival in Madras. Wilson saw Trevelyan as impulsive and vain, ‘thinking himself able equally to command a squadron, lead an army, or regenerate the civil government of a country’.¹⁶¹ Obituaries for Wilson strongly implied that this last administrative quarrel, and the advent of the rainy season, caused a fever-gripped Wilson, murmuring to Canning about ‘his income tax’ and in early August arranging his will, to go to ‘bed never to rise from it again’.¹⁶²