by James Grant
The day following the Wilsons’ arrival in Calcutta, November 30, was St. Andrew’s Day. Wilson made his first public appearance in the strange new country at a dinner given by the Scottish diaspora of Calcutta. Then it was off to Meerut to meet Charles Canning, governor general of India, an overland journey of 800 miles. Wilson, the kind of person on whom nothing is lost, took in the scenery, the people, and the commercial tempo (gratifyingly upbeat). He was thrilled by the beauty and the promise of what he saw: “a flat, rich country teeming with people and the richest of crops of every description,” he wrote to his daughters at home. “A goodly country to bear taxes.”
The government was sorely in need of revenue. Before the Mutiny, the Indian government had owed its creditors £60 million, and the costs of suppressing the insurrection had pushed the debt to almost £100 million. To restore financial order, Wilson proposed an income tax—India’s first—along with a license tax on traders, a tobacco tax, and a new paper currency.
At the close of December 1859, the Financial Member of the Supreme Council took his place at the Kashmere Gate, ceremonial entrance of the British rulers into Delhi and the scene of a bloody siege during the Mutiny. They entered on horseback, Wilson reported home, “I, as before, riding Lord Canning’s English horse, Negus, a fine showy white horse. Lord Canning and Lord Clyde, with Lady Canning between them, headed the procession. Lines of troops with fine bands of music, our own Cavalcade, and the roadsides, streets and house-tops crowded with people: you may conceive how fine the sight was.”26
The income tax sparked controversy, and not only from the Indians on whom the financial burden would fall. Charles Trevelyan, governor of the state of Madras, took the extraordinary step of issuing a public warning that Wilson’s program would risk igniting a second uprising. Trevelyan soon found himself out of a job and on a ship bound for England. As for Wilson, he judged that the Indian people “are ready to submit to anything and to pay any taxes we impose; they are only astonished by our generosity and leniency after the deep offense we have received.”27
As he had never failed to do in England, Wilson threw himself into his work. In February, he presented a budget that identified a massive deficit—of more than £9 million—and new taxes to fill the breach.28 Public, political, and journalistic reception were favorable, not least in the pages of the Economist, but the hard work of collecting the taxes with which to bank the revenue remained. “It seems almost as if I had known nothing but India all my life,” groaned Wilson, apologizing to Bagehot for his long neglect of family correspondence.29
No one was overly worried by the toll that this arduous labor exacted on Wilson’s health, least of all Wilson, though he had been unwell since the start of the rainy season in May. He remained in Calcutta when old India hands, and the Wilson ladies, left the city in their annual migration to healthier summer quarters and the cooler mountain air. But on August 2, Wilson was felled by an attack of dysentery. He died on August 11. “Take care of my income tax,” were among the final words he spoke; Halsey, Sophie’s husband and Wilson’s assistant, was at his bedside to hear them.30
British authorities sent word of his death to London by telegraph—they intended for the Wilson family to get the news through official channels. But it was Julia’s cry at the Wilsons’ Upper Belgrave Street home that sent up alarms. In her hands was a copy of The Times, which had scooped the government.
Bagehot instantly wrote to his parents. His father consoled him with words that said much about the second father whom his son had come to love:
Hour after hour makes me feel more and more sad and my heart aches for you all more than I can describe. The loss of such a parent, and such a man is not easily borne, nor can its extent be at once comprehended. I think of you as a fellow sufferer quite with his own children. Your affection for him I know, and his for you was always shown in a way not to be mistaken, and the relation of father to son seemed as complete as it could be. Your loss I cannot attempt to estimate. I will come to you whenever you wish. I feel almost that we have no right to intrude on sorrow so deep and trying.31
Bagehot could not come to grips with the fact of Wilson’s death; the older man’s vitality seemed to preclude it. To Halsey, he confessed, “I have never felt the shock of any event so much.”32
Wilson was buried in Calcutta in what was described as the biggest funeral in the city’s history. Carriages bearing mourners made a two-mile long procession to the burial ground.33
* Twentieth-century research fixes the average rate of expansion in the world’s above-ground stock of gold at between 1.07 percent and 3.79 percent per annum between 1839 and 1929. The single exception was the golden decade of the 1850s, when annual average production jumped by 6.39 percent. Chevalier’s concern was hardly groundless, though, as Bagehot patiently demonstrated, it was debatable. The torrent of supply did not persist, contrary to the expectations of both Chevalier and Bagehot, but leveled off even as Bagehot was writing. Growth in the supply of the world’s principal monetary metal reverted to its long-term trend (corresponding, more or less, to the long-term trend in population growth). The economist William Stanley Jevons, taking up the gold question in 1863, concluded that the purchasing power of gold had depreciated by at least 9 percent and perhaps by as much as 15 percent. Hugh Rockoff, “Some Evidence of the Real Price of Gold, Its Costs of Production, and Commodity Prices,” in A Retrospective on the Classical Gold Standard, 1821–1931, edited by Michael Bordo and Anna Schwartz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 621.
† Recalled Lord Courtney of Penwith: “Another clear and vigorous debater among us was W. R. Greg, author and reviewer—the W.R.G. of endless pungent paragraphs on topics of the day.” Like Bagehot, who was also a member, Lord Courtney continues, “he had a very large knowledge of literature and of business, but whilst Bagehot went on refining Greg was prompt and decisive and, if his nail may not always have been the right one, he always hit his nail and hit it on the head.” Ruth Dudley Edwards, The Pursuit of Reason: The Economist, 1843–1993 (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1993), 281.
‡ Eliza took no great pains with her writing, but was content (as were many critics, then and later) to construct a review out of lengthy quotations from the work under scrutiny. In the case of Robert Von Mohl’s The History and Literature of Political Science, which appeared in the Economist in 1856, even the copy-and-paste approach required considerable labor and not a little skill; Von Mohl wrote in German. Martha Westwater, The Wilson Sisters: A Biographical Study of Upper Middle-Class Victorian Life (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1984), 41.
§ “[P]erfectly orated but incomprehensible to his Italian-speaking audience,” reads Gladstone’s entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
¶ His report to Eliza on a dinner hosted by the Saturday Review which he attended in July 1859 includes this: “I sat next to [The Rev. William Scott] who writes the little amusing politics in the middle of the paper, and is not unpleasant tho’ he is ugly and unpopular.” The Collected Works of Walter Bagehot, 13:550.
CHAPTER 8
THE “PROBLEM” OF W. E. GLADSTONE
After the shock, death is a matter of details. Bagehot willingly dealt with the complications attending the distant death of his father-in-law. He was now, at the age of thirty-four, the patriarch of the Wilson family. In the company of Wilson’s brothers, he was appointed an executor of his father-in-law’s estate—indeed, the principal executor. He had formerly filled the temporary role as director of the Economist; now it became permanent.* To his sisters-in-law, he proved a godsend. “So completely one with us did we feel him to be, so naturally and unobtrusively did he at once take my father’s place in managing all our family affairs and in settling all matters great and small in which our interests were concerned that perhaps, at the time, we hardly realized how much of the great blank he filled,” Emilie testified.”1
Perhaps, if Wilson had survived, Bagehot would have continued to live the bala
nced railroad-riding, banking, and literary life into which he had happily settled. It was pleasant to manage the Stuckey’s branch at Bristol while writing odd pieces for his father-in-law’s weekly newspaper, producing two or three long literary essays a year—his masterpiece “William Pitt” appeared in the July 1861 issue of the National Review—and enjoying the society that his marriage and literary reputation had opened up for him. But the old life was now impossible—there were not enough hours in the day to live it.
In May 1861, the Walter Bagehots quit their Clevedon home and moved to London, taking interim quarters in the home of Bonamy Price, professor of political economy at Oxford University and an adherent of a strain of such old-fashioned, high-purity laissez-faire as to have commended him to James Wilson.† The West Country was not entirely out of striking range from the couple’s new London base and, in a staff capacity, Bagehot attended Stuckey’s directors meetings at Langport, Bristol, Bridgwater, and Taunton. Now a Justice of the Peace for the county of Somerset, he attended his first meeting of the Petty Sessions at Taunton in January 1861. But it was out of the question for him to continue to work at Bristol, and Stuckey’s allowed him to exchange that managerial position for lighter duties in London. By and by, he and Eliza, along with Eliza’s mother and her two unmarried daughters, returned to the Wilson home on Upper Belgrave Street.
Once in India, Wilson had set in motion a chain of events that would place Bagehot in the Economist’s editor’s chair. Instrumental in this outcome was Meredith White Townsend, publisher of a respected English-language newspaper in Calcutta, The Friend of India. Tireless, enterprising, and accomplished, Townsend had worked in the country for ten years, not only producing—at times almost unassisted—his own paper, but also contributing to The Times and becoming fluent in Bengali. But now, his health failing, Townsend asked Wilson for advice on starting a newspaper in England. Possibly thinking of what a fine editor of the Economist his son-in-law would make, Wilson urged Townsend to hire the incumbent editor, Hutton. Townsend returned home to engage Hutton in what would prove to be a fruitful lifelong partnership at the Spectator, which Hutton and he revitalized and set on its course of distinction. With Hutton gone—and occupied in the literary work for which he was eminently suited—Bagehot added the editorship of the Economist to his previously conferred title of director.
Though not a father and destined never to become one, Bagehot was the paterfamilias of No. 12 Upper Belgrave Street. A late riser and no stickler for railroad time, he liked to linger over breakfast. It had been impossible in Clevedon, lest he miss his train. In London, with no train to catch, he would pace around the breakfast room long after the eggs had been cleared away, delighting his sisters-in-law with his fast and funny talk. He assured them that he preferred their company to that of the notables who crowded the Gladstones’ breakfast parties.2 It was not purely for social reasons that the Gladstones included Bagehot in these levees of the elite. They knew a rising journalistic and financial star when they saw one. Bagehot returned their good will.
IN 1859, GLADSTONE TOOK up the chancellorship for the second time, under Palmerston. It was customary for the chancellor of the exchequer to present the government’s budget not merely in documentary form but also in a dramatic, sometimes hours-long speech—in Gladstone’s case, on February 10, a four-hour oration on both the budget and a new French commercial treaty. To achieve this feat of stamina, he heaved himself out of his sickbed, arriving at the House of Commons at 4:30 p.m., began speaking at 5 p.m., and finished at 9 p.m.—“without great exhaustion,” his diary recorded, “aided by a great stock of egg and wine. Thank God.”3
The speech, the third-longest Gladstonian parliamentary stemwinder,4 dealt with big themes as well as small facts, seasoned with pinches of Latin. As to the larger themes, the chancellor upheld free trade and attacked the idea that the best way to help the working classes was to reduce the tax they paid on the items they consumed. “This is good as far as it goes,” he argued,
But it is not this which has been mainly operative in bettering their condition as it has been bettered during the past ten or fifteen years. It is that you have set more free the general course of trade; it is that you have put in action the emancipating process that gives them the widest field and the widest rate of remuneration for their labor.5
As to the new commercial treaty, which provided for a deep reduction in the heavy British duties on French wine, Gladstone disposed of the canard that beer-loving Englishmen would drink no wine, even if you poured it down their throats. Of course they would—they had, once upon a time. “How was this consumption subsequently checked and discouraged? By the influence of prohibitive duties.”6 For the well-to-do, wine still served a medicinal purpose. And what of the poor, Gladstone demanded. He recounted a visit he had made to HMS Scourge, a British man-of-war. One of the seamen, recovering from an accident, was drinking wine under doctor’s orders. What kind of wine, Gladstone asked his naval hosts. Why, the surgeon answered, wine from the officers’ mess, the only potable supply on board. He urged Gladstone to taste the enlisted men’s vin ordinaire, “and certainly,” the statesman told the House, “it was with great difficulty that I succeeded in accomplishing the operation.”7
Bagehot contended that, for anyone, the House of Commons was “the most severe audience in the world,”8 though Gladstone might have quibbled that Bagehot himself was harder to please. In its coverage of the chancellor’s speech, the Economist withheld all but the most measured praise: the fiscal plan was too ambitious for the short time allowed. Bagehot then followed up with one of his best biographical studies, a lengthy profile for the National Review titled “Mr. Gladstone.”
Writers in the quarterly journals had an obligation to explore the personalities of the leading statesmen, Bagehot declared by way of preface. The politicians might not like it—indeed, many a reader might find it absurd. But “some deliberate truth should be spoken of our statesmen, and if Quarterly essayists do not speak it, who will?” Bagehot nominated himself for the task. Though his piece was unsigned, as such articles were until a dozen years later when the Fortnightly started to match bylines with headlines,9 its style was no one else’s.
Preliminaries out of the way, Bagehot sounded his theme: “Mr. Gladstone is a problem.” What a piece of work: a great orator, of course, but likewise impulsive, frenetic, unanchored, mutable, unimaginative. Bagehot serves notice that he is about to perform a kind of journalistic vivisection, an act of courage: Gladstone was the second most powerful man in English politics, behind the prime minister. He was the leader of the majority party in the House of Commons and perhaps the most feared speaker in Parliament. Still, there was nothing else to do, no other way to speak some deliberate truth of this “singular man of genius.”
One of the most enjoyable parts of Bagehot’s essay is his attack on the pretensions of Gladstone’s alma mater. “No one can deny to it very great and very peculiar merits,” writes the University of London alumnus of Oxford University. “But certainly it is not an exciting place, and its education operates as a narcotic rather than as a stimulant.”‡
Yet he has to admit that Gladstone, so much the Oxford man, was anything but languid. He was the opposite: “He cannot let anything alone.”10 Even his literary criticism was frenetic, for the statesman was an amateur classicist: “His book on Homer is perhaps the most zealous work which this generation has produced.”11 Certainly, Gladstone had the “oratorical impulse”; on this alone the chancellor’s friends and detractors could agree. He likewise had the “didactic impulse” and the “contentious impulse”—contentious, though far from bellicose; no politician hated war more than Gladstone or was more reluctant to finance it when hostilities became unavoidable. Moreover, he possessed a sixth sense about the English people: “He has the same sort of control over the minds of those he is addressing that a good driver has over the animals he guides: he feels the minds of his hearers as the driver the mouths of his horses.”12
/> What the great man lacked was the anchor of principle, Bagehot goes on. In 1853, in his first tour as chancellor, under the prime ministership of Lord Aberdeen, Gladstone planned for the gradual extinction of the income tax, “an engine of gigantic power for national purposes,” as he put it, only suitable in national emergencies. Reversing himself six years later, Gladstone declared that the income tax was a levy for all fiscal seasons. Bagehot said that he didn’t fault the chancellor for shifting his position on the technical question; what troubled him was his about-face on the political principle underlying the tax.13 Bagehot held that Gladstone did believe in truth—that is, he believed that there was such a thing as truth—but, like a clever lawyer, he was seemingly prepared to argue either side of a question of what constitutes that truth: “he has the soul of a martyr with the intellect of an advocate.”14
Reservations aside, Bagehot ultimately concluded that Gladstone was fit to lead England. In Peel’s time, the government’s great work was the abolition of destructive laws—the Corn Laws, the Navigation Acts, and other such protectionist relics, for instance. Now comes the work of construction, a much harder task. “No one desires more than we do that Mr. Gladstone’s future course should be enriched, not only with oratorical fame, but with useful power,” Bagehot closes. “Such gifts as his are amongst the rarest that are given to men; they are amongst the most valuable; they are singularly suited to our parliamentary life. England cannot afford to lose such a man.”
Gladstone’s “oratorical fame” had seemed assured as soon as he spoke at the newly formed Oxford Union Society in 1830, at the age of twenty-one. Like the youthful Bagehot, he was a bit of a prig and no hand with the ladies. Unlike Bagehot, he won a seat in the House of Commons on his very first try, at the age of twenty-three (a seat, to be sure, in the close control of the young man’s patron, the Duke of Newcastle).15 An evangelical Anglican, Gladstone read the Bible every day, either in English or Greek. He read Dante, whom he revered, in the Italian, having taught himself the language, and he loved Homer—“Old Homer” to Gladstone—just as well. “German was still beyond him,” biographer Roy Jenkins writes of the young Gladstone, “but he later acquired enough to be able in middle life to hold theological discussions with Ignaz von Dollinger in Munich.”