Bagehot

by James Grant

  Notorious though he was within the Wilson sisterhood for ducking out from balls or for ignoring the chatty “pillars of crinoline” who flanked him at dinner parties, Bagehot shone in conversation when others returned the favor. James Bryce, the Victorian jurist, historian, chronicler of America, diplomat, amateur botanist, world traveler, mountain climber, and Liberal politician, once fell into conversation with Bagehot at a party at George Eliot’s home. Of that and similar invigorating encounters, Bryce recalled, “one seemed to gain more profit as well as pleasure from a talk with [Bagehot] than with almost anyone else, all the more so because, however much one felt his superiority, it always remained conversation, and not, as so often with great talkers, a lecture or a declamation.”4

  Among his self-limited circle of friends and acquaintances, Bagehot made room for Tories as well as Liberals. He formed a deep attachment to Lord Carnarvon, the Conservative colonial secretary who resigned his ministerial post to protest the 1867 Reform Act. Carnarvon was “one of my sort,” as Bagehot told his parents in a note describing a weekend party at the earl’s country house among “the fast people”:

  The women wore wonderful dresses, and we played cards rather high, always in the evening and sometimes in the morning—at least some people played in the morning.—I kept my character for wisdom and did not. Lady Carnarvon is very clever and literary—at least with snaps of Literature. They will be people for some years to come, for they are both clever, very ambitious and have a beautiful place near London to entertain in.5

  The economist William Stanley Jevons, the jurist Henry Sumner Maine, the poet and theologian John Henry Newman, and Gladstone were among his correspondents. The poet Matthew Arnold was a frequent dinner guest and visited Bagehot when he fell ill.6 George Eliot and he talked shop at one of her Sunday afternoon parties, she complaining about “the pain of composition.” If Bagehot expressed sympathy, it was likely out of fellow-feeling rather than any personal experience with writer’s block: his pen fairly flew across the page.7

  Few journalists have ever enjoyed the kind of rapport with politicians that Bagehot enjoyed with Gladstone. If it was a transactional union, it was also a meeting of minds and spirits. And if Bagehot, sixteen years younger, was, of necessity, the junior partner, he was still that bookish politician’s intellectual peer.

  In 1865, Gladstone had thrown his weight behind the nascent Bagehot-for-Parliament campaign in Manchester. “If,” said Gladstone’s testimonial, which he addressed to Bagehot for circulation to the appropriate political powers, “thorough acquaintance with economic science, extensive and accurate knowledge, ready and practical habits of business and a conciliatory disposition, go to fit a man for the representation of these great national interests, it certainly appears to me that your fitness must stand without dispute in the first rank.”8 Bagehot did possess each of the qualities Gladstone named, even if he lacked the common touch. He might have made a political career if he, like certain lucky ungregarious politicians—Sir George Lewis, or the Conservative leader and future prime minister Lord Stanley were examples—could have procured a parliamentary seat without having had to stand in a contested election.

  On Black Friday, May 11, 1866, the day of the Overend Gurney panic, Bagehot made time to brief Gladstone, then the chancellor, on just how bad things were in the City. They met twice more the following week. Evidently, the chancellor was planning to revive his plan to regulate the country-bank issues, since Bagehot, on May 21, wrote to advise against it. The private circulation of the country banks was yesteryear’s problem, Bagehot counseled—as indeed it was.9 Gladstone took his advice.

  In the course of making his unsuccessful run to become the first member of Parliament for University College London one year later, Bagehot attested of Gladstone, “In amplitude of knowledge, intensity of labor, in a flexible eloquence suited either to the highest discussions or to the meanest details of public business, he has no living equal.” Certainly, there was no comparing the Liberal statesman with the corrupt Tory Disraeli.

  Bagehot became a confidant not only of Gladstone, but also his inner circle. On October 11, 1870, in the opening months of the Franco-Prussian War, the Earl of Granville, by now Gladstone’s foreign secretary, addressed a confidential letter to the editor of the Economist, whom he’d recommended to Brooks’s a year before. It closed with an unusual request:

  May I ask you in anything you say, which always comes with so much weight both from the high character of your paper and the great ability of the articles, not to write anything which will give the thoughtful Germans reason to believe that they have just cause of complaint against us. You will believe me when I say the request is exclusively on public grounds.10

  In the October 15 Economist, under the headline “Count Bernstorff’s Rejoinder to Lord Granville on Neutrality,” there duly appeared an article noting that, while England had indeed sent munitions to France, she had likewise shipped field blankets to Prussia, thereby favoring neither side and violating no rule of neutrality.11

  John Thadeus Delane of The Times and Edward Levy-Lawson, proprietor of the Daily Telegraph, were arguably the most influential journalists in London: they alone were accorded the privilege of standing at the bar of the House of Lords, along with members of the House of Commons. Yet while Delane’s name turns up in Gladstone’s diary 58 times and Levy-Lawson’s 53, Bagehot rated 125 mentions, 17 of which occur after his death, denoting that Gladstone had either been reading Bagehot’s writing or corresponding with his widow. During their courtship, Bagehot confessed to Eliza that his ambition was to write in such a way as to wield some influence “over people’s wills, faculties and conduct,” and in that he succeeded.

  BAGEHOT’S HEALTH BEGAN TO FAIL around Christmas, 1867. Returning from midnight church services, he “caught a chill which developed into a severe case of internal inflammation,” which left him too weak even to read. The malady persisted, and Eliza’s diary increasingly came to feature such entries as “Walter poorly,” “Walter not well,” “Walter in bed.” In 1868, he hired Robert Giffen, the economist whom Alfred Marshall would later call the “Prince of Statisticians,” to help him do the things he had previously done on his own.12 He suffered an attack in August 1869 that left him bedridden for a month.

  News of the death of Bagehot’s mother arrived by telegram on February 21, 1870, after Bagehot had left the house for a day at the office. Emilie Barrington, a Bagehot biographer and the youngest Wilson daughter, dispatched her husband to intercept him, and the brothers-in-law met on the platform of Cannon Street station—by which time Bagehot had already found out. “He looked scared,” Emilie recalled her husband telling her, “and his eyes wild. He exclaimed briefly, as if astonished at the sound of his own words—‘My mother is dead.’”13

  Bagehot loved his mother tenderly, treated her with the respect she often did not receive from others, and flew to her side whenever she lost control. After her funeral, he told Emilie how shocked he was to be consoled by well-intentioned people who felt her death was all for the best, as she had suffered so.

  Operating at less than full capacity, Bagehot nonetheless managed to produce some of his best writing in the aftermath of his mother’s death. Physics and Politics appeared serially in the Fortnightly Review beginning in 1867. The toll that lingering ill health took on Bagehot was evident in the uncharacteristically slow tempo of its publication; the finished book did not appear until 1872. The title was a misnomer—“Biology and Politics” would have been more descriptive.

  Physics and Politics owes its inspiration in part to Sir Henry Maine and his ideas about the evolution of society from status to contract, in part to Herbert Spencer and Thomas Malthus and their notions about the struggle for existence, and—in trace amounts—to Charles Darwin and the broadly defined theory of evolution. Though the publisher, Henry S. King, packaged the slim, 224-page volume as part of its International Scientific Series, Physics and Politics is a production not of science, but of imagi
nation and supposition. It is anthropology without the fieldwork, science without the laboratory, and scholarship without the footnotes. It is the daring and ambitious speculation of an educated Victorian amateur on a branch of knowledge about which he admits he knows little.14

  Progress is rare and stagnation common in human society, Bagehot observes. He sets himself the task of explaining why some nations advance and others stand still. “National character,” the source of which is the “innate tendency of the human mind to like what is around it,” explains a great deal. All this began in a time before nations, at the beginning of human society.

  First came the pre-economic, or “preliminary,” age, then the “age of fighting,” then the “age of discussion.” Darwin and his acolytes had put God on the defensive. Anticipating his critics, Bagehot announces that he has no quarrel with religion; “Providence” finds a place in his worldview.15 Bagehot describes the dawn of civilization with the authority of a man who was there to see it:

  Man, being the strongest of all animals, differs from the rest; he was obliged to be his own domesticator; he had to tame himself. And the way in which it happened was, that the most obedient, the tamest tribes are, at the first stage in the real struggle of life, the strongest and the conquerors. All are very wild then; the animal vigor, the savage virtue of the race has died out in none, and all have enough of it. But what makes one tribe—one incipient tribe, one bit of a tribe—to differ from another is their relative faculty of coherence. The slightest symptom of legal development, the least indication of a military bond, is then enough to turn the scale. The compact tribes win, and the compact tribes are the tamest. Civilization begins, because the beginning of civilization is a military advantage.16

  Change—variation, adaptation, originality—is the key to progress. And rare are the conditions that obtain it. It is “only possible in those happy cases where the force of legality has gone far enough to bind the nation together, but not far enough to kill out all varieties and destroy man’s perpetual tendency to change.”17

  In this clinical way, Bagehot deals with the unlovely human institutions of slavery and warfare. He deems the first a kind of blessing in early days, when slaves afforded leisure to those who would otherwise have had no time to think.18 War, too, served its purpose, conquest being “the missionary of valor, and the hard impact of military virtues beats meanness out of the world.”† Nor, he goes on, should one “be surprised at the prominence given to war. We are dealing with early ages; nation-making is the occupation of man in these ages, and it is war that makes nations.”19

  He then reflects on the well-known homogeneity of the savage tribes—all the civilized travelers, he notes, have remarked on it. What accounts for the undifferentiated quality of primitive peoples is their “extreme propensity to imitation.” They are afraid to break the “cake of custom.” So it is that “When you have seen one Fuegian, you have seen all Fuegians—one Tasmanian, all Tasmanians.” The “higher savages,” like the Maori, may appear less homogeneous yet “much of the same monotonous nature clings to them, too. A savage tribe resembles a herd of gregarious beasts; where the leader goes they go too; they copy blindly his habits, and thus soon become that which he already is.”20 To the student of financial anthropology, Bagehot’s “herd of gregarious beasts,” blindly following the leader, resembles nothing so much as the stampede to sell by presumably civilized, certainly white, shareholders when the bottom falls out of the stock market. It’s an analogy that Bagehot chooses not to draw.

  What of morality? It was formerly held that all men had an equal measure of conscience, says Bagehot, but nobody believes that any more:

  if men differ in anything they differ in the fineness and the delicacy of their moral intuitions, however we may suppose those feelings to have been acquired. We need not go as far as savages to learn that lesson; we need only talk to the English poor or to our own servants, and we shall be taught it very completely. The lower classes in civilized countries, like all classes in uncivilized countries, are clearly wanting in the nicer part of those feelings which, taken together, we call the sense of morality.21

  Bagehot divides the world in two. In the east, civilizations are old and stationary. In the West, civilizations are new and changeable. The “yoke of fixed custom” is what the newer, more dynamic civilizations have succeeded in throwing off. They have done it through the agency of “government by discussion.” “The age of discussion” is the age in which his enlightened readers are privileged to live.

  Among the savages, there is nothing to discuss. Everything is settled, either by custom or superstition. Evolved civilizations, by the mere act of inviting discussion, acknowledge that “there is no sacred authority—no one transcendent and divinely appointed man whom in that matter the community is bound to obey.”22

  Discussion teaches tolerance—and history shows that nothing else does:

  In all customary societies bigotry is the ruling principle. In rude places to this day any one who says anything new is looked on with suspicion, and is persecuted by opinion if not injured by penalty. One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea. It is, as common people say, so ‘upsetting’; it makes you think that, after all, your favorite notions may be wrong . . . Naturally, therefore, common men hate a new idea, and are disposed more or less to ill-treat the original man who brings it.23

  While antiquity belonged to men of action, modernity rewards the contemplative. Helmuth von Moltke, the learned and deliberate Prussian general—who could be “silent in seven languages”—is Bagehot’s model of the nineteenth-century warrior, a player of “a restrained and considerate game of chess with his enemy.” If only, Bagehot digresses, “the art of benefitting men had kept pace with the art of destroying them; for though war has become slow, philanthropy has remained hasty.” In charitable work, the impulse to action—the call to “do something,” anything—results in not only great good but also great harm.

  Even business is harmed by the disposition to heedless action. The source of every speculative mania, besides corruptingly low interest rates, is the drive to do too much with too little. Investing one’s own capital may occupy four hours a day. Trying to fill the other four, and to operate on a grander scale, restless people incur debt; it ruins them. “If they could only have sat idle the other four hours,” Bagehot reflects of this still-recognizable speculative type, “they would have been rich men.”24

  Latching on to that paradox, Bagehot proposes a remedy: if you want to not do something, open the floor to discussion. Invite all sides to weigh in. To a degree, England was doing just that—regrettably so, according to Bagehot’s contemporary Thomas Carlyle, the historian of heroes and heroism, who bemoaned the “national palaver.” Bagehot countered that he wished there were more of it. If the “hereditary, barbaric impulse is decaying and dying out,” credit should go to government by discussion, “which has fostered a general intellectual tone, a diffused disposition to weigh evidence, a conviction that much may be said on every side of everything, which the elder and more fanatic ages of the world wanted.”25

  There was a final benefit to government by discussion that Bagehot could not bring himself to address directly. It had to do with overpopulation, the reproductive urge, and “the great sin of great cities,” as Bagehot’s friend, William Rathbone Greg, termed the blight of prostitution. Roundaboutly but unmistakably, Bagehot is saying that there was too much sex.

  In ages past, human numbers decided the competitive advantage between tribes and nations. The greater the numbers, the greater the success. While mere numbers no longer counted as they once did, the vestigial impulse to create those numbers persisted. Inching closer to the subject he was driving at, Bagehot argues that there remains “a desire far in excess of what is needed.”26

  In the civilized world, the progress of production could not keep pace with the growth in population: “How painful is the conclusion that it is dubious whether all the machines and in
ventions of mankind ‘have yet lightened the day’s labor of a human being.’ They have enabled more people to exist, but these people work just as hard and are just as mean and miserable as the elder and the fewer.”27

  And how might government by discussion contain this Malthusian evil? Bagehot, invoking the authority of Herbert Spencer, argues that the energy required to lead a life of the mind—a life of political discussion—leaves less energy for reproduction:

  The perpetual atmosphere of intellectual inquiry acts powerfully, as every one may see by looking about him in London, upon the constitution both of men and women. There is only a certain quantum of power in each of our race; if it goes in one way it is spent, and cannot go in another. The intellectual atmosphere abstracts strength to intellectual matters; it tends to divert that strength which the circumstances of early society directed to the multiplication of numbers; and as a polity of discussion tends, above all things, to produce an intellectual atmosphere, the two things which seemed so far off have been shown to be near, and free government has, in a second case, been shown to tend to cure an inherited excess of human nature.28

  What this interesting quotation might imply about the state of things chez Bagehot, one may only wonder.

  Physics and Politics met a warm reception in Boston (“charming . . . rich in original thought”—The Atlantic) as well as in London (“a first and most successful attempt to invest re-historic researches with political interest”—Pall Mall Gazette). Today, its merit lies less in what Bagehot said than in the zestful way he said it. “A brilliant piece of dilletantism,” the twentieth-century judgment of Joseph Schumpeter, still stands in the twenty-first.29

  * Defunct since 1946. According to a Short Account of the Windham Club from its Formation in 1828, Bagehot “suffered from indifferent health, especially in the matter of digestion, and was heard on one occasion to say that, although he belonged to another well-known club, nothing would induce him to dine elsewhere than at the Windham.” Norman St John-Stevas, ed., The Collected Works of Walter Bagehot, vol. 13 (London: the Economist, 1896), 632.