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 w
ill 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 speec
h 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.
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