Liberalism at Large

by Alexander Zevin

  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, unn
erving 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