Liberalism at Large

by Alexander Zevin

  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 fl
ag.’ 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.