Bagehot was momentarily chastened at the outbreak of hostilities. Maybe those who had called Plonplon ‘a gambler and a desperado’ had been right after all.93 Just a month later, however, he noted that what had failed in France was not ‘personal government’ – since Prussia was ruled by a military autocracy at the pleasure of a king. It was Caesarism: a plebiscitary despotism that had cut out the middle classes, courting ‘the favour of the ignorant peasantry’.94 Bagehot remembered Napoleon III fondly at his death in exile three years later. His defeat at Sedan was excused, attributed to a painful bladder stone that had impaired his usual ‘clearness of insight’. The muse of history blessed the fallen hero. ‘To declare him a great man may be impossible in the face of his failures, but to declare him a small one is ridiculous. Small men dying in exile do not leave wide gaps in the European political horizon.’95
What of those gaps? Just before the collapse of the Second Empire, Bagehot had advised Liberals to refrain from trying to topple it, to ‘defer all ideas of a republic’.96 Rather, ‘thinking Liberals’ should ‘engraft upon it rational and liberal principles’ because the republic they wanted – sober, ‘with no nonsense in it’ – was impossible in France. Under pressure from workers it would turn red, demanding ‘equal division of property’.97 After the fall of the Empire, socialists took power in Paris in 1871, declaring a revolutionary republic and vowing to fight on against the Prussian invaders in defiance of their own government, which had surrendered. The Economist, predictably enough, recoiled in horror. The Paris Commune was a gang of ‘artisans and working men’, ‘desperate poor’, ‘mad with rage and envy’. It only prayed they could be stopped before their ‘settled design to destroy the Tuileries, the Louvre, the Palais Royal’ was realized.98
The Economist was thus grateful to Adolphe Thiers, provisional president of the French national government, for marching 60,000 loyal troops on Paris, aided by the Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who released them for this task at Thiers’s urgent plea. In the ensuing bloodbath, around 20,000 civilians were killed – many shot without trial, to be burnt or dumped in open graves, as the opening act of the French Third Republic. The fact that Thiers, a self-avowed republican, had given orders to massacre so many fellow citizens was encouraging. France owed 5 million francs in reparations to a newly united Germany and needed to show markets, where it would have to raise much of the cash, who was in control.99 Above all, the defeat of the Commune ‘effectively severed the name of the Republic from the creed of the delirious Republicans. It left it perfectly open to M. Thiers to identify the idea of the Republic with the soberest possible conceptions.’100
Till the end Bagehot never thought a republic could succeed, however, and welcomed signs of a return to enlightened dictatorship. ‘Why an English Liberal May Look without Disapproval on the Progress of Imperialism in France’, a leader from 1874, argued that while a parliament was just right for England – where a new ministry ‘does not change consols an eighth’, and a monarch sits ‘behind the ministry, to preserve at least an appearance of stability’ – this would never do for the French.101 In a friendly mood, he nevertheless offered to advise the National Assembly meeting at Versailles. He printed his own constitutional template in the Economist, ‘drawn up by one who has great experience in such matters’.102 In it, Bagehot urged the French delegates to vest power in a strongman, elected by an assembly, but who could in turn dissolve it – reminding readers that this was the secret ‘mainspring’ of the English Constitution. The document the Assembly actually adopted in 1875 earned his admiration on this basis. The ‘Conservative Republic’ looked forward – incorrectly, as the history of the Third Republic would show – to an executive more powerful than the US president and British prime minister combined. ‘Indeed, it is not very easy to conceive, outside Russia, a position of more influence and grandeur’, he wrote, thinking the model of the Czar to be an appropriate outer limit for a leader whose aim was to liberalize France.103
National character may have been a key category in comparative explorations of political order for Bagehot. But to nationalism as a leading force of the period he was relatively blind. A necessary precondition for a great nation was, of course, he granted, ‘accordance in sentiment, language and manners’ – but he was unwilling to endorse the existence of pure nationalities, or place them above these looser categories of national belonging. The term was unscientific, ‘a vague sort of faith to vast multitudes – a vague sort of implement to some plotters’. Yet it was also useful, so long as it was helping to build modern states – as in Germany and Italy. As a rallying cry for ‘alien fragments of old races’, however, nationalism was pernicious. ‘To set up the Basque nationality, or the Breton, or the Welsh, would be injurious to the Basque, the Bretons, and Welsh, even more than to Spain, France and England.’104 Its point was to release talented men cooped up in the administration of tiny nations (‘small politics debase the mind just as large politics improve it’), into larger ones, somehow leading to smaller, efficient government – and peace, with big countries less tempted to go to war to snap up weaker neighbours.105
What interest Bagehot’s Economist did take in nationalism was usually focused on its leading proponents. In Mazzini, the founder of Young Italy and champion of Italian unification, it saw a ‘true zealot’, more in love with himself than Italy, obsessed with the name of a republic, and too stubborn to accept its reality under the guise of a constitutional monarch. The brilliant military commander Garibaldi was a dimwit, who fought ‘with windmills instead of giants’. In both cases Bagehot refused to recognize the popular forces backing Mazzini and Garibaldi up and down the Italian peninsula.106 The Economist registered patriotic fervour in France and Prussia, meanwhile, but thought statesmen there would act to restrain lowborn passions at the last moment; in reality, Bismarck manipulated them – while Louis-Napoléon tried and failed to do the same, at home and as far afield as Mexico.107
Nowhere was the misreading of nationalism more pronounced, however, than in America, and the form this drive took in Lincolnism. And here the stakes were highest: of the 800 million pounds of cotton British mills consumed each year, 77 per cent came from the slave plantations of the American South, in which one-tenth of British capital was sunk. The outbreak of the Civil War in April 1861 cut off these supplies, endangering the most important industry in Britain, which added up to near half of exports. Anxious industrialists, merchants and investors turned to the Economist not just for analysis of the American situation, but for reports on markets as far afield as Egypt and India, where capital raced to open up new sources of cotton cultivation, leading to a cycle of boom and bust that transformed peasant agriculture and merchant trading networks around the world.108 For Bagehot the conflict also prompted a third constitutional investigation, setting the efficient secret of the English system against the grim realities of the American.
The American Constitution and the Civil War
Of all the politicians whose portraits Bagehot painted, his estimate of the US president, Abraham Lincoln, was at first lowest. ‘The President is unequal to the situation in which he is placed’, judged the Economist flatly at the end of 1861. ‘He has received the training of a rural attorney, and a fortuitous concurrence of electioneering elements have placed him at the head of a nation.’109 The federal government had ‘fallen into the hands of the smallest, weakest and meanest set of men who ever presided over the policy of a great nation at the critical epoch of its affairs.’ Their collective wisdom was a ‘concatenation of paltry arts which their own word “dodge” and no other will describe’.110 By the time of his re-election in 1864 Bagehot considered Lincoln the best candidate but made it clear this was not saying much. ‘It is not even contended that Mr. Lincoln is a man of eminent ability. It is only said that he is a man of common honesty, and it seems, this is so rare a virtue at Washington that at their utmost need no other man can be picked out to possess it and true ability also.’111 Bagehot did not even value
his literary style, the ultimate insult, comparing ‘the dignified and able State Papers of Jefferson Davis to the feeble and ungrammatical prolixity of Abraham Lincoln’.112
Bagehot looked down his nose at Lincoln, but it was the American Constitution he blamed for putting him in charge, and for the seeming inability of the more prosperous and populous North to suppress a rebellion of eight million backward Southerners.113 The contrast with the efficient political reflexes of the English system was constant in his leaders for the Economist, and formed a considered corpus of work beyond it. ‘The American Constitution has puzzled most persons in this country since the remarkable course of recent events has attracted a real attention to American affairs.’114 Bagehot would explain its mysteries. Indeed, his disclosure of the efficient secret of English parliamentarianism depended on a prior act of exposure in America, where the Civil War revealed the horrific administrative, military, and financial consequences of wrong constitutional theories.
The US founding fathers had built upon an interpretation of the English Constitution that Bagehot would attack as false – with the perverse result that, here, checks and balances were real, limiting efficient government without restricting the suffrage. Americans had trusted to ‘paper checks and constitutional devices’ to ‘resist the force of democracy’ but ‘either could not or did not take the one effectual means of so doing; they did not place the substantial power in the hands of men of education and of property’.115 Congress, meanwhile, lacked the dynamic powers that might have made it an effective check either on the people or the president. With respect to the latter, it had an ‘extreme remedy’ only, ‘the power of refusing supplies’. The Founders had misunderstood their model. For ‘the framers of this clause in the American Constitution copied it from the traditional theory of the English Constitution.’ They had not understood that though it was ‘a deadly sleeping weapon’, in practice ‘a lesser instrument had been annexed to it, and was always used instead of it – that of choosing the executive’.116 Their mistaken reading meant the president had a ‘lease for years’ and stayed for all four no matter how ‘unfit, incompetent, and ignorant’.117
Congress, with a power almost ‘too terrible to use’, put America at a disadvantage in the new age of global capitalism. ‘The use of it stops the whole machinery of government, and the mere fear of its use annihilates public credit. Since the creation of large national debts, which did not exist in the times when the English House of Commons acquired its power, it is questionable whether a successful use of the power of withholding supplies could be effectually made with safety to the state.’118 The evils were legion: presidential impunity, the poor quality and limited ‘educating capacity’ of Congress, and apathy even among those supposed to be leading citizens.119 To Englishmen this was the most astonishing facet of the Northern character. ‘They bear defeat in their armies, fraud in their contractors, incompetence in their generals and statesmen, with a stoicism which would be admirable if it rested on philosophy or reason, if it were anything but ignorant patience.’120
Given this barrage of bad press, readers must have been stunned to open the Economist at the end of April in 1865 and find an encomium to Lincoln, after he was shot by an assassin during a performance in Washington, D.C. ‘We do not know in history such an example of the growth of a ruler in wisdom as was exhibited by Mr. Lincoln. Power and responsibility visibly widened his mind and elevated his character.’ In taking a second look at the dead president Bagehot found his hidden greatness to have been his ability to make the constitution work – a document even more wretched than he had imagined at the outset of the Civil War.
‘The difficulty of creating a strong government in America’, able ‘to do great acts very quickly, is almost insuperable.’ The national character was dead set against both efficiency and dignity. ‘The people in the first place dislike government, not this or that administration, but government in the abstract, to such a degree that they have invented a quasi philosophical theory, proving that government, like war or harlotry, is a “necessary evil.”’ States impeded any central initiative. ‘To make this weakness permanent they have deprived even themselves of absolute power, have first forbidden themselves to change the Constitution, except under circumstances which never occur, and have then, through the machinery of the common schools, given to that Constitution the moral weight of a religious document.’ Lincoln seemed the one man, ‘by infinitesimal chance’, capable of managing this infernal machine. ‘The President had, in fact, attained to the very position – the dictatorship – to use a bad description, required by revolutionary times.’121
The Economist made a post-mortem exception for Lincoln, but it entertained few doubts about the low character of his compatriots and hoped that one outcome of the Civil War would be to humble them. Above all it had called for a speedy end to the conflict, and resumption of cheap and unrestricted flows of raw cotton to the shuttered mills of Lancashire, cut off from their supplies by the blockade of Southern ports. While Bagehot stopped just short of calling for Britain’s Royal Navy to reopen them, he had welcomed the dissolution of the Union in 1861 and looked forward to a future with two ‘less aggressive, less insolent, and less irritable’ trading partners.122 In many ways a lucid critic of American politics, he was less perceptive about the impact of the ultimate victory of the North, in part because the Economist had a profound interest in the economic and imperial consequences of the outcome for Britain.
Bagehot had personally sympathized with the Confederacy and maintained it could not be defeated, scoffing at the idea that ‘5 or 6 millions of resolute and virulent Anglo-Saxons can be forcibly retained as citizens’.123 He urged Russian or French or English mediation, for ‘there is not the slightest prospect of their forcible subjugation’. The brilliant victories of the South had earned it ‘the right to be admitted into the society of the world as a substantive and sovereign State. Certainly, neither Belgium, nor Greece, nor the Spanish colonies of the New World, manifested in anything like the same degree the qualities and resources which enable nations to maintain freedom and command respect.’124 With the Confederate capital of Richmond in flames, he saluted its ‘vanquished gallantry which appeals to the good side of human nature’.125
Southern courage contrasted with Northern cowardice. ‘They are a wholly untried people, they have never yet faced a really formidable foe.’ In the war of American independence, it was true, they had shown ‘pluck’, but ‘the indescribable imbecility of their enemies was yet more wonderful than their own vigour’. The only triumph since 1783 had been in the War of 1812, a short conflict in a minor theatre of Britain’s war against Napoleonic France, when the future president Andrew Jackson ‘defended a walled city against an inadequately-provided invading force lodged in an unhealthy swamp’ outside New Orleans – not exactly bad odds. ‘All their other contests have been against naked Indians and degenerate and undisciplined Mexicans: these were raids rather than wars.’126 The Economist flew into a rage at US interference with British shipping, which was ‘very like insanity’ for Northern officials to condone.127 When two Confederate diplomats aboard the Trent were taken prisoner en route to London in 1861, it demanded their release and an apology, ‘or we have no alternative save war’. The incident was blamed on ‘the voting, electioneering, spouting, rowdying public’ in the North, which actually believed it could beat the South, ‘lick Great Britain in the bargain’, and add ‘Canada to Texas’. ‘The depth of their ignorance is unfathomable. The height of their frenzy is inconceivable.’128
The Economist repeatedly predicted the collapse of the Northern war effort at the turn of 1862 for lack of funds. ‘With a revenue of twelve millions they are spending one hundred and twenty millions; indirect taxes bring in next to nothing; direct taxes are not even yet voted; the loans required are not taken up; and already they have resorted to the desperate, ruinous, and speedily exhausted contrivance of inconvertible paper money.’ There was no need to intervene: ‘mere wa
nt of funds must almost infallibly bring them to a stand in twelve months – probably in six.’129
Nor did Bagehot accept the casus belli of the Union, and he steadfastly denied the charge levelled against the Economist as a result – that it was condoning slavery. Lincoln had made it quite clear, he reminded readers, that the North was not fighting to extinguish this peculiar institution. If the choice were ‘between the preservation of the Union and the perpetuation of slavery; if “Union” meant negro emancipation as surely as “secession” means negro servitude, – then, indeed, we should be called upon to take a very different view of the subject.’130 He scoffed at the Emancipation Proclamation a year later, a strategic ploy to stir slave rebellions behind enemy lines and score humanitarian points abroad. ‘Half-hearted and inconsistent’, it would disgust public opinion in Europe. This ‘shibboleth of Emancipation’, which freed slaves in enemy but not loyal states, ‘is so curiously infelicitous, so grotesquely illogical, so transparently un-anti-slavery, that we cannot conceive how it could have emanated from a shrewd man.’ Lincoln had confirmed ‘the servitude of those whom he might set free, and he decrees the freedom of those whom neither his decree nor his arm can reach!’
Britain and the Economist sincerely desired to see slavery abolished, without a thought as to the price of raw cotton, Bagehot insisted. Still, the paper made some surprising claims about what would tend to that end – perhaps reflecting the fact that, as one biographer puts it, its editor ‘did not take a high principled abstract view on slavery’.131 The surest route to abolition, argued the Economist, was the success of the South. ‘It is in the independence of the South, and not in her defeat, that we can alone look with confidence for the early amelioration and the ultimate extinction of the slavery we abhor.’132 The paper was no friend of ‘the fanatics who hope to found a great empire on the basis of slavery’, it clarified, for ‘we do not believe that predial slavery such as exists in the slave states is a possible basis for a good and enduring commonwealth’. But it was unclear why, in that case, Southern independence was desirable. ‘We wish the area of slavery should be so small that, by the sure operation of economical causes, and especially by the inevitable exhaustion of the soil which it always produces, slavery should, within a reasonable time, be gradually extinguished.’133
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