In the end slavery was a side note, however. Far more important in the paper’s warnings about a Northern victory was the intertwining logic of empire and economics. Two states were better than one, and would balance the naturally grasping character of each: ‘reckless Southerners may talk of seizing on Mexico, Nicaragua, and Cuba; unprincipled and inflated Northerners may talk of seizing on Canada; but there will be some hope that we may leave them to each other’s mutual control, and smile at the villainous cupidities of both.’134 Harriet Beecher Stowe and her abolitionist ilk were thus wrong to accuse London of rooting for the South: ‘The effectual discomfiture of either party would answer our purpose equally well.’135 If the Economist looked slightly more favourably on the South, this was because it had a right to leave the Union, was ‘more decent and courteous’ to Britain, and because it desired ‘to admit our goods at 10 per cent duty, while their enemies imposed 40 per cent’.136 Not just a geopolitical check, then, but freer trade would flow from the Southern states’ independence. In articles for the New York Daily Tribune, Marx had mocked the Economist up to this point for rationalizing slavery; now he gave it an ironic salute, as ‘honest enough to confess at last that with it and its followers sympathy is a mere question of tariff’.137
Bagehot continued to push British Liberals to acknowledge that, despite their distaste for slavery, ‘the experiment of one nation for one continent has turned out on the whole far from well.’ America was an only child, with ‘no correct measure of its own strength’, and having never played with others, ‘indulges in the infinite braggadocio which a public school soon rubs out of a conceited boy’.138 It was, in other words, a dangerous imperial rival, a point nicely captured by his image of the English public school, where playground bullying was preparatory to a career in the Empire. By the turn of 1865 the victory of the North looked imminent, ‘exciting the brains of Americans’, based on a mania for ‘empire and exclusive possession of a continent’. Bagehot was hostile to this outcome. The rest of the world, he wrote ruefully, ‘could not look with much favour or anticipated comfort on the formation of a new power thus motivated and thus clenched – a power whose two fundamental rules of action and raisons d’être would be, to defy its neighbour, and to annex its neighbour’s land.’139
The British Empire
If Bagehot viewed America through the prism of the British Empire and its interests, what did he have to say about the latter? Bagehot’s editorship was less rich in incident than Wilson’s – sitting between bursts of warfare and annexation in the 1850s and 1880s–1890s – and Bagehot showed the same breezy, flexible confidence in imperial destiny as he did in English political economy. Whether in Canada, the Cape, New Zealand or Australia, he admitted that colonists could be difficult, demanding, costly, and confrontational with natives. But he opposed the idea of cutting them loose. ‘We are pre-eminently a colonizing people. We are, beyond all comparison, the most enterprising, the most successful, and in most respects the best, colonists on the face of the earth.’140 He countenanced force wherever that valiant spirit was obstructed by recalcitrant subjects, or non-Westerners, though in such cases he preferred it to be moderate, and directed from London.
Closest to home, he backed Gladstone’s efforts to ‘pacify Ireland’ after 1868: disestablishing the Church of Ireland – Protestant, in a country four-fifths Catholic – and passing very limited tenure reform to give evicted farmers compensation for their improvements to the land. Any step outside the 1801 Act of Union, however, was anathema. The Economist attacked both the Fenian Brotherhood, made up of armed republicans in America and Ireland, as well as the Home Rule League, which sought greater autonomy through conventional parliamentary forms. Gladstone was right to ‘tread out the Fenian folly’ following an uprising in 1867, which proved that the organization preferred sowing strife to practical politics. But since Home Rule was a ‘gigantic and impossible constitutional revolution’, it was hardly less of a folly. A parliament for Ireland would tear down the entire edifice of the British state, creating a federal instead of imperial parliament in London, unable to override the Irish one ‘without provoking something like a rebellion on every separate occasion’. Home Rulers would ‘be imprudent, but they would be far more logical, if they were to raise a cry at once for an independent Irish Republic’.141 The one consolation for the defeat of the Liberals in 1874 that so shocked Bagehot was, ‘at least it delivers us from the rule of the faction which is anti-English in essence, and which wishes to destroy the Empire’.142 His idea for political reform in Ireland was to suppress the office of viceroy: concentrating the symbolic majesty of the British state in such a person lent credence to the claim of Irish nationalists to live in a subjugated colony – as if Dublin were no different than Delhi.143
Perhaps the most far-reaching colonial crisis during the period was not in Ireland, but in the West Indian colony of Jamaica. Here, in 1865, Governor Edward John Eyre responded to an uprising of former slaves in Morant Bay with brutal force, declaring martial law and deploying troops, who burned and looted over a thousand homes, and killed several hundred black Jamaicans, including a mixed-race member of the Jamaica Assembly. This looked like an organized lynching designed to shore up the power of white sugar planters, whose fortunes had declined since the advent of free labour, free trade and lower-cost sugar a generation earlier – and these events caused massive controversy when news of them reached Britain. Though Bagehot rebuked black rebels as ‘negro Fenians’, he was much more critical of Governor Eyre. For a time he made common cause with John Stuart Mill, who in 1866 set up the Jamaica Committee to press for Eyre to be put on trial; a host of liberals joined Mill, including John Bright, Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer and many others. Opposite them stood Thomas Carlyle and the members of the Governor Eyre Defence and Aid Committee. Bagehot attacked Carlyle in the Economist for defending Eyre’s ‘carnival’ of violence as ‘the worship of brute force’, and a threat to law, justice and liberty – not just in Jamaica, but in England. ‘On Mr. Carlyle’s principles of judging human actions, as exemplified in this Eyre case, Philip II and Alva have a right to the honour and thanks of posterity.’144 But as might be expected, his objection was not primarily moral. Bagehot agreed that blacks were inferior to whites, and acknowledged the importance of maintaining order in the Empire. To assure this in keeping with the needs of capital, however, required some cooperation from subject peoples. The Economist pointed to the tantalizing investments to be made in China’s railways, canals, tea planting, silk growing, and steam navigation, ‘beyond any experience we have yet acquired’, and similar opportunities in ‘Japan, Indochina, Persia, Asiatic Turkey’ and Africa, ‘from Abyssinia to the Cape’. To unlock these treasures, one point had be kept in mind – ‘that very large bodies of dark laborers will work willingly under a very few European supervisors’.145
As it turned out, gaining access to these markets involved more than investment prospectuses. It required armed compulsion, especially in East Asia. Bagehot saw British and French interventions in China to prop up the tottering Qing dynasty against Taiping rebels – a radical millenarian rebellion that spread from rural Guangxi to convulse the country, in part due to prior Western wars to force it open – as a regrettable necessity; but with Englishmen ‘leading the fleets and armies, and administering the finances of the Celestial Empire’, soon to be ‘Governors and Viceroys over vast provinces’, its violent repression had a silver lining. Farther east in Japan, trade – and the sort of extra-territorial legal treatment that British merchants should expect – was also at stake, in a nation that had shown still stronger distrust of Westerners than China. The Economist was unsure if the Royal Navy had legitimate grounds to bombard Kagoshima in 1863, to punish the ‘Daimio Satsuma’ for the death of a British merchant. But once begun, the paper pushed for widening the war. ‘Possibly we may have to bombard the Spiritual Emperor as well as the Feudal Baron, if his palace lie within a mile or two of the shore. Anyhow we are in for it: we mu
st now hold our ground and make good our position; and we must do this by force and at the cost of blood.’146 As the smoke settled afterwards, it worried that in continuously shelling a town of 150,000 (‘as large as Sheffield’) for over forty-eight hours ‘we do seem to have outstepped all the now recognized boundaries of civilized and credible warfare’. Satsuma’s representatives later put the death toll at 1,500.147
Not all imperial undertakings were military during these years. Bagehot grumbled in 1875 when Disraeli, as prime minister, opted to buy 176,602 shares in the Suez Canal from the Khedive of Egypt, bringing the total Britain owned to just under half. As an investment yielding 5 per cent it was sound, and would allow the Khedive to ‘reform his finances’. But Bagehot was unsure if it would solve the problem it was meant to address – making sure the passage to India stayed open, and in British hands. ‘We do not know what will be the course of history or the necessities of future times.’ ‘If we are prepared to take hold of Egypt, will this share in the Suez Canal help us in so doing? Will it not be better to take the country when necessary, without making public beforehand our intention to do so?’148 India itself was non-negotiable, whatever route was taken there, as Bagehot affirmed in 1863 at the death of Elgin – the man sent east to break Chinese resistance in the Second Opium War and open Japan, subsequently appointed viceroy of India. His successor, Sir John Lawrence, had the ‘single quality’ needed to ‘keep a vast population which wants to recede, perpetually advancing’. What was that? ‘Force’.149
Perhaps the most revealing example of the open-ended imperialism of the Economist under Bagehot was its enthusiasm for the least successful of all such ventures: the invasion of Mexico at the end of 1861 by France, with support from Spain and Britain. It applauded Napoleon III for rebuilding a failed state unable to pay its creditors in Europe, and for balancing the US, with its back turned fighting the Civil War. The installation of an Austrian archduke, Maximilian, on Mexico’s throne three years later, was a particular stroke of brilliance – a better administrator than ‘any obtainable half-caste or Indian president’, whose rule would ensure the export of everything from silver to apples, and timely interest payments on Mexico’s sovereign debt.150 Three years later Maximilian was executed by firing squad in Querétaro, after French forces hastily withdrew.
In Physics and Politics, Bagehot explained his approach to empire in more theoretical terms, as a complement to these snapshots in the Economist. Applying his take on positivism and the natural sciences to human societies around the world, he divided them into three evolutionary epochs: a ‘preliminary age’, primitive, tribal and customary; a ‘fighting age’, in which some nations prevailed over others thanks to their martial qualities; and a third, progressive, industrial and peaceful ‘age of discussion’, where the ‘higher gifts and graces have rapid progress’. This, of course, was Victorian Britain: the class rule of the ten thousand educated members of society that Bagehot had outlined in the English Constitution found an evolutionary basis in ‘adaptation’ and ‘natural selection’. Bagehot added that some law of imitation must operate inside nations to account for their success in the world – a copying process, working its way from ‘predominant manners’ down and then inherited, in a Lamarckian sense. Bagehot was himself copying social evolutionists – not least Herbert Spencer and John Lubbock – by making such claims, and then extending them outwards. British wars were justified in China, for example, since its ancient civilization had been arrested at an earlier stage of development. There, to ‘crack the cake of custom’ might indeed require cannonballs.151
Bagehot and the Faces of Liberalism
Bagehot endowed the Economist with his tone as well as his point of view. ‘He is not only clever himself’, wrote one biographer, but he ‘gives a distinct impression that he is one of a band of like-minded conspirators, to which the reader is invited to attach himself.’152 What was this band of conspirators, and where did Bagehot’s editorial positions place the Economist on the spectrum of liberalism in the 1860s and ’70s? Other liberals were far more open to democratization of the British political system, more critical of the Second Empire in France, less hostile to the American republic, and less complicit with imperialism. These stances reinforced each other, so that the radicals within the Liberal Party – the same men with whom Wilson had so spectacularly fallen out in the 1850s – continued to embody all that Bagehot and the Economist opposed.
Bagehot’s views brought him into conflict with various shades of liberal thinkers, journalists and statesmen. Frederic Harrison, a barrister and one of the English Comtists whom Bagehot despised, was a radical who gave free courses to workers as well as refugees from the Paris Commune. In 1867 he used the Fortnightly Review to attack the Economist editor, that ‘able constitutionalist’ who ‘in these pages could scarcely defend without a smile’ the House of Lords, the bench of bishops and the throne, ‘as the “theatric part” of the constitution’. But that, Harrison pointed out, was itself a mystification: ‘a fiction which covers a fiction’, for behind all ‘parliamentary play’ was ‘the hard fact of an aristocratic regime’. Where was the ‘efficient secret’ Bagehot described? It had scarcely a single significant accomplishment since the repeal of the Corn Laws (and that had been ‘forced on the House of Commons at the price of revolution’, he noted): ‘no national education, no efficient poor law, no reorganised army, no law reform, no contented Ireland’. Bagehot was unconscionably embellishing a moneyed, undemocratic status quo. ‘If we are going to tear down shams, let us be consistent, and know where we are going.’153
Bagehot, for his part, evaluated other liberals – even allies – in terms of their proximity to radical elements of the Liberal Party. Gladstone, drafting his budget of 1860, was told that to become a great statesman he must learn ‘not to object to war because it is war, or to expenditure because it is expenditure’ – to reject, in other words, the liberalism of Cobden and Bright. ‘It may be that the defence of England … is one of our duties; if so, we must not sit down to count the cost.’154 Bagehot may have praised Cobden as a ‘sensitive agitator’ at his death in 1865, but he still used the occasion to sharply rebuke the former leader of the Anti-Corn Law League: ‘his mind was very peculiar and had sharp limits’, in particular an ‘insufficient regard for the solid heritage of transmitted knowledge’ contained in the ‘dignified’ parts of the constitution.155 Cobden had also been wrong to oppose the Crimean War. ‘There are occasions when a war itself does its own work, and does it better than any pacification. The Crimean War was an instance of this’, which, Bagehot argued, ‘destroyed the prestige and the pernicious predominance of Russia. At the end of it, what were to be the conditions of peace were almost immaterial.’156
The richest, most revealing comparison between Bagehot and a compatriot thinker is with John Stuart Mill – who Bagehot read more carefully than any other, and whose liberalism troubled him greatly the more it diverged from his own. At twenty-two, the future Economist editor praised Mill’s Principles of Political Economy as a thoroughly modern foundation for the dismal science, combining all that was logical about Ricardo with the worldliness of Smith. Bagehot was already puzzled, however, by Mill’s plans to improve the labouring poor, which placed too much stress on their ‘intellectual cultivation’. What workers needed was not so much education – especially in those ‘depots of temptation’, the great towns – than a ‘restraining discipline over their passions and an effectual culture of their consciences’.157 As 1848 rolled on, and revolutions swept the capitals of Europe, the gap between them widened. Mill was thrilled, seeing the uplift of workers and democratic reform in Britain as tied to the republican experiment in France.158 Inspired by the Fourierist socialists, Mill quickly revised his Principles to emphasize support for workers’ co-operatives, and hailed ‘the capacity of exertion and self-denial in the masses of mankind’ when ‘appealed to in the name of some great idea’.159 Writing from Paris in 1851, Bagehot saw these associations as bad jo
kes or worse – a polarization that only grew more marked two decades later during the worker-led Paris Commune, which Mill defended and the Economist denounced.160
If the paper endorsed Mill when he stood for parliament in 1865, it was because of the crucial ways in which their conceptions of liberalism did coincide: on empire. ‘Differing as we do in the strongest manner from many of Mr Mill’s political opinions’ – including a franchise that would extend to the labouring classes almost half of national representation – ‘we should vote for him in preference to any other candidate’. Why? In his address to the electors of Westminster, it saw an indictment of the ‘official creed of the advanced Liberals’, ‘shattering into dust those Radical fallacies’ of ‘Mr. Bright and the Manchester School’. Mill promised to vote for defence outlays, and in contrast to the radicals – who argued that ‘England must never interfere in foreign affairs’ except in ‘her own national interest’ – declared that ‘interposition on the side of liberty, to countervail interposition on the side of oppression, is a right and may become a duty.’161 As the Governor Eyre controversy gripped parliament, Bagehot took Mill’s side against Eyre. But this was not only because his rampage in Jamaica undermined the rule of law: both Mill and Bagehot accepted that white colonial administrators should continue to rule over black Jamaicans, treating the episode as an isolated infraction. Shared support for the imperial order as given went beyond one event or policy. Bagehot’s civilizational hierarchy in Physics and Politics, in which Britain might force societies at arrested stages of development to advance, echoed Mill’s voluminous writings on the backwardness of Indians and Irish and the progressive purpose behind London’s unrepresentative rule over them.162
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