In all these instances British imperialism was peerless, avoiding the vainglorious preening of the French, the shifting Weltpolitik of Germany, or the hypocrisies of America. What distinguished it was liberalism, a talent for promoting trade, investment and ‘higher civilization’. Yet as the scramble for territory reached fever pitch in the late nineteenth century, obscuring this civilizing commercial mission, criticism of imperialism was never to be found in the Economist. It could not be, since the reproduction of national as well as international wealth was inconceivable for the paper under Johnstone outside the imperial framework, and the invasions, pacifications, occupations and annexations necessary to construct, preserve and extend it. Whether imperialism was an ‘urge’ or a ‘tension’ internal to liberalism, or one twist in its ‘convoluted trajectory’, as several scholars would have it, what is abundantly clear is that in the second half of the nineteenth century it was central to the mainstream of liberalism – to which the Economist gave authoritative expression.66 Empire structured the world economy and made it safe for capital, even outside the zones under its direct control. And though the Economist faced criticism from radical Liberals over the policies this governing reality led it to endorse, such voices only looked (even momentarily) strong enough to challenge its dominance after 1899, when the Second Boer War shook the British Empire.
As Beijing burned, Britain faced a war in South Africa entirely on its own, in what turned into its costliest military engagement since the time of Napoleon. Not only was its performance in the Second Boer War unsteady, so was its pretext for the war, which seemed to many critics at home and abroad like a plot to grab the gold and diamond mines of two small independent Boer republics, the Transvaal and Orange Free State.67 The Economist had doubts about the official reason offered by its erstwhile contributor, High Commissioner Alfred Milner. At Bloemfontein in June 1899 it was Milner, not the Boer leaders, who refused compromise over the status of Britain’s Uitlander expatriates in their territory, provoking the paper in a rare burst of candour to call the issue of their voting rights in the Transvaal a red herring, ‘moneyed interests standing in ambush behind a political movement’. Cecil Rhodes, at once prime minister of the neighbouring British Cape Colony, director of the British South Africa Company, speculator in diamond and gold, and the architect of the botched Jameson Raid four years earlier, symbolized this ‘unhappily close connection between politics and capitalist interests’.68 Rhodes’s enablers in London were nearly as bad, especially Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain, whose brash style unsettled diplomacy and markets.69 The annexation these men were pushing for was above all short-sighted. For surrounded by British colonies, inundated by British migrants bearing British capital, both Boer republics would be absorbed into a British-controlled Union of South Africa inside a generation.70 ‘Do not let an exaggerated Imperialism make us ridiculous before the world’, the paper initially remonstrated. ‘Our Empire was not built up that way.’71
But in a trice the Second Boer War proved no different from the other colonial conflicts – for the Economist abruptly changed tack when the Transvaal’s president Kruger served an ultimatum to the British to halt their troop build-up in October 1899. No matter how just their cause, if the Boers ‘once presume to attack a British colony’, the country ‘would be united in a war which would be literally waged saigner à blanc. There would be no compromise, as in 1881; the Boer State would be wiped out of existence by general consent.’72 From ‘stock-breeders of the lower type’, such a ‘horrible blunder’ might have been expected: average Boers ‘knew less than people like the Afghans’; but their leaders believed ‘as Muslim fanatics believe’, and were ‘possessed with the idea that Englishmen want their mines – which, we may remark, Englishmen own already’. Boers may have thought like ‘Orientals’ but counted on being treated as white men, in a ‘war with limited liability’. ‘They know perfectly well that the English will neither execute them, nor take their farms, nor subject them to special taxation.’73 When this proved untrue, and revelations about the use of concentration camps emerged, the Economist fell silent. Thereafter, criticism was confined to calls for more and better guns, more and swifter transport, and a larger, better-paid standing army.74
Imperial Unity and Liberal Splits
Johnstone presided over a less predictable political scene than past editors, as the old quarrels over empire between the Economist and its onetime backers, Cobden and Bright, suddenly took hold of the entire Liberal Party; the succession of far-flung colonial wars, joined to the simmering of nationalism in Ireland, added up to a full-blown crisis. The paper remained militantly hostile to any hint of ‘radical pacifism’ and any Liberals who espoused such views in parliament. Sir Wilfrid Lawson, the temperance campaigning MP, and a ‘small knot’ of ‘advanced Liberals’ were inexcusable in their ‘blind’ and ‘mischievous’ opposition to Gladstone’s seizure of Egypt in 1882–83.75 Bright was dismissed for ‘denouncing our interference’ in Burma in 1885 since he was merely venting ‘his favourite dogma on the essential criminality of war’.76 John Morley, who had nearly become editor of the Economist, was admirably Cobdenite when it came to free trade, but took the likeness too far – asking ‘foolish’ and ‘illogical’ questions about British scorched earth tactics in the Sudan.77
Critiques of empire that hadn’t had much impact in the past now seemed to be gaining ground in the Liberal Party and straining its unity. So much so that when Gladstone himself announced a belated conversion to Home Rule for Ireland in 1885, the party imploded – nearly one hundred of its MPs formed a breakaway Unionist faction. In this crisis, the Economist knew where it stood, and expressed itself without hesitation. Almost overnight Gladstone turned from a great Liberal hero into an ageing demagogue, dragging his party and country down a sinkhole. Liberals that stood with him over Home Rule had struck a ‘fanatical alliance’ with nationalist Irish Parnellite MPs, fomenting ‘a war against all payment of rent in Ireland’, the ‘very foundations of contract’, to ‘hand that unhappy country over to the strife of rival factions, the bitter play of religious animosities, and the keener conflict of class hatreds’.78 By 1893, the split between the Liberal Unionists and the Liberals was so severe that the Economist stopped calling for a reconciliation between them: Unionists needed to throw their full force behind the Conservatives to stop Gladstone’s second Home Rule Bill – a ‘step towards the disintegration’ of the Empire, this time crushed only by the merciful intervention of the House of Lords.79
The early editors of the Economist, Wilson and Bagehot, had been pillars of the Liberal Party, both of them intimates of Gladstone. Under Johnstone, the Economist now issued its liberalism from a distance, as the paper switched to support for the Conservatives, who soon absorbed the Liberal Unionists (the latter agreeing to drop the prefix ‘Liberal’ in 1890), and ruled Britain with brief interruptions for the next twenty years.
Disraeli stepped down in 1880 and was remembered with surprising fondness at his death a year later, given that the Economist had ‘resisted half his proposals’ – for he had a sharp mind, ‘fought his way amidst great disadvantages to the top’, and showed the country and the Liberals (with their ‘tendency to forget the importance of force in human affairs’) that ‘a small nation which governs a great Empire must make sacrifices’ and ‘occasionally do high-handed things’.80 Salisbury, the most powerful Conservative statesman of the last third of the nineteenth century, enjoyed even better press, at least by his third stint as prime minister, as the paper acquired a taste for this strangely ‘sardonic man’. The marquis had stood up to Germany in South Africa, France in Egypt, and all of Europe over Crete; and he had held fast to his Liberal Unionist allies on Irish Home Rule, living down an earlier reputation for weakness – while resisting ‘injudicious adventures’.81 His nephew and protégé seemed at first a disappointing contrast. Arthur Balfour, who became prime minister in 1902, possessed his uncle’s hauteur and ‘scant respect for popular government’, wi
thout his political instincts, or a grasp of economics.82
The Liberal politicians of the period faced much harsher criticism, in part because the Economist doubted their hold over the party – with the 1886 split having by no means settled imperial policy outside Ireland. The paper backed the Unionists-cum-Conservatives in 1886, 1892, 1895, and 1900. In the last, a ‘khaki election’ during the Second Boer War, it found the official Liberal opposition in a ‘sad way’ – ‘incurably divided by personal dislike, with followers who upon the leading question of Imperialism really form two, if not three, parties’.83 Henry Campbell-Bannerman, the leader of the Liberals, was ‘obviously not the man to govern this particular situation’; his infamous 1901 speech, denouncing the farm burnings and concentration camp roundups inflicted on Boer civilians as ‘methods of barbarism’, made him a pariah at the Economist. It praised the Liberal Imperialists who defied his leadership to walk out of the House of Commons rather than support a radical motion condemning these camps. Their parliamentary leader, the erudite, horse-racing Lord Rosebery, was far superior – but, for reasons it could not fathom, refused to mount a serious challenge to Campbell-Bannerman for control of the party.84
Not until 1906 did the paper break with the Unionists and Conservatives – and then reluctantly, at the last minute, driven to it only when the leader of the former, Joseph Chamberlain, forced the latter, under Arthur Balfour, to adopt ‘tariff reform’ as the price of an electoral pact between them. This swerve away from free trade and towards protection turned out to be as suicidal in the ensuing general election as the Economist predicted. The remarkable fact, however, is that on the eve of the greatest electoral triumph for Liberalism, when it won 400 out of 670 Commons seats, the Economist failed to endorse it. Conservatives, under a Chamberlainite ‘delusion’ the Empire could be bound with reciprocal tariffs, were no longer trustworthy on free trade; sound on trade, Liberals seemed to lack the nerve to defend the Empire, most damningly in Ireland.85 So far as the paper was concerned, the election of 1906 was a choice between the devil and the deep blue sea.
Asquith, Ireland and the New Radicalism
One of the editors responsible for leading the Economist to this impasse had, paradoxically, just assumed high office in the new Liberal government. Herbert Henry Asquith, as Chancellor of the Exchequer and then as prime minister from 1908, would lead the party during the legislative battles that defined New Liberalism in power. Asquith had begun writing at least one leader a week for the Economist in 1880, as a young barrister in need of extra money. He got the job, which paid £150 a year, through Bagehot’s old friend and co-editor, Richard Hutton, for whom Asquith also wrote at the Spectator. Before crossing the Strand to the Economist offices, Asquith would wax on classical themes – ‘The Art of Tacitus’, say, or ‘The Age of Demosthenes’ – as well as on contemporary topics like fair trade, land reform and Ireland.86 At the Economist he set down his ideas on the future of liberalism, at this stage under the heading of ‘New Radicalism’, intended to head off the very schism that precipitated his own exit from both the Spectator and the Economist in 1885.
A Liberalism fit for the times would, Asquith argued, take on board some progressive social demands without endangering international free trade, while banishing any concerted opposition to interventions overseas, which was as unrealistic as it was unpopular. In the first place, the idea was to revise the strict laissez-faire injunction the Economist had laid down under Wilson: ‘that the duty of the State begins and ends with protection of life and property and the enforcement of contracts’.87 To Asquith, fresh from Balliol at Oxford, where the idealist philosopher T. H. Green was a tutor and the art critic John Ruskin had engaged students in social experiments like digging roads, this sounded out of date. That point was underscored at the time by Asquith’s meetings with Herbert Spencer, once Wilson’s assistant editor at the Economist. Spencer was still writing essays, Asquith recalled, ‘with such titles as “The Coming Slavery” and “The Great Political Superstition,” attacking, with all the fervour of an uncompromising Individualist, the Liberal party for having forsworn its faith in personal freedom’.88
In advanced industrial societies the state now had a positive responsibility, Asquith replied in his Economist pieces, ‘to some undefined degree, for the distribution of comfort and social well-being’. Old radicals like Mill, Macaulay, Bright, Cobden and Wilson, were in a way responsible for this turnabout: after their victory in the ‘crusade against the follies of paternal government’ at mid-century, the ensuing ‘generation of perfect industrial freedom’ had stimulated new wants and new evils at the century’s close. Free education, sanitation, well-mannered, apolitical trade unions – insofar as these were possible, it was by ‘direct action of the State alone’.89 This Asquithian prospectus included a wider franchise and some redistribution of seats from country to town. The 1884–85 Reform Bills were, after all, far from the populist earthquakes Bagehot had feared back in 1864: even after their passage, at least 4.5 million adult males could not vote, in what remained a franchise system tied to property, not universal rights. Democracy could act as a hedge against disorder, Asquith argued. But that was because he still understood democracy in such a limited sense: ‘universal suffrage, which so fetters continental politicians, takes little hold on Englishmen.’90
New Radicalism was meant, on the other hand, to sever once and for all the connection between free trade and peace posited by the ‘Manchester School of foreign policy’. Abolition of war was not on the cards; ensuring uninterrupted flows of capital, goods, and people within and among the empires actually required such ‘shows of force’. Thankfully, ‘younger Radicals are obviously indisposed to the idea of non-intervention’ – having accurately taken the pulse of the ‘new constituencies’ created by the latest Reform Bills. Popular opinion not only grasped how important it was to secure the route to India: ‘No anxiety is shown to reduce the numbers of the Army; strong measures, like the dispatch of a fleet to Smyrna, to secure the surrender of Thessaly to the Greeks, are not resisted; and in recent Egyptian difficulties the country has been, on the whole, in favour of high-handed action.’91
Ireland was the pivot on which both sides of this New Radical realignment – social reform at home, imperial unity abroad – hinged: it was thus significant for both the Economist and for liberalism that Asquith grew so exasperated with the place, backing a wave of repression that set the tone at the paper long after he departed. The Land League, which began to urge Irishmen on to economic disobedience in 1880, calling for rent strikes, boycotts and bank runs, was the object of his special hatred. To eradicate these ‘terrorists’ posing as ‘public benefactors’, responsible for all kinds of ‘agrarian outrages’, no measures were too harsh: indefinite suspension of habeas corpus and jury trials, curfews, round-the-clock police and army patrols, deportations, collective punishment. ‘Nor do we feel much sympathy with the rather pedantic constitutionalism’ of those Liberals who objected to the results: about six hundred Irishmen in jail without trial by 1882, including Charles Parnell, leader of the Irish Home Rulers in parliament.92
Asquith accepted that ‘pacifying’ Ireland depended on settling the land question by creating more ‘peasant proprietors’. But he condemned plans to set up such a class without fully compensating present owners of the land as ‘unblushing robbery’ (whether Irish peasants had also been robbed in the past was a footnote).93 Englishmen should be generous to the Irish, not on account of any historical wrong – there was none – but because the former might, in near future, ‘have to choose between holding Ireland as they hold India, or letting her go altogether’. To nudge ‘English democracy’ away from this precipice, ‘we wish the working classes to feel they have a just claim on Irish gratitude’, which was ‘the best attainable security that, if the time for making the choice should ever come, they will insist that three kingdoms shall not be reduced to two’.94 In this vision, the newly enfranchised workers would become allies in the cause of
imperial unity, and opponents of Irish Home Rule.
After Asquith, the language was less decorous, but its sense was similar.95 From 1889 to 1898, John St Loe Strachey wrote the Economist leaders on this and other political subjects – as a staunch ‘democratic imperialist’, who quit the Liberal Party in 1886 in opposition to Home Rule, putting him ‘in entire agreement’ with Johnstone, even if the latter was somewhat ‘less strongly Unionist’. To explain how he felt about the ‘sacred character’ of the Empire, and its ‘incomparable service to humanity’ for ‘maintaining stable government’ in India and Africa, Strachey recounted a stormy meeting with the unscrupulous mineral magnate and politician Cecil Rhodes at a Mayfair Hotel. Strachey told Rhodes off for having given £10,000 to Charles Parnell’s Irish Nationalists, so that Rhodes could secure a charter for his South Africa Company in the House of Commons. ‘I was an imperialist, I pointed out’, whereas Rhodes had given ‘money to the Irish enemies of Britain and the Empire, and that I could never forgive. “The Parnellites were engaged in a plot to ruin the British Empire. You knew it, and yet you helped them. You gave them the means to arm and fortify their conspirators and assassins.”’96 The Economist, in contrast, was sincerely imperialist.
Why Asquith broke with the Economist and the Spectator in 1885, a year before standing as a Liberal candidate for parliament, remains something of a puzzle, since his position on Ireland was all but indistinguishable from that of Strachey, who took over for him at both publications. It was Joseph Chamberlain, the Unionist leader, who showed the exemplary toughness that Asquith saw as the road to electoral success for Liberalism in the 1880s.97 One historian suggests party discipline, which Asquith defended in the Spectator, dictated his actions.98 If so, his work for the Economist, and his party’s long exile from office after it, help explain why he was in no hurry to push Home Rule to the front bench in the election of 1906. By then the Economist had itself reached a dead end, at least in party-political terms, with protection at least as great a threat to its brand of liberalism as the dimming prospects for devolution in Ireland. When Johnstone suffered a stroke in 1907, the Economist trustees replaced him with a young editor they thought could redirect the paper towards the triumphant New Liberalism. But they chose just the sort of Liberal who had never followed Asquith in renouncing the ‘Manchester School of foreign policy’. The question of empire was no ‘exhausted volcano’: seven years into the editorship of Francis Hirst, it would erupt with enough force to render the Liberal Party all but extinct.
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