29.Thomas P. Neill, The Rise and Decline of Liberalism, Milwaukee 1953, pp. 72–75, 112, 115. Liberal pamphleteers began to urge gradual reforms under a constitutional monarch, rejecting both ultra-royalists and ‘Napoléonistes’ as extremists, several years into the reign of Louis XVIII. See Avis aux libéraux, par un liberal, Paris 1818; Examen du libéralisme. Par un liberal, Paris 1819. Guizot and Constant used papers to spread ‘idées libérales’, the latter signing a letter listing these as ‘practical knowledge, the development of industry, destruction of prejudice … and hastening the constitutional education of France’: Etienne Aignan, Benjamin Constant, Évariste Dumoulin, A. Jay, E. Jouy, Pierre Louis de Lacretelle, and Pierre-François Tissot, La Minerve française, Paris 1818, p. 4.
30.Richard Whatmore, ‘The Politics of Political Economy in France from Rousseau to Constant’, in Markets in Historical Contexts, eds. Mark Bevir and Frank Trentmann, Cambridge 2004, pp. 46–50, 65–69; Ruggiero, European Liberalism, pp. 172, 204; Dean Russell, ‘Frederic Bastiat and the Free Trade Movement in France and England, 1840–1850’ (PhD diss., Université de Genève 1959), pp. 25–26, 62–64, 91–93; David Todd, L’identité Économique de la France: Libre-Échange et Protectionnisme, 1814–1851, Paris 2008, pp. 331–51, 416.
31.Smith invoked the term in The Wealth of Nations in 1776 to describe certain professions, or generous wages; he also referred to a ‘liberal plan of equality, liberty and justice’, that is, ‘allowing every man to pursue his own interest in his own way’, and also, in a digression on the Corn Laws, to a ‘liberal system’, by which he meant ‘freedom of the corn trade’. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan, New York 2003, pp. 509, 681–82.
32.José Luis Abellán, Historia Crítica del Pensamiento Español, Madrid 1984, Vol IV, pp. 58, 78–82; Jörn Leonhard, ‘From European Liberalism to the Language of Liberalisms: The Semantics of Liberalism in European Comparison’, in Redescriptions, 2004, pp. 17–31; Leonhard, Liberalismus, pp. 329–32, 347, 410–12, 416, 494.
33.In a letter from 1831, Mill opposed the ‘speculative Toryism’ of Wordsworth, Southey or Coleridge, ‘a reverence for government in the abstract … duly sensible that it is good for man to be ruled; to submit his body and mind to the guidance of a higher intelligence and virtue’, to lower case liberalism, ‘which is for making every man his own guide and sovereign master, and letting him think for himself and do exactly as he judges best for himself, giving other men leave to persuade him if they can by evidence, but forbidding him to give way to authority; and still less allowing them to constrain him more than the existence & tolerable security of every man’s person and property renders indispensably necessary’: Mill to John Sterling, 20 October 1831, in Collected Works, ed. Francis Ethelbert Louis Priestley, Michigan 1964, Vol XII, p. 84. It was not until the late 1850s, however, that he began to refer to a movement of which the ‘advanced Liberals’ in parliament were the vanguard. Retrospectively, Mill dated his adherence to ‘Liberalism’ from his first trip to France in 1821 when he was just fifteen. ‘The chief fruit which I carried away from the society I saw, was a strong and permanent interest in Continental Liberalism, of which I ever afterwards kept myself au courant … a thing not at all usual in those days with Englishmen, and which had a very salutary influence on my development, keeping me free from the error always prevalent in England, and from which even my father with all his superiority to prejudice was not exempt, of judging universal questions by a merely English standard’: Mill, ‘Autobiography’, in CW, Vol I, p. 63.
34.For contrast, see Alex Tyrell, ‘La Ligue Française, The Anti-Corn Law League and the Campaign for Economic Liberalism in France During the Last Days of the July Monarchy’, in Rethinking Nineteenth-Century Liberalism, eds. Anthony Howe and Simon Morgan, Aldershot 2006, pp. 99–116.
35.Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, Boston 2001, pp. 141–57; Walter Bagehot, ‘Postulates of Political Economy’, in The Collected Works of Walter Bagehot, Vol XI, p. 222.
36.Eric Voegelin, On the Form of the American Mind: The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, eds. Jürgen Gebhardt and Barry Cooper, Baton Rouge 1995, Vol I; Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution, New York 1955.
37.Herbert Hoover objected to their ‘perversion’ of the term, as did Walter Lippmann in his book The Good Society of 1936. For this history, see Ronald D. Rotunda, The Politics of Language: Liberalism as Word and Symbol, Iowa City 1986, pp. 14–17, 33–40, 58–60, 62–64, 70, 74; Hartz, Liberal Tradition, pp. 259–66, 270; David Green, Shaping Political Consciousness: The Language of Politics in America from McKinley to Reagan, Ithaca 1987, pp. 79–84; Barry D. Riccio, Walter Lippmann: Odyssey of a Liberal, New Brunswick 1994, pp. 128–33.
38.Norberto Bobbio, Liberalism and Democracy, London 1990. For Kahan, a limited suffrage based on intellectual capacity defined liberalism in nineteenth century France, Germany and England – the latter thus much the most successful branch, since it enjoyed one of the least democratic franchises in Western Europe in 1914: Alan S. Kahan, Liberalism in Nineteenth Century Europe, London 2003, pp. 133–35, 139–41, 191.
39.See Uday Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-century British Liberal Thought, Chicago 1999; Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment Against Empire, Princeton 2003, pp. 3–6; Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France, Princeton 2005. Contrasting Smith, Burke and Bentham with the Mills and Tocqueville, Pitts maintains that ‘no explanation that rests on some set of basic theoretical assumptions in the liberal tradition can possibly explain such flexibility on the question of empire’, concluding that ‘liberalism does not lead ineluctably either to imperialism or anti-imperialism’ – claims that rest partly on the notion that liberalism already existed in the eighteenth century and can be elided with thinkers in the nineteenth century: A Turn to Empire, pp. 1, 4. For a different sense of Smith’s ‘anti-imperialism’, see Donald Winch, Adam Smith’s Politics, Cambridge 1978, pp. 140, 151, 180.
40.Kynaston has written a comprehensive survey. David Kynaston, City of London. 4 vols, London, 1994–2001. For caution in ascribing coherent policy interests to the City, see The British Government and the City of London in the Twentieth Century, eds. Ronald Michie and Philip Williamson, Cambridge 2004, pp. 11–12.
41.The Economist, 1843–1943: A Centenary Volume was a ‘modest memorial’ comprising a slim collection of essays published two years after the offices, printers, library and records burned in the Blitz. The next two works appeared for the sesquicentennial in 1993. In The Economist: America, 1843–1993, the former editor Alastair Burnet narrated ‘150 Years of Reporting the American Connection’, while Ruth Dudley Edwards, a freelance journalist, produced what was meant to be the more comprehensive work. ‘I was so hard up at the time that if they had asked me to write the book in iambic pentameters and set it to music I would probably have consented’, Edwards told the Independent. Last-minute interventions from many staff hands resulted in an impenetrable 948-page tome, despite the omission of the ten years up to 1993 – a turning point, as Thatcher and Reagan remade the state, the Cold War ended, and the Economist’s circulation took off. ‘I did not intend to write much about the last decade or so’, she told chief executive David Gordon. ‘While you are actually in your jobs it would hardly be helpful to start analysing your deficiencies.’ With such obliging manners, her efforts were unlikely to be particularly revealing. Ruth Dudley Edwards, The Pursuit of Reason: The Economist, 1843–1993, London, 1993, pp xi–xix; ‘History saved from bombs and bin-liners’, The Independent, 2 Sept 1993.
1. Free Trade Empire
1.The Reform Bill did not include radical demands for manhood suffrage, annual parliaments, or a secret ballot. Nor did it address the imbalance between counties and boroughs, or south and north. It added about 300,000 to the rolls; after 1832 a seventh of all adult males could vote. The extent
to which this altered the social property relations on which political power was traditionally based is indicated by census figures from 1872, five years after passage of the Second Reform Act. Four-fifths of the land in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland was still owned by fewer than 7,000 people. Norman Gash, Aristocracy and People: Britain, 1815–1865, Cambridge, Mass 1979, pp. 17, 145–55.
2.Gash, Aristocracy and People, pp. 200–209; E. J. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire: From 1750 to the Present Day, London 1976, pp. 71–78.
3.‘There is no employer of labour in this country who gives employment to 5,000 people and upwards who is not a member of the council of the League’, boasted League chairman George Wilson, though himself owner of a smaller-scale starch plant, in 1846. Paul A. Pickering and Alex Tyrell, The People’s Bread: A History of the Anti-Corn Law League, London 2000, pp. 22–33, 199–212, 228.
4.Ibid., 91; Marc-William Palen, The ‘Conspiracy’ of Free Trade: The Anglo American Struggle over Empire and Economic Globalisation, Cambridge 2016, pp. xxv, 11–15; Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, Oxford 1988; C. P. Kindleberger, ‘The Rise of Free Trade in Western Europe, 1820–1875’, The Journal of Economic History, March 1975, pp. 31–32, 51.
5.For an excellent account of the unique centrality of free trade to the political, economic and intellectual history of Britain from repeal onwards, see Anthony Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England, 1846–1946, Oxford 1997. For ‘Free Trade’ as a ‘genuine national and democratic culture’ that shaped Britain’s ‘civil society’ and ‘national mission’, see Frank Trentmann, Free Trade Nation: Commerce, Consumption, and Civil Society in Modern Britain, Oxford 2008, pp. 4–10.
6.And of the losses to be sustained in bad times: at £20,000, the firm lost almost as much the following year. Miles Taylor, ‘Cobden, Richard (1804–1865)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004.
7.‘Corn laws are a part only of a system in which Whig and Tory aristocracy have about an equal interest.’ Cobden to Thomas Dick, 7 October 1836, in Richard Cobden, The Political Writings of Richard Cobden, London 1886, p. 2.
8.In reply to a ‘reader of the Economist, Hawick’, Wilson produced a list of the ‘best books on Political Economy’: ‘Smith’s Wealth of Nations, McCulloch’s edition; the Works of Mons J. B. Say; Ricardo’s Principles of Political Economy and Taxation; Mill’s Political Economy; Tooke’s History of Prices, and Porter’s Progress of the Nation. Smith’s Wealth of Nations as fixing fundamental principles; Tooke’s History of Prices, and Porter’s Progress of the Nation, as the most interesting, entertaining, and instructive practical applications of those principles, are most strongly recommended as the best books for the common student.’ ‘Correspondence and Answers to Inquiries’, Economist, 11 Nov 1843.
9.Bagehot, ‘Memoir of the Right Honourable James Wilson’, in CW, Vol III, p. 324.
10.Ibid., 326–28.
11.James Wilson, Influences of the Corn Laws as Affecting All Classes of the Community, and Particularly the Landed Interests, London 1839, p. 5. A similar work appeared the same year from G. R. Porter, head of the statistical department of the Board of Trade, author of Progress of the Nation, and Wilson’s close personal friend and neighbour at Dulwich.
12.Bagehot, ‘Memoir of the Right Honourable James Wilson’, in CW, Vol. III, p. 333.
13.Cobden to Wilson, 3 May 1839, in Emilie Barrington, The Servant of All: Pages from the Family, Social and Political Life of My Father, James Wilson: Twenty Years of mid-Victorian Life, London 1927, Vol. I, p. 27.
14.League Circular, No. 7, July 1839, p. 6.
15.J. R. McCulloch, The Literature of Political Economy: A Classified Catalogue, London 1845, p. 80.
16.‘How few of us there were, who, five years ago, believed that, in seeking repeal, we were also seeking the benefit of the agriculturalists!’ Richard Cobden, Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, London 1870, Vol. II, p. 98.
17.Wilson, Influences of the Corn Laws, p. 95.
18.David Ricardo, Works of David Ricardo, eds. Pierro Sraffa and M. H. Dobb, Vol. IV, Cambridge 1951, p. 197.
19.Ibid., 17–18, 37. There was a religious, millenarian dimension to Wilson’s conception of free trade. Its optimism about economic growth, however, was a departure from evangelical expectations: see Hilton, The Age of Atonement, pp. 54, 69, 246–47.
20.Wilson sympathized. ‘Sweets once tasted, advantages once enjoyed, are not easy to relinquish.’ In some districts, things had progressed to the point where oatmeal or barley had been substituted by wheat-flour, ‘as being at the moment from unnatural causes as cheap’. Is it any surprise that riots break out – ‘murderous scenes, which have disgraced our manufacturing districts?’ Or that workers are pushed to extremes, ‘otherwise distinguished for their patient, persevering industry and ingenuity, and which have won England triumphs more glorious, territories more extended, and influence more respected, than she ever obtained by her most dazzling military achievements’? Wilson, Influences of the Corn Laws, pp. 47–48, 108.
21.‘In his plain business-like way Mr. Wilson demolished Lord Monteagle’s fallacy about a fixed duty of 5s being paid, not by the British consumer, but by the foreign grower of wheat, and went on with a number of statistical proofs of the injury inflicted by “protection” not only without wearying his audience but manifestly to their high gratification.’ Archibald Prentice, History of the Anti-Corn-Law League, London 1853, p. 58.
22.Cobden was an exception, noted Wilson’s daughter, though ‘he naturally viewed the doings of the League, which was his own child so to speak, with more tolerance than did my father and his friends. Cobden even did not entirely scout the Chartists’ creeds and doings, but to my father they seemed little less than criminal and most baneful to any real progress.’ Barrington, The Servant of All, pp. 30, 41.
23.Ibid., 16–23.
24.Ronald K. Huch, The Radical Lord Radnor: The Public Life of Viscount Folkestone, Third Earl of Radnor, 1779–1869, Minneapolis 1977, pp. 7–9, 151.
25.Tocqueville attributed the English radicals’ focus on political demands for parliamentary reform to the desire of its middle classes to emulate the aristocracy socially and accumulate great fortunes. He looked forward to meeting Radnor, he told a correspondent, ‘who unites these rare qualities of being a member of the highest aristocracy and at the same time of the radical party, two seemingly incompatible things, but which sometimes coexist in this country.’ At Longford he was treated with ‘perfect grace’, his sleeping quarters the size of a ballroom, with four or five giant washbasins, and a hunting expedition, revealing a castle and grounds combining grandeur and comfort ‘surpassing the most beautiful chateaux in France’. Tocqueville to his father, 24 August 1833, OC, Vol XIV, pp. 173–74; Tocqueville to Marie, 27 August 1833, OC, Vol XIV, pp. 391–94.
26.James Wilson, Fluctuations of Currency, Commerce, and Manufactures: Referable to the Corn Laws, London 1840, pp. 100–101; James Wilson, The Revenue; Or, What Should the Chancellor Do?, London 1841, pp. 9, 21. Wilson waded into numerous controversies. For a summary of his economic tracts on currency and trade, see Robert G. Link, English Theories of Economic Fluctuation 1815–1848, New York 1959, pp. 102–26.
27.Barrington, The Servant of All, p. 68.
28.Cobden to Wilson, 22 June 1843, Wilson Papers, MCL.
29.Cobden urged that these be distributed to ‘all the leading Tories in Manchester and neighbourhood … and to Ashton, Stockport, Bolton, Preston, Salford and Oldham’. Norman McCord, The Anti-Corn Law League: 1838–1846, London 1958, pp. 182–84.
30.Anthony Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England, 1846–1946, Oxford 1997, p. 14.
31.Barrington, Servant of All, p. 69. After the first two years, when Cobden may have bailed it out to the tune of £600, the Economist has been profitable. McCord, Anti-Corn Law League, p. 184.
32.Barrington, Servant of All, p. 68.
33.Scott Gordon, ‘The London Economist and
the High Tide of Laissez Faire’, Journal of Political Economy, December 1955, p. 484.
34.Herbert Spencer, An Autobiography, London 1904, p. 379.
35.S. Leon Levy, Nassau W Senior: The Prophet of Modern Capitalism, Boston 1943, p. 279.
36.Thomas Hodgskin, Labour Defended Against the Claims of Capital, or the Unproductiveness of Capital Proved, London 1825. He was considered so extreme an advocate for the working class and such a severe critic of all laws that it is surprising his Benthamite friends did not begin to avoid him sooner, or that his post at the Morning Chronicle, obtained for him by James Mill in 1822, was not endangered earlier. Mill wrote to Lord Brougham in 1832 to complain of the ‘mad nonsense of our friend Hodgskin about the rights of the labourer to the whole produce of the country, wages, profits and rents, all included. These opinions, if they were to spread, would be the subversion of civilized society; worse than the overwhelming deluge of the Huns and Tartars.’ Mill to Brougham, September 3, 1833, in Alexander Bain, James Mill: A Biography, London 1882, p. 364.
37.This pamphlet probably brought Hodgskin to the attention of Wilson. But it also hinted that its author was already familiar with Wilson’s work. ‘The time will come, I believe it is not far off, when reason, truth, and justice will prevail, and when even the landlords will help us to abolish these laws.’ Thomas Hodgskin, A Lecture on Free Trade in Connexion with the Corn Laws: Delivered at the White Conduit House on January 31, 1843, London, 1843, pp. 22–23.
38.Thomas Hodgskin, Natural and Artificial Rights of Property Contrasted, London 1832, p. 101.
39.Elie Halévy, Thomas Hodgskin, London 1956, pp. 131–65.
40.Herbert Spencer, The Proper Sphere of Government, London 1843, p. 5.
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