41.For his time at the Economist, see, Herbert Spencer, An Autobiography, London 1904, pp. 329–30, 333, 341–43; David Duncan, The Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer, London 1908, pp. 56–62.
42.Herbert Spencer, Social Statics: Or, The Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, and the First of Them Developed, London 1851, pp. 286, 294.
43.‘Literature’, Economist, 8 February 1851.
44.Bernard Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform; English Social-Imperial Thought, 1895–1914, London 1960, pp. 29–31; Geoffrey Hawthorn, Enlightenment and Despair: A History of Social Theory, Cambridge 1987, p. 91.
45.William R. Greg, Enigmas of Life, London 1891, vii–xliv; John Morley, Critical Miscellanies, London 1886, Vol III, pp. 213–56. In the arena of Victorian eccentricities and ailments Spencer was not to be outdone. His hypochondria was comprehensive, lamenting chronic headaches, heart strain, insomnia and checking his and other people’s’ pulses constantly. Mark Francis, Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life, Chesham 2007, p. 55.
46.George Eliot, The George Eliot Letters, New Haven 1954, Vol. II, pp. 21, 66. His popularity with Eliot is unlikely to have been increased by the opinion he expressed in 1859. ‘There are vast numbers of lady novelists for the same reason that there are vast numbers of lady seamstresses. Thousands of women have nothing to do.’ ‘False Morality of Lady Novelists’, National Review, January 1859, pp. 144–67. For Greg’s extension of Darwinism to race, nation and sex see, ‘The Doom of the Negro Race’, Fraser’s Magazine, March 1866, pp. 277–305; ‘On the Failure of “Natural Selection” in the Case of Man’, Fraser’s Magazine, September 1868, pp. 353–62; ‘Realities of Irish Life’, Quarterly Review, January 1869, p 78.
47.Harriet Martineau, The Collected Letters of Harriet Martineau, ed. Deborah Anna Logan, London 2007, Vol IV, p. 260; Martineau, Collected Letters, London 2007, Vol V, pp. 233–35.
48.‘Donc, en attendant une autre définition, voici la mienne. L’Etat, c’est la grande fiction à travers laquelle tout le monde s’efforce de vivre aux dépens de tout le monde.’ ‘L’État’, Journals de Debats, September 1848; Dean Russell, Frederic Bastiat: Ideas and Influence, Irvington-on-Hudson 1965, p. 33.
49.The Economist, 1843–1943: A Centenary Volume, London 1943, p. 30.
50.‘M. Bastiat and his Works’, Economist, 15 May 1852.
51.‘Preliminary Number and Prospectus’, Economist, 1 August 1843.
52.James A. Monsure, ‘James Wilson and the Economist, 1805–1860’ (PhD thesis, Columbia, 1960), pp. 13–15.
53.Economist, 1 August 1843.
54.‘Our Brazilian Trade and the Anti-Slavery Party’, Economist, 16 September 1843; ‘Superior Value of Free over Slave Labour,’ Economist, 30 December 1844. To label the Economist ‘generally a strong opponent of slavery’ is a mischaracterization. Sven Beckert, ‘Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the World Wide Web of Cotton Production in the Age of the American Civil War’, American Historical Review, December 2004, p. 1419.
55.‘Mr. Gladstone’s Railway Bill’, Economist, 6 July 1844.
56.‘The Inconsistencies of the Late Debates,’ Economist, 30 March 1844; ‘Protection to Labour’, Economist, 6 April 1844.
57.Lord Ashley was ‘well-meaning, but mistaken; philanthropic, but unwise’. ‘Should the Capitalists Be Blamed?’, Economist, 28 November 1846.
58.Monsure, ‘James Wilson and the Economist’, p. 138; Economist: 3 January 1852; 15 July 1854; 10 March 1855; 1 March 1856.
59.Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume One, London 1990, 11n, 336–38n. Marx attacked Senior and Wilson, citing the Economist of 15 April 1848. He also paid tribute to Leonard Horner, chief factory inspector until 1859, who ‘rendered undying service to the English working class’. Horner and his semi-annual factory reports were routinely condemned as biased in the Economist, with Wilson reaching his wits’ end in 1855 when he wrote, ‘it was as dangerous to employ men like Mr. Horner to carry the Factory Acts into execution as to employ inefficient commissaries and storekeepers and captains at the port of Balaklava’. ‘Factories-Owners and Inspectors’, Economist, 10 March 1855.
60.Economist: ‘Right of Property in Inventions’, 1 February 1851; ‘Right of Property in Expression’, 28 April 1855; ‘What Shall We Know?’, 25 August 1855; ‘Why Companies are Now Necessary’, 19 July 1856.
61.‘Knowledge versus Dictation, the New Board of Health’, Economist, 10 April 1847.
62.‘Regulation of the Supply of Water’, Economist, 19 January 1850; ‘The Metropolitan Supply of Water’, Economist, 23 November 1850.
63.‘Chambers’s Papers for the People’, Economist, 13 July 1850.
64.This ended with a rhyme in honour of scavenging, rag-picking, and other supposedly lowly occupations: ‘Then let every toil be hallowed/ That man performs for man,/ And have its share of honour/ As part of one great plan.’ ‘The Disposal of Refuse’, Economist, 13 September 1856.
65.‘The Board of Health’, Economist, 5 August 1854. ‘This was during the Crimean War, and the full flavor of the article can perhaps be indicated by saying that a comparable suggestion in 1943 would have been that Sir William Beveridge was really a bureaucratic despot at heart and his spiritual home was Nazi Germany.’ Gordon, ‘The London Economist,’ p. 485.
66.‘Ragged Schools and Emigration’, Economist, 10 June 1848; ‘Ragged Schools and Charity’, Economist, 24 June 1848.
67.‘National Education’, Economist, 1 February 1851. Gradually, in the aftermath of the Crimean War, it gave way to the idea of strictly limited state grants to schools, provided that all parents pay some tuition, and purely on grounds of national economic utility, that England could thereby maintain her economic leadership of the world.
68.Economist: ‘Definitions in Political Economy’, 26 November 1853; ‘A Manual of Political Economy for Schools’, 7 April 1855; ‘On the Methods of Reasoning and Observation in Politics’, 27 November 1852.
69.George Jacob Holyoake, Sixty Years of an Agitator’s Life, London 1906, p. 229.
70.Charles Read argues that the response to the famine had little to do with laissez-faire ideology. Instead, a financial crisis forced the British Government to cut relief to Ireland in 1847, in obedience to economic laws (no longer Malthusian, but an up-to-date ‘macroeconomic policy trilemma’). Read thus tries to minimize ‘the strong laissez-faire beliefs’ of Wilson, whose ‘influence on government in the famine period was limited’. Read, ‘Laissez-faire, the Irish Famine, and British Financial Crisis’, Economic History Review, May 2016, p. 430. The notion that Wilson had scant influence, or that economic and ideological factors are easily disentangled in the crisis, is hard to square with the evidence. See Trevelyan to Wood, 26 July 1847, Hickleton Papers, CUL, CUL-Microfilm–1499.
71.Aware that free trade and state aid might be seen as complimentary policies, given the scale of the blight, the paper noted, ‘it is questionable whether this would actually bring us a positively increased supply – whether government brought home 1,500,000 quarters, merchants would bring so much less.’ It had no doubt what was about to happen in Ireland, ‘famine unquestionably impends’, but it once again questioned the wisdom of ignorant interventionists. ‘We do not know a more frightful spectacle than that of a number of people rushing to do good.’ ‘Charity as a Remedy in Case of Famine’, Economist, 29 November 1845.
72.Cormac Ó Gráda, Black ‘47’ and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory, Princeton 1999, pp. 4, 77–83.
73.Russell was praised for his sober reflections on the failure of Peel’s policies. ‘We do not propose’, Russell was quoted, ‘to interfere with the regular trade by which Indian corn and other food is brought into the country (Hear, hear). We propose to leave that as much at liberty as possible, thinking the market is best supplied in that manner without government interference.’ His chief secretary for Ireland, Mr Labouchere, was also given plaudits for criticizing the manner in which Indian me
al was ‘sold indiscriminately 20 per cent below prime cost’, which, the paper put in, ‘ruined and calumniated a useful class of honest and industrious retail traders’, was a ‘confiscation of property’, and vitiated ‘the utility to society of high prices when supplies are scanty’. The new Whig ministers did not go far enough in condemning the previous administration, whose scheme of buying corn, cooked up by Peel and Deputy Commissary General Hewetson, ‘a theoretical political economist’, might be suitable for ‘a pastoral tribe or an army’ but was ‘folly … in a complicated commercial society’. ‘Measures for Ireland’, Economist, 22 August, 1846.
74.‘The Food Crisis’, Economist, 19 December 1846.
75.‘Ireland’, Economist, 27 February 1847. The Economist published extracts from these letters. For context, see Cecil Woodham Smith, The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845–1849, New York 1962, pp. 54, 120, 132–33, 148.
76.‘Should the State Employ the Irish’, Economist, 26 December 1846; ‘The True Cure for Ireland’, 28 August 1847. Public works – ‘pauperism and slavery combined’ – instilled a culture of helplessness in Ireland. Worse, the wage fund theory showed how taxes, spent in this fashion, ‘diminish the funds for the employment of labour, and ultimately aggravate the evil’. To those who sought food for the Irish whatever the cost, it replied, ‘We thought that this had been so clearly demonstrated by Mr. Malthus to be an impossibility that we feel only astonishment at its being proposed.’ ‘Feeding the Irish’, Economist, 21 March 1846.
77.Clarendon to Wilson on 29 July 1847, 30 August 1847 and 22 December 1847, in Barrington, Servant of All, pp. 122–23, 129–30. Wilson also warned Clarendon about the effects of relief on the London money market. Peter Gray, Famine, Land and Politics: British Government and Irish Society, 1843–1850, Dublin 1999, pp. 76–77, 251.
78.‘Ireland’, Economist, 27 February 1847; ‘Irish Coercion Bill’, 18 December 1847.
79.Frederick Engels, ‘The Coercion Bill for Ireland and the Chartists’, La Réforme, 8 January 1848.
80.Clarendon to Wilson, 7 June 1848, in Barrington, Servant of All, p. 139.
81.Christine Kinealy, A Death-Dealing Famine: The Great Hunger in Ireland, London 1997, p. 127.
82.‘The Obrien Insurrection’, Economist, 5 August 1848; ‘Ireland’s Necessity, England’s Opportunity’, Economist, 2 September 1848. The latter would appear to be the work of Greg. The Oxford scholar Benjamin Jowett reported of Economist contributor Nassau Senior; ‘I have always had a certain horror of political economists since I heard one of them say that he feared the famine of 1848 in Ireland would not kill more than a million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do much good.’ Woodham-Smith, Great Hunger, pp. 375–76.
83.Clarendon to Wilson, 26 September 1848, in Barrington, The Servant of All, pp. 139–40. Clarendon called for a state loan to fund relief. ‘Surely this is a state of things to justify you asking the House of Commons for an advance, for I don’t think there is another legislature in Europe that would disregard such suffering as now exists in the west of Ireland, or coldly persist in a policy of extermination.’ Clarendon to Russell, 26 April 1849, in Kinealy, A Death-Dealing Famine, p. 138.
84.‘The Saxon, the Celt and the Gaul’, Economist, 29 April 1848; ‘Household Suffrage’, 8 July 1848; ‘New Reform Agitation’, 27 May 1848. Cobden objected to this rabid hostility to any widening of the suffrage. After being taunted by the Chartist leader Fergus O’Connor for his association with the Economist, he wrote to Wilson that ‘no person has a right to identify you with liberal politics because you are a Free-Trader. But I still regret as much as ever the view you take … upon the danger to property consequent upon giving working people the suffrage – because I find, in the inevitable tendency of democratic principles it places you in an unfavorable position in the eyes of a class which must exercise more and more power in the legislation.’ Cobden to Wilson, September 1843, in Barrington, The Servant of All, p. 71.
85.‘The Fermentation of Europe’, Economist, 1 April 1848. Grey and Lansdowne wrote to congratulate Wilson on this leader, which seems to have been written by Greg. Wilson confided his disdain for France to Cornewall Lewis after visiting Paris in December 1848: Barrington, The Servant of All, pp. 142–44.
86.Barrington, The Servant of All, pp. 156, 199; Bagehot, CW, Vol. III, p. 332.
87.Barrington, The Servant of All, pp. 88, 204–5, 209.
88.‘The Bankers’ Gazette: Bank Returns and Money Market’, Economist, 9 October 1852. In the subscription contract of 1852, Wilson is listed as a shareholder with 1,000 shares, among the four or five largest, along with the other founders: Joseph Robert Morrison, Lindsay William Shaw, Robert Lowe MP, John Gladstone (Stockwell Lodge, Surrey), John Bagshaw, Peter Bell, George Bowrings Carr and William Book. Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China Subscription Contract, 16 November 1852, Standard Chartered Bank, LMA, CLC/b/207/CH02/ 01/001.
89.Compton Mackenzie, Realms of Silver, New York 2005, pp. 4–9.
90.Wilson to Gladstone, 17 May 1853, Gladstone Papers, BL, Add. MS 44346, ff. 15–30.
91.Monsure, ‘James Wilson and the Economist’, p. 115.
92.Justin McCarthy, Short History of Our Own Times: From the Accession of Queen Victoria to the General Election of 1880, London 1887, p. 164.
93.Barrington, The Servant of All, p. 268.
94.Cobden was right to attack empire’s ‘grasping disposition’, entailing ‘responsibility, care, trouble and expense without any corresponding advantages’. Citing recent examples of British prickliness in China, Switzerland, Uruguay and Brazil, ‘we are apt to go a little further than Mr. Cobden’ and replace all diplomats with merchants. ‘We are sensible of the necessity of protecting trade, but we believe that trade is better able to protect itself without than with the help of the State; the interference of the State with other states, ostensibly for the protection of commerce, more frequently injures than serves it. Commercial men … come, we are afraid, to rely too much on men-of-war to procure those results which can only be procured by their own fair dealing, civility, and assiduity in their business.’ ‘Our Diplomacy’, Economist, 25 December 1847.
95.Economist: ‘War with a Despot’, 31 December 1853; ‘Eastern Question’, 26 March 1853.
96.‘The Turkish Crisis’, Economist, 6 August 1853. Tsar Nicolas, alleged defender of the more than 10 million Christians living under Ottoman rule, could lend his territorial ambitions a religious halo that was denied the British and French: the fact that their ally was a Muslim state spurred them to find liberal justifications for the Crimean War.
97.‘The Cloud in the East’, Economist, 24 September 1853.
98.Orlando Figes, Crimea: The Last Crusade, London 2010, p. 176.
99.‘Our Gallant Army in the Crimea’, Economist, 14 October 1854.
100.‘True Purpose of the War’, Economist, 2 December 1854.
101.‘War or Peace?’, Economist, 19 May 1855; ‘A New Way to Peace’, 2 June 1855.
102.‘Let us reflect with the deepest gratitude, but also with a wholesome terror, what would have been our fate, if these startling revelations … had surprised us in the midst of a struggle on our own shores instead of at the distance of 3,000 miles, and with the French as assailants instead of as allies!’ ‘The Practical Good to Be Educed from Our Disasters’, Economist, 27 January 1855.
103.‘The Balance Sheet’, Economist, 9 February 1856.
104.F. D. Munsell, ‘Crimean War’, in Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia, ed. Sally Mitchell, London 2011, pp. 202–3; Figes, Crimea, pp. 483, 488.
105.Wilson used the Economist to promote the government line on the war, as well as the policies favoured by allies in it. At Lord Clarendon’s urging, he ran a leader arguing that the British blockade of Russia should give way to a total trade embargo, before circulating a Treasury memorandum to the same effect. ‘Our War Commercial Policy: can it be continued?’, 30 September 1854. Wilson played down the cost of the war, and the fact that debt financed the
largest share of it. ‘The Balance Sheet’, Economist, 9 February 1856. Astronomically more than the £2,840,000 budgeted in 1854, it cost closer to £76 million – two thirds from loans. Olive Anderson, A Liberal State at War: English Politics and Economics During the Crimean War, New York 1967, pp. 201–6, 261–63.
106.For the Economist on wartime budgets, loans and banking, respectively, see ‘The War Budget and Its Principles’, 11 March 1854; ‘The Money Market, the Rate of Interest, and the War’, 8 September 1855; ‘The Banks of England and France’, 22 September 1855. For political gossip, see the ‘Foreign Correspondence’ column from 1855 to 1856. For social and political activities of Wilson and Greg, see Barrington, The Servant of All, pp. 272–82, 252, 293.
107.The Economist had prior disagreements with Cobden. But perhaps because of their relatively small scale they did not lead to a falling out, or to revisionism. In the Don Pacifico Affair, for example, Britain claimed to send warships to Greece on behalf of a Jewish merchant born in Gibraltar, whose house was sacked during a riot in Athens in 1847. The lesson of the episode, according to the Economist, was the ‘proud fact that however humble the condition of the man, be he but an English subject … the authority and power of England are at hand to secure him certain justice against undeserved outrages and loses … It is a conviction that gives confidence to the English merchant and success to his enterprise; and secures for him respect and safety wherever he goes.’ ‘The Greek Claims’, 15 June 1850. Cobden attacked this attitude in the House of Commons a week later as sham liberalism. Cobden, Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, p. 227.
108.Cobden wished to dispute the idea then widespread that Britain should intervene to protect the Poles from the Russians. His pamphlet ranged widely, asking how Britain could think to intervene on such a basis with the plight of Ireland on its doorstep. The entire empire was ‘planting, supporting and governing countries’, he added. And ‘so grateful to our national pride has been the spectacle, that we have never for once paused to inquire if our interests were advanced by so much nominal greatness. Three hundred millions of permanent debt – millions of direct taxation are annually levied – restrictions and prohibitions upon our trade in all quarters of the world; and for what?’ Cobden, The Political Writings of Richard Cobden, pp. 21, 36.
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