Liberalism at Large

by Alexander Zevin

  109.Richard Cobden, The Letters: 1815–1847, ed. Anthony Howe, Oxford 2007, Vol. I, p. 452; Cobden to Frederick Cobden, May 1853, in The Life of Richard Cobden, ed. John Morley, London 1906, p. 613.

  110.J. A. Hobson, Richard Cobden: The International Man, London 1919, p. 105.

  111.Cobden to Joseph Parkes, 18 December 1855, in Letters of Richard Cobden, eds. Anthony Howe and Simon Morgan, Oxford 2012, Vol. III, p. 174.

  112.Cobden to John Bright, 11 August 1856, in Hobson, Richard Cobden, p. 226.

  113.‘Mr. Cobden’s Letter and the Russian War’, Economist, 10 November 1855.

  114.‘Literature’, Economist, 6 August 1853; ‘Mr. Cobden’s What Next – and Next?’, 12 January 1856.

  115.Economist: ‘Nicholas and His Apologists’, 9 December 1854; ‘The Tactics of the Opposition and the Interests of the Country’, 6 October 1855; ‘The Beauties of Bright’, 2 February 1856.

  116.139 Parl. Deb. (3rd Ser.) (1855) 1283–1287.

  117.Ibid., 1287–1290.

  118.McCarthy, Short History, p. 164.

  119.J. Y. Wong, Deadly Dreams: Opium, Imperialism, and the Arrow War in China, Cambridge 1998, pp. 9–10, 335–65, 411–12; Carl A. Trocki, Opium, Empire and the Global Political Economy, London 1999.

  120.144 Parl. Deb. (3rd Ser.) (1857) 1155–1245.

  121.John Newsinger, ‘Elgin in China,’ New Left Review, no. 15, June 2002, 119–40, much the best treatment of the connection between liberalism and imperialism on display during the Second Opium War.

  122.Cobden to Richard, 13 April 1857, in Hobson, Richard Cobden, p. 210.

  123.The Illustrated London News described Bowring as ‘one of the reform philosophers of the age, a gentleman who has given his life to languages and liberalism; a traveller; a commercialist; a Benthamite’ in 1842. As an MP he had opposed the opium trade. He changed his mind in no small part because by 1856 he was indebted to, and his son employed by, one of the world’s largest opium dealers, Jardine Matheson: G. F. Bartle, An Old Radical and His Brood, London 1994, pp. 11, 36, 58–9, 90.

  124.Bowring had earlier been hailed for negotiating a treaty with Siam in 1855, ‘which throws open the whole of that rich country to European enterprise … The old system of monopoly has been abolished, and a duty of only 3 per cent is to be collected on all articles. British subjects are to be allowed to settle in the country, erect dwellings, cultivate soil, and buy and sell without restriction.’ Economist, 25 August 1855. Opium was also to be freely admitted.

  125.‘The Chinese Debate and Its Issue’, Economist, 7 March 1857.

  126.‘Our Prospects and Our Difficulties’, Economist, 14 March 1857. See also, ‘Peace the Result of Free Trade’, 9 May 1857.

  127.McCarthy, A Short History, pp. 166–67.

  128.‘Results of the Elections’, Economist, 4 April 1857; ‘Mr. Bright and His Retiring Address’, 18 April 1857.

  129.Cobden to Parkes, 9 August 1857, in Morley, Life of Richard Cobden, p. 663.

  130.Cobden to Mr Richard, 16 June 1857, in Hobson, Richard Cobden, pp. 218–19. ‘A lively, brief, touch-and-go style of showing up these people is best’, assured Cobden, who intended some of this material for the Morning Star.

  131.James L. Sturgis, John Bright and the Empire, London 1969, p. 40.

  132.Cobden to Bright, 17 October 1858, in E. D. Steele, Palmerston and Liberalism, 1855–1865, Cambridge 1991, p. 121.

  133.Bright on 29 October 1858 in Birmingham in Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Vol. II, pp. 373–99.

  134.Wilson to Lewis, 17 December 1858, in Barrington, Servant of All, Vol II, pp. 103–7; Steele, Palmerston and Liberalism, p. 122. Wilson had indicated his desire for a rapprochement after Bright was returned to the Commons, but before his incendiary speech, welcoming Bright back for past services ‘to commercial and individual freedom’, even as Wilson anticipated that if ‘India remain anxious and agitated Mr. Bright’s advice to that country may differ very materially from our own’. See ‘Mr. Bright’s Return for Birmingham’, Economist, 22 August 1857.

  135.Saul David, The Indian Mutiny: 1857, London 2002, pp. 9, 19, 28–31; Eric Stokes, The Peasant Armed: The Indian Revolt of 1857, ed. C. A. Bayly, Oxford 1986, pp. 1–16.

  136.‘The Indian Army’, Economist, 4 July 1857.

  137.‘India’, Economist, 18 July 1857; ‘Mind of the Mutiny’, Economist, 19 September 1857; ‘Delhi, Moghul and British Civilization’, Economist, 31 October 1857.

  138.‘The Indian Sufferers’, Economist, 29 August 1857.

  139.‘The Bright Side of the Picture’, Economist, 26 September 1857.

  140.‘The Indian Crisis of the Past Year’, Economist, 2 January 1858.

  141.‘The Treatment of the Sepoy Mutineers’, Economist, 27 February 1858; ‘The Military Policy of Lord Canning’s Proclamation’, 15 May 1858.

  142.Tim Dyson, A Population History of India: From the First Modern People to the Present Day, Oxford 2014, p. 95.

  143.The Times, 5 August 1859.

  144.The Times, 5 October 1859 and 29 September 1859.

  145.Barrington, Life of Walter Bagehot, London 1914, p. 286.

  146.Barrington, The Servant of All, p. 145.

  147.The Economist welcomed what was in effect the nationalization of the East India Company on precisely these grounds. Total net revenue was, it estimated, £22,000,000 in 1857, after debt interest payments. It assured holders of East India Company stocks and bonds (returning anywhere from 4 to 10 per cent per annum) that its obligations would now be counted as Indian Government debt – in line with Australia or Canada, and thus just as secure. ‘The Financial Obligations of the East India Company’, 2 January 1858.

  148.Bagehot, CW, Vol. III, p. 344. While Wilson backed a state guarantee for the railway companies, he opposed a general guarantee on Indian debt. His opposition to the latter was based on the fiscal laxity such a guarantee might encourage in India. In practice, the reforms he had imposed, along with the direct political control now exercised by Britain, were sufficient – evidenced by the investment that flowed into India over the next two decades. See, V. G. Kale, Dawn of Modern Finance in India, Poona 1922, p. 51.

  149.This exception to the rule of laissez-faire in the case of peoples considered primitive occurs throughout the work of Mill – thematically and chronologically, from political economy to politics. John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, London 1848, p. 366; John Stuart Mill, ‘Considerations on Representative Government’, in On Liberty, London 1861, p. 217. See Pitts, A Turn to Empire, pp. 123–60.

  150.Bagehot, CW, Vol. III, p. 345.

  151.The Times, 5 October 1859.

  152.Bagehot, CW, Vol. III, p. 357.

  153.Sabyasachi Battacharya, Financial Foundations of the British Raj, Simla 1971, pp. 4, 204–6; James Wilson, Financial Statement, Calcutta 1860, p. 9.

  154.Bagehot, CW, Vol. III, p. 359.

  155.Zhaojin Ji, A History of Modern Shanghai Banking: The Rise and Decline of China’s Finance Capitalism, Armonk 2003, p. 43.

  156.Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, p. 330; B. R. Tomlinson, ‘India and the British Empire, 1880–1935’, in Indian Economic and Social History Review, October 1975, pp. 337–80.

  157.Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, pp. 338, 341, 342. For an account of the Home Charges, see James Foreman-Peck, ‘Foreign Investment and Imperial Exploitation: Balance of Payments Reconstruction for Nineteenth-Century Britain and India’, The Economic History Review, August 1989, pp. 354–74.

  158.Bagehot, CW, Vol. III, p. 359.

  159.Wilson to Bagehot, 19 July 1860, in Ibid., pp. 358–59.

  160.‘Sir Charles Trevelyan’s Minute on Mr. Wilson’s Budget’, Economist, 12 May 1860; Indian Finance and the Madras Protest’, 2 June 1860.

  161.Class snobbery pervades Trevelyan’s comments about Wilson. Humphrey Trevelyan, The India We Left: Charles Trevelyan, 1826–65, Humphrey Trevelyan, 1929–47, London 1972, pp. 78–87.

  162.Bagehot, CW, Vol. III, pp. 354,
360–62.

  2. Walter Bagehot’s Dashed Doubts

  1.W. David Clinton, Tocqueville, Lieber, and Bagehot: Liberalism Confronts the World, New York 2003, p. 2.

  2.S. A. M. Westwater, ‘Walter Bagehot: A Reassessment’, Antioch Review, January 1977, p. 39; CW, Vol. XV, pp. 68–81.

  3.J. M. Keynes, ‘The Works of Bagehot’, Economic Journal, September 1915, p. 369.

  4.Wilson’s Congressional Government (1885) made ample use of Bagehot’s English Constitution to argue that the US suffered from a weak executive, which cabinet government on the English model might remedy. ‘My desire and ambition are to treat the American Constitution as Mr. Bagehot … has treated the English Constitution. His book has inspired my whole study of our government’, he confided to Ellen Axson in 1884. ‘He brings to the work a fresh and original method which has made the British system much more intelligible to ordinary men than it was before, and which, if it could be successfully applied to the exposition of our federal constitution, would result in something like a revelation to those who are still reading The Federalist as an authoritative constitutional manual.’ Ray S. Baker, Woodrow Wilson: Life and Letters, New York 1946, Vol. I, pp. 213–14. Though Wilson came to see the president as a more powerful office vis-à-vis Congress, he remained just as admiring of Bagehot, calling him a ‘wit as well as a seer’ in the Atlantic in 1898. For the Atlantic articles, see CW, Vol. XV, pp. 150–88; Mrs. Russell Barrington, The Life of Walter Bagehot, London 1914, p. 3.

  5.CW, Vol. XV, pp. 216–19.

  6.‘Times change, even the Economist changes a little’, Macmillan reflected. ‘Its format surprised me when it began. I used to remember it as rather a dull looking professorial paper that always rebuked me. Every article began, “Mr. Macmillan has now, in the last effort of this year, destroyed the British economy for ever.” But it didn’t seem to matter very much. Now, however, I read it to get news about all parts of the world and it has become what is called “a very readable paper.” Brilliantly edited and magnificently produced. When I was coming up today from Sussex I just wondered what Bagehot would have thought of it. I think on the whole he’d have liked it because it suits the age, it suits the time. It’s practical, it’s modern, it’s objective, it’s up to date. That’s what he liked.’ CW, Vol. XV, pp. 219–22.

  7.Ferdinand Mount, The British Constitution Now, London 2011, p. 41.

  8.Ferdinand Mount, ‘All the Sad Sages’, London Review of Books, February 2014, pp. 9–11.

  9.Biographers include Richard Hutton, Bagehot’s friend, in 1878; Emilie Barrington, his sister-in-law, in 1914; the Economist staffer Alastair Buchan in 1958; and official Economist historian Ruth Dudley Edwards in 1993. The only critical appraisal came from the poet and civil servant C. H. Sisson in 1972. Bagehot was, Sisson wrote in execration, the quintessential ‘man of affairs’, hateful of all that was artistic, primitive, rural or spiritual – ‘a good laugh at the monarchy, a series of little jeers at the historical Church, a jealous look at the gentry’. In arts and letters, praise for Shakespeare’s wise investments; aspersions on Coleridge, who was peculiar, ‘walked around, talked to undergraduates or women, but did not do anything noticeable such as running a bank’. C. H. Sisson, The Case of Walter Bagehot, London 1972, pp. 127, 37.

  10.Edith had ‘attacks of delirium’, thinking she was mute and smashing the bank windows. Bagehot could calm and amuse her and his half-brother, Vincent Estlin. ‘Every trouble in life is a joke compared to madness’, he once said. Alastair Buchan, The Spare Chancellor: The Life of Walter Bagehot, London 1959, p. 23; CW, Vol. XII, pp. 341–42.

  11.Other students may have found Bagehot priggish for informing his landlord that two lodgers were skipping classes and Sunday services to consort with women. Norman St John-Stevas, ‘Walter Bagehot: A Short Biography’, in CW, Vol. I, pp. 39, 41–42.

  12.A Covent Garden meeting in 1844 was memorable for O’Connell’s voice, its ‘higher tones very dignified and impressive, and the lower ones very sweet’, his fiery attack on slavery, and his linking the cause of Free Trade and Irish Freedom. James Wilson, also present, was remarkable to Bagehot at this time for being visibly annoyed by the cheers for O’Connell that kept interrupting his own speech. Barrington, Life of Walter Bagehot, pp. 11, 122.

  13.Barrington, Life of Walter Bagehot, p. 177.

  14.CW, Vol. XII, pp. 274–75.

  15.Jonathan Sperber, The European Revolutions, 1848–51, Cambridge 2005.

  16.The coup was illegal. But ‘no legal or constitutional act could have given an equal confidence’, and elections, due in May, would have been violent if ‘preceded by six months’ famine among the starvable classes’. CW, Vol. IV, pp. 30–36.

  17.Bagehot, wrote Hutton, ‘not only eulogized the Catholic Church, but supported the Prince-President’s military violence, attacked the Freedom of the Press in France, maintained that the country was wholly unfit for Parliamentary government – and worst of all perhaps – insinuated a panegyric on Louis Napoleon himself, asserting that he had been far better prepared for the duties of a statesmen by gambling on the turf, than he would have been by poring over the historical and political dissertations of the wise and the good.’ CW, Vol. XV, pp. 106–7.

  18.CW, Vol. XII, p. 329.

  19.‘The spirit of generalisation, which, John Mill tells us, honourably distinguishes the French mind has come to this, that every Parisian wants his head tapped in order to get the formulae and nonsense out of it.’ Ibid., p. 328. To his father, he boasted of breakfasting in the Palais Royal, after climbing the railings, and reminding himself not to run: ‘it is a bad habit to run in a Revolution, somebody may think you are the “other side” and shoot you.’ ‘I am pleased’, he concluded wearily, ‘to have had an opportunity of seeing it once but once is enough, as there is, I take it, a touch of sameness in this kind of sight.’ Barrington, Life of Walter Bagehot, pp. 194–96. His mother received a delighted confession: ‘I am in short what they would call a réactionnaire’. ‘And I think I am with the majority – a healthy habit for a young man to contract.’ ‘I wish for the President decidedly myself as against M. Thiers and his set in the Parliamentary World; even I can’t believe in a Government of barristers and newspaper editors, and also as against the Red party, who though not insincere, are too abstruse and theoretical for a plain man.’ CW, Vol. XII, p. 326.

  20.Barrington, Life of Walter Bagehot, pp. 56–57.

  21.Bagehot to Killigrew Wait, 5 January 1853, in Barrington, Life of Walter Bagehot, pp. 211–12.

  22.Ibid., pp. 62, 357. If, in addition, a ‘genius’ ventured an opinion on political economy, he received a swat. Ruskin earned his share, as the title of an Economist article Bagehot devoted to him attests: ‘Aesthetic Twaddle versus Political Economy’, 18 August 1860.

  23.CW, Vol. I, pp. 189–90, 213, 406–8. At times playing both sides of the street, or what he called, after St Paul, his ‘divided nature’, weighed on Bagehot. ‘Taken as a whole, the universe is absurd’, he declared during these years, struck by the incongruity between the human mind and its employments. ‘How can a soul be a merchant? What relation to an immortal being have the price of linseed, the fall of butter, the tare on tallow, or the brokerage on hemp? Can an undying creature debit “petty expenses”, and charge for “carriage paid”?’ Gertrude Himmelfarb, Victorian Minds, New York 1968, p. 222; ‘The First Edinburgh Reviews’, in CW, Vol. I, p. 338.

  24.Barrington, Life of Walter Bagehot, pp. 225–28.

  25.Ibid.

  26.CW, Vol. XIII, p. 547.

  27.Barrington, Life of Walter Bagehot, pp. 231–33.

  28.Ibid., pp. 391–92.

  29.Sisson, Case of Walter Bagehot, pp. 48–55. Bagehot confided the torment he continued to feel over his defeat to the Metaphysical Society during a dinner at the Grosvenor Hotel in 1870, reprinted in the Contemporary Review as ‘On the Emotion of Conviction’. For years after his defeat, no matter how hard he reasoned, ‘I had the deepest conviction that I should be “Mem
ber for Bridgwater”’, he told the assembled members. ‘Even still, if I allow my mind to dwell on the contest, if I think of the hours I was ahead in the morning, and the rush of votes at two o’clock by which I was defeated, – and even more, if I call up the image of the nomination day, with all the people’s hands outstretched, and all their excited faces looking the more different on account of their identity in posture, the old feeling almost comes back upon me, and for a moment I believe that I shall be Member for Bridgwater.’ The Contemporary Review, London 1871, p. 33.

  30.Bagehot had a high opinion of Gladstone. He nevertheless made constructive criticisms from time to time, urging the necessity of defence spending, for example. Bagehot also wanted to make income tax permanent – another point against Bright, who preferred to abolish the income tax along with tariffs and replace both with a property tax. On starting out as director Bagehot wrote to Gladstone, informing him that Wilson ‘used to write the economical and financial articles in the paper mainly himself as well as direct its general policy; and both these departments have in some sort fallen to me’. Since ‘the Economist has a certain influence over men of business whose opinions are not without importance on financial subjects’, Bagehot was ready ‘to call on you if there were anything which you thought the paper might discuss with advantage’. After Bagehot’s death Gladstone wrote to his widow, Eliza, ‘During the time when I was Chancellor of the Exchequer, I had the advantage of frequent and free communication with him on all matters of finance and currency.’ CW, Vol. XIII, pp. 553–56.

  31.‘For the first time in nearly thirty years there is the prospect of a Conservative majority in the House of Commons. It requires more thought than we have as yet had time to give to realize a state of things so new and so different from that to which we have been so long accustomed’: ‘The Conservative Majority’, Economist, 7 February 1874.