Liberalism at Large

by Alexander Zevin

  32.Trustees should resist chasing after glossy advertisements as a source of revenue, ‘always obtained by papers of good reputation and good sale’. CW, XIV, p. 426.

  33.CW, XIV, London 1986, p. 424.

  34.‘Nassau Senior’, in CW, Vol. II, p. 379.

  35.This was Bagehot’s first published article. ‘The Currency Monopoly’, in CW, Vol. IX, p. 236.

  36.Wilson had just released a pamphlet taken from his Economist leaders that opposed – along with Tooke and other representatives of the ‘Banking School’– any interference in the financial sector, including the Bank Act of 1844. Bagehot quoted Wilson, in Capital, Currency and Banking, as having ‘never been able to discover any good ground for the objections of a portion of even the most uncompromising free traders, against the application of the same principles to banking and especially to notes payable on demand.’ Bagehot countered, ‘the chief utility of unlimited competition is its quality of reducing the cost of production to the minimum which nature admits of … but improvements in the process of coining brought about by the competition of individual coiners would have a different and less beneficial effect. What is wanted in money is fixity of value.’ To Wilson he addressed another argument: ‘If new banks of issue had been allowed to spring up during the railway mania, who can doubt that a large number of insolvent concerns would have come into existence, and have gone down at the first appearance of depression, leaving the holders of their notes with papers not only inconvertible, but valueless?’ CW, Vol. IX, pp. 244, 247.

  37.Ibid., p. 235. At least in this early article laissez-faire is almost completely redefined. Bagehot says it must meet certain moral and political criteria before it can be applied. For Wilson laissez-faire was the force tending automatically to realize these goals and could never contradict them.

  38.‘Who indeed will be bold enough to say that without some such tax the higher classes of this country would pay their fair contribution to the public revenue?’ ‘Equalisation of the Income Tax’, 23 February 1861.

  39.‘We believe there is no worse blunder as to the scope of political economy than that which would represent it as contrary to its laws thus to interfere with the natural working of the principle of supply and demand. The principle on which the whole science is based is that, when men know their own interest, and are left free to act as they please, they may be trusted to pursue it far more efficiently for themselves than by the State or any other power can pursue it for them. But children do not know their own interest, and if they did, are not free to act as they please.’ Nor were the interests of parents and children identical. ‘It was one of the greatest blunders economists ever made’, Bagehot reiterated, ‘to prejudice people against a true science by pushing it beyond its natural limits.’ ‘Government Protection for Children’, 21 May 1864.

  40.‘Advantages of State Ownership of Railways’, 7 January 1865.

  41.Bagehot put the trade union phenomenon in perspective: in some cases a little resistance on their part prevented wages from sinking below subsistence level, and at least they were not as bad as the Luddites, who ‘years ago kept Nottinghamshire in terror’. Legal unions, new laws against intimidation, and the ‘useful selfishness’ natural to man would take care of the threat posed by these combinations. ‘It was because the guilds were legal that they perished, not because they were prohibited.’ So ‘allow new combinations to start easily, and they will be numerous enough, and competitive enough, to keep up the natural progress of society.’ ‘The Work of Trades Unions’, 27 April 1867; ‘The Effect of Trade Unions upon Wages and Prices’, 13 July 1867. Bagehot urged that trade unions be given the status not of ‘friendly societies’ but of London clubs like the Athenaeum. ‘The Trades Union Bill’, 10 July 1869.

  42.‘We need scarcely say a word as to his claim for the extension of the suffrage to all adult women’, he wrote in ‘Mill’s Address to the Electors of Westminster’ on 29 April 1865. ‘No party, and scarcely any individual politician save himself, holds this theory.’ Bagehot’s view of the lower classes also applied to the women in their ranks. ‘Out of the two or three million of women whom he [Mill] would thus endow – including half-a-million maid-servants – not above ten thousand would have any political opinions at all, or any political preferences for one candidate over another; and that in consequence to give them votes would merely be giving extra votes vicariously to their fathers, their husbands, their masters, their lovers, or their priests.’ Even if women were as ‘enlightened and rational’ as Mill thought them – something Bagehot doubted – ‘conceive the position of an unhappy woman, embracing his views, to whom an “advanced Liberal,” a Radical of Mr Bright’s school, stood in any of the relations we have specified! How she would be snubbed by her father, boudé by her husband, deserted by her lover, bullied by her master, and excommunicated by her priest!’ See also, ‘Women’s Claim to Registration’, Economist, 19 September 1868; ‘Suffrage for Women’, 7 May 1870.

  43.‘Postulates of Political Economy’ appeared in the Fortnightly Review in February and May 1876. CW, Vol. XI, p. 222.

  44.Classical theorists, from Smith to Ricardo – with supplements from James Mill, Senior, Torrens, McCulloch and John Stuart Mill – were more instructive than either the German or neo-classical newcomers. CW, Vol. XI, p. 234.

  45.Michael Edelstein, ‘Foreign Investment and Accumulation 1860–1914’, in The Economic History of Britain since 1700, eds. Roderick Floud and Deirdre McCloskey, Cambridge 1994, Vol. II, pp. 173–76.

  46.CW, Vol. XI, p. 233.

  47.Ibid., p. 230. English political economy was still imperfect, Bagehot admitted. As in his first texts, a criticism of the unbridled laissez-faire he found in the Economist of the 1840s is evident. Its laws did not apply everywhere or at all times, though increasingly they would, as one country after another began to imitate England. ‘A similar money market, a similar competing trade based on large capital, gradually tends to arise in all countries.’ He also claimed to scale back its pretensions. ‘Our political economy does not profess to prove this growing world to be a good world – far less, to be the best. Abroad the necessity of contesting socialism has made some writers use the conclusions brought out by our English science for that object. But the aim of that science is far more humble; it says these and these forces produce these and these effects, and there it stops. It does not profess to give a moral judgment on either; it leaves it for a higher science, and one yet more difficult, to pronounce what ought and what ought not to be.’ Ibid., p. 238.

  48.Barrington, Life of Walter Bagehot, pp. 373–76.

  49.Ibid., p.23.

  50.Ibid., p. 399; Gladstone Papers, BL, Add. MS 44410, ff 154, 204–5. Overend, Gurney & Co. made its name in the bills of exchange business before plunging into financial investment, and the longer-term lending required for railways and shipyards. Short-term deposits were being used to finance long-term investments in overpriced assets, inflated by a stock market boom; when the market crashed, depositors rushed to withdraw, and the bank was exposed as insolvent. For the Economist on the crisis, see ‘Overend, Gurney and Co’, 15 July 1865; ‘What a Panic Is and How It Might Be Mitigated’, 12 May 1866; ‘The Practical Effect of the Act of 1844’, 26 May 1866; ‘Overend, Gurney and Co., Limited and Unlimited’, 16 June 1866.

  51.Lombard Street in CW, IX, London 1978, p. 147.

  52.Ibid., pp. 64–65. Ashworth characterizes Lombard Street as ‘ramming home’ that the Bank had ‘the responsibility of maintaining a reserve big enough to meet the needs of all England’. After its publication, ‘both in theory and practice no one doubted that England was a country with one single reserve for its whole financial system.’ William Ashworth, An Economic History of England, 1870–1939, London 1960, pp. 165, 170.

  53.Lombard Street, p. 55.

  54.Ibid., p. 82.

  55.Ibid., pp. 214, 81.

  56.Ibid., p.155.

  57.Ibid., p. 167.

  58.Edelstein, ‘Foreign Investment’,
in Economic History of Britain since 1700, p. 173; Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Capital, London 1976, pp. 190–94; Larry Allen, The Global Financial System 1750–2000, London 2001, pp. 176–78.

  59.The English Constitution in CW, Vol. V, p. 206.

  60.‘The mass of Englishmen are not fit for an elective government; if they knew how near they were to it, they would be surprised, and almost tremble.’ CW, Vol. V, pp. 240, 379–80. Cobden had earlier used similar language. In an 1838 letter to his brother from Prussia, Cobden praised its government, comparing it to the ‘English constitution – a thing of monopolies, and Church-craft, and sinecures, armorial hocus pocus, primogeniture and pageantry’. What tickled Bagehot appalled Cobden, however: Wendy Hinde, Richard Cobden: A Victorian Outsider, New Haven 1987, p. 55. The same sort of analysis – with inverted judgment – is to be found in Marx. What the author of Capital derisively called the ‘executive committee of the bourgeoisie’ was, for Bagehot, the very best feature of parliamentary government in England.

  61.CW, Vol. XV, p. 81.

  62.In 1859, Bagehot fretted that the reform bills beginning to snake their way through the Commons might – even accidentally – enfranchise a substantial number of workers. To guard against ‘ultra-democracy’ he proposed a complex, varying franchise, in which ratepayers in the largest towns (above 75,000) could vote. This meant only the top layer of workers, ‘self-taught artisans’, who merited ‘special representation’ because of their ‘active intellects’ and ‘self-sufficient dispositions’. The unskilled masses and smaller town dwellers did not count, while farm workers, ‘with low wages and little knowledge, have no views and no sentiments which admit of parliamentary expression’. In this way, the lower orders would gain no more than 50 MPs out of a total of 658. CW, Vol. VI, pp. 196, 203, 226–27.

  63.‘Conservative Criticism of Liberal Politics’, 25 February 1860; ‘Plurality of Votes: The True Principle of a Reform Bill’, 24 March 1860.

  64.‘Considerations on Representative Government’, 11 May 1861. The Labour politician Richard Crossman noted the overlap between Mill and Bagehot in his introduction to a 1963 edition of the English Constitution, while observing some resentment on the part of the latter over the ‘ascendency’ of the former. For Crossman, Bagehot was partly justified in this: he had gone beyond the ‘paper description’ of the constitution offered up by Mill in Representative Government, thanks to ‘the role he [Bagehot] allots to the Cabinet … a new central authority which could manage the state’. Mill relied on ‘the old-fashioned notion of a division of power between the executive and the legislature’. Crossman, ‘Introduction’, in Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution, London 1963, pp. 8–9.

  65.‘Plurality of Votes’, 24 March 1860. Indignant at this swipe from the Daily News, Bagehot ended: ‘Now, which is the true Liberalism – the Liberalism which contends that the true ideal of Parliament is to have the largest number of really organic interests and ideas meeting together in the representative assembly, to try each other’s strength and weakness – or that which deprecates such a true representation of the intellect of the nation on the ground that if a particular class happens to be the largest in every constituency, it is the “natural” or even “Providential” arrangement to let the voice of no other class be heard at all?’ ‘True Liberalism and Reform’, 27 January 1866.

  66.‘Experience and Reform’, 5 May 1860.

  67.‘The Defeat of the Ministry and the Prospects of Reform’, 2 April 1859; ‘The Practical Difficulties of Secret Voting’, 2 September 1859.

  68.‘There only lower the franchise’, he wrote. Even there, lest this ‘throw the most intelligent part of the country into the exclusive power of the least intelligent inhabitants,’ there should be three members with each voter given three votes, ensuring ‘the rich and cultivated one member at least; for they would always be a large minority, and any minority greater than a fourth is by this sure of a vote’. ‘A Simple Plan of Reform’, 24 December 1864.

  69.‘I prefer to cite the following article, stating the same plan, which appeared in The Economist’, Bagehot wrote of his practical ‘scheme of Reform’. At the end he added, sensing perhaps that the tide of public opinion and the moods of both the Liberal and Conservatives had shifted, ‘I do not know whether such a scheme as this is now possible. Perhaps the passions of men have become too excited, and a far more commonplace plan is all which can now be hoped for. But I am sure it was possible when the above article was written, and that it would have saved us from many evils.’ CW, Vol. VI, p. 351.

  70.Crossman erred when he suggested that Bagehot, unlike Mill, thought it was possible to do without electoral reform. He probably ignored his output for the Economist. Crossman, ‘Introduction’, The English Constitution, pp. 9–10.

  71.CW, Vol. V, pp. 208, 299.

  72.‘A permanent combination of them would make them (now that so many of them have the suffrage) supreme in the country. So long as they are not taught to act together, there is a chance of this being averted, and it can only be averted by the greatest wisdom and the greatest foresight in the higher classes.’ Ibid., pp. 173–74.

  73.‘The New Reform Bill’, 2 March 1867

  74.‘It is plain that what we used to call our public opinion upon the constitution of the House of Commons, was not an opinion based on proof and due to inquiry, but only a chance impression’, he wrote in April 1867. ‘The extreme weakness and moveableness of what we thought rooted opinions, has been concealed from us for many years, because the questions most eagerly discussed have been questions of foreign policy, and upon these where the data are so difficult to learn and change from day to day, it is no dishonour to change an opinion quickly and rapidly. A fixed judgment on changing facts is, as men of business know, the most dangerous thing in the world. But here at home, and upon a much discussed question like Reform, there ought to have been no room for change.’ ‘The Painful Moral of Present Politics’, 20 April 1867.

  75.‘Why has the “Settlement” of 1832 So Easily Melted Away?’, 1 June 1867.

  76.Queen Victoria was not amused by this attitude to her person, much less her constitutional powers (reduced by Bagehot to consultation, encouragement, warning, and acting as camouflage for the cabinet). George V recalled that she was ‘quite displeased’ that he had been reading ‘such a radical writer’: Daniel Craig, ‘Bagehot’s Republicanism’, in The Monarchy and the British Nation, 1780 to the Present, ed. Andrzej Olechnowicz, Cambridge 2007, p. 139.

  77.‘The Lords will pass the great coming change, and the Queen will ratify it without a substantial doubt, and without material amendment. The elaborate checks on the power of the House of Commons, on which Blackstone and others so often insist, have now – just when they were wanted, if ever – ceased to act, and been unheard of.’ These were the main reasons ‘why this great revolution – a greater revolution, probably than that of 1832 – has been so noiseless and so silent. Let us hope that its results may be as quiet and unnoticed, for then, perhaps, they will be good.’ ‘Why has the “Settlement” of 1832 So Easily Melted Away?’, 1 June 1867.

  78.‘The most essential mental quality for a free people, whose liberty is to be progressive, permanent, and on a large scale … is much stupidity. I need not say that, in real sound stupidity, the English are unrivalled.’ Bagehot asked readers to imagine a House of Commons composed only of witty litterateurs like Disraeli. ‘It would be what M. Proudhon said of some French assemblies, “a box of matches”.’ ‘Letters on the French Coup d’État’, in CW, Vol. IV, pp. 50–51.

  79.CW, Vol. IV, p. 81. The link between national character and political structure remained crucial for Bagehot. The idea that there were certain rights, or one form of government, which ought to obtain at all times and places was an error that confused politics with ethics – as if you had ‘no more right to deprive a Dyak of his vote in a “possible” Polynesian assembly, than you have to steal his mat.’ ‘There are breeds in animal man just as in the animal dog’. ‘When you
hunt with greyhounds and course with beagles, then, and not till then, may you expect the inbred habits of a thousand years to pass away, that Hindoos can be free, or that Englishmen will be slaves.’ Ibid., pp. 48–52.

  80.There is scant evidence for Varouxakis’s claim that Bagehot – ‘the best that Victorian political thought had to offer on French politics during the Second Empire’ – reconsidered his position on the Second Empire in the 1860s. Georgios Varouxakis, Victorian Political Thought on France and the French, New York 2002, pp. 90, 170.

  81.‘The Mercantile Evils of Imperialism’, 31 August 1867.

  82.Bagehot scorned these clever men on the hunt for a ‘despot to work out their ideas’; if ever their utopias were enacted they stood a better chance of being hung. ‘Any despot will do what he himself likes, and will root out new ideas ninety-nine times for once that he introduces them.’ Even Matthew Arnold was guilty of Francophilia, and thus of trying to slip ‘a yoke upon our minds and styles’. CW, Vol. VII, pp. 50–51.

  83.‘France or England’, 5 September 1863; ‘The Emperor of the French’, 5 December 1863.

  84.‘The Gravity and Difficulty of Affairs in France’, 7 August 1869. France could not enjoy English-style liberty, because it had a national character without deference, and hated its bourgeoisie as much as its nobility: ‘Her passion for equality is so great that she will sacrifice everything to it. Free government involves privilege, because it requires that more power should be given to the instructed than the uninstructed: there is no method by which men can be both free and equal.’ ‘France or England’, 5 September 1863.

  85.‘The Emperor of the French’, 5 December 1863.

  86.‘Caesareanism as It Now Exists’, 4 March 1865.

  87.‘The Mercantile Evils of Imperialism’, 31 August 1867.

  88.‘Caesareanism as It Now Exists’, 4 March 1865.