89.‘The Mercantile Evils of Imperialism’, 31 August 1867. ‘She cannot distribute the savings of France to the activity of France as London distributes our savings to our merchants’: ‘France and the Money Market’, 14 December 1867. Bagehot was well aware of the French banking innovation, the Crédit Mobilier, but while impressed with its profits, he did not think its model of realizing them – playing the bourse with a limited amount of capital – would allow it to invest in infrastructural projects (aside from railways) on a very large scale. See, ‘The Credit Mobilier and Banking Companies in France’, National Review, January 1857, Vol. IV, in CW, Vol. X, pp. 341–71.
90.‘His position is too great to be lightly risked. He takes infinite pains to avert all chance of failure.’ ‘The Emperor of the French’, 28 November 1863.
91.‘The times are changed since eager rulers dragged reluctant peoples into war. Now, it is the people who are ready to fight, and monarchs and ministers who hold them back.’ For ‘we believe that both Count Bismarck and Napoleon are anxious to avoid a rupture … and will do all that can be done to avert it.’ ‘Continental Alarms’, 5 October 1867; ‘France and the Money Market’, 14 December 1867.
92.‘The Emperor’s Letter’, 26 March 1870.
93.‘To account for such conduct we have to abandon all recent ideas … and forget our experience of him as an important statesman and as for years one of the conservators and guardians of peace in Europe.’ ‘The Declaration of War by France’, 16 July 1870.
94.Bagehot attributed the shocking collapse of the French army, considered the most potent fighting force on the continent, to the reluctance of the French peasants to fight, shifting his admiration to the victors of the moment. King Wilhelm IV, who officered his army with nobles – ‘a strong guarantee for esprit de corps’ – represented a more efficient regime type; one that, for all its atavistic qualities, had the support, said Bagehot, of the right sort. ‘An hereditary king, strong in the affection of an aristocracy near his throne, and of a middle class that shows an educated preference for the old dynasty, has no need to fear the displeasure of the lowest among the population.’ ‘The Collapse of Caesarism’, 20 August 1870.
95.‘The Emperor Napoleon’, 11 January 1873.
96.‘The Lessons of the Plebiscite’, 14 May 1870. The year before, he urged moderation on grounds that a revolution in France was bound to be a setback for the liberal cause in Europe. ‘A defeat of French Liberals is not their defeat only; it is a defeat of all Liberals.’ ‘The Gravity and Difficulty of Affairs in France’, 7 August 1869.
97.Popular political apathy, ‘a blind popular feeling once fairly on the wane’, along with a monarch bound by liberal principles, was ‘the best conceivable cement for a political system’. ‘That is what we have in England. The liberals of France will do well to avail themselves of the advantages offered by the present situation to secure a similar combination of political advantages for France.’ ‘The Liberals and the Emperor’, 21 May 1870.
98.Much of this piece was directed against the ‘defenders of the Commune in England’. ‘The Destruction in Paris of What the World Goes to See at Paris’, 27 May 1871.
99.Bagehot lampooned the radical republican members of the Commune like a banker rejecting a loan applicant with no collateral: their republic was ‘associated with absurdly superstitious hopes’, arising from a ‘sort of belief among the reds that the proclamation of a Republic was a mystical expiation which would save Paris’, ‘screamed and wept over from balconies’, worshipped as if it were ‘a feminine deity’, or as if on hearing its name ‘enemies would sheathe their swords, and the proletariat in great European capitals would rise in their might, and forbid further bloodshed’. Thiers seemed the man to ‘shake off all delirium, and face the alarming facts of conquest and an empty Exchequer’. ‘Constitutional Tendencies in France’, 14 September 1872.
100.Ibid. Thiers was hailed again the next year, on semantic grounds, for his ‘astute policy of gradually accustoming France to associate order and strength, and a certain limited amount of liberty, with the name and form of a republic.’ ‘The Imperialist Manifesto’, 25 January 1873.
101.‘Why an English Liberal May Look without Disapproval on the Progress of Imperialism in France’, 6 June 1874. Bagehot tried to impress upon Liberals in England the necessity of what seemed illiberal measures in France, where the constant threat of a redistributive revolution was nipping the latest wave of capitalist development in the bud. ‘In England we have always had a secure government, and we find it difficult to bring home to our imaginations the evil of wanting it. But if we lost it, no people would suffer half so much. The whole industrial life of England is based in an unexampled degree on credit and confidence, and that credit and confidence the faintest idea of a revolution would at once destroy. It would be worse than a mercantile panic many times over. If our system of credit is so delicate as to be shaken by the failure of Overend, Gurney & Co., it would collapse into ruins at the fall of Queen Victoria. We must imagine Lombard street to be for months in possession of the roughs, and then we shall understand what it is which Frenchmen fear.’ ‘The Prospects of Bonapartism in France’, 30 May 1874.
102.‘French Politics’, 20 June 1874. The French, he granted, were a little too discerning to fall for the royal ruse that kept power in England in the hands of the middle and aristocratic classes. ‘“A king who reigns but does not govern” is a sort of logical nondescript.’ ‘The only monarchy possible in France is the Empire, and that is one not based on English ideas but on the very opposite of English ideas. A French copy of the English Constitution must not be one of its exterior but one of its interior’. ‘A Suggestion for the Future Government of France’, 15 August 1874.
103.‘The Conservative Republic’, 6 March 1875. Pierre Rosanvallon has praised Bagehot as one of the few modern thinkers to attempt a positive definition of Caesarism. La Democratie inachevée: Histoire de la Souveraineté du Peuple en France, Paris 2000, p. 219.
104.‘Limits of the Principle of Nationalities’, 18 June 1864. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was an exception, incapable of a ‘national life’ in a liberal age in which ‘unity is all but necessary’, because the peoples within it had no common feeling, different rights, and ‘did not understand each other’. Switzerland was another exception, albeit in the opposite sense, showing that a heterogeneous state ‘may maintain a free life, though three languages are spoken in its Parliament, and though more than three races make up its population’, but only under the extreme threat of external enemies. ‘The Gains of the World by the Two Last Wars in Europe’, 18 August 1866.
105.‘The Influence of Foreign Anxieties upon the Money Market’, 24 August 1867.
106.‘M. Mazzini’s Manifesto’, 11 October 1862. At the time of Mazzini’s death, Bagehot paid tribute to a ‘political force’ whose talents, though used ‘for impossible, and therefore anarchic ends’, had ‘revivified the political life of Italy and furnished the raw materials of which the great political strategy of Count Cavour was able to make such wonderful use’. Despite his flaws Mazzini ‘was by no means like Garibaldi’. ‘He was a half-way house between the “inspired idiot” of Caprera and the wily diplomatist of Turin.’ ‘Mazzini’, 16 March 1872.
107.‘Prince Bismarck’s Foreign Policy’, 10 April 1875.
108.The influx of capital into Egypt, India and elsewhere went hand in hand with a more competitive imperial order – seeking to ensure reliable cotton supplies, and pushing peasants into cultivating it – according to Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History, New York 2014, pp. 243, 247–49.
109.‘The Probability of an American War’, 14 December 1861.
110.‘The True Attitude of the Government of This Country Towards the Federal States’, 25 April 1863. One member of his entourage did receive praise, the financial architect of the war, Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase. ‘If the American war closed now, history could only say that Mr. Lincoln was a vulgar man with some respectability and a li
ttle humour, and that Mr. Chase had got much money under great political difficulties and with very little taxation.’ ‘Mr. Chase’s Resignation’, 23 July 1864.
111.‘Mr. Lincoln’s Re-Election’, 26 November 1864.
112.‘English Opinion as Distinguished from English Action on American Questions’, 31 October 1863. After his re-election Bagehot described Lincoln as ‘a person whose words are mean even when his actions are important’.
113.The electoral process was one of the worst sources of constitutional inefficiency exposed by the Civil War. In order to stand a chance of winning the Electoral College, each party ‘selects at a preliminary caucus the most unexceptional member whom they can find’. ‘If the wit of man had devised a system specially adapted to bring to the head of affairs an incompetent man at a pressing crisis, it could not have devised one more fit’: ‘The Practical Operation of the American Constitution at Present Extreme Crisis’, 1 June 1861. Once elected, the president had to wait months to take office, which had given the rebels time to plan, while Lincoln fretted over ‘petty details of patronage’. The entire system turned on the presidential cycle. ‘Great questions, public duties, political efficiency, are secondary’ to these contests, where, every four years, ‘every political office, large and small, changes hands’ and ‘the whole patronage of the country is turned into one great bribe’: ‘The Practical Operation of the American Constitution at Present Extreme Crisis’, 1 June 1861.
114.‘The Last Probabilities of War and Peace’, 21 December 1861.
115.‘The Practical Operation of the American Constitution at Present Extreme Crisis’, 1 June 1861. Laws and manners had degenerated. Whereas leaders ‘in Washington’s time were gentlemen and men of education’ and ‘institutions were free, but not democratic’, now ‘dirtier and rougher men’ had taken over, who ‘truckled and temporized and cajoled and cringed and fawned upon the mob’ to get elected. ‘The constitution has become an almost unmitigated ochlocracy.’ ‘What May Be in America’, 17 August 1861.
116.‘Presidential and Ministerial Governments Compared’, 13 December 1862. Not only was a parliament better at choosing leaders than the masses – the ‘Commons sees Lord Palmerston every day; the American people never saw Mr. Lincoln at all’ – it was very easily rid of them. ‘If Lord Palmerston should be unequal to a sudden exigency, we can seek elsewhere.’ A large, modern nation such as America could not ask voters to weigh in constantly. ‘The mass of the people are occupied in their own affairs, busy with their own trade, their profession, or their idleness.’ ‘The nation en masse is indifferent … the popular mind is at sea; it cannot elect for itself; and it falls into the guidance of professional electors (President-maker is the American word)’: ‘The Defect of America’, 6 December 1862.
117.A prime minister, in contrast, was a ‘tenant-at-will’. This was preferable since in four years ‘a Crimean war or an Indian mutiny may introduce on a sudden elements of incalculable force which no one could anticipate’: ‘The Last Probabilities of War and Peace’, 21 December 1861. ‘The worst defect of a presidential government is, that it leases for a stated term the supremacy to a single man, without the possibility of knowing beforehand whether he will be fit to control and master the unforeseen’: ‘The Defect of America’, 6 December 1862.
118.‘Presidential and Ministerial Governments Compared’, 13 December 1862.
119.Congress could not even stage a vote of want of confidence, nor could the president or members of his cabinet face their critics there. ‘Those who act cannot speak, and those who speak cannot act.’ As a result, Lincoln was unaccountable for his inept war policies. The indecisive conduct of the Civil War on the Northern side had revealed ‘what was for the most part unknown in Europe, – the bureaucratic character of the American people’: ‘The Invasion of the Federal States’, 11 July 1863.
120.‘The trifling disasters of the English before Sebastopol excited more rage in England than the gigantic defeats of the Northern armies have excited in America’: see ‘The Federal Constitution Responsible for Federal Apathy’, 10 January 1863. Bagehot later elaborated on ‘the terrible waste of the highest educating capacity’ in presidential forms of government, citing as an example a battle between then Secretary of the Treasury, Hugh McCulloch, ‘a man of remarkable knowledge and ability’, who held sound views on currency (‘for example, that government can no more create money by its bare fiat than it can create coals or tallow’) and Congress, which did not. See, ‘The Refusal to Impeach President Johnson’, 14 December 1867.
121.The need for a ‘dictatorship’ extended past the present crisis. Bagehot wondered how even mundane tasks – the dismissal of a popular general, overriding ‘crotchety states’ – would work in the absence of this unique moral force, this ‘good and benevolent, but restless temporary despot’, ‘who really reverenced civil liberty and could tolerate venomous opposition’ and whose authority could thus ‘never be directed to ends wholly disapproved by the ways of those who conferred it’: ‘The Assassination of Mr. Lincoln’, 29 April 1865.
122.‘The Disruption of the Union, as It Would Affect England’, 19 January 1861.
123.‘America’, 8 June 1861.
124.‘Recognition or Mediation’, 18 October 1862. The impossibility of conquering the South was a constant refrain. ‘We know that a restoration of real union, of voluntary union by arms is impossible’: ‘America’, 1 August 1863.
125.‘Fall of Richmond and Its Affect upon English Commerce’, 22 April 1865.
126.‘What May Be in America’, 17 August 1861.
127.‘Our Duty’, 30 November 1861.
128.‘Will There Be an American War?’, 7 December 1861. In happier days they were already ‘the most punctilious, overbearing, and contentious government which the world has ever seen’; now, ‘in the false shame of humiliated pride’, they were becoming unbearable. ‘Mercantile Difficulties of the American Civil War’, 25 May 1861.
129.‘Shall the Blockade Be Respected’, 25 January 1862.
130.‘English Feeling Toward America’, 28 September 1861.
131.In 1853 Bagehot wrote Hutton, then in the West Indies, ‘Have you seen anything of the blacks? It can’t be a pretty study, but it may be an instructive one. People are quite wild here again about slavery, as strong as they ever were when there was a bona fide agitation in this country on the point. I should like to know accurately what comes from emancipation, taking it as a question of sacrifices. I can imagine many cases in which slavery is good for a population, but none or not many in which traders can be trusted to be slave owners. It may answer in rural villages where they only supply their own demand, and where the notion of the slaves being “capital” is extremely secondary, but never in a mercantile community where that notion is the main one and the notion of moral and personal dependence extremely faint’: CW, Vol. XII, p. 30. Bagehot took a similar line in ‘The American Constitution at the Present Crisis’, a long essay in the National Review in October 1861. (CW, Vol. IV, p. 295). But both there and in Physics and Politics, first published serially in the Fortnightly Review from 1867 to 1872, he also saw the merits of slavery at given times and places. ‘The evils which we have endured from slavery in recent ages must not blind us to, or make us forget, the great services that slavery rendered in early ages’, he wrote, citing Aristotle, Wakefield, and the Bible in support. ‘Refinement is only possible when leisure is possible; and slavery first makes it possible.’ Though such fine feelings have ‘no market value in the early bidding of nations’, their result, ‘originality in war’, did. ‘Slave-owning nations, having time to think, are likely to be more shrewd in policy, and more crafty in strategy’: CW, Vol. VII, pp. 58–59.
132.General Lee’s failed invasion of the North in 1863 was regrettable for it could have forced it to come to terms. ‘Though we wish the South to be independent, we wish it to be weak’: ‘Shall the Blockade Be Respected?’, 25 January 1862.
133.‘America’, 1 August 1863.
135.‘American Complaints Against England’, 14 September 1861.
136.‘English Opinion as Distinguished from English Action on American Questions’, 31 October 1863.
137.Marx cited the Economist frequently in his journalism, criticizing it in 1861 and 1862 for back-pedalling on the Emancipation Proclamation (‘all cant’) and stoking patriotic hysteria in Britain over the Trent Affair. He also relied on it for facts and figures on US cotton and wheat imports, and for glimpses of ideological clarity (‘the cloven foot peeps out’). Karl Marx, The Civil War in the United States, New York 1961, pp. 5, 12–13, 42–43, 128, 145–46.
138.‘The Monroe Doctrine in 1823 and 1863’, 14 November 1863.
139.‘Negotiations for Peace’, 18 February 1865.
140.‘Abandonment of Transportation’, 25 February 1865.
141.‘Mr. Gladstone on Home Rule for Ireland’, 30 September 1871.
142.‘The Conservative Majority’, 7 February 1874.
143.‘The Irish Viceroyalty’, 21 October 1876. David Clinton paints a misleading picture of Bagehot as ‘anticolonial’, in part by ignoring Ireland, but also because he focuses so exclusively on Bagehot’s opposition to British intervention in the ‘Eastern Question’ in the last two years of his life. While this lends some support to the idea that Bagehot was wary of armed meddling in European affairs, it leaves out his attitude to the Empire, and all that came before 1875. His vehemence from this point on has more to do with hostility to a Conservative government led by Disraeli, whom he despised, than Clinton allows. Clinton, Tocqueville, Lieber, and Bagehot, pp. 76, 96–97, 100–102.
144.In championing ‘a purely muscular morality’, Carlyle and his intellectual allies, including John Ruskin and Charles Dickens, were behaving irresponsibly. ‘It is far more painful to witness their serious errors – because they ought to know better – than to read of the crimes and blunders of the poor coloured folk of Jamaica, whose very inferiority should have secured them the justest treatment.’ ‘Mr. Carlyle on Mr. Eyre’, 15 September 1866.
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