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  Backing the Economist: Wilson and the Whig Grandees

  Armed with such arguments Wilson became a regular speaker at meetings of the League, where Archibald Prentice of the Manchester Times remembered him as ‘relying more upon statistical figures than on figures of speech, and trusting more to facts and reasoning than to rhetorical flourishes.’ Yet his audience ‘had come to learn and not to be excited by flashes of oratory’, listening with ‘deep interest for three quarters of an hour’.21 Wilson for his part preferred the pen to the podium, and continued publishing, with Fluctuations of Currency, Commerce, and Manufactures: Referable to the Corn Laws in 1840. The assemblies were noisy and drew too many ‘Manchester School extremists’. After a meeting at the Drury Lane Theatre in London, in which Cobden, Bright and Daniel O’Connell took front stage, he confided to his family that this was ‘not to his taste, and he would be sorry to see other political questions settled that way’.22

  Wilson was aware that his voice carried farther than the theatre pits of the capital. His writings had caught the attention of a group of Whig politicians sympathetic to the goals of the League, if not to its noisy proceedings. In 1839, lordly letters began to stream into Dulwich Place. Charles Villiers, the radical MP for Wolverhampton, asked for help in drafting his annual motion for repeal in the House of Commons, a solitary ritual, usually voted down by a margin of several hundred. Would Wilson, he added, be kind enough to call on his brother George, fourth Earl of Clarendon, at the Athenaeum Club? William Pleydell-Bouverie, third Earl of Radnor, wrote from Longford Castle requesting anti-Corn Law arguments he could use against the surrounding squires in Wiltshire.23 Radnor, who took an almost fatherly interest in Wilson – nominating him to the Reform Club in 1842, and helping him take his first steps into politics – prided himself on being the most radical of all grandees. At the age of ten a terrified witness of the French Revolution, Radnor later became convinced (after repairing to Edinburgh and Oxford and studies of Smith, Blackstone and Montesquieu) that progress was possible without reliving those scenes of democratic chaos: the cause of individual liberty was best served by laissez-faire economics coupled with the political rule of an enlightened aristocracy.24 On a visit to Radnor’s vast demesne near Salisbury, built up on investments in the Levant trade, the French statesman Alexis de Tocqueville observed that the Radnor family embodied the eminently commercial character of the English nobility.25

  One drawing room after another, in town and country, opened its doors to Wilson, who passed through them to find the backers he would need to start the Economist. His message was that complete free trade would mean an end to the trade cycle itself, a thesis whose utopian flavour is evident in all his major works between 1839 and 1841 – from Influences and Fluctuations to The Revenue; or What Should the Chancellor Do?26 The idea of starting a newspaper arose soon after the last of these pamphlets appeared, for it was clear that neither corn nor the League offered sufficient scope for Wilson to develop his unique vision. ‘There never was a time when an independent organ was more required,’ Villiers insisted in the spring of 1843. Meeting at his club, Wilson found him ‘very fond of the thing, – but from what he said I fear we shall have some difficulty with the League – it appears they are extremely jealous of their importance and will want it a League Paper, and as such I will have nothing to do with it.’ Cobden was meanwhile reporting to Bright that ‘James Wilson has a plan for starting a weekly Free Trader by himself and his friends’. The two tried to persuade him to edit the Anti-Bread Tax Circular instead. Newspapers, Cobden informed Wilson, were ‘graves de fortunes in London … have you made up your mind to a great and continuous pecuniary loss?’ To Bright he wrote in slight bemusement, ‘Wilson has a notion that a paper would do more good if it were not the organ of the League but merely their independent support.’27 Still, he noted, Wilson was reluctant to act without their approval.

  Wilson desperately needed the League for its subscribers and distribution networks and so tried to explain his reasoning at a meeting with Bright and George Wilson, chairman of the League, to which he also invited Radnor. To his Anti-Corn Law colleagues he promised new and more influential converts than could be reached by any journal bearing the direct imprint of the League. His intended audience, he told Cobden in June, in what was probably his most compelling pitch, was ‘the higher circles of the landed and monied interests’.28 Wilson’s other partners came from just these social heights, and they wanted a moderate journal free of the faintest traces of populism. From Radnor he obtained £500, while the League, with the aim of winning both the City of London and the countryside, agreed to order 20,000 copies.29 For Cobden the journal would be another means of putting pressure on opinion within parliament – and of altering its composition, since a crucial by-election pitting a free-trader against a protectionist was coming up in the City.30

  To ensure the success of his venture Wilson imposed some drastic personal economies. He rented out one of his homes, and ordered a halt to pineapples in the hothouses. By shipping his wife and six daughters to Boulogne to take the waters and dismissing all servants – save nurse, maid, housekeeper and errand boy – he raised a further £800. In a letter to his wife in France, Wilson confided another reason for his drive for independence: ‘no question will ever arise as to the property, or to whom the benefit of the paper will belong after it shall have risen to a good circulation which I hope it may do in time.’ From the start the Economist was a business and had to make money.31

  Yet its founding was also a milestone in political and economic thought, a bugle blast of the first age of global capitalism. Wilson and his newspaper became more than mouthpieces for the Manchester school: they developed and disseminated the doctrine it embodied – laissez-faire liberalism – in its clearest and most consistent form. It was with this aim in mind that Wilson refused to work for the League. ‘My paper would not do for that purpose … mine must be perfectly philosophical, steady and moderate; nothing but pure principles.’32 Thus a footnote in the history of the Anti-Corn Law movement quickly eclipsed it: of the millions who now read the Economist how many have heard of the forces that made it possible, or the principles by which it found distinction?

  The Original Cast of the Economist

  The economic historian Scott Gordon thought he saw the force of an idea, steady if not moderate, in a portrait of Wilson painted a year before his death:

  He sits stolidly in his chair, his hands folded in finality. His round face is benevolent, but there is the unmistakable mark of doctrine in the eyes, close set and steady, and there is that thin, firm mouth. ‘There is no nonsense about me,’ they say. ‘I know what is right, I work hard, and I do my duty.’ ‘What is this man’s passion?’ one wonders, for surely he has one: good portraits do not lie about that. Is it Temperance? Abolition of slavery? Prevention of cruelty to animals? Education? It is all of these things and many more, for it is the one thing, the one principle, which will make the whole world a harmonious and beneficent order. It is laissez-faire.33

  Wilson controlled the Economist and wrote much of its content. ‘He worked on it indefatigably,’ remembered Herbert Spencer, sub-editor from 1848 to 1853, ‘and, being a man of good business judgment, sufficient literary faculty, and extensive knowledge of commercial and financial matters, soon made it an organ of the mercantile world, and, in course of a relatively short time, a valuable property.’34 His collaborators were perhaps the only men whose doctrinal commitments exceeded his own. Thomas Hodgskin was the most influential editor between 1844 and 1857, followed by Spencer and William Rathbone Greg, a leader-writer starting in 1847. Several other distinguished individuals made occasional contributions, including Charles Villiers’s brother-in-law Sir George Cornewall Lewis, Poor Law Commissioner and later Chancellor of the Exchequer in Palmerston’s first government, for whom Wilson worked as financial secretary. Lewis was also a classicist, linguist, philologist and political theorist, whose key public service had been to extend the English Po
or Law of 1834 to Ireland – condemning claimants of state assistance to workhouses, to be made as unpleasant as possible to teach their inmates self-reliance. Nassau Senior, the main author of the Poor Law and one of the most eminent economists of his day, was another contributor; for Wilson he seems to have written on foreign affairs.35 Together they extended laissez-faire in every conceivable direction, embellishing and amending it in the process. These were the original voices hidden behind the anonymous, imperious judgments for which the Economist would become famous.

  Hodgskin may seem oddly out of place among them, given his reputation as a Ricardian socialist and radical anarchist, whose texts from the 1820s so inspired Marx. When Wilson met Hodgskin, however, he was no longer arguing that capital and labour were locked in a battle to the death, or explaining that the labour theory of value showed how the former shamelessly cheated the latter of its moral right to the whole of what it produced.36 By 1843 Hodgskin had retreated from such attacks on capital, and the Ricardian reading of class conflict that fired them. What remained was an anarchic individualism: a profound distrust of all government and legislation, no matter how enlightened, and a deistic faith in natural law. That year he published a free trade tract praising the League in terms that would have made sense to Wilson; repeal of the Corn Laws, it argued, was merely a first step in beating back the Leviathan of the state, ‘a huge system of injustice, all of which must be removed’.37 Even as a young man Hodgskin had distinguished himself from other socialists in seeing the free market, not mutual aid, as the only way for workers to secure the full fruits of their labours. In the 1830s he no longer imagined that this would come about as a result of victory over the middle classes, but by workers being absorbed into its ranks.

  Now we find, in consequence of the respect for the natural rights of property, that a large middle class, completely emancipated from the bondage of destitution which the law … sought to perpetuate, has grown up in every part of Europe, uniting in their own persons the character both of labourers and capitalists. They are fast increasing in numbers; and we may hope, as the beautiful inventions of art gradually supersede unskilled labour, that they, reducing the whole society to equal and free men, will gradually extinguish all that yet remains of slavery and oppression.38

  ‘All these changes have been effected in spite of the law,’ he added, driving home his point that the middle class, if left alone, could achieve what no earthly government could. Hodgskin wrote book reviews as well as leaders, rebutting social reformers on everything from the Poor Law and Factory Acts to health and sanitation committees, and questions of crime and penal law.39

  Herbert Spencer was twenty-eight in 1848. He had yet to formulate his famous theories of social evolution but was groping towards them, and Wilson was favourably impressed by his first efforts, a series of letters to the Nonconformist published as the pamphlet The Proper Sphere of Government in 1843. In it Spencer argued that the state was originally designed to do almost nothing, except ‘defend the natural rights of man – to protect person and property’. Its proper sphere was definitely ‘not to regulate commerce; not to educate the people; not to teach religion; not to administer charity; not to make roads and railways’.40 He put the Economist together each week, working and sleeping at the Strand offices, where he sometimes dined with Hodgskin.41 He contributed little of his own writing. But he did soak up the atmosphere, even if he preferred going to the Royal Italian Opera, or crossing the street to see Westminster Review editor John Chapman. Through Chapman he met the leading radical thinkers of the day, and a publisher for his first book in 1850.

  Social Statics owed more to his Economist colleagues than his new friends, however. Both in its hostility to Utilitarian concepts of law and morality and style, direct and flippant, Spencer’s book was exactly like an Economist leader. The visible hand of the state was slippery: what began with ‘tax paid teachers’ was bound to end in doctors and scientists, ‘government funerals’, and things so absurd only the French could have dreamt of them, ‘public ball rooms, gratis concerts, cheap theatres, with state-paid actors, musicians, masters of ceremonies’. Meddling with the marketplace was far from a laughing matter, however. It had truly dire consequences, upsetting a natural process of adaptation on which all material progress depended: ‘principles that show themselves alike in the self-adjustment of planetary perturbations and in the healing of a scratched finger – in the balance of social systems and the increased hearing in a blind man’s ear – in the adaptation of prices to produce and the acclimatization of a plant.’42 A strong utopian element was evident. Spencer maintained that out of these harsh and slightly mysterious mechanisms of adjustment would emerge a perfect society of sexual equality, intellectual cultivation, and an end to private ownership of land.

  This last point went too far for Hodgskin, who noted, in an otherwise glowing review in the Economist, ‘the right of each individual is not to use the land … but each to use his own faculties’.43 Laissez-faire nevertheless received an important new justification in Spencer, who, as one historian has argued, wished to show that ‘the individualistic competitive society of Victorian England had been ordained by nature and was the sole guarantor of progress’.44 If some elements of his positivist social philosophy postdate his time at the Economist – for example, his juxtaposition of Lamarckian evolution and Darwinian natural selection after 1859, when he coined ‘survival of the fittest’ – these would be taken up with growing frequency in its pages.

  One conduit for social evolutionary theories in the Economist was William Rathbone Greg, who came up with his own applications of them. In fact, Greg had met Darwin before Spencer, when, as classmates at the University of Edinburgh, both Darwin and Greg joined the freethinking Plinian Society. Where Spencer stressed the internal, class dynamics of Social Darwinism – the struggle for survival in nature applied to economic competition between individuals in the nation – Greg pushed it in other directions: to the competition between races and nations and even sexes. It was this version, very often opposed to that of Spencer, which had a major impact on the next editor, Walter Bagehot.

  Greg authored some of the paper’s most ardent laissez-faire positions, applied indiscriminately to the Irish, the Gospels, the working class and women. Like Wilson he was the son of a mill-owner turned publicist for the League, winning its praise for his 1842 essay Agriculture and the Corn Laws. He was even more socially conservative, while indulging in more Victorian symptoms and mystic fads than Wilson would have thought decent. A mesmerist, he also claimed to be able to magnetize livestock, and experienced melancholia, dyspepsia, neuralgia and vapours. He claimed to abhor fornication, especially in women. Under similar psychological pressures his wife and brother went mad.45 Greg soldiered on, consoled that these and other traits could be discerned from inspection of the human skull – something he was glad to do at parties as a practising phrenologist. He also found time to write books and articles for the Economist, the North British Review, Westminster Review and Edinburgh Review.

  Greg seems to have fallen out with most of the women he met in these liberal circles – a fact linked not only to his hobbies but his influence on the paper. One reason may have been an 1862 article entitled ‘Why Are Women Redundant?’, which argued that unmarried British women – all 1.5 million – should be asked to emigrate. ‘He is very pleasing,’ wrote his Westminster Review editor George Eliot, ‘but somehow he frightens me dreadfully’. She praised his temperament and brain. ‘But when you see him across a room, you are unpleasantly impressed, and can’t believe he wrote his own books.’46 The popular political economist and writer Harriet Martineau was more forthright. Greg was insolent, his mind unbalanced. She condemned his view of blacks as inherently inferior, and suspected him of writing Economist pieces with ‘mistakes of the grossest kind on the American constitution … always on the slaveholding side’. Despite all contrary evidence, she added later, ‘he will go on supposing the Negro to be always sucking cane sugar in th
e sun … one might easily show him and Carlyle negroes considerably less “savage” than themselves.’ At least Thomas Carlyle was a ‘gentleman’ where women were concerned. Greg ‘philanders vulgarly & on the other hand unconsciously regards them insultingly’.47

  After Wilson, Hodgskin and Greg, one of the most important early contributors to the Economist was a foreigner who never actually worked there – Frédéric Bastiat, the leading advocate of free trade in France. Bastiat was a French complement to Wilson, whom he met alongside other leaders of the Anti-Corn Law League on his trips to England in the 1840s. The Economist reported on his Association pour la Liberté des Echanges (modelled on the League), quoted from its journal, Le Libre-Echange, reviewed his books – Harmonies Economiques was a special favourite. Dubbed ‘the Cobden of France’, Bastiat’s ability to distil laissez-faire principles into epigrams surpassed that of anyone in England. ‘The state’, he wrote in a style that captivated Wilson, ‘is the great fiction by which everybody tries to live at the expense of everybody else’.48 Bastiat considered the Economist a model. ‘There never was a periodical in which all the questions of political economy were treated with so much depth and impartiality. It is a precious collection of facts, doctrine and experience mutually support each other in its columns: its diffusion on the continent would have excellent effects.’49 On his death the paper returned the compliment, devoting an entire leader to ‘the most consistent and sturdiest opponent of Government action who has appeared in our time, or, perhaps, has ever appeared in the world’.50