universe of some of the main characters: what did their efforts look like in the Economist, which first appeared as a prospectus and preliminary number in August 1843? In it, Wilson promised ‘original leading articles in which free-trade principles will be most rigidly applied to all the important questions of the day’. His language conjures up images of a crusade more readily than a business journal. Abroad he saw ‘within the range of our commercial intercourse whole continents and islands, on which the light of civilization has scarce yet dawned’; at home, ‘ignorance, depravity, immorality and irreligion, abounding to an extent disgraceful to a civilized country’. In both cases the civilizing medium was free trade, which ‘we seriously believe will do more than any other visible agent to extend civilization and morality – yes, to extinguish slavery itself’. ‘We have no party or class interests or motives’, he continued, in the spirit of his pamphlets, ‘we are of no class, or rather of every class: we are of the landowning class: we are of the commercial class interested in our colonies, foreign trade, and manufactures’. One day, finally, it would be as difficult to understand the case for protection ‘as it is now to conceive how the mild, inoffensive spirit of Christianity could ever have been converted into the plea of persecution and martyrdom, or how poor old wrinkled women, with a little eccentricity, were burned by our forefathers for witchcraft.’ This was free trade as a mission, a worldview, which the Economist promised to serve and spread.51
In its first two years the fledgling paper was true to its word, examining the deleterious effects of tariffs on the supply, quality and cost of sugar, wool, wheat, wine, iron, corn, cochineal, silk, fish, lace, coal, coffee, wages, currency, tailors, slaves and French linen. Information was conveyed in two densely packed columns, beneath the ornate Gothic letterhead, The Economist: or the Political, Commercial, Agricultural, and Free Trade Journal. The paper gradually put on weight: sixteen pages the first year, twenty-four the next, and twenty-eight for two decades afterwards. These contained new sections, responding to reader requests and business trends: banking and railway reports, a monthly trade supplement, followed eventually by the first wholesale price index, statistical data on the terms of foreign trade, industrial profits, shipping rates, insurance shares, capital issues, and anything else that could be measured. Wilson altered the subtitle after less than two years to the Weekly Commercial Times, Bankers’ Gazette and Railway Monitor, a Political, Literary, and General Newspaper – a signal of his constant search for wider horizons, outside and beyond the League. Around that time a small notice began to appear, making the same point. ‘The Economist from its extensive and increasing circulation among Members of Parliament, Bankers, Merchants, Capitalists, and the Trading Community, is well adapted as the medium for advertisements intended to meet the attention of those numerous and respectable classes.’ Civil servants and professionals could have been added to the list. By the 1850s circulation was around 3,000 – small, even by contemporary standards, but held in the most powerful hands in the country and already sent to capitals in Europe and North and South America.52
The Economist addressed itself to the same social transformations that had given rise to Chartism – ‘this great national leprosy … want and pauperism and hunger’. Yet in contrast to these other agitations it declared itself above class. It alone could speak disinterestedly, and it implored readers – the very ones with the power to do so – not to interfere with a divine order: ‘personal experience has shown us in the manufacturing districts the people want no acts of parliament to coerce education or induce moral improvement … we look far beyond the power of acts … and the efforts of the philanthropist or charitable.’53 From its point of view the danger was never just the protectionists in parliament but the quorum there of gentle souls totally ignorant of the laws of political economy.
The Economist considered it a duty to instruct the latter, starting with the abolitionists, ‘that body of truly great philanthropists’, of the unintended consequences of their campaign to end slavery. The boycott they proposed of all goods made using slave labour would hurt British consumers and punish slaves. It would decimate foreign trade: half was in textiles, most spun from slave cotton, and must logically extend to gold, silver and copper imports from Brazil; rice, indigo, cochineal and tobacco from the US, Mexico and Guatemala; and sugar and coffee from Cuba. To really help slaves, and encourage masters to offer them wages, the answer was free trade, which would demonstrate to slave owners that free labour was in fact cheaper than the bonded kind. Britain could do its part by ending special treatment for its own West Indian colonies, which practically forced others to use slaves as a way to stay competitive. ‘That is a very doubtful humanity’, it concluded, which ‘seeks to inflict certain punishment upon poorer neighbours … for some speculative advantage on the slaves of Brazil’.54
Almost all the social reform movements of the Victorian era, intent on actively improving the lot of the lower classes at home, received this sober going-over from the Economist. The editorial reaction to the railway and factory legislation is indicative, though by no means exhaustive. In obliging companies to provide once a day a third tier of service for working-class passengers, who had formerly to travel in exposed freight cars, the 1844 Railway Act meddled in a problem best left to market competition. ‘Where the most profit is made, the public is best served … limit the profit, and you limit the exertion of ingenuity in a thousand ways.’55 That same year a Factory Bill limiting the workday for women to twelve hours, the same amount as for teenagers, was denounced as confused, illogical, harmful; proof that ‘no consistent medium between perfect freedom of capital and labour, and that principle which would regulate wages, profits, and the whole relations of life by acts of legislation – between perfect independent self-reliance and regulated socialism – between Adam Smith and Robert Owen’, was possible. As if that were not emphatic enough the next week it declared, ‘the more it is investigated, the more we are compelled to acknowledge that in any interference with industry and capital, the law is powerful only for evil, but utterly powerless for good.’56
The movement for a ten-hour day for adult males was therefore little less than criminally insane, abetted by demagogues, and sentimental old Tories like Lord Ashley, who in fact favoured a more modest measure aimed only at women and children. This caveat made no difference. The result would be to reduce the supply of labour, raise wages, increase the cost of manufactures, undercut British goods in foreign markets, and ultimately destroy all employment and industry. As Lord Ashley’s Ten-Hours Bill was taken up in 1846 the Economist reminded workers their interests were identical with those of their employers, and asked them to refrain from sniping about greed, for it ‘must be remembered that the capitalists of England are exposed to a keen competition, not only among themselves, from which no individual can escape – and that capitalist is sure to go to the wall who is less sharp and exacting than his fellows – but also to a similar competition with the capitalists of other countries.’57 The Economist attacked the bill long after it had passed into law: for the factory inspectorate it created – ‘busybodies’ who treated businessmen like ‘thieves and vagabonds’ – and for infringing on the rights of women and children to spend as many hours as they wanted working, in whatever way, be it at night or in relays.58 The paper’s influential tirades helped opponents in parliament water down this and similar measures.
Marx, a dedicated reader of the Economist, mocked its editor mercilessly for his apocalyptic predictions about the effects of these industrial regulations. In Capital, ‘James Wilson, an economic mandarin of high standing’, had simply rehashed the old shibboleths of Nassau Senior in 1836, among them the notion that ‘if children under 18 years of age, instead of being kept the full 12 hours in the warm and pure moral atmosphere of the factory, are turned out an hour sooner into the heartless and frivolous outer world, they will be deprived, owing to idleness and vice, of all hope of salvation for their souls.’59 A reduction in the working day for children under nine had not, Marx added, forced cotton mills to run at a loss. If Wilson and his writers applied the same kind of logic to every legislative demand, even to those from which its readers stood to benefit – the Economist was against patent law, copyright protection or funding for scientific research, and for a time against what is
