In 1847 the newspaper opposed the creation of a board of health. ‘We quite agree as to the evils’, went a leader, listing common urban plights such as narrow lanes, fetid pools of waste, and dingy and badly ventilated housing, ‘but the principle of laissez-faire compels us to disagree with those who promote Lord Morpeth’s Board of Health Bill as the remedy’.61 As the regulatory zeal of the Board intensified, so did the hostility of the Economist, which accused it of ‘lapsing into protection’ when it sought to merge the water companies of London or require new sewer systems in large towns. ‘Water is as much food as bread, and if the government must control the supply of the one, why not the other?’ Recent cholera epidemics were but ‘momentary terrors’, and should not be allowed to ‘suppress all the moral convictions which have been tangibly the experience of ages’.62 A book review criticized ‘the sanitary movement’ for its ‘shallow philosophy’, bound to aggravate the two main causes of disease. If the first was poverty (for which the remedy was free trade),
the second is that the people have never been allowed to take care of themselves. They have always been treated as serfs and children, and they have to a great extent become with respect to those objects government has undertaken to perform for them, imbecile … Besides, it makes them demand things from government – such as regulation for labour, for rates and wages – which no government can possibly accomplish. There is a worse evil than typhus or cholera or impure water, and that is mental imbecility.63
Some wondered if there was a role for central or local authorities to play in the disposal of ‘town guano’. ‘Certainly not. We are now agreed that it should not feed the people: why should it clear away their dirt? Every man is bound to remove his own refuse.’64 Attacks against public health officials and doctors grew violent and no one aroused such ire as the commissioner of the Board of Health, Edwin Chadwick, ‘a man of sincere benevolence’, but with ‘one mental peculiarity that utterly disqualifies him for the executive services of his country … he is essentially a despot and a bureaucrat’. The Economist rejoiced when he was forced to resign in 1854, but felt ‘free-born Britons’ were unsafe from his ‘frightful pertinacity’ so long as he remained in the country. The solution was to send him to Russia, as a gift, ‘to preside over and reform her corrupt but far stretching bureaucracy’.65
The Economist was not only opposed to public education of any kind. It even objected to charity schools which, by providing for children, removed all restraint on the appetites of their parents, who begat more of them. In London alone, 80,000 clogged the streets. ‘The houseless, deserted children have benevolence to thank for tempting their parents from the path of duty’, the paper opined. Alms and the state were poor substitutes for nature and reason; the truly compassionate were advised to let the struggle for survival run its course.
The whole history of the poor – weekly doles of loaves and soup; labour rate acts; the whole vast scheme of protecting their industry; charitable education, as well as alms-giving in the streets; factory acts; visiting the poor in their abodes; plans of emigration, and plans of penal reformation, have all in time been intended to promote the wellbeing of the poor, and have all ended in producing the population, which, according to Lord Ashley’s description, is about the most degraded in Europe.66
The Economist reiterated this position, even as pressure mounted in parliament for some form of national education bill in 1850 and 1851. ‘To be successful education must be sought from self-interest, and obtained by self-exertion.’ Common people should be ‘left to provide education as they provide food for themselves’.67
Editorials often went beyond denouncing particular laws as misguided: they also laid out grand theoretical statements, as in a series of articles asking, ‘Who is to Blame for the Condition of Society?’ After weighing in turn the role of the lower classes, the capitalists, the landowners and the state, the Economist found that the first and last shared responsibility – but unevenly. For in a world in which ‘each man is responsible to nature for his own actions’, and for learning from them, the poor were fully culpable for their misery, wasting wages and free time on sex, drink and gambling instead of practising thrift and self- improvement. ‘Looking to their habits, to their ignorance, to their deference to false friends, to their unshaken confidence in a long succession of charlatan leaders, we cannot exonerate them. Nature makes them responsible for their conduct – why should not we? We find them suffering, and we pronounce them at fault.’ The capitalists and landlords, taken together, were selfish, but so much the better, ‘for the larger their income, the greater is the quantity of net produce provided for the food of the community, and the greater is the quantity of employment and the amount of wages for the labouring classes.’ As for the state, it was simply unable to comprehend this complex social organism, and by attempting to enact laws whose effects no one could predict in advance, undertook a task ‘rather fit for God than man’. The reality was that ‘the desire for happiness, or what is called self-interest is universal. It is not confined to man – it pervades the whole animal kingdom. It is the law of nature, and if the pursuit of self-interest, left equally free for all, does not lead to the general welfare, no system of government can accomplish it.’ A more total and radical justification of individual responsibility in a market society is hard to imagine.
That all of these prescriptions could seem unfeeling the Economist was aware. But that they were anything other than absolutely true and ultimately humane was out of the question. Political economy was a science and so certain was the newspaper that its laws had been discovered, and by whom, that it argued repeatedly for changing its very name.
The application of the adjective political to the science of ‘The Wealth of Nations’ is of French origin; and never was an epithet more misapplied; for the distinguishing feature of Smith’s science is the proof it continually supplies that all policy – unless laissez-faire, or standing idle and religiously refraining from interfering, can be called a policy – is erroneous, injurious to the production of wealth, and repudiated by the science.
Political economy was a contradiction in terms because economics was the absence of political interference as such. ‘All matters connected with politics being but tradition, guess-work, assumption, fancy, usurpation, or expediency, there is no other science in politics but political economy.’ A review, penned by Hodgskin, of Cornewall Lewis’s Treatise on the Methods of Reasoning and Observation in Politics, criticized Lewis for accepting the very term, for ‘the principles of the science of the production of wealth may altogether be contrary, as we know they are in many cases, to the practices of political society, and, far from being subservient to it, may be destined to subvert it.’68
Free Trade’s Triumph, Ireland’s Tragedy
Despite holding to this essential antagonism between politics and economics, and the primacy of the second over the first, Wilson followed leaders of the League into parliament. Stockport, just outside Manchester, returned Cobden to the House in 1841, the year Sir Robert Peel formed a Tory government after a decade of Whig rule under Lords Melbourne and Grey. Bright joined from Durham, farther north, in 1843. Together they made the lower chamber echo with free trade motions, though both were surprised by the speed of their triumph, as well as its instrument. Peel split the cabinet and shocked and angered his own party with a bill to phase out the Corn Laws in 1846. What had caused this volte-face? In his last speech as prime minister, Peel gave the credit to Cobden, ‘the name which ought to be, and which will be associated with the success of these measures’. Cobden was more modest, reckoning that ‘despite all the expenditure on public instruction, the League would not have carried the repeal of the Corn Laws when they did, if it had not been for the Irish famine’.69 For Peel, the immediate impetus was indeed Ireland, England’s oldest and longest-suffering colony. Here the appearance of an unknown, virulent fungus, which quickly turned healthy potatoes into black decaying mush, was set to expose the failings of English rule – imposed
