not confined to Ireland in 1848, as upheavals swept across Europe, threatening not just continental monarchies but alarming even the crown-in-parliament in Britain, where Chartism saw a brief, unnerving revival. The Economist could find no words harsh enough to describe ‘a movement around which are aggregated all the turbulence, all the rapscallionism, all the demagogic ambition of the nation’. Its demands would hand power to the ‘one class exclusively, the most open to corruption and deception … partial, unfair, fatal, despotic’. Editorials argued that electoral reform would only infantilize the lower orders yet further: ‘it unteaches the people the great lesson of self-dependence; it encourages them to look to government rather than themselves, both for the causes and the remedies of their sufferings’. Political leadership belonged to the middle classes. They paid the most tax and practised the virtues, ‘frugality, industry and forethought’, on which the prosperity of all other classes depended.84
The appalling tumult in European capitals, on the other hand, put these domestic troubles in perspective. If there was some hope in Germany, since the revolution there was ‘led by the nobles, and consecrated by the priests’, France was lost: it had too many state employees, no respect for property (or credit: deposits had been frozen), and was obsessed by the wrong kind of freedom, ‘equality … without the slightest care for personal liberty … the right of unfettered action and speech’. Compared to the Irish or the French, the English were relatively safe: ‘order is beloved; property is sacred; we respect the rights of others.’ In private Wilson was even more scathing about the French, ‘a weak, puerile and despicable race … the only thing that will do them any good is the iron grasp of a sturdy but wise despot’.85
City, State, Empire: Joining the Gentlemanly Capitalists
The Economist’s influence grew in lockstep with that of its editor. Wilson sat on the parliamentary committees – Commercial Distress, Banking, Currency, Life Insurance – crafting the policies on which his paper pronounced each week. His aristocratic colleagues, a little unsure about the rudiments of political economy, leant on him. The ageing Duke of Wellington, victor of Waterloo and a monument to Tory reaction, required a private tutorial before agreeing to let repeal of the Navigation Laws pass through the upper chamber. The Whig imperialist Lord Palmerston took his lessons on early morning strolls back from Whitehall; his amusing banter more than making up for his ‘belligerent propensities’.86 Lord Grey, grudging sponsor of electoral reform in 1832, passed colonial news – Guiana, the Cape, a lecture by Lord Elgin on the progress of Upper Canada – to the paper. The diplomat Lord Howden paid a visit before setting sail for Argentina and Brazil to negotiate lower sugar duties, promising news of his progress.87 Wilson carried these intimacies into the countryside, first in Wiltshire, then in Somerset, with hunting, ponies for the girls, gentlemanly pursuits – judging sheep contests – rounding out the days.
This change in status was accompanied by a shift in interest from industry, where his father had given him his start, to finance – destined in the framework of the British Empire to benefit from free trade to a greater extent than any other branch of commerce. In 1852, during a brief interlude of Tory rule under Lord Derby, Wilson went to work on a new venture, which he must have partially funded from Economist profits: the following year the Banker’s Gazette section of the paper announced the founding of a Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China, initial capital £1 million, prospects ‘unrivalled’, success ‘beyond doubt’.88 Wilson’s pieces for the Economist on the 1847 financial crisis – published as Capital, Currency and Banking the same year – pointed out, in the wake of so many bank failures, a field for profitable investment in the Far East, and lessons on avoiding a similar fate there. For the official historian of Standard and Chartered Bank, this explains a charter initially restricting its exchange activities. Wilson showed ‘grave caution’, and emphasized that the note issue would be covered by ‘public securities and bullion on the same principle as was observed by the Bank of England’.89 Wilson insisted the bank be pan-Asian and include India, a case he made directly to Gladstone in a letter lobbying for a royal charter over the objections of the East India Company and the Board of Control.90 In the next few years the Chartered Bank expanded rapidly, driven by the growth of trade within Asia, most importantly in Indian opium, for the sake of which Britain would fight a second war with China.
At almost the same moment, Wilson was promoted to high government office in the Peelite-Whig coalition headed by Lord Aberdeen. As Financial Secretary to the Treasury until 1857, he assisted Gladstone in drafting his first budgets. To these landmarks in fiscal minimalism he contributed consolidation of customs duties, reducing or ending levies on soap, tea and apples, and cutting and simplifying all other import rules, a long-standing demand of City merchants whose realization Wilson viewed as a capstone of the free trade movement in England.91 In 1855 Cornewall Lewis succeeded Gladstone as Chancellor, making the Treasury an Economist stronghold. An academician whose delivery was described by a contemporary as ‘enough to dishearten any political assembly … nearly inaudible, monotonous, halting’, which yet ‘covered very powerful resources of argument, humour and illustration’,92 he once told his friend: ‘You see, Wilson, you are an animal, I am only a vegetable.’93 The self-deprecation was not to be taken seriously: Wilson held him in high regard, and with Lewis’s help was about to stamp his ideas on the map of the world.
Now ensconced at the pinnacle of the state, Wilson was in a position to survey the empire it had acquired, and was continuing to expand. A series of wars to defend and augment its borders, secure bases, trading rights and routes, and check the progress of rivals, coincided with his new vantage point. British imperial power started to become central to the liberal worldview of the Economist in ways it had not been before. In the 1840s the paper had viewed even white settler colonies like Canada either as burdens that cost more to defend than they were worth, or as simple outlets for trade and investment, over which it was unnecessary to exert direct control. (In this spirit, it once wanted to dismiss the entire diplomatic corps and replace it with merchants, who ‘may feel petty slights in intercourse with foreigners’ but never got so worked up as to risk their lives, while ‘inflated representatives excite strife and bloodshed on account of dignity’.)94 This was a position that could draw on Adam Smith and the Physiocrats, for whom colonies were among the most misguided and pernicious forms of protection. To their anti-mercantilist agenda, the Economist of these years added its theory of natural harmony, according to which free trade meant peace and goodwill not just at home between classes, but among the nations of the world as well.
Once Wilson was in government, however, the Economist revised this earlier vision of laissez-faire. Where imperial interests were at stake, war could become an absolute necessity, to be embraced. This conversion split the free traders of the 1840s, escalating into an epic confrontation with the most profound consequences for the Economist and the liberalism it embodied, which played out over a run of interconnected imperial conflicts from 1853 to 1860. Wars against Russia and China, and conflicts in India, rocked British liberalism at home and recast it abroad. Since then, the Economist has rarely wavered from the view that laissez-faire may best be furthered through the barrel of a gun.
Crimean Turning Point: Liberals Fall Out
Though little remembered today, the Crimean War was by far the largest armed conflict in the century between 1815 and 1914, involving pitched battles between the major powers in Russia and the Balkans, and naval clashes from the Black Sea to the Baltic and the Arctic to the Pacific. The war was ostensibly triggered by religious quarrels in Ottoman-controlled Palestine, and at stake was the fate of the Ottoman Empire itself – a large part of which still stood in south-eastern Europe – and which of the rival predators would dominate or dismember it: Russia in the East, or Britain and France in the West. War fever took hold of the British press late in 1853, when news reached London of the destruction of the Ottoman fleet at Sinope on the Black Sea, after a surprise naval bombardment by Russia. The Economist, however, had been clamouring for an armed solution to the ‘Eastern
