of the press – from the Westminster Review and the Spectator to the Times – took up the same cry.
Its editorialists dismissed the religious dimension of the question: disputes between the Russian Orthodox, French Catholic and Protestant Churches over control of holy places in Jerusalem and Bethlehem were an excuse for their respective nations ‘to peck at the unfortunate carcass of the Porte’. The issue lay elsewhere. If Britain failed to intervene to prop up the Ottomans against the Russians, its own empire in the Near East was in danger:
Russia will have command of Constantinople and the Dardanelles … she will be closer to the Levant than ourselves … her command over the Ottoman Court might at any time induce it to close off the Isthmus of Suez to us, or oblige us to engage in war to prevent such a catastrophe. It is perfectly obvious that our interest imperatively require either that Egypt shall be in our own hands, or in those of a naturally friendly and really independent power.95
In building its case for war the Economist blazoned its break with those who held that free trade automatically meant peace, or counselled the ‘hideous and shallow doctrine’ of non-interference in foreign affairs, even in the face of ‘barbarous sovereigns oppressing their subjects, or powerful states bullying and partitioning their weaker neighbours’. Ethical and commercial justifications for war with Russia were one. ‘Turkish independence’, ‘territorial integrity’, ‘justice, honour and national existence’ appeared side by side with warnings to British businessmen of the consequences of letting Tsar Nicolas take Constantinople.
That anyone who values India and is prepared to maintain and defend it, who regards England as a great empire and not as a little workshop, and who knows how much even of our safety depends upon our naval and especially our Mediterranean supremacy, should profess willingness to permit Russia to plant herself on the Bosporus and the Aegean, and regard it as a matter of indifference whether the key of our Eastern communication be held by a harmless friend or by a formidable rival – this, we confess, passes our powers of comprehension.96
The sooner war broke out the better, for a ‘precarious and ill-conceived peace is almost as fatal and discouraging to commerce as actual hostilities’.97
By the turn of 1854 Palmerston and his war party in parliament and the press had pushed a cautious cabinet headed by Aberdeen into striking an ambitious blow against Russia, with a scheme to shore up British interests in the Near East by offering swathes of the Baltic to Prussia, of the Balkans to Austria, and of the Caucasus to Turkey. Britain and France fought as allies, each loath to see the other benefit by the outcome, Britain eyeing with particular suspicion France’s competing claims in the Levant. The elderly British commander, Lord Raglan, who had lost his right arm at Waterloo, sometimes confused the French and Russians.98 From beginning to end the joint expedition was a disaster. French and British soldiers arrived in the pestilential Danube Delta in summer, and were sent on to the Crimea without maps, proper kit, food or medicine; they froze at the onset of winter. The battles of the Alma and Balaclava were beset by tactical errors; the siege of Sebastopol became the longest at that time in recorded history. The same papers that had bellowed for war now sent back, for the first time, horrifying images and stories from the front line.
The Economist, however, was not among them. ‘Our Gallant Army in the Crimea’ depicted a dying Maréchal Saint-Arnaud, deeply stirred by the behaviour of his British opposite number at the Alma. ‘The bravery of Lord Raglan’, he said, before breathing his last, ‘rivals that of antiquity. The rest of this item was a dispatch from … Lord Raglan.’99 As expectations of a quick victory dissolved, its coverage attempted to rally public opinion behind a Homeric struggle which ‘may task all our endurance … the commencement of that great conflict between liberty and despotism which Canning and Napoleon alike predicted as inevitable’. It reminded readers of the nature of the enemy, ‘whom we know to be the resolute, instinctive, conscientious foe of all that we hold dearest and most sacred – of human rights, civil liberty, enlightened progress’. Worse still, ‘freedom of trade, freedom of movement, freedom of thought, freedom of worship – all are proscribed as deadly sins in the Decalogue of Muscovy’. Giving thanks to the country’s ally, it explained: ‘France and England alone venture to make head against the terrible Colossus’, which, but for their courage, ‘would reign over Europe from the Ural Mountains to the Alps and Apennines, if not to the Pyrenees, without a rival and without check’.100
Diplomatic efforts for a negotiated peace were shot down from the beginning. The Economist sided with Palmerston, now prime minister, who wished to keep France in the war at all costs – with 310,000 men-in-arms compared to 98,000 for Britain, France’s will to fight started to flag earlier – and to expand operations, fielding an army to attack Russia through the Baltic. ‘Peace at any price or war at any cost?’ This was the wrong way of looking at the problem. ‘The correct mode is to inquire whether the objects we aim at be just? If they be, they must be fought for to the last drop of our blood and the last sovereign in our coffers.’101 Around this time the Economist finally acknowledged that cholera and typhus were killing more soldiers than the Russians. Yet the paper found Britain, at least, ‘was never served by abler or more zealous or more honest men’, and with the benefit of hindsight was even able to pull some lessons from the wreckage.102 Thanks to ‘the unimpaired resources of empire’, it declared in February 1856, shortly before the Peace of Paris was signed with its grudging assent, ‘never was there a year of greater or more uniform prosperity’.103 In the end, 21,000 British soldiers died, 16,000 from disease, exposure or starvation, along with 100,000 Frenchmen, 120,000 Turks and 450,000 Russians.104
Some of the Economist’s bellicosity can be explained by the fact that Wilson and Greg were government agents, making the paper a scrapbook of their wartime service. Setting aside previous scruples, Wilson defended Cornewall Lewis even when the latter caused an outcry among free traders for raising duties on sugar, spirits, coffee and tea in 1855.105 A £5 million loan to Turkey was needed, which Wilson helped to negotiate. He sprinkled lead articles with details of his meetings in Paris with Lord Cowley, ambassador to France, and Achille Fould, French finance minister. He secured the post of Commissioner of the Customs for Greg – also in Paris, transcribing his chats with the former premier François Guizot. Wartime London was a similar whirlwind of Allied loans and socializing, with Wilson near the centre: balls in honour of Louis-Napoleon, medal ceremonies for crippled heroes, and dinner parties; at one Ferdinand de Lesseps pitched his plans for the Suez Canal to Wilson over pudding as the poet Matthew Arnold, another guest, looked over the proposal.106
Neither Wilson’s editorial interventions nor his social life passed unnoticed in the wider liberal world, with which he had sometimes disagreed on foreign policy as early as 1850.107 Cobden and Bright furiously opposed the Crimean War, and had savage things to say about former brothers-in-arms who lent it support. Wilson was in a class apart, however; his betrayal was both personal, in light of the help they had given him to found the Economist, and political. All three had once shared a view of empire as a feudal residue. In Cobden’s early pamphlets free trade was perhaps less pronounced a theme even than the evils of foreign wars. England, Ireland and America, written in 1835 when he was thirty-one, summed up his position, which did not change. Trade was ‘the grand panacea’, the only thing, in stark contrast to misguided meddling abroad, likely to spread liberal institutions: ‘not a bale of merchandise leaves our shores, but it bears the seeds of intelligence … to the members of some less enlightened community; not a merchant visits our manufacturing industry, but he returns to his own country the missionary of freedom, peace and good government’.108 In the Economist’s early years Wilson devoted countless leaders to demonstrating how this process worked in practice. In the House of Commons, Cobden aimed to cut defence budgets; outside, he became an active member of the Peace Society. Free trade, peace and goodwill was his motto – the first naturally fostering the second, and vice versa. The idea that one country might force another to trade freely, let alone
