struck him as outrageous and hypocritical; now, though, the very liberals with whom he had fought against the Corn Laws were taking up this call. That Wilson was among them, formerly the most rigid expositor of laissez-faire principles imaginable, was a shock.
For Cobden the language used by the Economist and the rest of the hawkish press – ‘integrity of the Turkish Empire, balance of power’ – were ‘words without meaning, mere echoes of the past, suited for the mouths of senile Whiggery’.109 Wilson was a ‘Whig valet’, his defection symptomatic of a general desertion of wealthy Leaguers.110 Asked if he had read the latest Economist, which had backed a belligerent ultimatum to Russia, in December 1855, Cobden replied, ‘I never see the Economist though I have it on my conscience that I was mainly concerned in starting it. It was always a dull stupid paper even when it was honest. But to read sophistical arguments in no better style than Wilson’s is a task I would not condemn a dog to.’111 Writing to Bright, he asked: ‘Have you heard Greg has got a commissionership of the Customs, given him by Wilson, worth I suppose £1200 a yr., & nothing to interfere with his literary pursuits? The state into which our press has fallen is scandalous, dangerous to all sound public opinion, & it ought to be ripped up with the tomahawk of exposure.’112
For its part the Economist battered Cobden and Bright week after week. When Cobden published a letter in the Leeds Mercury maintaining that the war was as unpopular as it was badly run, the paper commented, ‘Few idols have ever so grieved or disappointed their worshippers as the member for West Riding … Cobden is becoming disingenuous … an ordinary demagogue.’113 In 1853 it had welcomed his pamphlet criticizing Britain’s annexation of Burma, ‘How Wars are Got Up in India’. Now, in 1856, much the same stance applied to Crimea in ‘What Next – and Next?’ was ‘irrational, feeble, and flagitious’.114 As for Bright and his ‘immoral moralizing’, it was in danger of running out of epithets – he was ‘the tool and sycophant of the Great Disturber of the peace’, the ‘intrepid advocate and reckless ally of the Czar’ and ‘worth a dozen regiments’.115 When a lead article in the paper fulminated against his and Cobden’s acts of deceit against the nation in arms – the article was entitled ‘The Enemies of Free Institutions’ – Bright directly addressed the Economist in the House of Commons, in a speech attacking the Turkish loan that Gladstone and Wilson had arranged behind the backs of parliament. ‘It is understood by the occupants of the Treasury bench, that when the country is at war the House of Commons is to be a shadow.’ Mocking the editorial anonymity behind which Wilson hid, he remarked:
If you want to know the opinions of Gentlemen upon the Treasury bench on this subject, I will give it you from a journal of great influence, which is supposed to be under the control of an hon. and very able Gentleman who sits upon that bench. Here is a paragraph which appeared in a leading article of that paper upon the 30th of December, 1854, and, of course, things are worse now – ‘It is difficult to say whether the leaders of the Radicals or the leaders of the Tories – whether Lord Derby, Mr. Bright, or Mr. Disraeli – have done most to awaken us to a perception how mischievous, at critical conjunctures, free legislative assemblies may become. The plain truth is, that Parliamentary government is, in time of war, an embarrassment, a danger, and an anomaly, and we have to thank the advocates of an extended suffrage and the supporters of rotten boroughs for making it so plain. Legislative bodies are needed for legislation and control. They are not needed, and they are not fitted for executive action, especially in moments of peril and difficulty. The seldomer Parliament meets, and the shorter time it sits during actual hostilities, the better for the country which it represents, and the better for its own dignity and influence.’ Now, that is a paragraph from the Economist newspaper.116
Bright had little doubt where the loan to fund an unjust war would end up. The money raised would not be given to the Turks directly, he noted, but to a French and English commission:
If we could by possibility, with the knowledge which we possess of the history of the past, conceive ourselves in the Ottoman Empire and subject to its rule, with two of the Powers of the West coming and, under the pretence of defending us from an enemy, taking first the revenues of Egypt, then that of Syria, then that of Smyrna, the inlet and outlet of their commerce, and then appointing a commission to sit in our capital city to expend the money necessary to defray the expenses of our army, should we not say, the glory of the nation had departed, and with it the last shadow of our independence? Should we not say, that the nations pretending to assist us were but treacherous friends … ? 117
Bright felt sure that behind the rhetoric of friendship lurked the desire for profit and territory, and he predicted that it would not be long before Britain and France made expansionist moves in the Near East. There he was wrong. The two allies in the Crimea turned their gaze instead to the Far East, where another backward and despotic empire was in need of liberal lessons in free trade.
The Second Opium War
The signal for the Second Opium War was given in October 1856, when Chinese police arrested the Chinese crew of the Arrow, a lorcha (a type of junk) in Canton accused of piracy. The British consul claimed, falsely, that the vessel was flying the Union Jack, that it was registered in Hong Kong, and so based on a treaty signed in 1843 (in the wake of the First Opium War) the Chinese had no right to detain anyone on board. Sir John Bowring, the plenipotentiary, chief superintendent of trade, governor, commander-in-chief and vice-admiral of Hong Kong, then sent a fleet to bomb Canton into submission – despite the fact that its governor had already released the captives and agreed to his terms, refusing only to apologize, since, as Governor Yeh stated, the Arrow was Chinese. For this, three weeks of fire rained down on Canton, followed by a four-year invasion ending in the sacking of Beijing. Thus was China opened to Western trade and culture.118 France, Russia and the US joined in the attack, but Britain and its special interest in one commodity gave the war its name. British revenue from opium was so vast at the time that it not only kept afloat the state machine in India, where most of the opium was grown, but turned a trade deficit with Asia in silk, tea and ceramics into an overall surplus.119 Chinese opium addicts were in demand, their supply limited by the ban the Qing dynasty had imposed on this powerful narcotic.
The pretext for invasion, and a widespread suspicion that the drug trade stood to benefit, sparked an uproar when news of the ‘Arrow incident’ reached London in 1857. The Conservative opposition leader Lord Derby brought forward a motion on 24 February condemning British behaviour as ‘the arrogant demands of overweening, self-styled civilization’, which was narrowly rejected in the upper house.120 Richard Bethell, Attorney General, privately advised ministers, ‘a very serious case against us on the points of international law could be, and probably would be, made in the Commons’.121 Cobden stepped in with a censure motion days later; carried by sixteen votes in a marathon debate, it toppled Lord Palmerston’s government, and an election was called.
Behind the scenes Cobden exhorted his press contacts to expose not only the illegality of British actions but also the free trade arguments with which some justified them. ‘There is no great empire where our trade is a quarter as free’, Cobden wrote, comparing the low duties charged in China favourably with Europe, and rounding on those close to Wilson, from Clarendon to Porter. Cobden denounced all groups backing war, from ‘Manchester fire-eaters’ and ‘the Liverpool China Association’ to the intrigues of Paris, London and Washington and the missionaries in league with them. ‘God help the Christians who think of making their religion acceptable in the rear of an opium war’, he wrote, ‘for surely nothing but an interruption of the laws of human nature by especial divine interposition could ever have that result!’122
This time the liberal backlash against any criticism of Britain’s action abroad was still more venomous than over Crimea. Bowring, the official at the centre of events, was a liberal intellectual of high standing, onetime editor of the Westminster Review, disciple and literary executor
