is Free Trade, and Free Trade is Jesus Christ.’ He had also been a close friend of Cobden and Bright.123 The Economist defended Bowring.124 He had acted a little ‘precipitously’, but it would only sow mischief to reprimand or recall him: besides, even if he had been in error, and his actions were technically illegal, and even if, ‘as regards that illicit trade our hands are not clean’ – an allusion to opium – ‘all declare that satisfactory, safe, and dignified intercourse with those arrogant and cruel people is impossible till they have met with severe chastisement’. The paper did not fear for Europeans resident in China, ‘for the same mail that carries out this news will carry out such reinforcements as will put opposition and danger at defiance’.125 In retrospect, there was a thread that ran between the wars in Crimea and Canton. ‘Trade is as much a necessity of society as air or food or clothing or heat.’ Interventions were therefore akin to humanitarian operations.
We may regret war … but we cannot deny that great advantages have followed in its wake. As the improvement both of Turkey and Russia will be consequent on the war now happily at an end; so any war with China that results in bringing her people more completely into trade communication with all other nations … relieving them from the temptation to put infants to death, to allow the aged to die for want of food, and to exterminate great numbers from their standing in each other’s way.126
The Economist and its allies prevailed, so far as public opinion was concerned, despite Cobden’s victory over Palmerston in the House. In the ensuing election, Palmerston took his campaign to the country, with an endlessly reprinted manifesto that ran, ‘An insolent barbarian wielding authority in Canton has violated the British flag.’ Virtually the entire ‘peace party’ was swept from office – Cobden, Bright and Thomas Milner Gibson among them.127 The Economist was exultant. Here was proof of who really represented the middle classes; not Manchester relics ‘extinguished’ by their pacifism, but the new Liberal Party. Bright ought to reflect on the ‘unrepented sin’ of his ‘disregard of all patriotic feeling and decorum’, rather than blaming electors who were just as interested in Peace, Retrenchment and Reform as ever, but stood firm for the flag. Ten years on from the repeal of the Corn Laws it was not they, but Bright who had changed. He did not understand the real men of Manchester, and the Economist endeavoured to educate him.
As a body wealth is not their sole pursuit, they are patriots as well as manufacturers. They think that there are higher objects both for men and citizens to strive for than mere material well-being. They did not grudge their hundred or thousand pounds subscription to the League for the defeat of Protection, and they were not likely to grudge their hundred or thousand pounds to the National Treasury for repelling Russian aggression. They did not like to be held up to the scorn and odium of the world as men who had no idea and no aim beyond their ledgers – as the incarnation of cold, hard, and narrow selfishness.128
Cobden drew more radical lessons from his defeat than Bright, and he advised the latter to take a break from politics and abandon his seat in Manchester. ‘The great capitalist class formed an excellent basis for the Anti-Corn-Law movement, for they had inexhaustible purses, which they opened freely in a contest where not only their pecuniary interests but their pride as “an order” was at stake’, Cobden reflected. ‘But I very much doubt whether such a state of society is favourable to a democratic political movement.’129 In another letter he complained bitterly of what the Economist had become, and of its role in pushing the government line on the war.
Jemmy Wilson wrote dull pamphlets and made duller speeches, but still he showed some Scotch pertinacity in keeping alive the agitation in the metropolis. When we dissolved our organization, a lithographed circular was sent to all its subscribers recommending them to support the Economist. This was the foundation of Wilson’s fortune, which was in a sickly state previously … [it] became the stepping stone to Office … What so natural as that the paper should be the obsequious servant of the government, or the Economist’s pages should be employed in assailing the two men who laid the foundation of all this success, if they happen no longer to be in favour with the dispensers of patronage?130
Bright ignored the Economist, and only partly listened to Cobden, agreeing a few months later to stand for a vacant seat in Birmingham – as news reached Britain in 1857 of a bloody uprising in India.131
India and the Indian Mutiny
In the climate of fear and vengeance that reports of the Indian Mutiny produced, criticisms of empire risked becoming still more unpopular, jeopardizing Bright’s chances of re-election, and Cobden urged him to moderate his tone, at least in public. In private, both condemned ‘the depraved, unhappy state of opinion’, Cobden wondering what point there was in taking to the stump: ‘I consider that we as a nation are little better than brigands, murderers, and poisoners in our dealings at this moment with half the population of the globe.’132 Once back in parliament, however, Bright grew bolder, informing his Birmingham constituents that the Empire ‘is a positive loss to the people’ and ‘neither more nor less than a gigantic system of outdoor relief for the aristocracy of Great Britain’. The rationale for fighting Russia and China, ‘introducing cotton cloth with cannon balls’, were ‘vain, foolish and wretched excuses for war’. India, moreover, was a ‘country we do not know how to govern’, and Indians were justified in rebelling against British rule in the subcontinent, where the conquest of Oudh, ‘with which our Government had but recently entered into a solemn treaty’ was ‘a great immorality and a great crime, and we have reaped an almost instantaneous retribution in the most gigantic and sanguinary revolt which probably any nation ever made against its conquerors’.133
Wilson found this last strophe on India so alarming that when he saw Bright in the Commons a few months later he obtained assurances from him that he had been ‘carried away much further than he intended’. Wilson relayed these assurances to Cornewall Lewis, who wanted to know if Bright would cooperate on electoral reform should the Tories be turned out and a new Liberal ministry formed – inevitably including Palmerston or Russell, the very men Bright was castigating for criminal misconduct in imperial and foreign affairs.134
From 1857 the Economist was as fixated as the rest of the press on the horror stories pouring out of British India – where a mutiny of Indian soldiers, or sepoys, against their European officers in Meerut rapidly grew into a full-fledged rebellion against the British East India Company. By this time the quasi-private company, founded under Elizabeth I, ruled about two-thirds of the Indian subcontinent, in exchange for a £630,000 annuity to London on the revenue the land under its control generated. Three separate armies marched under its banners, one for each of the presidencies into which India was subdivided: Bengal, Bombay and Madras, totalling 232,000 Indians and 45,000 Europeans. The first of these was the largest and most homogeneous, recruited since the mid-seventeenth century from Hindu peasants in Bengal, Oudh, Bihar and Benares. These men mutinied in far greater numbers than anywhere else; a fact contemporaries attributed to an unwitting religious insult, infantry in Meerut – it was said – refusing to bite cartridges greased with cow and pig fat, offensive to Muslims and Hindus alike. In reality, their grievances were structural: both in the army – low pay, poor living conditions, an inability to rise through the ranks, in which the most senior Indian officer was obliged to obey the most junior European – and in the surrounding society, whose once formidable textile economy had collapsed under the onslaught of British manufactured cloth, while being subjected to an East India Company business model based on the predatory chase after new revenues and territories.135
The Economist was just as ruthless with Indians as with the Irish or Chinese. As Elgin ordered troops en route to China to double back to Calcutta, the paper looked forward to swift justice being meted out to the mutineers for their treachery in ‘undiscriminating destruction of hospitals and barracks, of helpless women and children’, which it contemptuously attributed to the ‘native character … half child, half savage, actuated
