rowdying public’ in the North, which actually believed it could beat the South, ‘lick Great Britain in the bargain’, and add ‘Canada to Texas’. ‘The depth of their ignorance is unfathomable. The height of their frenzy is inconceivable.’128
The Economist repeatedly predicted the collapse of the Northern war effort at the turn of 1862 for lack of funds. ‘With a revenue of twelve millions they are spending one hundred and twenty millions; indirect taxes bring in next to nothing; direct taxes are not even yet voted; the loans required are not taken up; and already they have resorted to the desperate, ruinous, and speedily exhausted contrivance of inconvertible paper money.’ There was no need to intervene: ‘mere want of funds must almost infallibly bring them to a stand in twelve months – probably in six.’129
Nor did Bagehot accept the casus belli of the Union, and he steadfastly denied the charge levelled against the Economist as a result – that it was condoning slavery. Lincoln had made it quite clear, he reminded readers, that the North was not fighting to extinguish this peculiar institution. If the choice were ‘between the preservation of the Union and the perpetuation of slavery; if “Union” meant negro emancipation as surely as “secession” means negro servitude, – then, indeed, we should be called upon to take a very different view of the subject.’130 He scoffed at the Emancipation Proclamation a year later, a strategic ploy to stir slave rebellions behind enemy lines and score humanitarian points abroad. ‘Half-hearted and inconsistent’, it would disgust public opinion in Europe. This ‘shibboleth of Emancipation’, which freed slaves in enemy but not loyal states, ‘is so curiously infelicitous, so grotesquely illogical, so transparently un-anti-slavery, that we cannot conceive how it could have emanated from a shrewd man.’ Lincoln had confirmed ‘the servitude of those whom he might set free, and he decrees the freedom of those whom neither his decree nor his arm can reach!’
Britain and the Economist sincerely desired to see slavery abolished, without a thought as to the price of raw cotton, Bagehot insisted. Still, the paper made some surprising claims about what would tend to that end – perhaps reflecting the fact that, as one biographer puts it, its editor ‘did not take a high principled abstract view on slavery’.131 The surest route to abolition, argued the Economist, was the success of the South. ‘It is in the independence of the South, and not in her defeat, that we can alone look with confidence for the early amelioration and the ultimate extinction of the slavery we abhor.’132 The paper was no friend of ‘the fanatics who hope to found a great empire on the basis of slavery’, it clarified, for ‘we do not believe that predial slavery such as exists in the slave states is a possible basis for a good and enduring commonwealth’. But it was unclear why, in that case, Southern independence was desirable. ‘We wish the area of slavery should be so small that, by the sure operation of economical causes, and especially by the inevitable exhaustion of the soil which it always produces, slavery should, within a reasonable time, be gradually extinguished.’133
In the end slavery was a side note, however. Far more important in the paper’s warnings about a Northern victory was the intertwining logic of empire and economics. Two states were better than one, and would balance the naturally grasping character of each: ‘reckless Southerners may talk of seizing on Mexico, Nicaragua, and Cuba; unprincipled and inflated Northerners may talk of seizing on Canada; but there will be some hope that we may leave them to each other’s mutual control, and smile at the villainous cupidities of both.’134 Harriet Beecher Stowe and her abolitionist ilk were thus wrong to accuse London of rooting for the South: ‘The effectual discomfiture of either party would answer our purpose equally well.’135 If the Economist looked slightly more favourably on the South, this was because it had a right to leave the Union, was ‘more decent and courteous’ to Britain, and because it desired ‘to admit our goods at 10 per cent duty, while their enemies imposed 40 per cent’.136 Not just a geopolitical check, then, but freer trade would flow from the Southern states’ independence. In articles for the New York Daily Tribune, Marx had mocked the Economist up to this point for rationalizing slavery; now he gave it an ironic salute, as ‘honest enough to confess at last that with it and its followers sympathy is a mere question of tariff’.137
Bagehot continued to push British Liberals to acknowledge that, despite their distaste for slavery, ‘the experiment of one nation for one continent has turned out on the whole far from well.’ America was an only child, with ‘no correct measure of its own strength’, and having never played with others, ‘indulges in the infinite braggadocio which a public school soon rubs out of a conceited boy’.138 It was, in other words, a dangerous imperial rival, a point nicely captured by his image of the English public school, where playground bullying was preparatory to a career in the Empire. By the turn of 1865 the victory of the North looked imminent, ‘exciting the brains of Americans’, based on a mania for ‘empire and exclusive possession of a continent’. Bagehot was hostile to this outcome. The rest of the world, he wrote ruefully, ‘could not look with much favour or anticipated comfort on the formation of a new power thus motivated and thus clenched – a power whose two fundamental rules of action and raisons d’être would be, to defy its neighbour, and to annex its neighbour’s land.’139
The British Empire
If Bagehot viewed America through the prism of the British Empire and its interests, what did he have to say about the latter? Bagehot’s editorship was less rich in incident than Wilson’s – sitting between bursts of warfare and annexation in the 1850s and 1880s–1890s – and Bagehot showed the same breezy, flexible confidence in imperial destiny as he did in English political economy. Whether in Canada, the Cape, New Zealand or Australia, he admitted that colonists could be difficult, demanding, costly, and confrontational with natives. But he opposed the idea of cutting them loose. ‘We are pre-eminently a colonizing people. We are, beyond all comparison, the most enterprising, the most successful, and in most respects the best, colonists on the face of the earth.’140 He countenanced force wherever that valiant spirit was obstructed by recalcitrant subjects, or non-Westerners, though in such cases he preferred it to be moderate, and directed from London.
Closest to home, he backed Gladstone’s efforts to ‘pacify Ireland’ after 1868: disestablishing the Church of Ireland – Protestant, in a country four-fifths Catholic – and passing very limited tenure reform to give evicted farmers compensation for their improvements to the land. Any step outside the 1801 Act of Union, however, was anathema. The Economist attacked both the Fenian Brotherhood, made up of armed republicans in America and Ireland, as well as the Home Rule League, which sought greater autonomy through conventional parliamentary forms. Gladstone was right to ‘tread out the Fenian folly’ following an uprising in 1867, which proved that the organization preferred sowing strife to practical politics. But since Home Rule was a ‘gigantic and impossible constitutional revolution’, it was hardly less of a folly. A parliament for Ireland would tear down the entire edifice of the British state, creating a federal instead of imperial parliament in London, unable to override the Irish one ‘without provoking something like a rebellion on every separate occasion’. Home Rulers would ‘be imprudent, but they would be far more logical, if they were to raise a cry at once for an independent Irish Republic’.141 The one consolation for the defeat of the Liberals in 1874 that so shocked Bagehot was, ‘at least it delivers us from the rule of the faction which is anti-English in essence, and which wishes to destroy the Empire’.142 His idea for political reform in Ireland was to suppress the office of viceroy: concentrating the symbolic majesty of the British state in such a person lent credence to the claim of Irish nationalists to live in a subjugated colony – as if Dublin were no different than Delhi.143
Perhaps the most far-reaching colonial crisis during the period was not in Ireland, but in the West Indian colony of Jamaica. Here, in 1865, Governor Edward John Eyre responded to an uprising of former slaves in Morant Bay with brutal force, declaring martial law and deploying troops, who burned and looted over a thousand homes, and killed
