for his part, evaluated other liberals – even allies – in terms of their proximity to radical elements of the Liberal Party. Gladstone, drafting his budget of 1860, was told that to become a great statesman he must learn ‘not to object to war because it is war, or to expenditure because it is expenditure’ – to reject, in other words, the liberalism of Cobden and Bright. ‘It may be that the defence of England … is one of our duties; if so, we must not sit down to count the cost.’154 Bagehot may have praised Cobden as a ‘sensitive agitator’ at his death in 1865, but he still used the occasion to sharply rebuke the former leader of the Anti-Corn Law League: ‘his mind was very peculiar and had sharp limits’, in particular an ‘insufficient regard for the solid heritage of transmitted knowledge’ contained in the ‘dignified’ parts of the constitution.155 Cobden had also been wrong to oppose the Crimean War. ‘There are occasions when a war itself does its own work, and does it better than any pacification. The Crimean War was an instance of this’, which, Bagehot argued, ‘destroyed the prestige and the pernicious predominance of Russia. At the end of it, what were to be the conditions of peace were almost immaterial.’156
The richest, most revealing comparison between Bagehot and a compatriot thinker is with John Stuart Mill – who Bagehot read more carefully than any other, and whose liberalism troubled him greatly the more it diverged from his own. At twenty-two, the future Economist editor praised Mill’s Principles of Political Economy as a thoroughly modern foundation for the dismal science, combining all that was logical about Ricardo with the worldliness of Smith. Bagehot was already puzzled, however, by Mill’s plans to improve the labouring poor, which placed too much stress on their ‘intellectual cultivation’. What workers needed was not so much education – especially in those ‘depots of temptation’, the great towns – than a ‘restraining discipline over their passions and an effectual culture of their consciences’.157 As 1848 rolled on, and revolutions swept the capitals of Europe, the gap between them widened. Mill was thrilled, seeing the uplift of workers and democratic reform in Britain as tied to the republican experiment in France.158 Inspired by the Fourierist socialists, Mill quickly revised his Principles to emphasize support for workers’ co-operatives, and hailed ‘the capacity of exertion and self-denial in the masses of mankind’ when ‘appealed to in the name of some great idea’.159 Writing from Paris in 1851, Bagehot saw these associations as bad jokes or worse – a polarization that only grew more marked two decades later during the worker-led Paris Commune, which Mill defended and the Economist denounced.160
If the paper endorsed Mill when he stood for parliament in 1865, it was because of the crucial ways in which their conceptions of liberalism did coincide: on empire. ‘Differing as we do in the strongest manner from many of Mr Mill’s political opinions’ – including a franchise that would extend to the labouring classes almost half of national representation – ‘we should vote for him in preference to any other candidate’. Why? In his address to the electors of Westminster, it saw an indictment of the ‘official creed of the advanced Liberals’, ‘shattering into dust those Radical fallacies’ of ‘Mr. Bright and the Manchester School’. Mill promised to vote for defence outlays, and in contrast to the radicals – who argued that ‘England must never interfere in foreign affairs’ except in ‘her own national interest’ – declared that ‘interposition on the side of liberty, to countervail interposition on the side of oppression, is a right and may become a duty.’161 As the Governor Eyre controversy gripped parliament, Bagehot took Mill’s side against Eyre. But this was not only because his rampage in Jamaica undermined the rule of law: both Mill and Bagehot accepted that white colonial administrators should continue to rule over black Jamaicans, treating the episode as an isolated infraction. Shared support for the imperial order as given went beyond one event or policy. Bagehot’s civilizational hierarchy in Physics and Politics, in which Britain might force societies at arrested stages of development to advance, echoed Mill’s voluminous writings on the backwardness of Indians and Irish and the progressive purpose behind London’s unrepresentative rule over them.162
But even here, Bagehot found Mill too easily swept along by revolutionary currents. In 1868, the latter responded to the Irish nationalist upsurge of the year before with a proposal that addressed what he considered the root grievances of the Fenians, whom he wished to stamp out: creation of quasi-peasant proprietors, with fixity of tenure, via state guarantee or purchase – as much out of moral obligation for past misrule by England as to maintain that rule, through the imperial Act of Union.163 Scathing in his review of Mill’s pamphlet, Bagehot pointed to the contradictions that undermined the ultimate goal he shared with it. Not only was possession of land in itself unlikely to cure the misery of Irish peasants, given their ingrained habits of idleness, but it handed them a potent new weapon. ‘Suppose that at a moment of political excitement – at such a crisis, say, as this of Fenianism – the whole Irish people do not pay their rent to the English Government. What is to be done? You cannot serve a writ of eviction upon a whole nation.’ In Bagehot, the cause of liberal imperialism had a harsher, but also a more consistent and unfussed champion, who prided himself on this temperamental contrast with the great philosophic radical. On Ireland, Mill had shown himself to be ‘easily excitable and susceptible; the evil that is in his mind at the moment seems to him the greatest evil, – for the time nearly the only evil – the evil which must be cured at all hazards’, wrote Bagehot.164 ‘Mr Mill is, of course’, he could muse in 1871, ‘the standing instance of a philosopher spoilt by sending him into Parliament, and the world.’165
Perhaps the most revealing international comparative insight into the liberalism of the Economist under Bagehot comes from France – only fitting given the coverage devoted to it. ‘The English thinker with whom Tocqueville can be most properly compared is Bagehot’, wrote A. V. Dicey, and the two men are still often classed together on account of an allegedly shared distrust of democracy.166 In fact, they had less in common on democracy than they did in according a central importance to empire in the competitive environment of mid-nineteenth century Europe. Indeed, it was in part his recognition that democratic change could not be halted – in contrast to Bagehot, who bitterly resisted it – that led Tocqueville to advocate the merciless conquest and colonization of Algeria, as a ‘great task’ capable of unifying France in a post-revolutionary and egalitarian age. Elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1839, Tocqueville applied himself with singular energy to erecting a French empire in North Africa, and fulminated against just the sort of radical critics that Bagehot excoriated in the pages of the Economist – for John Bright, read Amédée Desjobert.167 As foreign minister for the Second Republic, he showed no qualms about using force in Europe either, if the end of national prestige justified it – overseeing the dispatch of troops to revolutionary Rome in 1849 to topple a sister republic on behalf of Pope Pius IX, in violation of the French constitution; in the aftermath, he connived at the illegal prolongation of powers of Louis-Napoléon that ended in his overthrow of the republic in France itself.
In reacting to this coup d’état, however, Tocqueville and Bagehot did hint at ways in which their liberalism differed. In his Recollections Tocqueville offered a vivid account of the revolution of 1848 right up to the moment of the coup in December 1851. In contrast to Bagehot’s sarcasm in the Inquirer, Tocqueville earnestly participated in the February uprising – upbraiding his fellow national guardsman, observing with approbation the handiwork of barricadiers, being lectured at by a working-class man outside the National Assembly (without, however, rendering his speech in cockney), and deploring the pious egotistical ravings of his sister-in-law, ‘concerned only with the good God, her husband, her children and especially her health, with no interest left over for other people’.168 Bagehot’s ode to ‘common comforts’ and ‘stupid lives’ in a national emergency was, for Tocqueville, selfishness. Though he helped pave the way for the coup that displaced the moderate republic he claimed to defend, when it came he denounced Louis-Napoléon in a letter smuggled out of France. ‘If the judgment of the people of England can approve these military saturnalia’, wrote Tocqueville, addressing the same audience of middle-class liberals that Bagehot was also trying to
