Liberalism at Large. Alexander Zevin

      One of the editors responsible for leading the Economist to this impasse had, paradoxically, just assumed high office in the new Liberal government. Herbert Henry Asquith, as Chancellor of the Exchequer and then as prime minister from 1908, would lead the party during the legislative battles that defined New Liberalism in power. Asquith had begun writing at least one leader a week for the Economist in 1880, as a young barrister in need of extra money. He got the job, which paid £150 a year, through Bagehot’s old friend and co-editor, Richard Hutton, for whom Asquith also wrote at the Spectator. Before crossing the Strand to the Economist offices, Asquith would wax on classical themes – ‘The Art of Tacitus’, say, or ‘The Age of Demosthenes’ – as well as on contemporary topics like fair trade, land reform and Ireland.⁸⁶ At the Economist he set down his ideas on the future of liberalism, at this stage under the heading of ‘New Radicalism’, intended to head off the very schism that precipitated his own exit from both the Spectator and the Economist in 1885.

      A Liberalism fit for the times would, Asquith argued, take on board some progressive social demands without endangering international free trade, while banishing any concerted opposition to interventions overseas, which was as unrealistic as it was unpopular. In the first place, the idea was to revise the strict laissez-faire injunction the Economist had laid down under Wilson: ‘that the duty of the State begins and ends with protection of life and property and the enforcement of contracts’.⁸⁷ To Asquith, fresh from Balliol at Oxford, where the idealist philosopher T. H. Green was a tutor and the art critic John Ruskin had engaged students in social experiments like digging roads, this sounded out of date. That point was underscored at the time by Asquith’s meetings with Herbert Spencer, once Wilson’s assistant editor at the Economist. Spencer was still writing essays, Asquith recalled, ‘with such titles as “The Coming Slavery” and “The Great Political Superstition,” attacking, with all the fervour of an uncompromising Individualist, the Liberal party for having forsworn its faith in personal freedom’.⁸⁸

      In advanced industrial societies the state now had a positive responsibility, Asquith replied in his Economist pieces, ‘to some undefined degree, for the distribution of comfort and social well-being’. Old radicals like Mill, Macaulay, Bright, Cobden and Wilson, were in a way responsible for this turnabout: after their victory in the ‘crusade against the follies of paternal government’ at mid-century, the ensuing ‘generation of perfect industrial freedom’ had stimulated new wants and new evils at the century’s close. Free education, sanitation, well-mannered, apolitical trade unions – insofar as these were possible, it was by ‘direct action of the State alone’.⁸⁹ This Asquithian prospectus included a wider franchise and some redistribution of seats from country to town. The 1884–85 Reform Bills were, after all, far from the populist earthquakes Bagehot had feared back in 1864: even after their passage, at least 4.5 million adult males could not vote, in what remained a franchise system tied to property, not universal rights. Democracy could act as a hedge against disorder, Asquith argued. But that was because he still understood democracy in such a limited sense: ‘universal suffrage, which so fetters continental politicians, takes little hold on Englishmen.’⁹⁰

      New Radicalism was meant, on the other hand, to sever once and for all the connection between free trade and peace posited by the ‘Manchester School of foreign policy’. Abolition of war was not on the cards; ensuring uninterrupted flows of capital, goods, and people within and among the empires actually required such ‘shows of force’. Thankfully, ‘younger Radicals are obviously indisposed to the idea of non-intervention’ – having accurately taken the pulse of the ‘new constituencies’ created by the latest Reform Bills. Popular opinion not only grasped how important it was to secure the route to India: ‘No anxiety is shown to reduce the numbers of the Army; strong measures, like the dispatch of a fleet to Smyrna, to secure the surrender of Thessaly to the Greeks, are not resisted; and in recent Egyptian difficulties the country has been, on the whole, in favour of high-handed action.’⁹¹

      Ireland was the pivot on which both sides of this New Radical realignment – social reform at home, imperial unity abroad – hinged: it was thus significant for both the Economist and for liberalism that Asquith grew so exasperated with the place, backing a wave of repression that set the tone at the paper long after he departed. The Land League, which began to urge Irishmen on to economic disobedience in 1880, calling for rent strikes, boycotts and bank runs, was the object of his special hatred. To eradicate these ‘terrorists’ posing as ‘public benefactors’, responsible for all kinds of ‘agrarian outrages’, no measures were too harsh: indefinite suspension of habeas corpus and jury trials, curfews, round-the-clock police and army patrols, deportations, collective punishment. ‘Nor do we feel much sympathy with the rather pedantic constitutionalism’ of those Liberals who objected to the results: about six hundred Irishmen in jail without trial by 1882, including Charles Parnell, leader of the Irish Home Rulers in parliament.⁹²