Commons, a solitary ritual, usually voted down by a margin of several hundred. Would Wilson, he added, be kind enough to call on his brother George, fourth Earl of Clarendon, at the Athenaeum Club? William Pleydell-Bouverie, third Earl of Radnor, wrote from Longford Castle requesting anti-Corn Law arguments he could use against the surrounding squires in Wiltshire.23 Radnor, who took an almost fatherly interest in Wilson – nominating him to the Reform Club in 1842, and helping him take his first steps into politics – prided himself on being the most radical of all grandees. At the age of ten a terrified witness of the French Revolution, Radnor later became convinced (after repairing to Edinburgh and Oxford and studies of Smith, Blackstone and Montesquieu) that progress was possible without reliving those scenes of democratic chaos: the cause of individual liberty was best served by laissez-faire economics coupled with the political rule of an enlightened aristocracy.24 On a visit to Radnor’s vast demesne near Salisbury, built up on investments in the Levant trade, the French statesman Alexis de Tocqueville observed that the Radnor family embodied the eminently commercial character of the English nobility.25
One drawing room after another, in town and country, opened its doors to Wilson, who passed through them to find the backers he would need to start the Economist. His message was that complete free trade would mean an end to the trade cycle itself, a thesis whose utopian flavour is evident in all his major works between 1839 and 1841 – from Influences and Fluctuations to The Revenue; or What Should the Chancellor Do?26 The idea of starting a newspaper arose soon after the last of these pamphlets appeared, for it was clear that neither corn nor the League offered sufficient scope for Wilson to develop his unique vision. ‘There never was a time when an independent organ was more required,’ Villiers insisted in the spring of 1843. Meeting at his club, Wilson found him ‘very fond of the thing, – but from what he said I fear we shall have some difficulty with the League – it appears they are extremely jealous of their importance and will want it a League Paper, and as such I will have nothing to do with it.’ Cobden was meanwhile reporting to Bright that ‘James Wilson has a plan for starting a weekly Free Trader by himself and his friends’. The two tried to persuade him to edit the Anti-Bread Tax Circular instead. Newspapers, Cobden informed Wilson, were ‘graves de fortunes in London … have you made up your mind to a great and continuous pecuniary loss?’ To Bright he wrote in slight bemusement, ‘Wilson has a notion that a paper would do more good if it were not the organ of the League but merely their independent support.’27 Still, he noted, Wilson was reluctant to act without their approval.
Wilson desperately needed the League for its subscribers and distribution networks and so tried to explain his reasoning at a meeting with Bright and George Wilson, chairman of the League, to which he also invited Radnor. To his Anti-Corn Law colleagues he promised new and more influential converts than could be reached by any journal bearing the direct imprint of the League. His intended audience, he told Cobden in June, in what was probably his most compelling pitch, was ‘the higher circles of the landed and monied interests’.28 Wilson’s other partners came from just these social heights, and they wanted a moderate journal free of the faintest traces of populism. From Radnor he obtained £500, while the League, with the aim of winning both the City of London and the countryside, agreed to order 20,000 copies.29 For Cobden the journal would be another means of putting pressure on opinion within parliament – and of altering its composition, since a crucial by-election pitting a free-trader against a protectionist was coming up in the City.30
To ensure the success of his venture Wilson imposed some drastic personal economies. He rented out one of his homes, and ordered a halt to pineapples in the hothouses. By shipping his wife and six daughters to Boulogne to take the waters and dismissing all servants – save nurse, maid, housekeeper and errand boy – he raised a further £800. In a letter to his wife in France, Wilson confided another reason for his drive for independence: ‘no question will ever arise as to the property, or to whom the benefit of the paper will belong after it shall have risen to a good circulation which I hope it may do in time.’ From the start the Economist was a business and had to make money.31
Yet its founding was also a milestone in political and economic thought, a bugle blast of the first age of global capitalism. Wilson and his newspaper became more than mouthpieces for the Manchester school: they developed and disseminated the doctrine it embodied – laissez-faire liberalism – in its clearest and most consistent form. It was with this aim in mind that Wilson refused to work for the League. ‘My paper would not do for that purpose … mine must be perfectly philosophical, steady and moderate; nothing but pure principles.’32 Thus a footnote in the history of the Anti-Corn Law movement quickly eclipsed it: of the millions who now read the Economist how many have heard of the forces that made it possible, or the principles by which it found distinction?
The Original Cast of the Economist
The economic historian Scott Gordon thought he saw the force of an idea, steady if not moderate, in a portrait of Wilson painted a year before his death:
He sits stolidly in his chair, his hands folded in finality. His round face is benevolent, but there is the unmistakable mark of doctrine in the eyes, close set and steady, and there is that thin, firm mouth. ‘There is no nonsense about me,’ they say. ‘I know what is right, I work hard, and I do my duty.’ ‘What is this man’s passion?’ one wonders, for surely he has one: good portraits do not lie about that. Is it Temperance? Abolition of slavery? Prevention of cruelty to animals? Education? It is all of these things and many more, for it is the one thing, the one principle, which will make the whole world a harmonious and beneficent order. It is laissez-faire.33
Wilson controlled the Economist and wrote much of its content. ‘He worked on it indefatigably,’ remembered Herbert Spencer, sub-editor from 1848 to 1853, ‘and, being a man of good business judgment, sufficient literary faculty, and extensive knowledge of commercial and financial matters, soon made it an organ of the mercantile world, and, in course of a relatively short time, a valuable property.’34 His collaborators were perhaps the only men whose doctrinal commitments exceeded his own. Thomas Hodgskin was the most influential editor between 1844 and 1857, followed by Spencer and William Rathbone Greg, a leader-writer starting in 1847. Several other distinguished individuals made occasional contributions, including Charles Villiers’s brother-in-law Sir George Cornewall Lewis, Poor Law Commissioner and later Chancellor of the Exchequer in Palmerston’s first government, for whom Wilson worked as financial secretary. Lewis was also a classicist, linguist, philologist and political theorist, whose key public service had been to extend the English Poor Law of 1834 to Ireland – condemning claimants of state assistance to workhouses, to be made as unpleasant as possible to teach their inmates self-reliance. Nassau Senior, the main author of the Poor Law and one of the most eminent economists of his day, was another contributor; for Wilson he seems to have written on foreign affairs.35 Together they extended laissez-faire in every conceivable direction, embellishing and amending it in the process. These were the original voices hidden behind the anonymous, imperious judgments for which the Economist would become famous.
Hodgskin may seem oddly out of place among them, given his reputation as a Ricardian socialist and radical anarchist, whose texts from the 1820s so inspired Marx. When Wilson met Hodgskin, however, he was no longer arguing that capital and labour were locked in a battle to the death, or explaining that the labour theory of value showed how the former shamelessly cheated the latter of its moral right to the whole of what it produced.36 By 1843 Hodgskin had retreated from such attacks on capital, and the Ricardian reading of class conflict that fired them. What remained was an anarchic individualism: a profound distrust of all government and legislation, no matter how enlightened, and a deistic faith in natural law. That year he published a free trade tract praising the League in terms that would have made sense to Wilson; repeal of the Corn Laws, it argued, was merely a first step in beating back the Leviathan of the state, ‘a huge system of injustice, all of which must be removed’.37 Even as a young man Hodgskin had
