their labours. In the 1830s he no longer imagined that this would come about as a result of victory over the middle classes, but by workers being absorbed into its ranks.
Now we find, in consequence of the respect for the natural rights of property, that a large middle class, completely emancipated from the bondage of destitution which the law … sought to perpetuate, has grown up in every part of Europe, uniting in their own persons the character both of labourers and capitalists. They are fast increasing in numbers; and we may hope, as the beautiful inventions of art gradually supersede unskilled labour, that they, reducing the whole society to equal and free men, will gradually extinguish all that yet remains of slavery and oppression.38
‘All these changes have been effected in spite of the law,’ he added, driving home his point that the middle class, if left alone, could achieve what no earthly government could. Hodgskin wrote book reviews as well as leaders, rebutting social reformers on everything from the Poor Law and Factory Acts to health and sanitation committees, and questions of crime and penal law.39
Herbert Spencer was twenty-eight in 1848. He had yet to formulate his famous theories of social evolution but was groping towards them, and Wilson was favourably impressed by his first efforts, a series of letters to the Nonconformist published as the pamphlet The Proper Sphere of Government in 1843. In it Spencer argued that the state was originally designed to do almost nothing, except ‘defend the natural rights of man – to protect person and property’. Its proper sphere was definitely ‘not to regulate commerce; not to educate the people; not to teach religion; not to administer charity; not to make roads and railways’.40 He put the Economist together each week, working and sleeping at the Strand offices, where he sometimes dined with Hodgskin.41 He contributed little of his own writing. But he did soak up the atmosphere, even if he preferred going to the Royal Italian Opera, or crossing the street to see Westminster Review editor John Chapman. Through Chapman he met the leading radical thinkers of the day, and a publisher for his first book in 1850.
Social Statics owed more to his Economist colleagues than his new friends, however. Both in its hostility to Utilitarian concepts of law and morality and style, direct and flippant, Spencer’s book was exactly like an Economist leader. The visible hand of the state was slippery: what began with ‘tax paid teachers’ was bound to end in doctors and scientists, ‘government funerals’, and things so absurd only the French could have dreamt of them, ‘public ball rooms, gratis concerts, cheap theatres, with state-paid actors, musicians, masters of ceremonies’. Meddling with the marketplace was far from a laughing matter, however. It had truly dire consequences, upsetting a natural process of adaptation on which all material progress depended: ‘principles that show themselves alike in the self-adjustment of planetary perturbations and in the healing of a scratched finger – in the balance of social systems and the increased hearing in a blind man’s ear – in the adaptation of prices to produce and the acclimatization of a plant.’42 A strong utopian element was evident. Spencer maintained that out of these harsh and slightly mysterious mechanisms of adjustment would emerge a perfect society of sexual equality, intellectual cultivation, and an end to private ownership of land.
This last point went too far for Hodgskin, who noted, in an otherwise glowing review in the Economist, ‘the right of each individual is not to use the land … but each to use his own faculties’.43 Laissez-faire nevertheless received an important new justification in Spencer, who, as one historian has argued, wished to show that ‘the individualistic competitive society of Victorian England had been ordained by nature and was the sole guarantor of progress’.44 If some elements of his positivist social philosophy postdate his time at the Economist – for example, his juxtaposition of Lamarckian evolution and Darwinian natural selection after 1859, when he coined ‘survival of the fittest’ – these would be taken up with growing frequency in its pages.
One conduit for social evolutionary theories in the Economist was William Rathbone Greg, who came up with his own applications of them. In fact, Greg had met Darwin before Spencer, when, as classmates at the University of Edinburgh, both Darwin and Greg joined the freethinking Plinian Society. Where Spencer stressed the internal, class dynamics of Social Darwinism – the struggle for survival in nature applied to economic competition between individuals in the nation – Greg pushed it in other directions: to the competition between races and nations and even sexes. It was this version, very often opposed to that of Spencer, which had a major impact on the next editor, Walter Bagehot.
Greg authored some of the paper’s most ardent laissez-faire positions, applied indiscriminately to the Irish, the Gospels, the working class and women. Like Wilson he was the son of a mill-owner turned publicist for the League, winning its praise for his 1842 essay Agriculture and the Corn Laws. He was even more socially conservative, while indulging in more Victorian symptoms and mystic fads than Wilson would have thought decent. A mesmerist, he also claimed to be able to magnetize livestock, and experienced melancholia, dyspepsia, neuralgia and vapours. He claimed to abhor fornication, especially in women. Under similar psychological pressures his wife and brother went mad.45 Greg soldiered on, consoled that these and other traits could be discerned from inspection of the human skull – something he was glad to do at parties as a practising phrenologist. He also found time to write books and articles for the Economist, the North British Review, Westminster Review and Edinburgh Review.
Greg seems to have fallen out with most of the women he met in these liberal circles – a fact linked not only to his hobbies but his influence on the paper. One reason may have been an 1862 article entitled ‘Why Are Women Redundant?’, which argued that unmarried British women – all 1.5 million – should be asked to emigrate. ‘He is very pleasing,’ wrote his Westminster Review editor George Eliot, ‘but somehow he frightens me dreadfully’. She praised his temperament and brain. ‘But when you see him across a room, you are unpleasantly impressed, and can’t believe he wrote his own books.’46 The popular political economist and writer Harriet Martineau was more forthright. Greg was insolent, his mind unbalanced. She condemned his view of blacks as inherently inferior, and suspected him of writing Economist pieces with ‘mistakes of the grossest kind on the American constitution … always on the slaveholding side’. Despite all contrary evidence, she added later, ‘he will go on supposing the Negro to be always sucking cane sugar in the sun … one might easily show him and Carlyle negroes considerably less “savage” than themselves.’ At least Thomas Carlyle was a ‘gentleman’ where women were concerned. Greg ‘philanders vulgarly & on the other hand unconsciously regards them insultingly’.47
After Wilson, Hodgskin and Greg, one of the most important early contributors to the Economist was a foreigner who never actually worked there – Frédéric Bastiat, the leading advocate of free trade in France. Bastiat was a French complement to Wilson, whom he met alongside other leaders of the Anti-Corn Law League on his trips to England in the 1840s. The Economist reported on his Association pour la Liberté des Echanges (modelled on the League), quoted from its journal, Le Libre-Echange, reviewed his books – Harmonies Economiques was a special favourite. Dubbed ‘the Cobden of France’, Bastiat’s ability to distil laissez-faire principles into epigrams surpassed that of anyone in England. ‘The state’, he wrote in a style that captivated Wilson, ‘is the great fiction by which everybody tries to live at the expense of everybody else’.48 Bastiat considered the Economist a model. ‘There never was a periodical in which all the questions of political economy were treated with so much depth and impartiality. It is a precious collection of facts, doctrine and experience mutually support each other in its columns: its diffusion on the continent would have excellent effects.’49 On his death the paper returned the compliment, devoting an entire leader to ‘the most consistent and sturdiest opponent of Government action who has appeared in our time, or, perhaps, has ever appeared in the world’.50
The Belief Producer: ‘Free trade principles most
