from its extensive and increasing circulation among Members of Parliament, Bankers, Merchants, Capitalists, and the Trading Community, is well adapted as the medium for advertisements intended to meet the attention of those numerous and respectable classes.’ Civil servants and professionals could have been added to the list. By the 1850s circulation was around 3,000 – small, even by contemporary standards, but held in the most powerful hands in the country and already sent to capitals in Europe and North and South America.52
The Economist addressed itself to the same social transformations that had given rise to Chartism – ‘this great national leprosy … want and pauperism and hunger’. Yet in contrast to these other agitations it declared itself above class. It alone could speak disinterestedly, and it implored readers – the very ones with the power to do so – not to interfere with a divine order: ‘personal experience has shown us in the manufacturing districts the people want no acts of parliament to coerce education or induce moral improvement … we look far beyond the power of acts … and the efforts of the philanthropist or charitable.’53 From its point of view the danger was never just the protectionists in parliament but the quorum there of gentle souls totally ignorant of the laws of political economy.
The Economist considered it a duty to instruct the latter, starting with the abolitionists, ‘that body of truly great philanthropists’, of the unintended consequences of their campaign to end slavery. The boycott they proposed of all goods made using slave labour would hurt British consumers and punish slaves. It would decimate foreign trade: half was in textiles, most spun from slave cotton, and must logically extend to gold, silver and copper imports from Brazil; rice, indigo, cochineal and tobacco from the US, Mexico and Guatemala; and sugar and coffee from Cuba. To really help slaves, and encourage masters to offer them wages, the answer was free trade, which would demonstrate to slave owners that free labour was in fact cheaper than the bonded kind. Britain could do its part by ending special treatment for its own West Indian colonies, which practically forced others to use slaves as a way to stay competitive. ‘That is a very doubtful humanity’, it concluded, which ‘seeks to inflict certain punishment upon poorer neighbours … for some speculative advantage on the slaves of Brazil’.54
Almost all the social reform movements of the Victorian era, intent on actively improving the lot of the lower classes at home, received this sober going-over from the Economist. The editorial reaction to the railway and factory legislation is indicative, though by no means exhaustive. In obliging companies to provide once a day a third tier of service for working-class passengers, who had formerly to travel in exposed freight cars, the 1844 Railway Act meddled in a problem best left to market competition. ‘Where the most profit is made, the public is best served … limit the profit, and you limit the exertion of ingenuity in a thousand ways.’55 That same year a Factory Bill limiting the workday for women to twelve hours, the same amount as for teenagers, was denounced as confused, illogical, harmful; proof that ‘no consistent medium between perfect freedom of capital and labour, and that principle which would regulate wages, profits, and the whole relations of life by acts of legislation – between perfect independent self-reliance and regulated socialism – between Adam Smith and Robert Owen’, was possible. As if that were not emphatic enough the next week it declared, ‘the more it is investigated, the more we are compelled to acknowledge that in any interference with industry and capital, the law is powerful only for evil, but utterly powerless for good.’56
The movement for a ten-hour day for adult males was therefore little less than criminally insane, abetted by demagogues, and sentimental old Tories like Lord Ashley, who in fact favoured a more modest measure aimed only at women and children. This caveat made no difference. The result would be to reduce the supply of labour, raise wages, increase the cost of manufactures, undercut British goods in foreign markets, and ultimately destroy all employment and industry. As Lord Ashley’s Ten-Hours Bill was taken up in 1846 the Economist reminded workers their interests were identical with those of their employers, and asked them to refrain from sniping about greed, for it ‘must be remembered that the capitalists of England are exposed to a keen competition, not only among themselves, from which no individual can escape – and that capitalist is sure to go to the wall who is less sharp and exacting than his fellows – but also to a similar competition with the capitalists of other countries.’57 The Economist attacked the bill long after it had passed into law: for the factory inspectorate it created – ‘busybodies’ who treated businessmen like ‘thieves and vagabonds’ – and for infringing on the rights of women and children to spend as many hours as they wanted working, in whatever way, be it at night or in relays.58 The paper’s influential tirades helped opponents in parliament water down this and similar measures.
Marx, a dedicated reader of the Economist, mocked its editor mercilessly for his apocalyptic predictions about the effects of these industrial regulations. In Capital, ‘James Wilson, an economic mandarin of high standing’, had simply rehashed the old shibboleths of Nassau Senior in 1836, among them the notion that ‘if children under 18 years of age, instead of being kept the full 12 hours in the warm and pure moral atmosphere of the factory, are turned out an hour sooner into the heartless and frivolous outer world, they will be deprived, owing to idleness and vice, of all hope of salvation for their souls.’59 A reduction in the working day for children under nine had not, Marx added, forced cotton mills to run at a loss. If Wilson and his writers applied the same kind of logic to every legislative demand, even to those from which its readers stood to benefit – the Economist was against patent law, copyright protection or funding for scientific research, and for a time against what is now considered basic company and banking law60 – it was measures to alleviate the lot of the worst off that attracted its most ferocious objections.
In 1847 the newspaper opposed the creation of a board of health. ‘We quite agree as to the evils’, went a leader, listing common urban plights such as narrow lanes, fetid pools of waste, and dingy and badly ventilated housing, ‘but the principle of laissez-faire compels us to disagree with those who promote Lord Morpeth’s Board of Health Bill as the remedy’.61 As the regulatory zeal of the Board intensified, so did the hostility of the Economist, which accused it of ‘lapsing into protection’ when it sought to merge the water companies of London or require new sewer systems in large towns. ‘Water is as much food as bread, and if the government must control the supply of the one, why not the other?’ Recent cholera epidemics were but ‘momentary terrors’, and should not be allowed to ‘suppress all the moral convictions which have been tangibly the experience of ages’.62 A book review criticized ‘the sanitary movement’ for its ‘shallow philosophy’, bound to aggravate the two main causes of disease. If the first was poverty (for which the remedy was free trade),
the second is that the people have never been allowed to take care of themselves. They have always been treated as serfs and children, and they have to a great extent become with respect to those objects government has undertaken to perform for them, imbecile … Besides, it makes them demand things from government – such as regulation for labour, for rates and wages – which no government can possibly accomplish. There is a worse evil than typhus or cholera or impure water, and that is mental imbecility.63
Some wondered if there was a role for central or local authorities to play in the disposal of ‘town guano’. ‘Certainly not. We are now agreed that it should not feed the people: why should it clear away their dirt? Every man is bound to remove his own refuse.’64 Attacks against public health officials and doctors grew violent and no one aroused such ire as the commissioner of the Board of Health, Edwin Chadwick, ‘a man of sincere benevolence’, but with ‘one mental peculiarity that utterly disqualifies him for the executive services of his country … he is essentially a despot and a bureaucrat’. The Economist rejoiced when he was forced to resign in 1854, but felt ‘free-born Britons’ were unsafe from his ‘frightful pertinacity’ so long as he remained in the country. The solution was to send him to Russia, as a gift, ‘to preside over and reform her corrupt but far stretching bureaucracy’.65
The Economist was not only opposed to public education of any kind. It even objected to charity schools which,