London alone, 80,000 clogged the streets. ‘The houseless, deserted children have benevolence to thank for tempting their parents from the path of duty’, the paper opined. Alms and the state were poor substitutes for nature and reason; the truly compassionate were advised to let the struggle for survival run its course.
The whole history of the poor – weekly doles of loaves and soup; labour rate acts; the whole vast scheme of protecting their industry; charitable education, as well as alms-giving in the streets; factory acts; visiting the poor in their abodes; plans of emigration, and plans of penal reformation, have all in time been intended to promote the wellbeing of the poor, and have all ended in producing the population, which, according to Lord Ashley’s description, is about the most degraded in Europe.66
The Economist reiterated this position, even as pressure mounted in parliament for some form of national education bill in 1850 and 1851. ‘To be successful education must be sought from self-interest, and obtained by self-exertion.’ Common people should be ‘left to provide education as they provide food for themselves’.67
Editorials often went beyond denouncing particular laws as misguided: they also laid out grand theoretical statements, as in a series of articles asking, ‘Who is to Blame for the Condition of Society?’ After weighing in turn the role of the lower classes, the capitalists, the landowners and the state, the Economist found that the first and last shared responsibility – but unevenly. For in a world in which ‘each man is responsible to nature for his own actions’, and for learning from them, the poor were fully culpable for their misery, wasting wages and free time on sex, drink and gambling instead of practising thrift and self- improvement. ‘Looking to their habits, to their ignorance, to their deference to false friends, to their unshaken confidence in a long succession of charlatan leaders, we cannot exonerate them. Nature makes them responsible for their conduct – why should not we? We find them suffering, and we pronounce them at fault.’ The capitalists and landlords, taken together, were selfish, but so much the better, ‘for the larger their income, the greater is the quantity of net produce provided for the food of the community, and the greater is the quantity of employment and the amount of wages for the labouring classes.’ As for the state, it was simply unable to comprehend this complex social organism, and by attempting to enact laws whose effects no one could predict in advance, undertook a task ‘rather fit for God than man’. The reality was that ‘the desire for happiness, or what is called self-interest is universal. It is not confined to man – it pervades the whole animal kingdom. It is the law of nature, and if the pursuit of self-interest, left equally free for all, does not lead to the general welfare, no system of government can accomplish it.’ A more total and radical justification of individual responsibility in a market society is hard to imagine.
That all of these prescriptions could seem unfeeling the Economist was aware. But that they were anything other than absolutely true and ultimately humane was out of the question. Political economy was a science and so certain was the newspaper that its laws had been discovered, and by whom, that it argued repeatedly for changing its very name.
The application of the adjective political to the science of ‘The Wealth of Nations’ is of French origin; and never was an epithet more misapplied; for the distinguishing feature of Smith’s science is the proof it continually supplies that all policy – unless laissez-faire, or standing idle and religiously refraining from interfering, can be called a policy – is erroneous, injurious to the production of wealth, and repudiated by the science.
Political economy was a contradiction in terms because economics was the absence of political interference as such. ‘All matters connected with politics being but tradition, guess-work, assumption, fancy, usurpation, or expediency, there is no other science in politics but political economy.’ A review, penned by Hodgskin, of Cornewall Lewis’s Treatise on the Methods of Reasoning and Observation in Politics, criticized Lewis for accepting the very term, for ‘the principles of the science of the production of wealth may altogether be contrary, as we know they are in many cases, to the practices of political society, and, far from being subservient to it, may be destined to subvert it.’68
Free Trade’s Triumph, Ireland’s Tragedy
Despite holding to this essential antagonism between politics and economics, and the primacy of the second over the first, Wilson followed leaders of the League into parliament. Stockport, just outside Manchester, returned Cobden to the House in 1841, the year Sir Robert Peel formed a Tory government after a decade of Whig rule under Lords Melbourne and Grey. Bright joined from Durham, farther north, in 1843. Together they made the lower chamber echo with free trade motions, though both were surprised by the speed of their triumph, as well as its instrument. Peel split the cabinet and shocked and angered his own party with a bill to phase out the Corn Laws in 1846. What had caused this volte-face? In his last speech as prime minister, Peel gave the credit to Cobden, ‘the name which ought to be, and which will be associated with the success of these measures’. Cobden was more modest, reckoning that ‘despite all the expenditure on public instruction, the League would not have carried the repeal of the Corn Laws when they did, if it had not been for the Irish famine’.69 For Peel, the immediate impetus was indeed Ireland, England’s oldest and longest-suffering colony. Here the appearance of an unknown, virulent fungus, which quickly turned healthy potatoes into black decaying mush, was set to expose the failings of English rule – imposed over three centuries of conquest and colonization, to the benefit of a ruthless Protestant elite. By November 1845 it was clear that at least half the crop of potatoes in Ireland was infected, ‘either destroyed or unfit for the food of man’, that the same would hold next year, and that this spelled doom for Irish peasants, who unlike the English or Scottish relied almost entirely on potatoes for food. On the brink of a major crisis and with all the accumulated arguments in its favour, the pressure to allow the free entry of grain into Ireland had been enormous.
To pass his repeal of Corn Laws, Peel had relied on support from the Whigs, almost as angry with him for stealing their signature issue as the Tories were for his somersault on it. Both parties conspired to topple him the next year. The Whigs won the election that followed, and Wilson was among the new arrivals: sent from Westbury in Wiltshire, a constituency Radnor had found him, in which he beat the West Indian planter Matthew Higgins by 21 votes. Months later Wilson was appointed to the India Board. The Economist was now edited from the heart of government, just as the new Whig regime faced full-scale famine in Ireland. What role did the Economist play in the official response to it? In accordance with the laissez-faire outlook of the ministers in charge of the emergency, cheap provisions were expected to flow from the act of repeal straight into Ireland.70 Would these suffice? Late in November 1847 the Economist grew alarmed at rumours that a grant of £3 million was about to be made to Ireland to allow it to buy food, urging its countrymen to reflect that this would increase the price of grain, not the supply, causing hardship in England to alleviate it in Ireland. ‘Charity was a natural English error.’ But it could be corrected. The only ways to mitigate scarcity were ‘to procure more food or eat less’. Or to at last throw open the ports, in which case, ‘any supply that America could afford would then be brought hither by the regular course of trade, and employment – not eleemosynary aid – would enable people to purchase it.’71 The result of following the Economist’s prescriptions was a utopian social experiment on par with the better-known holocausts of the twentieth century.72 During the worst of the famine years of 1845–1849, one and a half million people died out of a population of 8 million, and another million fled.
The British government showed its commitment to the invisible hand of the market throughout, with the Economist critical of even the smallest departure from its rigours. In 1845–1846 Peel had shown insufficient firmness. He had ordered small batches of Indian corn to be bought discreetly by Baring Brothers in North America, as a reserve to keep prices in check; but the severity of the famine forced him to release small dribbles at select government depots. In 1846–47 the Russell administration, in which Wilson served, announced that it would buy no more foreign grain: Charles Wood, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Charles Trevelyan, Assistant Secretary, blamed Peel’s purchases the year before for paralysing trade by deterring dealers and merchants