if they did. Under no circumstances were exports to be restricted, as some in Ireland were demanding. True, even as people scrounged for nettles, thousands of tons of wheat, oats, cattle, pigs, eggs and butter were sailing out of the country. Yet this was all for the best. For in a free trade world the high prices these articles obtained abroad would allow merchants to buy and import cheap food to make up the lost potatoes.74 In practice what private enterprise there was in Ireland never imported enough, or at prices most could afford.
The correspondence between high officials was laden with nostrums lifted from the Economist, as the paper itself acknowledged when reviewing a parliamentary selection of them in 1847. But this only spurred it to attack compromises made on humanitarian grounds, in full knowledge of the errors committed. ‘We totally deny that what is wrong in principle can be right in practice. If a principle be true there can be no exception to its application, and least of all can it be abandoned or neglected in an extreme case.’75 The paper was aware that Adam Smith had sanctioned public works in like situations. But it doubted if he would still approve, and defended him from a hostile pamphlet, The True Cure for Ireland, which called it ‘perfect folly to be dancing a Will-o’-the-wisp dance, after the abstract principles of political economy, as laid down by Adam Smith, for it ought to be remembered he wrote for a country advanced in social position and high civilization.’ On the contrary, retorted the Economist, ‘Smith wrote for all time, and of all time’.76
Wilson not only ensured that his paper constantly firmed up civil servants and politicians over Ireland: he soon enlisted them to craft the Economist itself. George Villiers, the fourth Earl of Clarendon, and one of his original backers, was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in the spring of 1847. He was in constant touch with Wilson, feeding him data on the famine – from potato yields to confidential reports on Irish Poor Law returns intended for cabinet eyes only. On taking up his post in relatively optimistic mood, Clarendon asked for Economist articles on landlord-tenant relations. Did Wilson have ‘any hints’ on the ideal form of lease? A few months later he asked him to ‘prepare the public mind’ for his plans to effect large scale emigration out of Ireland. As one ostensibly liberal policy after another failed to do any good, however, both began to despair of the whole race. A crackdown was needed.77
When a number of landlords were assassinated in the winter of 1847, Clarendon became convinced an armed insurrection was brewing and threatened to resign unless he was given extraordinary powers to protect life and property. The Economist supported him: the ‘special duty’ of government in such a country was not to tamper with the labour or money markets but to counter the turbulence that ‘had driven away capital’; ‘the more dangerous the state of society becomes the more necessary it is that order and security should be enforced.’78 A Coercion Bill received the royal assent in December, and as Engels observed, ‘the Lord Lieutenant was not slow in taking advantage of the despotic powers with which this new law invests him.’79 In the summer of 1848, Clarendon wrote to Wilson that the bill was a ‘complete success’, thanking him for articles ‘exhibiting your accurate knowledge of Ireland and friendly feeling towards myself’. As for the country he was ruling, he felt ‘like the governor of an ill-guarded jail … they have been made a nation of political gossips instead of agricultural labourers, and as they sow idleness so they reap misery’.80
When an uprising did occur that summer it was not the work of the starving masses, as officials had feared, but of a small band of intellectuals in Tipperary calling themselves Young Ireland, easily subdued by local constables. They were ‘the laughing stock of the world’, jeered the Economist. Still, the precautions taken by government – suspending habeas corpus, dispatching an extra 15,000 troops and ordering the fleet to patrol the coast – were sensible.81 The Economist urged their extension for twelve months and that martial law be declared. Trials by jury should be cancelled: military tribunals alone could be relied on to punish rebels. ‘It is liberty, not despotism, which acts as an irritant to the Irish constitution. It simply, as doctors say, does not agree with it. The oriental element – mental prostration before power – is paramount.’ ‘Powerful, resolute, but just repression’ would render the Irishman ‘not only submissive, but content’. It continued:
These suggestions will sound strange in English and in liberal ears. But it is time the truth should be spoken boldly out that the ideal of equal laws for England and Ireland is a delusion, a mockery and a mischief … not till Ireland has been trained and inured to respect and obey the law by years of rigid and severe enforcement, will she have learnt those lessons of justice, honesty, truth, and subordination, which can alone entitle her, by sharing English virtues, to share English liberties and English institutions.82
This was enough to make even Clarendon hesitate: ‘I would like to hear how your articles have been received by the middle classes in England, and whether they are prepared to go your lengths. Pray let me know this as it may to a certain extent guide my proceedings.’ Clarendon had earlier voiced doubts about the lengths to which Wilson was taking laissez-faire in Ireland, feeling that repression must be coupled with relief, and by 1849 he implored Russell not to leave the Irish, in Trevelyan’s phrase, to ‘the operation of natural causes’.83
Revolutionary disturbances were not confined to Ireland in 1848, as upheavals swept across Europe, threatening not just continental monarchies but alarming even the crown-in-parliament in Britain, where Chartism saw a brief, unnerving revival. The Economist could find no words harsh enough to describe ‘a movement around which are aggregated all the turbulence, all the rapscallionism, all the demagogic ambition of the nation’. Its demands would hand power to the ‘one class exclusively, the most open to corruption and deception … partial, unfair, fatal, despotic’. Editorials argued that electoral reform would only infantilize the lower orders yet further: ‘it unteaches the people the great lesson of self-dependence; it encourages them to look to government rather than themselves, both for the causes and the remedies of their sufferings’. Political leadership belonged to the middle classes. They paid the most tax and practised the virtues, ‘frugality, industry and forethought’, on which the prosperity of all other classes depended.84
The appalling tumult in European capitals, on the other hand, put these domestic troubles in perspective. If there was some hope in Germany, since the revolution there was ‘led by the nobles, and consecrated by the priests’, France was lost: it had too many state employees, no respect for property (or credit: deposits had been frozen), and was obsessed by the wrong kind of freedom, ‘equality … without the slightest care for personal liberty … the right of unfettered action and speech’. Compared to the Irish or the French, the English were relatively safe: ‘order is beloved; property is sacred; we respect the rights of others.’ In private Wilson was even more scathing about the French, ‘a weak, puerile and despicable race … the only thing that will do them any good is the iron grasp of a sturdy but wise despot’.85
City, State, Empire: Joining the Gentlemanly Capitalists
The Economist’s influence grew in lockstep with that of its editor. Wilson sat on the parliamentary committees – Commercial Distress, Banking, Currency, Life Insurance – crafting the policies on which his paper pronounced each week. His aristocratic colleagues, a little unsure about the rudiments of political economy, leant on him. The ageing Duke of Wellington, victor of Waterloo and a monument to Tory reaction, required a private tutorial before agreeing to let repeal of the Navigation Laws pass through the upper chamber. The Whig imperialist Lord Palmerston took his lessons on early morning strolls back from Whitehall; his amusing banter more than making up for his ‘belligerent propensities’.86 Lord Grey, grudging sponsor of electoral reform in 1832, passed colonial news – Guiana, the Cape, a lecture by Lord Elgin on the progress of Upper Canada – to the paper. The diplomat Lord Howden paid a visit before setting sail for Argentina and Brazil to negotiate lower sugar duties, promising news of his progress.87 Wilson carried these intimacies into the countryside, first in Wiltshire, then in Somerset, with hunting, ponies for the girls, gentlemanly pursuits – judging sheep contests – rounding out the days.
This change in status was