stories from the front line.
The Economist, however, was not among them. ‘Our Gallant Army in the Crimea’ depicted a dying Maréchal Saint-Arnaud, deeply stirred by the behaviour of his British opposite number at the Alma. ‘The bravery of Lord Raglan’, he said, before breathing his last, ‘rivals that of antiquity. The rest of this item was a dispatch from … Lord Raglan.’99 As expectations of a quick victory dissolved, its coverage attempted to rally public opinion behind a Homeric struggle which ‘may task all our endurance … the commencement of that great conflict between liberty and despotism which Canning and Napoleon alike predicted as inevitable’. It reminded readers of the nature of the enemy, ‘whom we know to be the resolute, instinctive, conscientious foe of all that we hold dearest and most sacred – of human rights, civil liberty, enlightened progress’. Worse still, ‘freedom of trade, freedom of movement, freedom of thought, freedom of worship – all are proscribed as deadly sins in the Decalogue of Muscovy’. Giving thanks to the country’s ally, it explained: ‘France and England alone venture to make head against the terrible Colossus’, which, but for their courage, ‘would reign over Europe from the Ural Mountains to the Alps and Apennines, if not to the Pyrenees, without a rival and without check’.100
Diplomatic efforts for a negotiated peace were shot down from the beginning. The Economist sided with Palmerston, now prime minister, who wished to keep France in the war at all costs – with 310,000 men-in-arms compared to 98,000 for Britain, France’s will to fight started to flag earlier – and to expand operations, fielding an army to attack Russia through the Baltic. ‘Peace at any price or war at any cost?’ This was the wrong way of looking at the problem. ‘The correct mode is to inquire whether the objects we aim at be just? If they be, they must be fought for to the last drop of our blood and the last sovereign in our coffers.’101 Around this time the Economist finally acknowledged that cholera and typhus were killing more soldiers than the Russians. Yet the paper found Britain, at least, ‘was never served by abler or more zealous or more honest men’, and with the benefit of hindsight was even able to pull some lessons from the wreckage.102 Thanks to ‘the unimpaired resources of empire’, it declared in February 1856, shortly before the Peace of Paris was signed with its grudging assent, ‘never was there a year of greater or more uniform prosperity’.103 In the end, 21,000 British soldiers died, 16,000 from disease, exposure or starvation, along with 100,000 Frenchmen, 120,000 Turks and 450,000 Russians.104
Some of the Economist’s bellicosity can be explained by the fact that Wilson and Greg were government agents, making the paper a scrapbook of their wartime service. Setting aside previous scruples, Wilson defended Cornewall Lewis even when the latter caused an outcry among free traders for raising duties on sugar, spirits, coffee and tea in 1855.105 A £5 million loan to Turkey was needed, which Wilson helped to negotiate. He sprinkled lead articles with details of his meetings in Paris with Lord Cowley, ambassador to France, and Achille Fould, French finance minister. He secured the post of Commissioner of the Customs for Greg – also in Paris, transcribing his chats with the former premier François Guizot. Wartime London was a similar whirlwind of Allied loans and socializing, with Wilson near the centre: balls in honour of Louis-Napoleon, medal ceremonies for crippled heroes, and dinner parties; at one Ferdinand de Lesseps pitched his plans for the Suez Canal to Wilson over pudding as the poet Matthew Arnold, another guest, looked over the proposal.106
Neither Wilson’s editorial interventions nor his social life passed unnoticed in the wider liberal world, with which he had sometimes disagreed on foreign policy as early as 1850.107 Cobden and Bright furiously opposed the Crimean War, and had savage things to say about former brothers-in-arms who lent it support. Wilson was in a class apart, however; his betrayal was both personal, in light of the help they had given him to found the Economist, and political. All three had once shared a view of empire as a feudal residue. In Cobden’s early pamphlets free trade was perhaps less pronounced a theme even than the evils of foreign wars. England, Ireland and America, written in 1835 when he was thirty-one, summed up his position, which did not change. Trade was ‘the grand panacea’, the only thing, in stark contrast to misguided meddling abroad, likely to spread liberal institutions: ‘not a bale of merchandise leaves our shores, but it bears the seeds of intelligence … to the members of some less enlightened community; not a merchant visits our manufacturing industry, but he returns to his own country the missionary of freedom, peace and good government’.108 In the Economist’s early years Wilson devoted countless leaders to demonstrating how this process worked in practice. In the House of Commons, Cobden aimed to cut defence budgets; outside, he became an active member of the Peace Society. Free trade, peace and goodwill was his motto – the first naturally fostering the second, and vice versa. The idea that one country might force another to trade freely, let alone be free, never appealed to Cobden. Calling on the Royal Navy to pry open foreign markets or protect trade routes and lines of communication struck him as outrageous and hypocritical; now, though, the very liberals with whom he had fought against the Corn Laws were taking up this call. That Wilson was among them, formerly the most rigid expositor of laissez-faire principles imaginable, was a shock.
For Cobden the language used by the Economist and the rest of the hawkish press – ‘integrity of the Turkish Empire, balance of power’ – were ‘words without meaning, mere echoes of the past, suited for the mouths of senile Whiggery’.109 Wilson was a ‘Whig valet’, his defection symptomatic of a general desertion of wealthy Leaguers.110 Asked if he had read the latest Economist, which had backed a belligerent ultimatum to Russia, in December 1855, Cobden replied, ‘I never see the Economist though I have it on my conscience that I was mainly concerned in starting it. It was always a dull stupid paper even when it was honest. But to read sophistical arguments in no better style than Wilson’s is a task I would not condemn a dog to.’111 Writing to Bright, he asked: ‘Have you heard Greg has got a commissionership of the Customs, given him by Wilson, worth I suppose £1200 a yr., & nothing to interfere with his literary pursuits? The state into which our press has fallen is scandalous, dangerous to all sound public opinion, & it ought to be ripped up with the tomahawk of exposure.’112
For its part the Economist battered Cobden and Bright week after week. When Cobden published a letter in the Leeds Mercury maintaining that the war was as unpopular as it was badly run, the paper commented, ‘Few idols have ever so grieved or disappointed their worshippers as the member for West Riding … Cobden is becoming disingenuous … an ordinary demagogue.’113 In 1853 it had welcomed his pamphlet criticizing Britain’s annexation of Burma, ‘How Wars are Got Up in India’. Now, in 1856, much the same stance applied to Crimea in ‘What Next – and Next?’ was ‘irrational, feeble, and flagitious’.114 As for Bright and his ‘immoral moralizing’, it was in danger of running out of epithets – he was ‘the tool and sycophant of the Great Disturber of the peace’, the ‘intrepid advocate and reckless ally of the Czar’ and ‘worth a dozen regiments’.115 When a lead article in the paper fulminated against his and Cobden’s acts of deceit against the nation in arms – the article was entitled ‘The Enemies of Free Institutions’ – Bright directly addressed the Economist in the House of Commons, in a speech attacking the Turkish loan that Gladstone and Wilson had arranged behind the backs of parliament. ‘It is understood by the occupants of the Treasury bench, that when the country is at war the House of Commons is to be a shadow.’ Mocking the editorial anonymity behind which Wilson hid, he remarked:
If you want to know the opinions of Gentlemen upon the Treasury bench on this subject, I will give it you from a journal of great influence, which is supposed to be under the control of an hon. and very able Gentleman who sits upon that bench. Here is a paragraph which appeared in a leading article of that paper upon the 30th of December, 1854, and, of course, things are worse now – ‘It is difficult to say whether the leaders of the Radicals or the leaders of the Tories – whether Lord Derby, Mr. Bright, or Mr. Disraeli – have done most to awaken us to a perception how mischievous, at critical conjunctures, free legislative assemblies may become. The plain truth is, that Parliamentary government is, in time of war, an embarrassment, a danger, and an anomaly, and we have to thank the advocates