alive the agitation in the metropolis. When we dissolved our organization, a lithographed circular was sent to all its subscribers recommending them to support the Economist. This was the foundation of Wilson’s fortune, which was in a sickly state previously … [it] became the stepping stone to Office … What so natural as that the paper should be the obsequious servant of the government, or the Economist’s pages should be employed in assailing the two men who laid the foundation of all this success, if they happen no longer to be in favour with the dispensers of patronage?130
Bright ignored the Economist, and only partly listened to Cobden, agreeing a few months later to stand for a vacant seat in Birmingham – as news reached Britain in 1857 of a bloody uprising in India.131
India and the Indian Mutiny
In the climate of fear and vengeance that reports of the Indian Mutiny produced, criticisms of empire risked becoming still more unpopular, jeopardizing Bright’s chances of re-election, and Cobden urged him to moderate his tone, at least in public. In private, both condemned ‘the depraved, unhappy state of opinion’, Cobden wondering what point there was in taking to the stump: ‘I consider that we as a nation are little better than brigands, murderers, and poisoners in our dealings at this moment with half the population of the globe.’132 Once back in parliament, however, Bright grew bolder, informing his Birmingham constituents that the Empire ‘is a positive loss to the people’ and ‘neither more nor less than a gigantic system of outdoor relief for the aristocracy of Great Britain’. The rationale for fighting Russia and China, ‘introducing cotton cloth with cannon balls’, were ‘vain, foolish and wretched excuses for war’. India, moreover, was a ‘country we do not know how to govern’, and Indians were justified in rebelling against British rule in the subcontinent, where the conquest of Oudh, ‘with which our Government had but recently entered into a solemn treaty’ was ‘a great immorality and a great crime, and we have reaped an almost instantaneous retribution in the most gigantic and sanguinary revolt which probably any nation ever made against its conquerors’.133
Wilson found this last strophe on India so alarming that when he saw Bright in the Commons a few months later he obtained assurances from him that he had been ‘carried away much further than he intended’. Wilson relayed these assurances to Cornewall Lewis, who wanted to know if Bright would cooperate on electoral reform should the Tories be turned out and a new Liberal ministry formed – inevitably including Palmerston or Russell, the very men Bright was castigating for criminal misconduct in imperial and foreign affairs.134
From 1857 the Economist was as fixated as the rest of the press on the horror stories pouring out of British India – where a mutiny of Indian soldiers, or sepoys, against their European officers in Meerut rapidly grew into a full-fledged rebellion against the British East India Company. By this time the quasi-private company, founded under Elizabeth I, ruled about two-thirds of the Indian subcontinent, in exchange for a £630,000 annuity to London on the revenue the land under its control generated. Three separate armies marched under its banners, one for each of the presidencies into which India was subdivided: Bengal, Bombay and Madras, totalling 232,000 Indians and 45,000 Europeans. The first of these was the largest and most homogeneous, recruited since the mid-seventeenth century from Hindu peasants in Bengal, Oudh, Bihar and Benares. These men mutinied in far greater numbers than anywhere else; a fact contemporaries attributed to an unwitting religious insult, infantry in Meerut – it was said – refusing to bite cartridges greased with cow and pig fat, offensive to Muslims and Hindus alike. In reality, their grievances were structural: both in the army – low pay, poor living conditions, an inability to rise through the ranks, in which the most senior Indian officer was obliged to obey the most junior European – and in the surrounding society, whose once formidable textile economy had collapsed under the onslaught of British manufactured cloth, while being subjected to an East India Company business model based on the predatory chase after new revenues and territories.135
The Economist was just as ruthless with Indians as with the Irish or Chinese. As Elgin ordered troops en route to China to double back to Calcutta, the paper looked forward to swift justice being meted out to the mutineers for their treachery in ‘undiscriminating destruction of hospitals and barracks, of helpless women and children’, which it contemptuously attributed to the ‘native character … half child, half savage, actuated by sudden and unreasoning impulses’ more than to any coherent motivation or design.136 It thought the worst was probably over by mid-July when the fall of Delhi to the rebels failed to ignite a general uprising. ‘Three-fourths of the Bengal army – the whole of the Madras and Bombay – and the entire non-military population from Cape Comorin to the Himalayas, have stayed aloof … could there be stronger evidence that, in spite of numerous errors, British rule is regarded by the natives of India as a blessing rather than a curse?’137
Even the ‘barbarous and treacherous massacre of the garrison at Cawnpore’, which, unlike the Times it declined to describe in detail, scarcely troubled its confidence in the future of empire.138 In fact, the mutiny was soon viewed as little less than a blessing in disguise. A month later, it offered ‘The Bright Side of the Picture’ in a tone of elated Benthamite optimism. The English character perhaps required such a shock to ‘startle and energize us’ – ‘a Crimean winter to convince us of the defects in our military administration, and a universal mutiny to open our eyes in India’. The sheer scale of the disaster gave British statesmen that rare thing, ‘carte blanche – an unencumbered field … we are free to act as on the first day of our Imperial existence’.139 This notion became the refrain of the Economist. ‘No event less horrible could have strengthened our hands so powerfully.’ If the sepoys had only committed garden-variety cruelties, ‘the Government would have been assailed at once by a strong party likening the revolt to that of the American colonies, and recommending the nation not to resist a patriotic movement … Eloquent voices would have been raised as Mr Bright’s was formerly, to warn the nation that a due retribution had come upon them for a selfish feeling of grasping ambition.’
Yet now all these doubts and fears are absolutely stilled … Every Englishman knows that to abandon India, would be to commit a far worse sin against the millions of Hindoos than against our own nation … to the horrors of a military anarchy compared with which the reign of terror in the French revolution was a model of justice and mercy … In Europe too they see how helpless are the Indian races to restrain their own superstitions and their own passions – that no reverence for law, and civil order, and social obligations, adequate for the rudest form of self-government is yet written on their minds … Commerce with India would be at an end were English power withdrawn.140
British forces regained the initiative at the turn of 1858, with the active help or acquiescence of princely states in upper and central India, and the diversion of regiments from Crimea, Persia and China. Imperial troops, reconquering or relieving besieged cities – in Delhi, Cawnpore, Lucknow and elsewhere – exacted terrible revenge on whole populations deemed guilty of aiding rebels. The Economist noted with approval ‘the stern vigour afforded by daily executions of mutineers of every rank’ – some were shot from the mouths of cannons – but wondered whether journalists and officers calling for the head of every sepoy in a mutinous regiment, even those who had committed no violence, had thought through the domestic reaction that might ensue: ‘it is at least worthy of consideration’, it submitted, ‘whether the deliberate execution of 35,000 men or more is a measure which the people and Government of England are prepared for’.141 When the East India Company itself failed to survive the uprising, London henceforward assuming direct control of the new British Raj, the Economist gave the change a warm welcome.
Noblesse Oblige: Wilson in India
One reason why the Economist embraced the new model of government for India became clear a month after a state of peace was declared. ‘James Wilson’, the Times announced on 5 August 1859, had consented to become ‘Chancellor of the Indian Exchequer’, tasked with mopping up the cost of the mutiny. As in Crimea this had exceeded Economist estimates, with the death toll from the disproportionate British retaliation against Indian