the existence of pure nationalities, or place them above these looser categories of national belonging. The term was unscientific, ‘a vague sort of faith to vast multitudes – a vague sort of implement to some plotters’. Yet it was also useful, so long as it was helping to build modern states – as in Germany and Italy. As a rallying cry for ‘alien fragments of old races’, however, nationalism was pernicious. ‘To set up the Basque nationality, or the Breton, or the Welsh, would be injurious to the Basque, the Bretons, and Welsh, even more than to Spain, France and England.’104 Its point was to release talented men cooped up in the administration of tiny nations (‘small politics debase the mind just as large politics improve it’), into larger ones, somehow leading to smaller, efficient government – and peace, with big countries less tempted to go to war to snap up weaker neighbours.105
What interest Bagehot’s Economist did take in nationalism was usually focused on its leading proponents. In Mazzini, the founder of Young Italy and champion of Italian unification, it saw a ‘true zealot’, more in love with himself than Italy, obsessed with the name of a republic, and too stubborn to accept its reality under the guise of a constitutional monarch. The brilliant military commander Garibaldi was a dimwit, who fought ‘with windmills instead of giants’. In both cases Bagehot refused to recognize the popular forces backing Mazzini and Garibaldi up and down the Italian peninsula.106 The Economist registered patriotic fervour in France and Prussia, meanwhile, but thought statesmen there would act to restrain lowborn passions at the last moment; in reality, Bismarck manipulated them – while Louis-Napoléon tried and failed to do the same, at home and as far afield as Mexico.107
Nowhere was the misreading of nationalism more pronounced, however, than in America, and the form this drive took in Lincolnism. And here the stakes were highest: of the 800 million pounds of cotton British mills consumed each year, 77 per cent came from the slave plantations of the American South, in which one-tenth of British capital was sunk. The outbreak of the Civil War in April 1861 cut off these supplies, endangering the most important industry in Britain, which added up to near half of exports. Anxious industrialists, merchants and investors turned to the Economist not just for analysis of the American situation, but for reports on markets as far afield as Egypt and India, where capital raced to open up new sources of cotton cultivation, leading to a cycle of boom and bust that transformed peasant agriculture and merchant trading networks around the world.108 For Bagehot the conflict also prompted a third constitutional investigation, setting the efficient secret of the English system against the grim realities of the American.
The American Constitution and the Civil War
Of all the politicians whose portraits Bagehot painted, his estimate of the US president, Abraham Lincoln, was at first lowest. ‘The President is unequal to the situation in which he is placed’, judged the Economist flatly at the end of 1861. ‘He has received the training of a rural attorney, and a fortuitous concurrence of electioneering elements have placed him at the head of a nation.’109 The federal government had ‘fallen into the hands of the smallest, weakest and meanest set of men who ever presided over the policy of a great nation at the critical epoch of its affairs.’ Their collective wisdom was a ‘concatenation of paltry arts which their own word “dodge” and no other will describe’.110 By the time of his re-election in 1864 Bagehot considered Lincoln the best candidate but made it clear this was not saying much. ‘It is not even contended that Mr. Lincoln is a man of eminent ability. It is only said that he is a man of common honesty, and it seems, this is so rare a virtue at Washington that at their utmost need no other man can be picked out to possess it and true ability also.’111 Bagehot did not even value his literary style, the ultimate insult, comparing ‘the dignified and able State Papers of Jefferson Davis to the feeble and ungrammatical prolixity of Abraham Lincoln’.112
Bagehot looked down his nose at Lincoln, but it was the American Constitution he blamed for putting him in charge, and for the seeming inability of the more prosperous and populous North to suppress a rebellion of eight million backward Southerners.113 The contrast with the efficient political reflexes of the English system was constant in his leaders for the Economist, and formed a considered corpus of work beyond it. ‘The American Constitution has puzzled most persons in this country since the remarkable course of recent events has attracted a real attention to American affairs.’114 Bagehot would explain its mysteries. Indeed, his disclosure of the efficient secret of English parliamentarianism depended on a prior act of exposure in America, where the Civil War revealed the horrific administrative, military, and financial consequences of wrong constitutional theories.
The US founding fathers had built upon an interpretation of the English Constitution that Bagehot would attack as false – with the perverse result that, here, checks and balances were real, limiting efficient government without restricting the suffrage. Americans had trusted to ‘paper checks and constitutional devices’ to ‘resist the force of democracy’ but ‘either could not or did not take the one effectual means of so doing; they did not place the substantial power in the hands of men of education and of property’.115 Congress, meanwhile, lacked the dynamic powers that might have made it an effective check either on the people or the president. With respect to the latter, it had an ‘extreme remedy’ only, ‘the power of refusing supplies’. The Founders had misunderstood their model. For ‘the framers of this clause in the American Constitution copied it from the traditional theory of the English Constitution.’ They had not understood that though it was ‘a deadly sleeping weapon’, in practice ‘a lesser instrument had been annexed to it, and was always used instead of it – that of choosing the executive’.116 Their mistaken reading meant the president had a ‘lease for years’ and stayed for all four no matter how ‘unfit, incompetent, and ignorant’.117
Congress, with a power almost ‘too terrible to use’, put America at a disadvantage in the new age of global capitalism. ‘The use of it stops the whole machinery of government, and the mere fear of its use annihilates public credit. Since the creation of large national debts, which did not exist in the times when the English House of Commons acquired its power, it is questionable whether a successful use of the power of withholding supplies could be effectually made with safety to the state.’118 The evils were legion: presidential impunity, the poor quality and limited ‘educating capacity’ of Congress, and apathy even among those supposed to be leading citizens.119 To Englishmen this was the most astonishing facet of the Northern character. ‘They bear defeat in their armies, fraud in their contractors, incompetence in their generals and statesmen, with a stoicism which would be admirable if it rested on philosophy or reason, if it were anything but ignorant patience.’120
Given this barrage of bad press, readers must have been stunned to open the Economist at the end of April in 1865 and find an encomium to Lincoln, after he was shot by an assassin during a performance in Washington, D.C. ‘We do not know in history such an example of the growth of a ruler in wisdom as was exhibited by Mr. Lincoln. Power and responsibility visibly widened his mind and elevated his character.’ In taking a second look at the dead president Bagehot found his hidden greatness to have been his ability to make the constitution work – a document even more wretched than he had imagined at the outset of the Civil War.
‘The difficulty of creating a strong government in America’, able ‘to do great acts very quickly, is almost insuperable.’ The national character was dead set against both efficiency and dignity. ‘The people in the first place dislike government, not this or that administration, but government in the abstract, to such a degree that they have invented a quasi philosophical theory, proving that government, like war or harlotry, is a “necessary evil.”’ States impeded any central initiative. ‘To make this weakness permanent they have deprived even themselves of absolute power, have first forbidden themselves to change the Constitution, except under circumstances which never occur, and have then, through the machinery of the common schools, given to that Constitution the moral weight of a religious document.’ Lincoln seemed the one man, ‘by infinitesimal chance’, capable of managing this infernal machine. ‘The President had, in fact, attained to the very position – the dictatorship