fever pitch in the late nineteenth century, obscuring this civilizing commercial mission, criticism of imperialism was never to be found in the Economist. It could not be, since the reproduction of national as well as international wealth was inconceivable for the paper under Johnstone outside the imperial framework, and the invasions, pacifications, occupations and annexations necessary to construct, preserve and extend it. Whether imperialism was an ‘urge’ or a ‘tension’ internal to liberalism, or one twist in its ‘convoluted trajectory’, as several scholars would have it, what is abundantly clear is that in the second half of the nineteenth century it was central to the mainstream of liberalism – to which the Economist gave authoritative expression.66 Empire structured the world economy and made it safe for capital, even outside the zones under its direct control. And though the Economist faced criticism from radical Liberals over the policies this governing reality led it to endorse, such voices only looked (even momentarily) strong enough to challenge its dominance after 1899, when the Second Boer War shook the British Empire.
As Beijing burned, Britain faced a war in South Africa entirely on its own, in what turned into its costliest military engagement since the time of Napoleon. Not only was its performance in the Second Boer War unsteady, so was its pretext for the war, which seemed to many critics at home and abroad like a plot to grab the gold and diamond mines of two small independent Boer republics, the Transvaal and Orange Free State.67 The Economist had doubts about the official reason offered by its erstwhile contributor, High Commissioner Alfred Milner. At Bloemfontein in June 1899 it was Milner, not the Boer leaders, who refused compromise over the status of Britain’s Uitlander expatriates in their territory, provoking the paper in a rare burst of candour to call the issue of their voting rights in the Transvaal a red herring, ‘moneyed interests standing in ambush behind a political movement’. Cecil Rhodes, at once prime minister of the neighbouring British Cape Colony, director of the British South Africa Company, speculator in diamond and gold, and the architect of the botched Jameson Raid four years earlier, symbolized this ‘unhappily close connection between politics and capitalist interests’.68 Rhodes’s enablers in London were nearly as bad, especially Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain, whose brash style unsettled diplomacy and markets.69 The annexation these men were pushing for was above all short-sighted. For surrounded by British colonies, inundated by British migrants bearing British capital, both Boer republics would be absorbed into a British-controlled Union of South Africa inside a generation.70 ‘Do not let an exaggerated Imperialism make us ridiculous before the world’, the paper initially remonstrated. ‘Our Empire was not built up that way.’71
But in a trice the Second Boer War proved no different from the other colonial conflicts – for the Economist abruptly changed tack when the Transvaal’s president Kruger served an ultimatum to the British to halt their troop build-up in October 1899. No matter how just their cause, if the Boers ‘once presume to attack a British colony’, the country ‘would be united in a war which would be literally waged saigner à blanc. There would be no compromise, as in 1881; the Boer State would be wiped out of existence by general consent.’72 From ‘stock-breeders of the lower type’, such a ‘horrible blunder’ might have been expected: average Boers ‘knew less than people like the Afghans’; but their leaders believed ‘as Muslim fanatics believe’, and were ‘possessed with the idea that Englishmen want their mines – which, we may remark, Englishmen own already’. Boers may have thought like ‘Orientals’ but counted on being treated as white men, in a ‘war with limited liability’. ‘They know perfectly well that the English will neither execute them, nor take their farms, nor subject them to special taxation.’73 When this proved untrue, and revelations about the use of concentration camps emerged, the Economist fell silent. Thereafter, criticism was confined to calls for more and better guns, more and swifter transport, and a larger, better-paid standing army.74
Imperial Unity and Liberal Splits
Johnstone presided over a less predictable political scene than past editors, as the old quarrels over empire between the Economist and its onetime backers, Cobden and Bright, suddenly took hold of the entire Liberal Party; the succession of far-flung colonial wars, joined to the simmering of nationalism in Ireland, added up to a full-blown crisis. The paper remained militantly hostile to any hint of ‘radical pacifism’ and any Liberals who espoused such views in parliament. Sir Wilfrid Lawson, the temperance campaigning MP, and a ‘small knot’ of ‘advanced Liberals’ were inexcusable in their ‘blind’ and ‘mischievous’ opposition to Gladstone’s seizure of Egypt in 1882–83.75 Bright was dismissed for ‘denouncing our interference’ in Burma in 1885 since he was merely venting ‘his favourite dogma on the essential criminality of war’.76 John Morley, who had nearly become editor of the Economist, was admirably Cobdenite when it came to free trade, but took the likeness too far – asking ‘foolish’ and ‘illogical’ questions about British scorched earth tactics in the Sudan.77
Critiques of empire that hadn’t had much impact in the past now seemed to be gaining ground in the Liberal Party and straining its unity. So much so that when Gladstone himself announced a belated conversion to Home Rule for Ireland in 1885, the party imploded – nearly one hundred of its MPs formed a breakaway Unionist faction. In this crisis, the Economist knew where it stood, and expressed itself without hesitation. Almost overnight Gladstone turned from a great Liberal hero into an ageing demagogue, dragging his party and country down a sinkhole. Liberals that stood with him over Home Rule had struck a ‘fanatical alliance’ with nationalist Irish Parnellite MPs, fomenting ‘a war against all payment of rent in Ireland’, the ‘very foundations of contract’, to ‘hand that unhappy country over to the strife of rival factions, the bitter play of religious animosities, and the keener conflict of class hatreds’.78 By 1893, the split between the Liberal Unionists and the Liberals was so severe that the Economist stopped calling for a reconciliation between them: Unionists needed to throw their full force behind the Conservatives to stop Gladstone’s second Home Rule Bill – a ‘step towards the disintegration’ of the Empire, this time crushed only by the merciful intervention of the House of Lords.79
The early editors of the Economist, Wilson and Bagehot, had been pillars of the Liberal Party, both of them intimates of Gladstone. Under Johnstone, the Economist now issued its liberalism from a distance, as the paper switched to support for the Conservatives, who soon absorbed the Liberal Unionists (the latter agreeing to drop the prefix ‘Liberal’ in 1890), and ruled Britain with brief interruptions for the next twenty years.
Disraeli stepped down in 1880 and was remembered with surprising fondness at his death a year later, given that the Economist had ‘resisted half his proposals’ – for he had a sharp mind, ‘fought his way amidst great disadvantages to the top’, and showed the country and the Liberals (with their ‘tendency to forget the importance of force in human affairs’) that ‘a small nation which governs a great Empire must make sacrifices’ and ‘occasionally do high-handed things’.80 Salisbury, the most powerful Conservative statesman of the last third of the nineteenth century, enjoyed even better press, at least by his third stint as prime minister, as the paper acquired a taste for this strangely ‘sardonic man’. The marquis had stood up to Germany in South Africa, France in Egypt, and all of Europe over Crete; and he had held fast to his Liberal Unionist allies on Irish Home Rule, living down an earlier reputation for weakness – while resisting ‘injudicious adventures’.81 His nephew and protégé seemed at first a disappointing contrast. Arthur Balfour, who became prime minister in 1902, possessed his uncle’s hauteur and ‘scant respect for popular government’, without his political instincts, or a grasp of economics.82
The Liberal politicians of the period faced much harsher criticism, in part because the Economist doubted their hold over the party – with the 1886 split having by no means settled imperial policy outside Ireland. The paper backed the Unionists-cum-Conservatives in 1886, 1892, 1895, and 1900. In the last, a ‘khaki election’ during the Second Boer War, it found the official Liberal opposition in a ‘sad way’ – ‘incurably divided by personal dislike, with followers who upon the leading question