been approached.’ Rather it was protection – a flawed, unnatural system of government interference with commerce – that was the enemy, ‘prejudicial to all classes of the community’.11 It was not a matter for ‘class enmity … the interest of all classes was the same’, and Wilson spoke privately, on this score, of ‘the rubbish they have been talking at Manchester’.12 It is unlikely Cobden and Bright were ever won over to this line of thinking, so different from their broadsides against the parasitism of rent-seeking aristocrats. Cobden even ventured a small criticism at the time. ‘I think you have lost sight of one gain to the aristocratic land-lords … the political power arising out of the present state of their tenantry – and political power in this country has been pecuniary gain.’13
Whatever its flaws, however, the pamphlet proved strategically invaluable. The League and the Leeds Mercury (a leading voice of provincial Whiggism) reprinted it. Cobden praised Wilson for ‘labouring to prove to the Landlords that they may safely do justice to others without endangering their own interests.’14 J. R. McCulloch, the chief disciple of David Ricardo, called it ‘one of the best and most reasonable of the late tracts in favour of unconditional repeal’.15 It was even quoted by certain Tories, then the party of protection, including the prime minister Sir Robert Peel. Such was its power to transform debate and attract formerly committed foes of free trade in the countryside that, for a time, even Cobden adopted its language. ‘I am afraid, if we must confess the truth, that most of us entered upon this struggle with the belief that we had some distinct class interest in the question, and that we should carry it by a manifestation of our will’, he told a Manchester crowd in 1843. ‘If there is one thing which more than another has elevated and dignified and ennobled this agitation, it is, we have found, that every interest and every object which every part of the community can justly seek, harmonize perfectly with the views of the Anti-Corn Law League.’16 In Wilson the League discovered that in pursuing its own class interests it was pursuing those of all classes.
Yet it is just as easy to see the appeal his early tracts against protection held out to enterprising landowners. In Influences, his clearest point was conveyed in statistical tables which claimed to show that production costs in England were competitive with Europe; given other variables, like soil conditions and cost of transport, foreign grain was unlikely to flood the home market.17 Still more significant, however, were the theoretical foundations for this claim. In contrast to Ricardo and Thomas Malthus he did not see class conflict as an inherent fact of economic life: from the former he discarded or modified the theory of marginal rents and wages, and from the latter the pessimistic forecast that population always outpaces food supply. Ricardo suggested that landed capital gained at the expense of industrial capital, and Malthus that working-class wages tended towards the bare minimum necessary for survival. Wilson favoured a model of rapid growth, in which rent, profits and wages all rose in tandem – provided that a free trade system was in place, allowing Britain to exchange its finished goods for the raw materials of less advanced nations. The less advanced nations could then buy even more from Britain. Given such a system, Ricardo had written, ‘it is difficult to say where the limit is at which you could cease to accumulate wealth and to derive profit from its exploit’.18 If this blueprint for growth owed much to Ricardo, however, the universal identity of class interests it presaged belonged to Adam Smith.
Wilson posited a theory of price fluctuations to explain a status quo that only appeared to benefit agriculture at the expense of capital and labour. High grain prices ensured by protective tariffs encouraged farmers to over-cultivate during good times, only to see their surplus grain mouldering during subsequent crashes. Worse, falling prices meant a reverse cycle of abandoned fields and diminishing investment. As prices began to rise again the home grower had little to sell; foreign wheat was then called in and it reaped the profits. Landowners suffered nearly as much, faced with the unpalatable options of accepting steeply reduced rents, ruining their tenants without being able to find new ones, or taking over the fields themselves.19 Manufacturing would also be served by reform, though not in the way many Leaguers assumed. Repeal was not going to lower the price of provisions or labour. Quite the contrary, since prices were bound to climb in step with the general prosperity attendant upon a more productive application of labour and capital and the rise in exports. What of the workers? Price swings were, finally, most regrettable for their effect on ‘the moral and political condition of the labouring population of all kinds.’ No one could forget the terror which swept the countryside during the last crisis: ‘the awful and mysterious midnight fires … anonymous letters; secret societies to fan and inflame the worst passions; highway robberies and personal attacks.’ And all this carried out by the indigent peasants whose miseries ‘were really much more apt to excite our pity than our blame’. Factory workers were even more cruelly used, lulled by ‘the temporary possession of comforts and luxuries far beyond what their average condition will enable them to support’.20
Backing the Economist: Wilson and the Whig Grandees
Armed with such arguments Wilson became a regular speaker at meetings of the League, where Archibald Prentice of the Manchester Times remembered him as ‘relying more upon statistical figures than on figures of speech, and trusting more to facts and reasoning than to rhetorical flourishes.’ Yet his audience ‘had come to learn and not to be excited by flashes of oratory’, listening with ‘deep interest for three quarters of an hour’.21 Wilson for his part preferred the pen to the podium, and continued publishing, with Fluctuations of Currency, Commerce, and Manufactures: Referable to the Corn Laws in 1840. The assemblies were noisy and drew too many ‘Manchester School extremists’. After a meeting at the Drury Lane Theatre in London, in which Cobden, Bright and Daniel O’Connell took front stage, he confided to his family that this was ‘not to his taste, and he would be sorry to see other political questions settled that way’.22
Wilson was aware that his voice carried farther than the theatre pits of the capital. His writings had caught the attention of a group of Whig politicians sympathetic to the goals of the League, if not to its noisy proceedings. In 1839, lordly letters began to stream into Dulwich Place. Charles Villiers, the radical MP for Wolverhampton, asked for help in drafting his annual motion for repeal in the House of Commons, a solitary ritual, usually voted down by a margin of several hundred. Would Wilson, he added, be kind enough to call on his brother George, fourth Earl of Clarendon, at the Athenaeum Club? William Pleydell-Bouverie, third Earl of Radnor, wrote from Longford Castle requesting anti-Corn Law arguments he could use against the surrounding squires in Wiltshire.23 Radnor, who took an almost fatherly interest in Wilson – nominating him to the Reform Club in 1842, and helping him take his first steps into politics – prided himself on being the most radical of all grandees. At the age of ten a terrified witness of the French Revolution, Radnor later became convinced (after repairing to Edinburgh and Oxford and studies of Smith, Blackstone and Montesquieu) that progress was possible without reliving those scenes of democratic chaos: the cause of individual liberty was best served by laissez-faire economics coupled with the political rule of an enlightened aristocracy.24 On a visit to Radnor’s vast demesne near Salisbury, built up on investments in the Levant trade, the French statesman Alexis de Tocqueville observed that the Radnor family embodied the eminently commercial character of the English nobility.25
One drawing room after another, in town and country, opened its doors to Wilson, who passed through them to find the backers he would need to start the Economist. His message was that complete free trade would mean an end to the trade cycle itself, a thesis whose utopian flavour is evident in all his major works between 1839 and 1841 – from Influences and Fluctuations to The Revenue; or What Should the Chancellor Do?26 The idea of starting a newspaper arose soon after the last of these pamphlets appeared, for it was clear that neither corn nor the League offered sufficient scope for Wilson to develop his unique vision. ‘There never was a time when an independent organ was more required,’ Villiers insisted in the spring of 1843. Meeting at his club, Wilson found him ‘very fond of the thing, – but from what he said I fear we shall have some difficulty with the League – it appears they are extremely jealous of their importance and will want it a League Paper, and as such I will have nothing to