Is it not possible to continue some means of saving the people from this painful, lingering process of death from starvation?
Do we live under a regular or responsible government?
Is there justice or humanity in the world that such things could be in the middle of the nineteenth century, and within twelve hours reach of the opulence, grandeur and power of a court and capital – the first upon the earth?
*
Finally, I’d like to walk along the corridors and look inside the rooms of Trevelyan’s Treasury, the Foreign Office and Downing Street during the years of the Famine. Barely 200 miles from where families were starving to death. As far from Whitehall, as the crow flies, as the city of York. Can you visualise all the letters written from those offices, and the hundreds of memoranda exchanged between Trevelyan and Peel and Russell and Wood? All the judgements made in these grand, panelled rooms with portraits staring down on these statesmen, all the decisions signed off on government paper, stamped with government seals. All the deaths authorised from those mahogany desks in Whitehall. And how to even begin to quantify the devastation caused by the Manchester School of political economy? Those whose savage belief in the non-intervention of the state is summed up in Nassau William Senior’s phrase that a million deaths would ‘scarcely be enough to do much good’.
I can see Trevelyan quite clearly, writing in his ornate office at the Treasury, looking over King Charles Street towards the domes of the Foreign Office, dipping his quill into the ink. It’s 9 October 1846, the second year of the Famine is beginning. It’s quite clear that hundreds of thousands are now threatened by starvation. He is replying to his colleague Lord Monteagle, a prominent landowner in Limerick (and a former Chancellor of the Exchequer), who had written to him raising his concerns about the extent of this second year of almost total potato blight, and asking the assistant secretary to the Treasury for greater government intervention. Trevelyan pauses to consider how to express his views on the crisis across the water, and then writes this:
I think I see a bright light shining in the distance through the dark cloud which at present hangs over Ireland … The deep and inveterate root of social evil remains, [but] I hope I am not guilty of irreverence in thinking that … the cure has been applied by the direct stroke of an all-wise Providence in a manner as unexpected and unthought as it is likely to be effectual.fn14
This was not only his private opinion, casually written in a letter to a colleague; he expressed almost exactly the same sentiment at the opening of his work The Irish Crisis in 1848, proclaiming publicly that ‘Supreme Wisdom has educed permanent good out of transient evil’.fn15
How is it possible for us today to explain what appears like Trevelyan’s psychopathic coldness towards a starving population? His view that hundreds of thousands of dead was, to use a later politician’s phrasing, ‘a price worth paying’? In his mind he had already dehumanised the Irish people, like so many of his fellow Victorians, influenced by the vicious propaganda in newspapers and magazines of the time, as we’ve already seen. Once the mass of the population had been dehumanised, then a kind of repulsion could follow – they could be seen as ‘monkeys’ inhabiting disgusting ‘hovels’. Clearances, evictions, destruction of cottages could then be seen as a method of pest control, a chance to sweep away the dirt and evil of such a society, to be replaced by a new order. The historian Jennifer Hart has perhaps come closer than many in getting to the core of Trevelyan’s world view, his psyche:
He regarded deaths by starvation as a ‘discipline’, a painful one, admittedly, but nevertheless a discipline, and he considered that they were a smaller evil than bankruptcy, for, through them, a greater good was to be obtained for Ireland and the British nation.fn16
We also need to consider the culture of racial supremacism which the British Empire inculcated in all its ruling parties – Britain, after all, had been chosen by Divine Providence to lead the world; this is why its empire was more extensive than any other power, why it held dominion over so much of the world.
Trevelyan’s views, however extreme, were certainly not exceptional in Victorian culture. It would be a mistake to believe that policy towards the Irish Famine was dictated by only a coterie of ideological zealots; the reality was that the cultural framework which enabled the policy of non-intervention in Ireland to go ahead with such catastrophic consequences was established by a governing class consensus – a web of hundreds of economists, politicians, civil servants, clerics and journalists – all reinforcing each other’s ideas into a lethal cocktail of race hatred, supremacism and laissez-faire capitalism. Trevelyan’s view (from a letter quoted in Woodham-Smith, The Great Hunger), that ‘the judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity should not be too much mitigated … the greatest evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the famine but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people’ would have been shared by the vast majority of his contemporaries in the British government, Whitehall and Fleet Street. This, of course, is not to suggest that there weren’t other voices, that there wasn’t opposition to government policy on Ireland, just that, for the moment at least, these voices were in a minority.
*
At the height of the Famine at the end of November 1847, just as Trevelyan was writing his article for the Edinburgh Review, trying to defend British policy in Ireland, barely half a mile away from his Whitehall offices the recently formed Communist League was meeting for their second congress in an upstairs room at the Red Lion Hotel in Great Windmill Street, Soho. At this gathering, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, then twenty-nine and twenty-seven, were given the role of drawing up a programme for the league. In December 1847 and January 1848, they worked together writing The Communist Manifesto, which was first published in London on 21 February 1848.10 Marx viewed what was happening across the Irish Sea with horror, regarding ‘the starving of Ireland into submission’ as a key example of the European class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the working class.fn17 We also know from his later work that he continued to reflect on the Famine and its aftermath – this in a famous footnote in Das Kapital:
the famine and its consequences have been deliberately made the worst of, both by the individual landlords and by the English legislature, to forcibly carry out the agricultural revolution and to thin the population of Ireland down to the proportion satisfactory to the landlords.fn18
He even references the cynicism of Nassau Senior, and goes on to quote from Senior’s work Journals, Conversations and Essays relating to Ireland:
‘Well … we have got our Poor Law and it is a great instrument for giving the victory to the landlords. Another, and a still more powerful instrument is emigration … No friend to Ireland can wish the war to be prolonged [between the landlords and the small Celtic farmers] – still less, that it should end by the victory of the tenants. The sooner it is over – the sooner Ireland becomes a grazing country, with the comparatively thin population which a grazing country requires, the better for all classes.’