In fact, Marx devotes an entire section in this chapter to the exploitation of Ireland, not only providing a remarkably detailed picture of changes in land ownership and profits to landlords, but also a witheringly ironic and angry attack on how the Irish people had been treated – remarking in a Swiftian aside: ‘The Irish famine of 1846 killed more than 1,000,000 people, but it killed poor devils only’ – leaving the wealth intact for landlords to benefit from. His portrait of Ireland bristles with anger, describing the living conditions of agricultural labourers there in the 1840s as of a ‘hideousness [which] far surpasses the worst that English agricultural labourers’ experience.’ He quotes an inspector in 1861 saying that the housing conditions ‘are a disgrace to the Christianity and to the civilisation of this country’. After the Famine and the ‘agricultural revolution’ that followed, ‘many labourers were compelled to seek shelter in villages and towns. There they were thrown like refuse into garrets, holes, cellars and corners, in the worst back slums.’
In a powerful passage, Marx details the relentlessness and grinding poverty of an Irish factory worker’s life – seventeen-hour working days, twelve hours on Saturdays, for ten shillings sixpence a week. This to feed a family of five children – their diet is mainly oatmeal, supplemented by a few potatoes in the summer. At the end of this section he simply reflects, ‘Such are Irish wages, such is Irish life!’ He then contrasts this existence with the vast profits made by ‘land magnates’ in Ireland such as Lord Dufferin – pocketing millions of pounds in rent from ‘the people’s misery’. Marx came to understand that the real legacy of the Famine was the permanent destruction of an entire class of small, agricultural labourers in Ireland to the benefit of the colonial masters. The English aristocracy and bourgeoise, he wrote, had a
common interest … in turning Ireland into mere pasture land which provides the English market with meat and wool at the cheapest possible prices. It is likewise interested in reducing the Irish population by eviction and forcible emigration, to such a small number that English capital … can function there with ‘security’.fn19
He would have been fascinated, but probably not at all surprised, if he had known what Trevelyan had previously written about British strategy in Ireland in strikingly similar terms, in a letter to Edward Twisleton, chief Poor Law commissioner there:
I do not know how farms are to be consolidated if small farmers do not emigrate … we should be defaulting at our own object … If small farmers go, and their landlords are reduced to sell portions of their estates to persons who will invest capital we shall at last arrive at something like a satisfactory settlement of the country.fn20
Sir Charles Wood, at that time Chancellor of the Exchequer, shared this view, suggesting that more vigorous enforcement of rates payments should be adopted, in order that ‘the pressure will lead to some emigrating … what we really want to obtain is a clearance of small farms’.fn21
We should understand that such views were not universal among the British government and those working to deliver policy on the ground. In fact Edward Twistleton, who as Poor Law commissioner during the first years of the Famine had to witness many of the dire consequences of government policy, is a case in point. He was one of the few to emerge with some real moral integrity from these years. In March 1849, after many arguments with Trevelyan, he finally resigned, writing an explosive open letter to the assistant secretary at the Treasury and the British government as a whole, castigating them for their policy towards Ireland. He argued that the destitution of the Irish people was the fault of the British government, that their policy of ‘famine relief’ had become a policy of extermination rather than salvation, and ended by saying he was not prepared to play the part of executioner any more – Britain’s handling of Ireland was ‘a deep disgrace’. As a final broadside, clearly aimed at Trevelyan, he wrote:
here are individuals of even superior minds who now seem to me to have steeled their hearts entirely to the sufferings of the people of Ireland … It is said that the law of nature is that those persons should die … now my feeling is … wholly the contrary: that it is part of … nature that we should have feelings of compassion for those people, and that it is a most narrow-minded view of the system of nature that these people should be left to die.fn22
Even Lord Clarendon, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, was forced to concede much of the substance of Twistleton’s attack, writing to Prime Minister Lord Russell on 26 April 1849: ‘I don’t think there is another legislature in Europe that would disregard such suffering as now exists in the west of Ireland, or coldly persist in a policy of extermination.’fn23
*
In all that has been written about the Irish Famine and Trevelyan’s role in it, too little attention has been paid to one remarkable episode. And it is an episode that goes to the heart of how desk killers are able to function and how they can continue to do their work. I had assumed that, as a senior civil servant at the Treasury, Trevelyan would have been desk-bound, needing to be in Whitehall all the time – just as Mitchel had written, as the Famine was raging, ‘Lord John Russell sat safe in Chesham Place; and the grand commissioner of the pauper system wove his webs of red tape around them from afar!’ But I’ve recently discovered that Trevelyan did make a single trip to Ireland – to Dublin, at the height of the Famine in October 1847. But, tellingly, he didn’t travel outside the capital, the place most sheltered from the impacts of the Famine, so he didn’t see any of rural Ireland, where the starvation and disease was at its worst.
He stayed at the Salt Hill Hotel in Dublin, where he wrote to a priest acquaintance, Father Mathew, ‘I have come to Dublin for a few days in the prosecution of my labours in the cause of old Ireland.’fn24 We have to remind ourselves here that Trevelyan officially believed the Famine was ‘over’ by August 1847, and so had ordered the closing down of the soup kitchens across the country. So, what he then did in Dublin is even more baffling. On 7 October, he wrote a personal letter to The Times from his hotel, publicising to readers in Britain that there was going to be a national collection in all churches the following Sunday to help ‘the unhappy people in the western districts of Ireland, who will again perish by the thousands this year if they are not relieved’. This, from the same man who apparently believed the Famine was ‘over’! The man responsible for co-ordinating the government relief strategy is now begging for charitable donations! But, if you think this letter may have indicated a change of heart on Trevelyan’s side, you would be wrong. Shortly afterwards he gave strict instructions that ‘No assistance whatever will be given from national funds to unions who would help their own poor’, and ‘the collection of rates will be enforced … even in those distressed western unions’.
What is so striking about what Trevelyan writes in The Times is that we can detect an extremely rare expression of sentiment in what he says – those words ‘unhappy people’ and the choice of the expression ‘perish by the thousands’. It is as if his almost sociopathic official persona is being challenged from within; as if, momentarily, Dr Jekyll has taken over from Mr Hyde. And suddenly, perhaps, we can guess why he realised he could not travel beyond Dublin – for if he came face to face with the consequences of his policies, if he saw the eyes of the starving, they would no longer be a collective mass of abstract Irish peasantry, they would be individual human beings who were suffering. They would move from being ‘them’ to ‘him’ or ‘her’. And perhaps Trevelyan, deep down, knew he would not have been able to face that; today, we would say that his cognitive dissonance – his ability to continue holding contradictory moral positions – would no longer be able to function. Because here, fundamentally, was a man of duty, a man who strictly ordered his own feelings, regarded them with the suspicion he reserved for enemy forces. He was a man – in this particular respect – not dissimilar to Adolf Eichmann, who put all his energies into his official self, his work, most content behind his desk in Whitehall, issuing the orders in letters and memoranda which resulted in the deaths of a multitude of people he would never see. A man terrified of his own humanity. ‘Remoteness from the suffering, he once stated, kept his judgement more acute than that of his administrators actually working among the people affected.’12fn25