The Irish Potato Famine

In discussing the failure of classical economics in his day, Friedrich List attacked Parson Malthus as its most famous limg representative. Because Malthus failed to understand that productive power was the nation's true source of wealth, he fell into "the error of wishing to restrain the increase of population'" instead of allowing human productivity its full rein and human reason a larger role in arranging for more equitable distribution of the surplus value which human labor created.

Malthus's erroneous views on population flowed from his failure to see that the inventiveness of human labor always outstrips the increase of the population. List minces no words in condemning the theory of Malthus as "contrary to nature," as well as "destructive to moral energy-in one word, horrible!-" because:

It asks us to shut our hearts and our hands to the hungry, for in giving them food and drink, we may be the cause, perhaps, that thirty years hence another may be famished. It substitutes calculation for pity. Such a doctrine would turn the hearts of men into stones. And what should we expect from a people with hearts of stone, but the complete ruin of morals, and consequently, the destruction of productive power, the loss of capital, civilization, and the political power of the country.'

In denouncing Malthus, List unwittingly provided an epitaph for England, its economic system, and, more importantly, the ruling class which administered the empire of laissez-faire. List understood that laissez-faire economics, rooted as it was in the Theory of Moral Sentiments propounded by Adam Smith and his mentor David Hume, led inexorably to moral degeneracy. This was nowhere more true than in the English landed aristocracy, who, during the 19th century, frittered away the productive capacity of their lands in an orgy of ostentatious spending, mansion building, licentiousness, and gambling.

The inevitable result of this collective self-indulgence became apparent by the middle of the 19th century as ruinous unrepayable debt. According to David Cannandine, "a significant characteristic of this new British aristocracy," i.e., the one which came into being during the years surrounding the Napoleonic wars, "was a relatively high degree of indebtedness."3

Debate over the magnitude and consequences of the debt began in the 1950s, largely between Professor David Spring and Professor F.M.I. Thompson. Spring claimed that "widespread financial embarrassment" and the "heavy indebtedness" were . . . "often to be found among the older landed families ... resulting from heavy and accumulated family charges, from electoral extravagance, from the expense of house building, and from the high living of the Regency period.'⁴

Thompson contested Spring's view by defending the usefulness of borrowing money, but the evidence which Cannandine brings forth not only supports Spring's claim about the indebtedness of the landed aristocracy, it also undermines Spring's claim that they were able to get out of debt.
In general the only way that the landed aristocracy ever got out of debt was by selling off their property to their creditors. By the time that Burke's Landed Gentry rolled off the presses in 1937, fully one-third of all the aristocratic families mentioned had lost their ancestral lands.⁵ The trajectory was clear. Over the course of the 19th century, moral degeneracy led to extravagant spending; extravagant spending led to debt; debt led to foreclosure, and foreclosure to loss of land. This trajectory of high living on borrowed money explains "the aristocracy's weakened position at the end of the 19th century.''⁶

As was so often the case, the decline began with the Reformation, which began with the theft of Church property and the revocation of the traditional Catholic ban on usury. As soon as the upstart aristocracy stole Church lands, they immediately sought out money-lenders so that they could monetize the fruit of their theft. Then as now, leverage set off a real estate bubble, which led to rack-renting and enclosure, as landlords tried to grind their tenants to make their mortgage payments in the hope that they could unload their inflated properties at a profit before the usury burden ruined them. Shakespeare's Timon of Athens trenchantly describe the orgy of high living that theft of land and borrowed money enabled in 16th century "reformed" England. Because land became an inflated object of speculation, constant debt became part of what it meant to be member of the landed gentry. "Debt," according to Cannadine,

was a constant feature of life for the early modern aristocracy, the only means by which expenditure and income, both of which fluctuated, but rarely together, could be reconciled. It seems to have been between the years of 1580 and 1610 that the nobility first became heavily dependent on credit, and by 1641 the total indebtedness of the peerage amounted to approximately 1.5 million pounds.⁷

After a momentary pause in the rate of rising indebtedness during the second half of the 1ih century, debt continued its inexorable rise during the course of the 18th century, largely because:

legal refinements in the terms of mortgages, the decline of the rate of interest, the evolution of the "West End" banks, the advent of insurance companies, the development of the provincial mortgage market, and the professionalization of estate management, made it much easier for the landowner to borrow.⁸

The flight of capital from the German principalities to England which Napoleon caused when his army headed east was best symbolized by Nathan Rothschild's arrival in London with the prince ofHesse-Kassel's treasure. It bespoke a huge amount of capital which the Rothschild family and other German Jews could lend at interest to the English landed aristocracy, which had always considered itself cash poor because of the Whig monopoly on the Bank ofEngland's financial resources. As a result of this windfall of continental capital seeking a safe haven in England, "total aristocratic indebtedness" increased dramatically.

By the early 19th century, "some degree of indebtedness was a familiar condition" for the landed aristocracy, as well as for "their immediate ancestors, their relatives and their friends. And recent research suggests that this continued to be the case throughout the 19th century, not just for the first 50 years or so.''⁹ After 70 years, compound interest on floating loans makes them unrepayable. As the Habsburgs discovered to their chagrin in the 16th century, not even the ownership of every gold and silver mine in the New World can compete with the inexorable, exponential nature of compound interest. And so it should come as no surprise that 70 years after the boom in lending began in 1780 the first of a number of increasingly spectacular defaults took place. In 1848, the second Duke of Buckingham and Chandos went bankrupt with debts "in excess of 1.5 million pounds, 950,000 pounds of which had been borrowed between 1839 and 1845."'¹⁰ Over the next twenty years, a procession of aristocrats which included the Earl of Mornington, the Duke of Beaufort, the Duke of Newcastle, the Earl ofWinchilsea, and Lord De Mauley followed Buckingham to the bankruptcy courts.¹¹

The main way the profligate landed aristocracy paid off their debts was by selling off their land. "Distant properties, to which there was little senti-mental attachment," Cannandine tells us, "were usually the first to go .... The Dukes of Portland sold part of their Cumberland estate, Coke of Nor-folk sold out in Buckinghamshire, the Duke of Bedford sold some of his Bloomsbury acres, the Duke of Marlborough sold his Waddesdon estate, and Lord Carrington sold extensively in Wales and Bedfordshire."¹² Sales of art and family heirlooms followed in second place as the favorite way to discharge debt.

But for the most part, the race against compound interest on a floating debt was doomed to failure.

As a result, the landed families of England, Ireland and Wales reconciled themselves to permanent debt and hoped that their limited resources, usually derived from rack-renting their increasingly burdened tenants, could keep up with the interest payments alone. As a result, "sustained indebtedness" became part of "the immutable order of things"¹³ for many landed dynasties and rack-rent became part of the immutable order of things for their increasingly impoverished tenants as the gentry tried to pass the usury burden which their estates incurred to support their lavish life-styles down the economic food chain to the hapless peasantry.

What was true of England was a fortiori true of lreland, where religious difference, absentee landlordism, and the ideology of English laissez-faire Capitalism all collaborated in disrupting any lasting moral relationship between the landlord and his tenants. No matter how spectacular aristocratic debt was in England, it was greater in Ireland, where "the burden weighed more heavily on small estates than on greater accumulations of land.'"¹⁴ O'Grada claims that "In England around this time, it was commonly held that land was mortgaged to bout one-half its value, or that servicing debt absorbed about half the gross rental income.'¹⁵

The situation was significantly worse in Ireland, "The Downshires' debts on their Irish estates fluctuated between 250,000 pounds and 400,000 pounds.'¹⁶ This meant that in Ireland more than 50 percent of all rental in-come went directly to interest payments, which meant that Irish landlords were forced by the usury system to grind their tenants even more than English landlords, and, even more significantly, the resources of the Irish landlords where thin to non-existent when the burden of famine relief was transferred from the British treasury to the local poor rates. The usury burden on Irish land was a sleeping menace to the Irish poor because it was the usury-burdened estates which were supposed to bear the burden of poor relief in time of need.¹⁷

List's indictment of capitalism and the moral bankruptcy of England's ruling class elites received vindication from an unexpected quarter when the potato crop failed in Ireland in the fall of 1845. In early August 1845, Sir Robert Peel, the British Prime Minister, received a report from the Isle of Wight claiming that a strange new disease had devastated the potato crop there. Potatoes which seemed healthy at the beginning of the growing season (and even after they were harvested) would turn inexplicably into a black, stinking mass of corruption almost over night. Potato blight, as it was commonly called, made its first appearance in America in the previous year. Before that the disease was unknown.

At the beginning of July, which was dry and hot in 1845, the potato crop in Ireland seemed more promising than usual. Then the weather turned rainy for three weeks, and the potatoes turned mysteriously black and rotted in the fields. By the end of August, Dr. John Lindley, the first professor of botany appointed in the University of London, was trying to explain to his readers the magnitude of the looming catastrophe. "A fearful malady," he wrote, "has broken out among the potato crop. On all sides we hear of the destruction. In Belgium the fields are said to be completely desolated. There is hardly a sound sample in Covent Garden market .... As to cure for his distemper, there is none ... We are visited by a great calamity which we must bear.'¹⁸

Observers who tried to discern a cause often fell into the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy by ascribing to rain the causality for the disease which followed. We know now that that was not the case. The necessary condition for the potato blight was rain, but the sufficient cause was a fungus, known by the scientific name of phytophtora infestans. The disease made its first appearance along the Atlantic coast of North America in 1842. During that year, potatoes which grew anywhere between Boston and Nova Scotia turned into a black stinking mass before they could be harvested. The blight didn't cross the Atlantic then because "the fungus was killed by heat in the slow passage'¹⁹ in the holds of sailing ships. When the advent of the steam ship shortened that journey by days, the difference was enough to allow the fungus to cross the Atlantic and lie dormant until the proper conditions for its spread emerged.

The main condition necessary for the spread of phytophtora infestans was moisture, which was always abundant in Ireland but excessively so during the summer of 1845. Because of its mild climate and abundant rain, Ireland provided "ideal conditions for the spread of the fungus, and has been truly described as a forcing house for blight.'²⁰ If the conditions were right:

one diseased plant within a day or two releases several million spores each one of which is capable of dividing within itself and producing a swarm of smaller spores. If a number of slightly diseased seed potatoes have been planted in different places, and diseased shoots appear in any quantity, blight can become general in a few weeks. Countless millions of spore containers germinate hourly; germ-tubes work their way into leaf and tuber, reducing green and healthy plants to decay; fields are seen to turn black; tubers hastily dug collapse into stinking masses, and the fearful stench of decomposition hangs over the land." If the potato were a human being, phytophtora infestans brought about a situation in which its victims were being simultaneously choked and devoured by "growths of some weird and colorless seaweed issuing from his mouth and nostrils, from roots which were destroying and choking both his digestive system and his lungs."²²

Terror soon spread through the Irish population. The Irish were no strangers to hunger-more than two million people went hungry every year in Ireland whether the potato failed or not²³-but the devastation which this new, hitherto unknown disease created during the fall of 1845 was unprecedented in scale. Worse than that, no remedy seemed to help:

"Whether ventilated, desiccated, salted, or gassed, the potatoes melted into a slimy, decaying mass; and pits, on being opened, were found to be filled with diseased potatoes" ²⁴ It would be two decades before the cause of the potato blight was found to be a fungus, and even longer before the French discovered a way to thwart it. One of the most bewildering aspects of the blight was its newness. Potatoes were hardly a novelty. By the time the crop failed in Ireland in 1845, "Potatoes had been grown in most European countries for 200 years .... "²⁵ But nothing as catastrophic as the blight had occurred during that time, and so no one had the faintest idea of what to do when it appeared.

When phytophtora infestans struck in 1845, the potato crop failed all across Europe. This caused hardship in England where:

During the previous 50 years potatoes had assumed a dangerous importance in the diet of the English laboring classes. Hard times, the blockade during the Napoleonic wars, the unemployment and wage cutting, which followed since the declaration of peace after Waterloo, had been gradually forcing the English laborer to eat potatoes in place of bread, and on September 30, 1845, the Times reported that in England the two main meals of a working man's day now consisted of potatoes.²⁶

If the blight had occurred within years of its introduction to European soil, the subsequent damage would have been minor. But the fact that it occurred after the potato had become a staple of the working class diet meant severe hardship in most countries and catastrophe in Ireland, where it had replaced bread as the staff of life. What was "a shocking calamity for the poor'²⁷ in Holland, France, and Belgium became an unmitigated disaster in Ireland, where in the end a million people, or one-eighth of the entire population, would die. The same blight which produced hardship for the poor in England and on the Continent caused starvation in Ireland because for the overwhelming majority of the laboring agricultural classes in Ireland, potatoes were the only source of food.

Unlike governments on the continent, which began buying up surplus grain from America almost immediately, the British government was slow to respond to the looming catastrophe. Two months after receiving the initial reports that the potato crop had failed, Sir Robert Peel still hadn't done anything. On October 13, 1845, he justified his inactivity and the fact that he had ignored the early reports by claiming that "There is such a tendency to exaggeration and inaccuracy in Irish reports, that delay in acting on them is always desirable."²⁷ Peel ignored the reports largely because of his attitude toward the Irish people. As Chief Secretary Peel had not only shown "no liking for the Irish character" as well as "no sympathy with Irish aspirations"; he, in fact,

"cordially detested Irish life," and had identified himself with the extreme Irish party. Year after year he had opposed the motions for Catholic emancipation and for enquiry into the state of Ireland .... Peel, when Chief Secretary of Ireland, frequently rose after dinner and assuming the traditional attitude, "standing on his chair with one foot on the table," drank the Orange toast, to "the pious, glorious and immortal memory of William III." These and similar activities led O'Connell to give him the nickname, by which he is still remembered in Ireland, of "Orange Peel.''²⁹

Peel, whose efforts to relieve the famine in Ireland far exceeded those of those who succeeded him in office, was typical of the British administrator of his age, whose humanity in the face of unbelievable suffering was always at odds with his religious beliefs and, more importantly, his economic theories. Taken together, the combined effects of Protestantism and Capitalism far outweighed the blight as the cause of starvation during the years 1845-49. The main cause of the Great Famine was not phytophtora infestans, but rather English Protestantism, especially if we take Capitalism as the ultimate expression of the cultural form which the Reformation had taken by the middle of the 19th century.³⁰

The main cause of poverty in Ireland in the years leading up to the famine was the confiscation of Catholic land by Protestant invaders. Over the centuries, following the Reformation and conquests by figures like Cromwell, the land had been stolen from the natives and distributed to English freebooters, who used religious difference as an excuse to grind their Irish tenants and reduce them to a poverty so severe that it was unknown in any other part of Europe. Wherever the English ruled, markets took priority over human need during famine. As Sen points out, this was not only the case in Ireland during the famine of the 1840s when "the indisputable fact that huge quantities of food were exported from Ireland to England throughout the period when the people of lreland were dying of starvation" created anger and "embittered relations between the two countries.''³¹ The same prioritization of markets over the needs of the starving humanity existd in China, "where British refusal to ban rice exports was one of the causes of an uprising in 1906."³² The same refusal led to "the famous Chang-sha rice riot of 1910,''³³ and to widespread famine in Bangladesh in 1974.³⁴

Lord Palmerston, born Henry John Temple, on October 20, 1784, was one of the wealthiest landlords· in Ireland by the time he became famous by the middle of the 19th century, but his wealth came into existence as the result of centuries of theft. Palmerston's ancestor Sir John Temple was a member of the revolutionary Parliament and an ardent supporter of Oliver Cromwell's bloody Irish campaign of the 1640s. Sir John's ardor was rewarded by "lands confiscated from dispossessed Irish Catholic landowners.''³⁵ The Temple family's ardor for the Protestant cause only increased at the time of the Glorious Revolution, in the aftermath of which Sir John's Irish estates were again "much enlarged.''³⁶ In England it is customary to ennoble thieves who have stolen exceptionally large amounts of property (petty thieves of items like spoons and bread are just as customarily hanged), and sot in 1723, Sir John's grandson, Henry Temple "was given an Irish peerage and became the first Viscount Palmerston." This title "now guaranteed" the Temples "a secure position in the aristocratic firmament of 18th century England.''³⁷

The Catholic Irish, like the Highland Scots, backed the Stuarts in their attempt to reclaim the throne from the usurper William of Orange. Like their Celtic cousins, the Highland Scots, the Irish Catholics lost their war against the Whigs who came to power when the Dutch usurper ascended to the throne in 1688. What followed the Catholic defeat in Ireland was no less draconian than what followed the defeat of the Highland Scots half a century later. The punitive measures following the war came to be know as the Penal Laws, which came into effect in 1695, and "aimed at the destruction of Catholicism in Ireland by a series of ferocious enactments"³⁸ which:

barred Catholics from the army and navy, the law, commerce, and from every civic activity. No Catholic could vote, hold ariy office under the Crown, or purchase land, and Catholic estates were dismembered by an enactment directing that at the death of a Catholic owner, his land was to be divided among all his sons, unless the eldest became a Protestant, when he would inherit the whole. Education was made almost impossible . . . The practice of the Catholic faith was proscribed; informing was encouraged as "an honorable service" and priest-hunting treated as a sport.³⁹

Edmund Burke describe the Penal Laws as "a machine as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment, and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man."⁴⁰

A little less than a century after Scotland joined England in 1705, Ireland became part of Great Britain when that act of union became operative on January 1, 1801. Unlike the Scottish lowlands, prosperity did not follow for Ireland, which became a dumping ground for England's surplus manufactures. Unlike Scotland, Ireland, under centuries of English domination, had never been able to develop either industry or commerce. What little manufacturing existed at the beginning of the 19th century was wiped out by the Act of Union, which allowed English manufacturers to dump excess production on the Irish market, undercutting the prices of any possible manufacturer. In the 20 years following the Act of Union, production of woolen cloth dropped by 50 percent. As a result, 75 percent of the frieze, the thick woolen cloth worn by Irish peasants, "was dumped by England.'⁴¹ The result, as List could have predicted, was widespread poverty. In Mayo, "the herring fishermen were too poor to buy salt with which to preserve a catch."⁴²

Ireland's fledgling industries, deprived of the protection which tariffs afforded in Germany and the United States, collapsed and Ireland became a land of poor tenant farmers. Without manufactures, Ireland could not raise the money to import food. They had to grow what they needed to survive or starve to death.

During the same period, population increased dramatically. The introduction of the potato "prompted or accommodated ... the fastest population growth in the whole of western Europe for several decades between the mid-18th and early 19th centuries,'⁴³ and nowhere was that population growth more dramatic than in Ireland. 

Population growth drove up the cost of rent and led to more and more subdivision of the land, as larger and larger families tried to eke out an existence on smaller and smaller plots of land:

The consequence was the doom of lreland. The land was divided and sub-divided again and again, and holdings were split into smaller and smaller fragments until families were attempting to exist on plots of less than an acre, in some cases half an acre .... As the population increased and the demand for a portion of ground grew more and more frantic, land became like gold in Ireland .... In a comparatively short time three, six or even ten families were settled on land which could provide food for only one family.⁴⁴

That meant that "The possession of a piece of land was literally the difference between life and death.⁴⁵ In a land where rents were enormously expensive and land forever being subdivided to accommodate larger and larger families, cultivation of the potato was the only way an impoverished family could survive. The Act of Union and the dumping which it enabled ruled out any significant employment in manufacturing, and that meant that "Unless an Irish laborer could get hold of a patch of land and grow potatoes, the family starved.⁴⁶

Malthus's theories of population were especially applicable to islands. As he had predicted, the increase of population led to smaller and smaller holdings. By 1845, the Irish people had reached a point where only the potato could provide the sustenance they needed from the small amount of land that was available to them to feed their families:

An acre and a half would provide a family of five or six with food for twelve months, while to grow the equivalent in grain required an acreage four to six times as large and some knowledge of tillage as well. Only a spade was needed for the primitive method of potato culture usually practiced in Ireland.⁴⁷

It would be deceptive to refer to the potato culture as the basis of the Irish economy because it was essentially outside of the economy. When it came to the staple of the Irish diet, no economic exchange was involved. Most of the people in Ireland fed themselves from what they raised on their own plots. When the Irish peasant received money, he generally hid the coins in the thatched roof of his cottage. It was only when he ran out of the potatoes that he had grown himself for his family, that the Irish agricultural laborer entered the economy. If the potatoes ran out, the peasantry would have to buy meal "on credit, at exorbitant prices, from the petty dealer and usurer who was the scourge of the Irish village-the dreaded 'Gombeen man."⁴⁸

Citing "Joel Mokyr's classic question about the Irish famine," O'Grada wonders "Was Malthus right?" in his analysis of the Irish economic and demographic situation, and concludes that· "On this reading the famine was not simply bound to happen; had the potato blight somehow missed Ireland, economic adjustment would have come gradually through an in-crease in the demand for Irish labor abroad and increasing incidence of the preventative check.'⁴⁹ In other words, Malthus was not right, not over the short run or the long run under normal conditions.

But conditions in Irela,nd in the 1840s were far from normal, and the potato blight didn't miss Ireland. When it occurred, the intellectual descendants of Adam Smith, whose morals had been corrupted by the ethical theories emanating from the Scottish Enlightenment, exposed the intel-lectual and moral bankruptcy of classical economics in a way that was irrefutable to the common man and which left a permanent scar on the Irish psyche. The Communist Manifesto was written during the height of the Irish potato famine. The Irish potato famine was traumatic enough, but combined with the Revolution of 1848, it exposed the moral bankruptcy of classical economics. It also helped grant, by contrast, a legitimacy to Communism, which that ideology did not deserve, and it removed forever the possibility of any peaceful union between England and Ireland.

Parson Malthus had been dead for 11 years by the time the blight arrived in Ireland and so we have no way of knowing how he would have reacted to the existential reality of so much intense human suffering. But we do know how classical economics reacted because we have the testimony of its most prominent defender, Nassau Senior, who famously claimed that the famine · "would not kill more than one million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do any good.''⁵⁰ Benjamin Jowett, the famous Oxford don, claimed that he had "always felt a certain horror of political economists," ever since "I heard one of them say that he feared that the famine of 1848 in Ireland would not kill more than a million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do much good."⁵¹

Jowett could generalize his indictment of Senior to include all "political economists" because by 1845 virtually every English politician who had responsibility for administering Ireland its hour of greatest need shared Nassau Senior's view on the relationship between economics and morality.
Phytophtora infestans may have destroyed the potato crop, but the main cause of starvation in Ireland between 1845 and 1849 was capitalism, which Woodham-Smith refers to as "laissez faire," an English economic theory which:

let people do as they think best; insisted that in the economic sphere individuals should be allowed to pursue their own interests and asserted that the government should interfere as little as possible. Not only were the rights of property sacred; private enterprise was revered and respected and given almost complete liberty, and on this theory, which incidentally gave the employer and the land-lord freedom to exploit his fellow man, the prosperity of England had unquestionably been based.⁵²

Ireland's poverty was the mirror image of the rise of Capitalism. Ireland was the converse of the economic development that took place in England, but the trajectory was the same. It began with the theft of land during the Reformation and it ended during the hey-day of laissez-faire econom-ics, when politicians thought it more virtuous to let a million people starve to death than violate one tenet of political economy. "The Influence of laissez-faire on the treatment of lreland during the famine," Woodham-Smith continues:

is impossible to exaggerate. Almost without exception the high officials and politicians responsible for Ireland were fervent believers in non-interference by Government, and the behavior of the British authorities only becomes explicable when their fanatical belief in private enterprise and their suspicions of any action which might be considered Government intervention are borne in mind.⁵³

All of the government actors in the Irish potato famine drama were intellectual hostages to the economic philosophy of laissez-faire capitalism. The ideology which derived from Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, as expounded by contemporary economists like Nassau Senior, established limits on English intellectual horizons-and hence on government action-which were inviolable.

Government officials like Sir Robert Peel and, more importantly, Edward Charles Trevelyan, who served as undersecretary of the treasury from 1840 to 1859 and the main administrator of famine relief, were aware that the potato crop had failed and that, as a result, large numbers of the Irish peasantry were faced with starvation, but their ability to act on these perceptions became inexplicably paralyzed when they construed them in the light of what the had learned from the Scottish Enlightenment in terms of economics and morals. Both Peel and his successor Lord John Russell, as well as Trevelyan and his collaborators at the treasury, felt that the government
could only remedy the famine "without government interference" in the market through:

the operations of private enterprise and private firms using the normal channels of commerce. The Government was not to appear in food markets as a buyer, there was to be "no disturbance of the ordinary course of trade" and "no complaints from private traders" on account of Government competition.⁵⁴

The government, in other words, could not function as the government, and on that self-contradictory note Peel embarked upon his program of famine relief, when circumstances forced him to act.

By mid-October 1845, Peel could no longer dismiss as typically Irish exaggeration reports emanating from Ireland on the failure of the potato crop. In order to find the true magnitude of the problem, he dispatched John Lindey, a professor of the new science of botany at London University and Lyon Playfair, a chemist, on a fact-finding mission to Ireland. Their reports made it clear that the danger to the Irish population was real, and that immediate action was needed to remedy a situation that could quickly turn catastrophic.

The gravity of the situation in combination with the economic "laws" of laissez-faire economics led Peel to conclude that the only way to rectify the situation without violating the laws of the market was to repeal England's corn laws. According to the free trade school of thought, which reached its apogee in England during the 1840s, once the tariff was removed, the price of grain would fall, and once it fell, the starving Irish would be able to buy more grain at lower prices, thus bringing the famine to an end.

Peel, it should be remembered, was a Tory, and as such a representative of the landowning classes who benefited directly from the artificially high prices which the tariff created in grain. Peel's party may have supported the grain laws, but Peel by birth was a free-trader whose wealth came from his family's textile mills, a group which was notorious in its support for free trade, When push came to shove, nurture triumphed over politics in forming Peel's mind. He had come to power in 1841 as the head of a conservative Tory ticket committed to maintaining the corn laws, but he personally believed in the dogmas of free trade and felt that they alone could "revive the languishing commerce and manufacturing industry of this country" and "make this country a cheap country for living."⁵⁵ When he proposed suspending the duties on grain, in light of what he had learned about the situation in Ireland, only three members of his cabinet supported him. By December Peel had resolved to resign if his cabinet did not support repeal of the grain tariff.

In an attempt to balance his compassion for the suffering Irish⁵⁶ with what his economic principles allowed, Peel secretly arranged for the purchase of Indian maize from American markets through the merchant banking house of Baring,⁵⁷ because its importation did not interfere with market forces. Peel's decision was a mixed blessing because, no matter what good it did over the short run, it situated all relief efforts within the matrix of what the market allowed. Woodham-Smith claims that Peel's purchase of Indian corn proved the decisive factor in relieving the distress of 1845-46 but the subsequent value to Ireland of Peel's boldness, independence and strength of mind was unfortunately outweighed by his belief in an economic theory which almost every politician of the day, Whig or Tory, held with religious fervor.⁵⁸

This meant that if the ideology of the market proved inadequate as the basis of relief, the Irish would starve to death. Peel chose maize as the vehicle for famine relief because "no trade in Indian corn existed," and therefore the purchase of a commodity "virtually unknown as food in Ireland or any other part of the United Kingdom" would "not interfere with private enterprise."⁵⁹ Peel planned to use his stock of Indian corn as "a weapon to keep prices down.' ⁶⁰ Woodham-Smith calls Peel's plan "far-seeing and ingenious,'"'' but it had a number of serious drawbacks. To begin with, 100,000 pounds worth of maize could not replace 3.5 million pounds worth of potatoes, the cost of the amount of potatoes lost due to blight. Secondly, no one in Ireland had the skills or the instruments to make Indian corn edible:

Unground Indian corn is not only hard, but sharp and irritating-it even pierces the intestines-and is all but impossible to digest. Boiling for an hour and a half did not soften the flint-hard grain, and Indian corn in this state, eaten by half-starving people, produced agonizing pains, especially in children.⁶²

In order to turn it into "hominy" or "grits," maize had to be chopped in a steel mill, and no such mills were available in Ireland. As a result, when the Indian corn first arrived in Ireland, it was indigestible because no one knew how to prepare it properly. By the time of the potato famine, Irish women had lost the ability to cook anything but potatoes. Baking flour into bread had become a lost art in Ireland because of the potato monoculture. As a result of inadequate preparation, "Trevelyan's flint" did next to nothing to alleviate the famine and caused severe gastro-intestinal disorders in those who ate it.

The Famine and Free Trade 

0n15 May 1846 the repeal of the Corn Laws was passed by a coalition of Conservatives, Whigs and free traders. Only 112 Conservatives voted for repeal; 241 voted against it. On June 26, Peel's corn bill passed the House of Lords. A few hours later the Tory government fell, largely as a result of the machinations of fellow Tory Benjamin Disraeli, and Peel was replaced by Lord John Russell, who now headed a Whig government.

Intellectually, Lord John Russell was no more sympathetic to the Irish than Peel had been, but the deficiencies in Russell's intellect were exacerbated by deficiencies of personality. Russell was so short that the caricaturists of his age routinely depicted him as a large-headed dwarf. When he married the recently widowed wife of Lord Ribblesdale, the same pundits referred to him as "the Widow's Mite.'¹

Russell made up in hauteur what he lacked in stature. His manners were so arrogant, that Greville vowed "never to go near him again" after being received by Russell in "the coldest and most offensive manner."² Rigidity of intellect based on the inflexible tenets of laissez-faire capitalism combined with rigidity of character and manners to produce an administrator ill-equipped to deal with one of the greatest humanitarian disasters in the history of the British Empire.

People started dying in earnest during the fall of 1846. On October 24, Dennis McKennedy was found dead during his shift working on road No.1 in West Carberry, County Cork. After a post-mortem examination discov-ered that there was no food in either his stomach or small intestine, Drs. Daniel Donovan and Patrick Due concluded that McKennedy had "died of starvation caused by the gross neglect of Board of Works." The charge of neglect referred to the fact that McKennedy was involved in a public works project that the English authorities had concocted in lieu of providing food for the starving Irish.

To add insult to injury, the Crown insisted not only that the starving Irish work for what was quite literally a starvation wage, but it could not pay its Irish workers on time, even when prompt payment was, as in this instance, a matter of life and death. McKennedy died with the government owing him two weeks' salary. One week later in Bandon, more people died whose wages were three weeks in arrears. On November 3, the Lord-Lieutenant "called for a report of the number of persons who had died from starvation because their wages were delayed.''³ Reports of some of the worst abuses came from the town of Skibbereen, where the starving poor were crowded into that town's overcrowded work-house because "outside relief" was not available. Overcrowding quickly led to the spread of disease, and diseases like typhus and dysentery led to death: 

Between early October 1846 and early January 1847, 266 people died in the packed workhouse in Skibbereen, compared to ten in the same period a year earlier, and 11 two years earlier, and by the end of 1846 one inmate in four was suffering from either fever or dysentery. The workhouse was already "full to suffocation" by then.⁴

The workhouse was overcrowded because Trevelyan, who was the chief administrator of poor relief under both Peel and Russell, had decreed that the poor had to work in order to get relief. The wage Trevelyan offered to the starving Irish during one of the coldest winters in recent memory was, quite literally, a starvation wage; it was "not adequate . . . to support life."⁵ The average worker received eight pence per day, which he could then spend on Indian meal, which because of market forces had risen to 2s. 5d. per stone of 14 lbs: ''At these prices you can easily suppose that a working man with a family of six persons (which is about the average number) cannot procure for them even one tolerable meal out of his miserable earnings, supposing him fortunate enough to get employment, and to be able to work every day, which is impossible in this inclement season.''⁶

In order to augment his inadequate wages, the Irishman was forced to send his wife and children out on the roads to work with him, which led one observer in December of 1846 to describe:

a gang of 150, composed principally of old men, women and little boys, going out to work on one of the roads near the town [near daybreak]. At that time the ground was covered with snow, and there was also a very severe frost; seeing that they were miserably clad, I remarked to a bystander that it was a miracle that the cold did not kill them, even though they had enough to eat. In less than half an hour after one of them, an old man, named Richard Cotter, was brought on a man's back dying, and I had to give a cart to take him home. In the course of the day I went out to visit this gang, who were opening a drain inside the fence on the Marsh road, and such a scene I hope I may never again be called upon to witness. The women and children were crying out from the severity of the cold, and were unable to hold the implements with which they were at work; most of them declared that they had not tasted food for the day, while others said that but for the soup supplied by the Committee they must starve. The actual value of the labor executed by these could not average two pence each per day, and to talk of task work to such laborers would be ridiculous.⁷

The cause of this deadly folly was capitalism. Instead of granting starving and miserably clad women and children "some temporary relief in their own homes during this severe weather," Russell, Trevelyan and the other proponents of laissez-faire economics condemned the Irish "to sacrifice their lives to carry out a miserable project of political economy."⁸

Rather than feed the starving Irish, Trevelyan and Britain's newly-appointed chancellor of the exchequer, Charles Wood, decided. that hunger would be alleviated by employing the Irish in a large-scale public works project. The starving Irish could now purchase food with the money which they had earned by busting rocks and building roads in the middle of the harshest winter in recent memory. Payment for public works was superior to the distribution of food because it meant that the government would not "interfere with the regular mode by which Indian corn and other grains were brought into the country." Trade would be granted "as much liberty as possible,''⁹ and the invisible hand would ensure a benevolent outcome in the end.

After deciding to halt the importation of maize, Trevelyan decided that public works, not charity, would solve the problem of famine in Ireland. Instead of money to buy food coming from the treasury in London, as it had under Peel, the entire expense of famine relief "was to be paid by the district in which the works were carried out.'¹⁰ And how were the estates of Ireland which were already over-burdened by debt to find the money to pay for poor relief? By borrowing more money, of course. The cost of poor relief was "to be met by advances from the Treasury, repayable in their entirety in ten years at 3.5 percent interest, and the money for repayment was to be raised by a rate levied on all poor-rate payers in the locality ... .'¹¹

By the early months of 1847, the inadequacy of public works as a remedy for starvation was evident to everyone but Trevelyan, who would eventually concede that the wages that public works offered did not even reach subsistence level, "melancholy proof of which was afforded by daily instances of starvation.'¹²

Trevelyan's reluctance to admit the failure of his "miserable project of political economy" would have fatal consequences for the poor in Ireland. The weakness which naturally flowed from lack of food was compounded by going through the motions of working when the weather made any real work outdoors impossible, and both burdens taken together eventuated in more death. Reports at the end of November, the month when the first snow fell, "contained a rapidly-increasing number of cases of deaths on the works from starvation, aggravated by exposure to cold, snow and drenching rain.'¹³ Of the 5,000 beggars who roamed the streets of Cork during the winter of 1846-7, 100 hundred died every week of exposure and starvation.¹⁴ If credit for the fact that starvation did not begin in earnest until the fall of 1846 "must go to the relief measures taken by the administration of Sir Robert Peel,'¹⁵ the responsibility for the catastrophe of 1846-47 must be laid at the feet of Sir John Russell and Charles Edward Trevelyan.

Because of the change in government which took place during the famine, the main responsibility for famine relief devolved upon Trevelyan, who served as assistant secretary to His Majesty's Treasury from 1840 to 1859. It was Peel's idea to buy Indian corn for famine relief, but Trevelyan was responsible for its distribution, an association which appeared in popular ballads like "The Fields of Athenry," which describes the fate of someone who "stole Trevelyan's corn" and was transported to Botany Bay for his pains.

Like Peel and Sir John Russell under whom he served, Trevelyan was even more of a thrall to the mind-forged manacles which laissez-faire capitalism imposed upon his class of Englishman and rendered them incapable of dealing with the tide of famine which swept over Ireland in earnest dur-ing the fall of 1846.

Trevelyan, who became first director and then virtually dictator of Irish relief, had the unfortunate habit of seeking religious justification for the injustice he imposed in the name of capitalism. This trait would go far in justifying the odium in which the communists would hold religion. When unloading food on the coast of western Ireland proved difficult, Trevelyan opined that: "It is annoying that all these harbors are so insignificant. It shows Providence never intended Ireland to be a great nation.'¹⁶  Trevelyan claimed that "the people must not, under any circumstances, be allowed to starve," but this imperative, like every other humane feeling he entertained, had to be implemented in light of economic principles which ensured that the native hue of resolution was inevitably sicklied o'er with the pale cast of economic thought, and that any measure the government undertook "must proceed with as little disturbance as possible of the ordiknary course of private trade.'¹⁷

With his economic ideas firmly at odds with his native moral sense, it is hardly surprising that Trevelyan's plans for hunger relief rarely found fruition in effective action, nor is it surprising that his inaction "worsened the famine.'¹⁸ Trevelyan frequently lapsed into religious-tinged fatalism when confronting the problem. When confronted with reports of "mothers half naked, shivering in the snow and sleet, uttering exclamations of despair while their children were screaming with hunger,'¹⁹ Trevelyan opined that "The judgement of God [had] sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated" because "the real 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.''²⁰ According to Trevelyan's moral and economic outlook, the only other possible villain in the economic drama of the Irish famine was "government interference," which, if extended any further, would deprive Ireland of "the funds required by farmers for carrying on the ordinary cultivation of the land.''²¹ After the Peel government fell following the repeal of the Corn Laws, Trevelyan became "virtual dictator of relief for Ireland''²² over the summer of 1846. During this period, he made a number of decisions which would prove fatal for large numbers of Irishmen. On May 15, Trevelyan opened the corn depots to sell what remained of Peel's corn. That was certainly good news, but the unannounced bad news that accompanied this move was Trevelyan's decision that the sale of this one batch of corn was sufficient to solve the problem: "Irish relief was to be restricted to a single operation; the government Indian corn, purchased at the orders of Sr. Robert Peel was to be placed in deposit by the Commissariat, sold to the people-and that was the end.',,²³ Trevelyan's assistant Randolph Routh was appalled, "You cannot answer the cry of want," he wrote to Trevelyan, "by a quotation from political economy.''²⁴ But Trevelyan and Charles Wood had made up their minds that the government was no longer going to import food from abroad, and Routh, deprived of a theory of political economy grounded in the moral law, could raise no substantive objections any time they invoked the market as the solution to Ireland's problems. So Routh capitulated, and "tried therefore to convince himself that Trevelyan's policy was just and wise.²⁵

By July 1846, the stores of Peel's corn had been exhausted, and the Irish were consuming the seed potatoes that were required for next year's planting, but Trevelyan decided that the maize which Peel had imported had solved the hunger once and for all, in spite of the fact that reports were then arriving indicating that the failure of the potato crop in 1846 was more severe than in 1845. In spite of that, the government would import no more food and would shut down the depots already in existence. Trevelyan claimed that trade had been paralyzed by government purchases and that this interference with private enterprise had denied profits to grain dealers, who had no incentive to invest in the purchase of more food. He said this in spite of the fact that he had received ~ letter from a noted Catholic priest on August 7, 1846 begging Trevelyan "to take some action to feed the people" and complaining.that "the capitalists in the corn and flour trade are endeavoring to induce government not or protect the people from the famine but to leave them at their mercy.'²⁶

Convinced that charity was counter-productive, Trevelyan ordered Routh to close all government food depots by August 15: "The only way to prevent the people from becoming habitually dependent on Government," he told Routh on July 17, "is to bring the operations to a close. The uncertainty about the new crop only makes it more necessary." In a second letter he wrote, "Whatever may be done hereafter, these things should be stopped now, or you run the risk of paralyzing all private enterprise and having this country on you for an indefinite number of years. The Chancellor of the Exchequer supports this strongly."²⁷

Trevelyan's decision to stop the distribution of Peel's corn during the summer of 1846 led to food riots in the fall. When the "turbulent" Irish attempted to stop the wagons and ships which were exporting food while the people starved, Trevelyan sent troops, as well as ample provisions to feed them, but nothing for the starving Irishmen the troops were sent to subdue. "Do not encourage the idea of prohibiting exports," he wrote on September 3, "perfect Free Trade is the right course.''²⁸

Instead of sending food, Trevelyan sent troops to protect the exportation of grain. After the Irish began rioting and cutting the traces on the wagons that carried food for export to the ships waiting on the river Shannon, the British government sent 2,000 troops to protect grain exports, and Trevelyan, who had discontinued Peel's importation of maize:

arranged for the provisioning with beef, pork and biscuit, of 2,000 troops formed into mobile columns "to be directed on particular points at very short notice." Provisions for six weeks were sufficient, wrote Trevelyan, because "food riots are quite different from organized rebellion and are not likely to be of long duration."²⁹ O'Grada claims that:

One of the most evocative images of the Irish famine is of a people being left to starve while their corn was being shipped off under police and military protection to pay rents. Indeed, Dreze and Sen write of "English consumers attract[ing] food away, through market mechanism, from famine stricken Ireland to rich England, with ship after ship sailing down the river Shannon with various types offood."³⁰

During the harvest season of 1846, the starving Irish watched helplessly as "boatloads of home-grown oats and grain departed on schedule from their shores for shipment to England," and anger replaced resignation:

Food riots erupted in ports such as Youghal near Cork where peasants tried unsuccessfully to confiscate a boatload of oats. At Dungarvan in County Water-ford, British troops were pelted with stones and fired 26 shots into the crowd, killing two peasants and wounding several others. British naval escorts were then provided for the riverboats as they passed before the starving eyes of peasants watching on shore.

The government claimed that sending food (but not troops) to Ireland would be "unjust to the rest of the United Kingdom.''³¹ Feeding the Irish, Trevelyan opined was "to transfer famine from one country to another.''³² So the government sent soldiers instead: "Would to God the Government would send us food instead of soldiers," a starving inhabitant of Ballinrobe, County Mayo, was heard to lament as the ih Hussars entered the town".³³

Contrary to what Trevelyan thought, Capitalism functioned just anyone who was familiar with its ruthless logic could have expected during the entire five-years of the potato famine. During December 1846, the domestic market reacted to the government's withdrawal from providing food, and prices skyrocketed as speculators made fortunes by buying up stocks of Indian corn cheap and selling it dear to the starving who still had any money left to buy it. Even those who were outraged by the price-gouging in foodstuffs found that their moral objections, like those of Mr. Hewtson of Cork, who "complained of merchants making 40 to 80,000 pounds on corn" were undermined by economic principles which convinced them that the gouging was conducted "according to the spirit of trade and therefore legitimate."³⁴ Acting according to what the German socialist Ferdinand Lassalle described as the "Iron Law of Wages," Trevelyan forced the Irish to work for the lowest possible wages while simultaneously insuring that no restraint whatsoever would be put upon those bent on the most ruthless sort of price gouging. The results of this Manchesterian mumbo-jumbo became apparent in February when 250 ships full of 50,000 tons of food lay waiting unloaded in Cork harbor because "prices were to high for the people to pay."³⁶ The market which Trevelyan counted on to alleviate Ireland's hunger accelerated starvation by driving prices up: Public works were "not saving the people from starvation on account of the enormous rise in food prices''³⁶ in combination with the starvation wages which the glut in the labor market and the monopoly which the British government had as the island's only employer of agricultural workers.

There was no point in complaining about price-gouging capitalists to Trevelyan, as Father Matthew had done, because Trevelyan defended price gouging as a legitimate part of free trade economic theory. When prices rose in October to the point where even those who earned wages were starving because they could not pay the exorbitant prices that the unhindered market had set, Trevelyan refused to interfere because "If dealers were to confine themselves to what in ordinary circumstances might be considered fair profits, the scarcity would be aggravated in a fearful degree.''³⁷ Trevelyan's subordinate Sir Randolph Routh told the Marquess of Sligo, "We must bear in mind that if an article is scarce ... a smaller quantity must be made to last for a longer time, and that high price is the only criterion by which consumption can be economized.''³⁸ Trevelyan felt that nothing ought to be done for the west of Ireland which might send prices, already high, still higher for people, "who, unlike the inhabitants of the west coast of Ireland, have to depend on their own exertions." Trevelyan was convinced that the market would solve this problem.

"Nothing," he wrote, "was more calculated to attract supplies and especially from North America, than high prices." The real beneficiary of Trevelyan's laissez-faire policies, however, was the "gombeen man," the hated Irish meal-dealer and money-lender who preyed on the Irish poor in normal times during the summer before the potato harvest arrived. Trevelyan's laissez-faire policies now allowed Ireland's gombeen men to get rich at the expense of the starving poor by allowing them to "buy up whatever comes to market and offer it again in small quantities at a great price which a poor man cannot pay and live."³⁹

Trevelyan then drew a picture of what would happen in the US when high prices made themselves felt-"then down from Cincinnati and Ohio would come quantities of Indian corn, formerly used to feed pigs." Routh agreed with Trevelyan and felt that higher prices would draw corn to Ireland like a magnet. Trevelyan considered the rise in prices a "great blessing," because they were "indispensably necessary to attract from abroad the supplies necessary to full up the void occasioned by the destruction of the· potato crop."⁴⁰ Hearing reports that the starvation was increasing, Trevelyan reversed himself and sent an order for Indian corn off on the last ships to leave for America in September. Unfortunately, there was no corn left in Ohio. Trevelyan's change of heart came too late for the starving Irish.

Nothing would be forthcoming from America until the Spring of 1847.⁴¹ By the time Trevelyan authorized more imports, the harvest of 1846 had already been bought up by other European governments who felt that feeding their starving population was more important than adherence to the laws oflaissez-faire economics. By the time Trevelyan realized his mistake, it was too late in the year to rectify it.

When it became apparent that the Government's actions were totally inadequate to the task of feeding the starving Irish, private philanthropy stepped in to supplement the shortfall which the government refused to augment and which private enterprise was determined to exploit. On No-vember 23, 1846, the Quakers organized the Central Relief Committee of the Society of Friends in Dublin, with a branch office in London.⁴² Unlike the government, which forced the starving Irish to work for relief, the Quakers set up soup kitchens to feed the people directly. Two months later a group of wealthy Englishmen founded The British Association for the relief of the extreme distress in the remote parishes of lreland and Scotland.⁴³ Charter members included financiers like Baron Lionel de Rothschild and Thomas Baring, who was the first chairman. The Rothschilds contributed 1,000 pounds, and Queen Victoria 2,000, but significant as the gesture was, the sums collected were nothing more than the proverbial drop in the bucket of Irish suffering.

When he heard that the government had allotted 50,000 pounds for famine relief in Ireland, Archbishop John MacHale reminded Lord John Russell that England had spent 20 million pounds to emancipate the Negroes of the West Indies.⁴⁴ To propose 0.25 percent of that sum for people  who were not in need of emancipation but starving to death seemed to be nothing more than mockery of the very charity it proclaimed, especially since the "scenes which presented themselves were such as no tongue or pen can convey the slightest idea of.'³⁵ By the time the winter of 1846-7 arrived, even the people who had found refuge in the workhouses were dying of starvation. Outside the workhouses, the situation was even worse. During November 197 people had died in the Skibbereen workhouse and in addition to that "nearly 100 bodies had been found dead in the lanes or in derelict cabins, half-eaten by rats.'³⁶ During the winter of 1846-7, corpses lying by the road-side half eaten by rats became a common sight.⁴⁷

Since there was not a scrap of food to be found in rural Ireland during these months, the only hope was in assistance from the outside, which could only be administered in population centers. Unfortunately, during February, food distribution by groups like the Quakers was hampered by blizzards which made roads impassable and turned the remoter parts of Ireland into towns and villages "full of starving paupers.''⁴⁸ Commander Caffyn, captain of the ship that had been hired by the Quakers to deliver corn to the starving inhabitants of Skull, discovered "in one cabin four adults and three children ... crouched silent over a fire while in another room a man and a woman ... in bed the woman shrieking for food, the man past speech.'³⁹ Ironically, the sons of all the adults in the cabin were fully employed by the government on a public works project, but the 8 d.a day they earned, "was not enough to keep the family from starvation."⁵⁰ The farther the Irish found themselves from the towns, the more horrors proliferated. At a farm in Caheragh, County Cork, a woman and her two children were found dead and half-eaten by dogs.⁵¹

During the winter of 1846-7, so many died of starvation and so many of the survivors were so weak from hunger that the normal procedures for funerals and the burial of the dead broke down. When the medical officer of the Tralee workshop visited that town's cemetery in April, he found half-eaten corpses strewn about the graveyard. "Tis most revolting," he wrote:

to see the body of a child rather grown, dragged quite out of the coffin and lying on the yard totally uncovered, with one leg and one thing completely taken off and devoured by dogs which nightly prowl about this yard. Many of the coffins are completely exposed to view and the whole state of the yard is such as to cause much apprehension for the public safety. The effluvia even at present must engender and give disease to those frequenting it on the occasion of the burial of their friends.⁵²

In the parishes of Tralee, Rathass, and Cloherbrien, so many people died, that older coffins had to be disinterred before the newly deceased could be buried. As a result, "the remains of only lately interred persons, are to be seen above ground in the burial grounds of these parishes by all passers by."⁵³

Given sanitary conditions like this, it is not surprising that famine was followed by disease. Routh warned Trevelyan as early as July 14 that "disease is reappearing."⁵⁴ The incidence of disease, in particular Typhus fever, which would ravage Ireland "on a gigantic scale,"⁵⁵ only increased with the advent of winter because "the abnormal severity of the winter drove the people to huddle together for warmth,"⁵⁶ and proximity allowed fever-bearing lice to transmit Typhus to new victims huddling for  warmth under the same blanket. Under circumstances like this, "one fever-stricken person could pass on infection to a hundred others in the course of a day."⁵⁷ By March 1847, typhus, bacillary dysentery and scurvy had become so rampant that medical facilities had exhausted their resources in treating the sick. When he visited the Bantry fever hospital, one doctor found:

Fever patients were lying naked on straw, the living and the dead together. The doctor was ill and no one had been near the hospital for two days. There was no medicine, no drink, no fire; wretched beings were crying out, 'Water, Water! But there was no one to give it to them; the sole attendant was one pauper nurse, "utterly unfit."⁵⁸

The epidemic reached its height in Dublin in June 1847 and didn't begin to subside until months later. Woodham-Smith estimates that ten times the number of Irish who starved to death died of disease.⁵⁹ Faced with a catastrophe of this magnitude, the government once again changed its policy. Confronted with reports of men on relief (as well as their families) starving to death because of inadequate and unpaid wages, the government, in imitation of the Quakers, decided to erect soup kitchens. The arrival of the soup kitchen was proof, if any were still needed, that the government's policy of public works had failed. "The expenditure had been enormous, the work hopelessly inefficient" and all the Irish had to show for it were "violence, corruption and scandals.''⁶⁰ Henceforth, "soup would be distributed without any work being required in return.''⁶¹ Unfortunately, the soup was so "utterly deficient in the due supply of those materials from which the human frame can elaborate bones, tendon, blood, muscle, nervous substance, etc.,''⁶² that a doctor in Skibbereen concluded that "it was 'actually injurious' to the very large number of people" who ate and came down with dysentery.⁶³

The soup came nowhere near satisfying demand, but it did save lives over the summer of 1847. The fact that its distribution looked like an act of charity, however, turned the chattering classes in London against the Irish.

"To convert a period of distress," opined The Economist, on January 16, 1847, "arising from natural causes, into one of unusual comfort and ease, by the interference of government money, or of private charity, is to paralyze the efforts of the people themselves.''⁶⁴

By the Spring of 1847, famine fatigue had set in, and the English news-papers started to blame the Irish for their own misery. The Irish were portrayed, not as starving victims, but as sly beggars who used the money they cadged from the well-meaning English to buy guns in preparation for an imminent insurrection. "With the money they get from our relief funds," Greville wrote in his Diary, "they buy arms."⁶⁵ English guilt for centuries of economic exploitation and the current homicidal policy of laissez-faire neglect got transmuted into one of the most flagrant examples of blaming the victim in human history. The English penchant for justifying injustice through an appeal to nature which began with Newton and would reach a culmination in Darwin in the not-too-distant future reached an all-time low in the editorials of English newspapers like The Economist, whose editor James Wilson opined to a presumably Christian nation that "it is no man's business to provide for another.''⁶⁶ The greatest danger which the potato famine posed was not that the Irish peasantry might starve to death, but rather the possibility that the government might interfere into "the natural law of distribution," which decreed that "those who deserved more would obtain it."⁶⁷

The converse of that proposition was clear enough: those who had little (like the Irish) deserved even less. If it seemed cruel to allow children to starve to death lying in the same cold, louse-infested bed with their mothers and to have their corpses gnawed away by rats, that was only because the observer, lacking instruction in the finer points of laissez-faire, capitalist political economy, failed to see that often, as the London Times put it in an editorial in 1847, "something like harshness [was] the greatest humanity.''⁶⁸ When Dennis McKennedy starved to death in October 1846, it was news. The deaths which followed so overwhelmed the already burdened English conscience that their existence was suppressed. Death by starvation was no longer news; in fact, it hardly deserved mention by the fall of 1847.

The silence in the press on those deaths coupled with editorials endorsing even colder neglect created a reaction against capitalism which is with us still. The Communist Manifesto, which appeared in November 1847 leveled a searing moral indictment against the religious-inspired looting and economic exploitation that the English ruling elites had defended for centuries. The Irish famine revealed capitalism in all of its naked brutality, and the vision the famine conjured was so disconcerting that the scribblers who wrote for the capitalist press had to transmute it into something more congenial to the collective conscience of the ruling class elites responsible for it.

And so the Irish got blamed for their own famine. The Irish were a bunch of whiners: "Why," the Times wondered, "is that so terrible in Ireland which in England does not create perplexity and hardly moves compassion?"⁶⁹ The only one who came close to the mark in evaluating the organs of public opinion at the time was the aged novelist Maria Edgeworth, who claimed that journalists like Wilson and economists like Nassau Senior and politicos like Trevelyan and Charles Wood had "heart[s] of iron," and "nature[s] from which the natural instinct of sympathy or pity have been destroyed."⁷⁰ The Theory of Moral Sentiments, it seems, eventuated in genocide or war crimes or something similar every time its economic les-sons got applied to indigenous peoples:

Many people in high places in both London and Dublin in the 1840s believed that the famine·was nature's response to Irish demographic irresponsibility, and that too much public kindness would obscure the message. There is some truth then in John Mitchel's contemporary claim that "Ireland died of politcal economy." ... To relieve one famine would only "have postponed a calamitous reckoning when a swollen population multiplied beyond its subsistence."'⁷¹

At some time during 1847, sympathy for the plight of the Irish famine victims dried up and was replaced by an anger which was at first generalized and free-floating but which later began to focus on the Irish landlord as the source of all evil. It was they, the public cried, who should shoulder the main financial burden which the famine created. The landlords resisted the suggestion that rate-payers (i.e., local taxpayers) should bear the brunt of responsibility for relief efforts. They claimed, with some justification, that the famine was "a national calamity and that therefore the burden should be shared throughout the United Kingdom.''⁷² The sense that this was "an imperial calamity [to] be borne by imperial resources" was wide-spread.⁷³

There may have been collective finger-pointing in the press, but there was no collective response to the calamity at hand and the burden of dealing with the famine was placed on the shoulders of a group of landlords who were notoriously profligate and as a result deeply in debt. Most of the Irish landlords were already "hopelessly insolvent" because of "the extravagance of their predecessors, the building of over large mansions, reckless expenditure on horses, hounds, and conviviality,. followed by equally reckless borrowing" which "had brought very many landlords to the point where, however desperate the needs of their tenantry, they were powerless to give any help."⁷⁴

Demonized by the press in England, the landlords decided to solve the problem by deporting their tenants to North America. Because of the English capitalist understanding of property rights, the Irish tenant was rack-rented by middlemen employed by the landowners who "often ... visited property in Ireland only once or twice in a lifetime, sometimes not at all."⁷⁵ The "long lease" ensured that the landlord could "rid himself of responsibility and assured himself of a regular income, but the tenants were handed over to exploitation. Profit was the only motive.'⁷⁶ That understanding of property rights also meant that the tenants received no compensation for any improvements they made on the landlord's property. The people who worked the land and improved it were considered tenants "at will," which meant the landlord could drive them off the land whenever he chose. This was not the case in Protestant Ulster, and the Devon Commission ascribed the "superior prosperity and tranquility" of that region to tenant right.⁷⁷ The Catholic Irish peasant lived, as a result, in a constant state of insecurity knowing that he could be expelled from land he tilled at the whim of a landlord imbued with the most ruthless capitalist principles.

On March 13, 1846, Mrs. Gerrard evicted 300 tenants from her estate in Ballinglass, County Galway. Even though the tenants were not in arrears in paying their rent and even though they had reclaimed 400 acres of bogland by their own labors, they were forced to leave their well-built houses, which were demolished by a group of constables and their agents. An observer described a "frightful" scene of:

women tunning wailing with pieces of their property, and clinging to door posts from which they had to be forcibly torn, men cursing, children screaming with fright. That night the people slept in the ruins; then next day they were driven out, the foundations of the houses were razed and no neighbor was allowed to take them in.⁷⁸ The English capitalists justified the Irish evictions, and the death by starvation that often followed therefrom, in the name of property rights.

One of the most ardent defenders of those property rights was Lord Brougham, who rose before the House of Lords two weeks later to defend the behavior of Mrs Gerrard and other landlords by claiming that it was the landlord's right to do as he pleased and if he abstained he conferred a favor and was doing an act of kindness. If on the other hand he chose to stand on his right, the tenants must be taught by the strong arm of the law that they had no power to oppose or to resist .... property would be valueless and capital would no longer be invested in cultivation of the land if it were not acknowledged that it was the landlord's undoubted, indefeasible and most sacred right to deal with his property as he list. .... "⁷⁹

Faced with tenants who could not work or pay rent and the demand from England that the Irish solve their own problems, the landlords chose eviction as the solution to their dilemma: "Throughout these months ... evictions were reported weekly. The potato failure endangered the payment of rents, a swarming population was likely to become unprofitable, and landlords were eager to clear their property of non-paying tenants."⁸⁰

Bereft of public sympathy, accused of being the source of their own misery, and triply burdened by disease and the elements in addition to famine, many Irish tacitly agreed with their evicting landlords and concluded that their only hope of staying alive lay in emigration. By February of 1847, Ireland's roads were packed with emigrants. "All who are able," reported a Board of Works officer, "are leaving the country."⁸¹ In addition to the million Irishmen who died of hunger, another million crossed the Atlantic to North America during the famine years. The number of Irishmen who went as ballast to cities like Liverpool across the Irish Sea was even greater than the number that went to America.⁸² Because Canada was still an English colony at the time, the vast majority of emigrants chose it as their gateway to North America and landed at Grosse Isle, an island just below Quebec on the St. Lawrence River.

Emigration to Canada was only possible after the ice on the St. Lawrence River melted in the spring. Because of the severity of the winter of 1846-7, that didn't happen until May. Since the emigration started in earnest in February, the starving Irish were confined to the overcrowded holds of what came to be known as "coffin ships," for at least two months with no legally fixed provision of food and water before they could be processed at Grosse Isle and pass upstream to Montreal and points west. Because of the closeness of quarters in the coffin ships, diseases like typhus spread there even faster than in the remote cottages where people huddled together to ward off the cold.

The North Atlantic passage, taxing for the strong under the best of conditions, proved fatal for those weakened by famine and disease. When the ship Syria arrived at Grosse Isle on May 17, nine of the Irish passengers had already died, and 84 of the 214 passengers on board had succumbed to fever.⁸³ When the Larch arrived from Sligo, 150 of its 440 passengers arrived with fever after 108 had already died at sea. When the Agnes arrived, only 150 of its 427 passengers were alive after the Atlantic passage and the mandatory 15-day quarantine.⁸⁴

As more and more ships arrived, the number of fever cases began to spike, creating the steep curve that signaled an epidemic. Four days after the Syria, eight more ships arrived with a total of 431 fever cases on board.⁸⁵ Within three more days, 17 more ships arrived in which everyone had succumbed to fever. By this point, there were 695 fever cases in the hospital with 164 more on board various ships waiting to land. By May 263 ships carrying 10,000 immigrants had dropped anchor off Grosse Isle. Within the next three days, six more ships arrived carrying another 3,000 immigrants. By May 31, 40 ships were waiting to be unloaded and the 1,100 pa-tients being treated for typhus on Grosse Isle overflowed the local hospital into the local church, tents, and sheds, and anything with a roof on it.

Given the overcrowding on Grosse Isle, customs officials had little choice but to send the emigrants, many of whom were already dying of fever, upstream to Montreal at the rate of over 2,000 a day.⁸⁶ The steamer ships which carried the immigrants to Montreal discharged them on the docks, where they were left by the thousands to fend for themselves, "sick, bewildered,. and. helpless."⁸⁷ Those who were unable to walk·off the ship crawled down the gangplank and often died on the wharf. Then, with its health facilities totally overburdened, Canadian health officials received word that another 45,000.emigrants were en route. At this point, in spite of the heroic efforts of many Canadians, including eight Catholic priests and the bishops of Montreal and Toronto, who died after contracting fever while ministering to the Irish,⁸⁸ health care on the wharves and in the sheds along the St. Lawrence River collapsed completely and "the only per-sons who could be induced to take charge of the sick were abandoned and callous creatures, of both sexes, who robbed the dead."⁸⁹

During 1847 public opinion in England turned against Ireland's land-lords: Lord John Russell led the change in public opinion by claiming that the Irish landlords had failed in their duty to support their own tenants.⁹⁰ Unlike the claims that Irish were responsible for their own misery, the claim that the landlords used emigration as the simplest way to get rid of starving tenants and thereby "decrease the surplus population" had an element of truth to it. But no matter how much the landlords earned the odium that was heaped upon them, the picture wasn't as simple as Russell and the press portrayed it.

To begin with, it was Russell's refusal to buy Indian maize, as his predecessor Peel had done, which put the landlords into a position in which they were being "squeezed by the pincer movement of lower rents and higher outlays both on relief and taxation.⁹¹ The proximate cause came in January 1847 when: "the Government announced that the whole destitute population was to be transferred to the Poor Law, to be maintained out of local rates at the expense of owners of property.''⁹² Once the Russell government decided to stop importing Indian corn and the responsibility of feeding Ireland's starving multitudes was placed on the landlords' shoulders, their only hope for solvency lay in forcing the destitute off their lands. And the simplest way to remove them forever was to ship them to North America, because "Once the ship sailed the destitute were effectually gotten rid of"⁹³.

In order to stem the orgy of speculation which accompanied the build-out of England's and America's rail networks, the Peel government passed the Bank Charter Act of 1844; it reduced the ratio of gold to paper currency which constituted the essence of the Gold Standard which England imposed on the world during the course of the 19th century. According to the principles of the' Gold Standard, whenever the Bank of England's gold reserves dropped below a certain point, the Bank had to curtail the paper money supply.

The Gold Standard, as a result, contributed to the famine. Because of the crash of 1847, no money was available for loans. Because of the failure of the potato harvest and the bad harvests of 1846-47, England was forced to buy food abroad, and to do that England had to dip into its gold reserves because only gold was accepted as international currency at the time. In order to insure the stability of a gold-backed currency, the Bank Charter Act of 1844 had lowered even further the ratio of gold to paper. The bank did this by raising the interest rate and calling in loans. This is what precipitated the Panic of 1847, which started

 as a collapse of British financial markets associated with the end of the 1840s railway industry boom. As a means of stabilizing the British economy the ministry of Robert Peel passed the Bank Charter Act of 1844. This Act fixed a maximum quantity of bank notes that could be in circulation at any one time and guaranteed that definite reserve funds of gold and silver would be held in reserve to back up the money in circulation. Furthermore, the Act required that the supply of money in circulation could only be increased when gold or silver reserves were proportionately increased.⁹⁴

According to the Austrian School economist, Jesus Huerta de Soto, the Bank Charter Act of 1844:

represented the triumph of Ricardo's Currency School and prohibited the issuance of bills not backed 100 percent by gold. Nevertheless this provision was not established in relation to deposits and loans, the volume of which increased five-fold in only two years, which explains the spread of speculation and the severity of the crisis which erupted in 1846.⁹⁵

The Austrian School has always favored gold over paper, a policy which invariably leads to deflation and the contraction of the economy, which is precisely what happened in 1847. The Gold Standard ensures that paper money will be issued for speculation, but that it will disappear whenever the interests of those who hold the gold are threatened, i.e., when gold reserves shrink, as they did in England after the bad harvests of 1846-7.

The Bank Charter Act sought to regulate and strengthen the credit structure. by tying any increase in the note issue to the gold held by the Bank of England in its Issue Department. In 1847 foreign speculation had increased the need to send gold abroad, and when grain prices and railway shares collapsed, a financial crisis occurred. To stem the panic, it was de-sirable for the Bank to lend freely, possible at a higher rate of interest, but this could not be done because the drain of gold was reducing the. back-ing required for notes; moreover,. loans from the Bank would inevitably mean that more notes would be required, and the Bank feared a short-age. Between August 28, and October 30, 1847, notes with the public went up by 2.5 million po1;1,I1ds. The Bank therefore refused to lend freely, the crisis was aggravated, and "a great panic in the money market" followed. Early in August failures began in the corn trade. They then spread to other branches of commerce, and by the end of September they involved, among first-class firms alone, losses of nine to ten million pounds. In October, 11 banks failed and the state of the City of London was described by Lord John Russell as "disastrous." In the House of Commons, it was stated that during the course of the panic 117 firms failed.⁹⁶

This is the most plausible explanation for the decision of the Rothschild family to enter the political lists in England. It was not the increasingly fractious Jewish question which convinced Lionel Rothschild to run for public office but rather the threat to capitalism which Ireland posed. Lionel Rothschild had made his decision to stand as a Whig for Parliament in June 1846 in the wake of Peel's defeat over the repeal of the Corn Laws. Although he opposed the Corn Laws on laissez-faire principles, Peel used free trade to overturn them in order to provide aidto Ireland, which set a dangerous precedent according to those who were committed to capitalist principles. If economic laws could be suspended for humanitarian-ie., moral-reasons, there was no telling where a precedent like that might lead.

The Whigs adopted Lionel as their candidate on June 29,. 1847,97 but he had decided to run months before. Lionel made "no secret of his determination to carry his election by money''⁹⁸ or of his determination to use bribery to get political office. On December 23, 1846, Lionel's brother Nat expressed some qualms about the means which Lionel thought necessary to achieve his desired end:

I regret much to observe that you think it necessary to use certain means to secure some votes in the House of Lords which are not peculiarly commendable. I must say I should have preferred to have seen it otherwise, after the late proces decorruption which we witnessed where one might rather shy of being party to anything of the sort. To come however to the point, on this occasion our worthy uncle and your humble servant are of the opinion that we must not be too scrupulous and if it be necessary to ensure the success of the measure we must not mind a sacrifice-We can not fix the amount; you must know better how much is required than we do ... of course you will not cash up until the bill passes the Lords, and you must not make any bargain or care about who gets it.⁹⁹

Peel's altruism, in other words, forced Lionel Rothschild into the political arena to defend the hegemony of money over moral concerns. Lionel's campaign, which included "buy[ing] votes in the Upper House,'"¹⁰⁰ as well as bribing Prince Albert with a 50,000 pound contribution to his "pet but chronically underfunded project for a Great Exhibition of the 'Industry of all Nations,"¹⁰¹ reached its culmination when he was sworn into office on a Bible from which the New Testatment had been excised. It was a gesture full of symbolism, which most Englishmen were loathe to admit much less explicate. Lionel's wife Charlotte called his political victory "the beginning of a new era for the Jewish nation,'' and in a sense it was. The excision of the New Testament from the Bible Lionel swore his oath on was symbolic of an excision of the Christian moral order from a country which had been founded upon it. The repudiation of that order which began with the Reformation and which continued after the Glorious Revolution, would find its culmination in an anti-Christian Jewish hegemony, which many of Lionel's contemporaries found ignominious. Thomas Carlyle, who was infuriated by Lionel's candidacy, wrote to the MP Monckton Milnes, wondering, "how can a real Jew, by possibility, try to be a Senator, or even a Citizen of any country except his own wretched Palestine, whither all his thoughts and steps and efforts tend?'¹⁰² and wanted the state to repossess the wealth that the Jews had accumulated through usury. "I do not mean that I want King John back again," Carlyle told the historian J. A. Froude, "but if you ask me which mode of treating these people to have been nearest the will of the Almighty about them-to build them palaces like that, or to take the pincers for them, I declare for the pincers .... 'Now, Sir, the State requires some of these millions you have heaped together with your financing work."¹⁰³ Oblivious to the anti-Semitism that their behavior was causing among local patriots on both sides of the channel, Lionel's brother James wrote from Paris to tell him that his admission to Parliament was "a real triumph for the family.'"¹⁰⁴

If so, it was an even greater triumph for the gold standard and the notion that there was no greater tragedy in life than a decline in the amount of gold in English vaults. The Rothschilds were firm supporters of the gold standard because "the gold standard was, in effect, the global monetary system."¹⁰⁵ The Rothschilds' great achievement was the creation of a truly international bond market, but this depended on the gold standard, which "ensured that foreign bonds denominated in gold-based currencies were proof against exchange rate fluctuation and therefore marketable to more cautious investors'"¹⁰⁶ as well as the British Navy's willingness to enforce contracts and collect debts: The enormous levels of capital export from Britain which characterized the late 19th and early 20th centuries were to some extent facilitated by the development of a global monetary system, first the bimetallic (silver and gold) system and then, from the mid-187os, the gold standard, which fixed the exchange rates of most major currencies in terms of gold and then tied them to sterling the world's major reserve currency.'¹⁰⁷

The Rothschilds were "strenuously devoted towards maintaining our financial supremacy to which England owed her overwhelming mercantile supremacy.'"¹⁰⁸ But it was precisely the "financial supremacy" embodied in the gold standard which spelled doom for Ireland.

The ultimate cause of Russell's refusal to buy maize was economic. In general, the decision was based on the principles which he and his class had imbibed from Smith and Smith's Manchester School epigoni, but in particular, Russel's decision stemmed from a more immediate crisis, namely, the financial panic of 1847: "Trevelyan ended poor relief during the summer of 1847 because of the Financial crisis of 1847: the food shortage led to trade deficits which brought about drain of bullion from the Bank of England.'"¹⁰⁹The total amount of money (10 million pounds) which England spent on famine relief between 1846 and 1852 was trifling compared to the money they spent on emancipating black slaves in the West Indies and even more trifling compared to the 1 percent of GDP which the Czar spent to relieve "the much less threatening Russian famine of 1891–2."¹¹⁰ When it came to real priorities feeding the poor finished a distant second to maintaining the Gold Standard, by which England dominated the world's system of financial exchange. The measures which the Old Lady of Threadneedle street took to stop the external drain of bullion from the Bank of England spelled doom for the Irish poor and prompted Charles Wood to tell Clarendon, "I have no money," and plead that he was unable to provide financial help for Ireland:¹¹¹

At this Clarendon became angry, citing Trevelyan, who in accordance with the principle of laissez-faire had produced a phrase, "the operation of natural causes," to which he considered Ireland should be left. As for "the operation of natural causes," Clarendon told Grey, it meant "wholesale deaths from starvation and disease, and John Bull won't like that, however cross he may be at paying."¹¹²

On September 30, Trevelyan informed his agent Twislton that treasury grants to distressed Irish unions were to cease:

There would be no issue of condemned and unwanted Ordnance clothing to Irish workhouses, as there had been last winter . . . "it is a great object not to revive the habit of dependence on government aide," wrote Trevelyan, and to encourage independence he further stopped feeding destitute children, in spite of Lord John Russell's pledge ... funds were now exhausted and the Government could do nothing."¹¹³

Twisleton responded by telling Trevelyan:

that he had thought it better to omit from the annual report of the Poor Law Commission (Ireland) and statement as to how much each pauper cost, in case people should say "we were slowly murdering the peasantry by the scantiness of our relief. "¹¹⁴

The answer was that Ireland was to be abandoned to Trevelyan's operation-of-natural-causes system. That meant in Greville's words that:

Charles Wood has along set his face against giving or lending money ... and he contemplates (with what seems very like cruelty, though he is not really cruel) that misery and distress should run their course; and that such havoc should be made among the landed proprietors, that the price of land will at last fall so low as to tempt capitalists to invest their funds therein .... "¹¹⁵

The landlords weren't responsible for the government's decision to discontinue the importation of corn, nor were they responsible for the panic of 1847 or the gold standard which created the panic, but they were certainly responsible for the appalling conditions in the ships that brought their former tenants to the New World. Of all of the suffering that took place between 1845 and 1849, nothing "aroused such savage resentment, or left behind such hatred, as the landlord emigrations."¹¹⁶ Once the government refused to take responsibility for even the minimal famine relief which Peel had authorized, the temptation to ship off those "who, through age, infirmity or the potato failure, had become useless and an apparently endless source of expense,"¹¹⁷ became irresistible.

But why did the landlords find it impossible to feed the people who raised their crops? The answer is debt: by the time that the potato blight destroyed the crop of 1846, "The majority of Irish landlords were ... bank-rupt"¹¹⁸ from previous extravagance paid for by borrowed money. The Irish landlords couldn't provide aid to their tenants because they were all in debt. Irish landlords, most of whom were absentees living in London, were notorious for not improving their property. The famine was simply the straw the broke the back of a camel already over burdened by debt that had accumulated for generations:

The verdict of the specialist literature is that conspicuous consumption and poor estate management rather than bad luck or investment plans thwarted by famine were responsible for the lion's share of estate indebtedness. When the famine was over, the pro-landlord Mayo Constitution conceded that the demise of ancient landed families was due to debts of many past generations. The record is full of examples of landlord extravagance in quest of a quality of life set by their peers across the Irish Sea. The behavior of Cork landlords prompted the historian who knows them best to surmise that "although the fateful events of 1845-49 pushed the encumbered landlords of Cork over the brink of disaster, it was clear ... that the long awaited day of reckoning with their creditors was close athand."¹¹⁹

By the time the Russell government made the landlords responsible for poor relief, their estates were so overburdened with debt that they could hardly keep up with the interest payments on their loans, much less pay off their debts. The usury burden on encumbered Irish estates had become so onerous that there was no money left over to pay for the upkeep of the workers who planted and harvested the crops, much less for their dependents. O'Grada claims that: 

there can be little doubt but that "the cumulative cost of an aristocratic life-style drove many owners of estates to the moneylender." Landlord indebtedness was by no means a uniquely Irish feature, however. In England around this time, it was commonly held that land was mortgaged to bout one-half its value, or that servicing debt absorbed about half the gross rental income."¹²⁰

Woodham-Smith sets the figure for Ireland even higher. Lord Mountcashel told the House of Lords that "out of an annual rental of 13 million pounds it was estimated that Irish landlords paid away nearly ten and a half million pounds in mortgages and 'borrowed money,' so that the sum actually at their disposal was something less than three million pounds."¹²¹ The landlords, in other words, were assessed as having a taxable annual rental income of close to 14 million pounds when, in fact, the entire island had less than 3 million pounds at its disposal once debt service got subtracted from gross income.

Once property law got reformed and Irish estates started landing in bankruptcy court around the middle of the century, the true magnitude of landlord indebtedness became painfully apparent. In November of 1849, in one of the first cases heard by the reformed encumbered estates court, the Earl of Portarlington declared debts of 700,000 pounds against an annual rental income of 33,000 pounds, a situation in which income from rent hardly covered the interest payments on his loans.¹²² His situation was, however, mild by comparison to that of his peers. Lord Oranmore and Browne owed over 200,000 pounds on an estate which earned less than 5,000 pounds in annual pre-famine rent, which is to say less than half of the interest payment due if he were paying simple interest, which he most certainly was not. The Earl of Aldborough owed 151,478 on an estate which earned him 2,229 pounds in rent annually.¹²³ During the first three years of the reformed bankruptcy court, three-quarters of all the cases heard involved estates which had debts exceeding ten times the amount of annual rent collected on them.¹²⁴ Even in the poorest areas of Ireland during the famine, poor relief accounted for only a small percentage of the rents due. Once these figures became commonly known they turned British public opinion against the Irish landlords. Missing from that calculation, however, was the debt service which gobbled up virtually all of the rental income on virtually all of the Irish estates. This didn't exculpate the landlords from their responsibility for past extravagance, but it didn't help their starving tenants either. Because of the usury burden, there was no money to spare for poor relief, even if it only accounted for a "small fraction" of gross rental income. "Debts accumulated in the years before the famine" was the main factor which "prevented many landlords from playing a more active part in limiting mass mortality during the famine."'¹²⁵

Debt may have been the main factor in determining the administration (or lack thereof) of poor relief, but the famine was irrelevant when it came to bankruptcy. O'Grada claims that "it was doubtful that any landlord who was free of debt and owed no rent in 1845 succumbed during the famine."¹²⁶ Given a situation like this, it seems clear that most Irish landlords would not have escaped bankruptcy court in the 1850s even if there had been no famine. Conversely, most landlords were so encumbered with debt that any poor relief would have been beyond their economic means.

Endnotes The Irish Potato Famine

1 Friedrich List, National System of Political Economy (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1974), List, p. 201.
2 List, p. 205.
3 David Cannandine, Aspects of Aristocracy: Grandeur and Decline in Modern Britain (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 2.
4 Cannadine, p. 37.
s Cannadine, p. 52.
6 Cannadine, p. 38.
7 Cannadine, p. 39.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 Cannadine, p. 40.
12 Ibid.
13 Cannadine, p. 41.
14 Ibid.
Barren Metal 15 Cormac O'Grada, Black '47 and Beyond· the Great Irish Famine in History, Economy and Memory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 129.
16 Cannadine, p. 41.
17 The example of aristocrats mortgaging half their land and having interest rates gobble half their rent suggests that interest rates were close to rental yields, Le., rent divided by real estate value. William Petty gave some attention to the question of what interest rates should be and concluded that they should be similar to land rents. His investigation into this question also included the question of what the appropriate balance is between the return to labor and the return to land. That balance was dubbed the question of the PAR. Petty's solution meant that there was little benefit to borrowing against land investment unless there was capital growth to boost the rental return. Speculation was done on this basis, but sometimes capital gain was caused by no more than the bubble effect induced by speculative optimism and easy debt. That means that it was highly risky but borrowers were invariably drugged by optimism and greed.
18 Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Great Hunger:Ireland 1845-1849 (London:
Penguin, 1962), p. 40.
19 Woodham-Smith, p. 95.
20 Woodham-Smith, p. 98.
21 Woodham-Smith, p. 101.
22 Woodham-Smith, p. 99.
23 Woodham-Smith, p. 32.
24 Woodham-Smith, p. 47.
25 Woodham-Smith, p. 94.
26 Woodham-Smith, p. 39.
27 Ibid.
28 Woodham-Smith, p. 40.
29 Woodham-Smith, p. 42.
30 Cf. Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981). Sen claimed that the Irish famine was economic not physical and· that this characteristic was shared with all (or most) major famines in the last couple of centuries. He received a Nobel Prize for his work which is in itself a powerful critique of capitalism focused on the way that markets malfunction.
31 Sen, p. 161.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid.
35 Denis Judd, Palmerston (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975), pp. 1-2.
36 Judd, p. 2.
37 Ibid.
38 Woodham-Smith, p. 27.
39 Ibid.
The Irish Potato Famine 50 "Nassau William Senior," Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassau _ William Senior.
40 Ibid.
41 Woodham-Smith, p. 32.
42Ibid.
43 O'Grada, p. 14.
44 Woodham-Smith, p. 32.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid.
47 Woodham-Smith, p. 35.
48 Woodham-Smith, p. 36.
49 O'Grada, p. 29.
51 Woodham-Smith, pp. 375-6.
52 Woodham-Smith, p. 52.
53 Ibid.
54 Woodham-Smith, pp. 54-55.
55 Marjie Blay, "The Campaign for the Repeal of the Corn Laws," The Victorian Web, last modified April 1997, http://www.victorianweb.org/history/cornlaws2.
html.
56 Woodham-Smith, p. 43: "however little liking Peel might feel for the Irish people he could be relied upon never to allow his feelings to influence what he considered to be his duty toward Ireland." 57 Bloy, op. cit.
58 Woodham-Smith, p. 52.
59 Woodham-Smith, p. 55.
60 Ibid.
61 Ibid.
62 Woodham-Smith, p. 135.

Endnotes The Famine and Free Trade

1 Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845-1849, (London:
Penguin, 1962), p. 103.
2 Ibid.
3 Woodham-Smith, p. 141.
4 Cormac O'Grada, Black '47 and Beyond: the Greatlrish Famine in History, Economy and Memory, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 39.
5 O'Grada, p. 68.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
9 Woodham-Smith, p. 107.
10 Woodham-Smith, p. 100.
11 Woodham0Smith, p. 106.
12 O'Grada, pp. 68-9.
13 Woodham-Smith, p. 143.
14 Woodham-Smith, p. 144.
15 O'Grada, p. 38.
16 Woodham-Smith, p. 67.
17 "Sir Charles Trevelyan 1st Baronet," Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Sir_ Charles_ Trevelyan,_ 1st_ Baronet 18 Ibid.
19 Woodham-Smith, p. 155.
20 "Sir Charles," op. cit.
21 Woodham-Smith, p. 148.
22 Woodham-Smith, p. 61.
23 Woodham-Smith, p. 84.
24 Woodham-Smith, p. 91.
25 Woodham-Smith, p. 89.
26 Woodham-Smith, p. 100.
27 Woodham-Smith, p. 89. 

28 Woodham-Smith, p. 123. This thinking was also rife in India in the 20th century. In Poverty and Famines, Sen goes into details of the Indians famines including one where a British administrator had a train loaded with emergency food supplies for a famine stricken area but was stopped by his superiors who upbraided him for not applying Adam Smith and ordered the relief train not sent since the market would take care of the food shortage. The peasants who had spent all their resources on planting failed crops had no money to spend, so the private sector did not appear, and the people died. During this time, the area was The Famine and Free Trade exporting food.
29 Woodham-Smith, p. 116.
30 O'Grada, p. 122.
31 Woodham-Smith, p. 137.
32 Ibid.
33 Woodham-Smith, p. 137.
34 Woodham-Smith, p. 167.
35 Woodham-Smith, p. 185.
36 Woodham-Smith, p. 148.
37 Woodham-Smith, p. 133.
38 Ibid.
39 Woodham-Smith, p. 119.
40 Woodham-Smith, p. 115.
41 Wootdham-Smith, p. 116.
42 Woodham-Smith, p. 157.
43 Woodham-Smith, p. 168.
44 Woodham-Smith, p. 113.
45 Woodham-Smith, p. 162.
46 Woodham-Smith, p. 163.
47 Woodham-Smith, p. 180.
48 Ibid.
49 Woodham-Smith, p. 181.
so Woodham-Smith, p. 182.
51 Ibid.
52 O'Grada, p. 72.
53 Ibid.
54 Woodham-Smith, p. 89.
55 Woodham-Smith, p. 189.
56 Woodham-Smith, p. 191.
57 Woodham-Smith, p. 192.
58 Woodham-Smith, p. 200.
59 Woodham-Smith, p. 204.
60 Woodham-Smith, p. 171.
61 Woodham-Smith, p. 168.
62 Woodham-Smith, p. 178.
63 Woodham-Smith, p. 179.
64 O'Grada, p. 77.
65 Woodham-Smith, p. 105.
66 O'Grada, p. 6.
67 Ibid.
68 Ibid.
69 Woodham-Smith, p. 122.
70 O'Grada, p. 6.
71 Ibid.
72 O'Grada, p. 43.
73 O'Grada, p. 78.
74 Woodham-Smith, p. 63.
75 Woodham-Smith, p. 21.
76 Woodham-Smith, p. 22.
77 Woodham-Smith, p. 23.
78 Woodham-Smith, pp. 71-2.
79 Woodham-Smith, p. 72.
80 Woodham-Smith, p. 71.
81 Woodham-Smith, p. 215.
82 Woodham-Smith, p. 206.
83 Woodham-Smith, p .219.
84 Woodham-Smith, p. 231.
85 Woodham-Smith, p. 220.
86 Woodham-Smith, p. 232.
87 Woodham-Smith, p. 233.
88 Woodham-Smith, p. 235.
89 Woodham-Smith, p. 221.
go Woodham-Smith, p. 297.
91 O'Grada, p. 133.
92 Woodham-Smith, p. 227.
93 Ibid.
95 Ibid.
96 Woodham-Smith, p. 305.
97 Niall Ferguson, The House of Rothschild: the World's Banker 1849-1999 (New York: Viking, 1999), p. 26.
98 Ferguson, p. 27.
99 Ferguson, pp. 36-7.
100 Ferguson, p. 37.
101 Ferguson, p. 38.
102 Ferguson, p. 27.
103 Ibid.
104 Ibid.
105 Ferguson, p. 349.
106 Ferguson, p. 348.
107 Ferguson, p. 347.
108 Ferguson, p. 348.
109 Woodham-Smith, p. 78.
110 O'Grada, p. 83.
The Famine and Free Trade 111 Woodham-Smith, p. 206.
112 Woodham-Smith, p. 374.
113 Woodham-Smith, p. 370.
114 Woodham-Smith, p. 368.
115 Woodham-Smith, p. 379.
116 Woodham-Smith, p. 227.
117 Ibid.
118 Woodham-Smith, p. 284.
119 O'Grada, p. 130.
120 O'Grada, p. 129.
121 Woodham-Smith, p. 297.
122 O'Grada, p. 131.
123 Ibid.
124 O'Grada, p. 132.
125 O'Grada, p. 134.
126 Ibid.

Barren Metal: a history of capitalism as the conflict between labor and usury
E. Michael Jones3