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

Learning from Silence

Pico Iyer: Aflame, Learning from Silence. New York: Riverhead, 2025.
Pico Iyer is not a stranger to the themes of silence and stillness, but always on his own terms, little reference to standard resources and thinkers on the topics, often reducing his writing to subjective experiences, interlocutor’s comments, and anecdotal reports amounting to the overheard and observed.

Iyer is a seasoned travel writer, with several novels, plus essays collected into books. His interest in countries, cities, and places geographical and specialized (such as monasteries) is part of his job description, enhanced by his perpetual curiosity and desire to describe. But this curiosity leaves his experiences in silence and stillness difficult to convey. In The Art of Stillness (2014), the subtitle stretches the irony: “Adventures in Going Nowhere.” That project culminated in Iyer’s TED talk — not a self-effacing “nowhere” by most standards.

In Aflame: Learning from Silence (2025), Iyer revisits a favorite setting for personal retreat: the monastery of Big Sur, a Camaldolese monastery in northern California. The style is relaxed, the retreatants are secular, and the agenda is self-determined, presenting motel-like individual rooms for withdrawal and quietude. The retreat is not quite Catholic (symbols without theology), and not quite Zen (given the optional nature of ritual and schedule), but parallels a loose version of an à la carte restaurant where everyone’s psychological taste is accommodated.

Aflame includes occasional references to writers: Merton, Camus, Henry Miller, Leonard Cohen, Thoreau, Emily Dickinson.

In an early anecdote, given Iyer’s regular visits to Big Sur over the years, Iyer’s mother asks him the “name of these people you are staying with,” and about his dogged interest in the Camodolese. Are they friendly? she asks. Iyer replies, “Tremendously. They don’t ask anything of visitors other than a ‘spirit of quiet and recollection.’ Most of the people visiting are women. I don’t think many of them are Catholic.” Then Iyer’s mother gets to her real question.

“You’re not going to get converted?” “No fear of that,” I say, and she smiles back, knowing her only child well enough to see that he’s far too prone to run in the opposite direction.

After Iyer’s many solo stints at Big Sur over the years, his wife Hiroko finally accompanies him to a retreat. Together they had visited many religious retreat-houses (Hindu, Buddhist, and other) but she agrees that Big Sur is different. “True Heaven,” she remarks when asked her verdict. Iyer writes: “By which, I think she means, no words; and the people around us do not as a rule seem to be looking for enlightenment or transport or mystic truth. They’ve simply found a place to renew themselves in quiet.”

While finding quality-time isn’t the entire issue in Aflame, it nearly is. Or, perhaps, it's dilettantism. Iyer isn’t doing research or interviews (just occasional conversations with monks and visitors); he is presumably testing the viability of silence and stillness—but not solitude. At least, this version of silence and stillness, which leaves much to the imagination of the aspirant. Iyer’s writing is elegant, engaging, breezy, chatty, and a little restless; he is extroverted, sensitive, and empathetic. As a veteran travel writer of decades, Iyer is skilled at observing minutiae and can paint landscapes big and small. Aflame is rich in both, from the details of conversations to the grand backdrop of California wildfires that surrounded Big Sur.

In an ironic way Iyer would probably appreciate the Taoist saying: “The farther you travel, the less you know.” Aflame is warm but not a mystic’s “living flame” (to quote John of the Cross); and it is not silent enough to accomplish “learning from silence.”

https://www.hermitary.com/bookreviews/iyer.html

W.H. Auden - The Greeks and Us

 ONCE upon a time there was a little boy. Before he could read, his father told him stories about the War between the Greeks and the Trojans. Hector and Achilles were as familiar to him as his brothers, and when the Olympians quarreled he thought of his uncles and aunts. At seven he went to a boarding school and most of the next seven years were spent in translating Greek and Latin into English and vice versa. Then he went on to another boarding school which had a Classical Side and a Modem Side.

The latter was regarded by boys and masters alike in much the same way as; in a militarist country, civilians are regarded by officers, and with the same kind of degrees of inferiority: history and mathematics were, like professional men, possible; the natural sciences, comprehensively labeled Stinks, like tradesmen were not. The Classical Side, too, had its nice distinctions: Greek, like the Navy, was the senior, the aristocratic service.

It is hard to believe now that this story is not a fairy tale but a historical account of middle-class education in England thirty-five years ago.

For anyone brought up in this way, Greece and Rome are so mixed up with his personal memories of childhood and classroom that it is extremely difficult to look at these civilizations objectively. This is particularly so, perhaps, in the case of Greece. Until near the end of the eighteenth century, Europe thought of itself less as Europe than as Western Christendom, the heir to the Roman Empire, and its educational system was based on the study of Latin. The rise of Hellenic studies to an equal and then a superior position was a nineteenth century phenomenon and coincided with the development of European nations and nationalist feeling.

It is significant, surely, that when, today, an after-dinner speaker refers to the sources of our civilization, he always names Jerusalem and Athens, but rarely Rome, for the last is the symbol of a religious and polit ical unity which has ceased to exist and the revival of which few believe in or desire. The historical discontinuity between Greek culture and our own, the disappearance for so many centuries of any direct influence, made it all the easier, when it was rediscovered, for each nation to fashion a classical Greece in its own image. There is a German Greece, a French Greece, an English Greece—there may even be an American Greece—all quite different. Had Hölderlin met Jowett, for instance, one suspects that neither would have understood a word the other said, and their parting would have been cold.

Even within a single country different Greeces coexist. For instance here are two English caricatures:

Professor X. Reade Chair of Moral Philosophy. 59. Married. Three daughters. Religion: C of E (Broad). Politics: Conservative. Lives in a small suburban house stuffed with Victorian knickknacks. Does not entertain. Smokes a pipe. Does not notice what he eats. Hobbies: gardening and long solitary walks. Dislikes: foreigners, Roman Catholicism, modem literature, noise. Current worry: his wife’s health.

Mr. Y. Classical tutor. 41. Unmarried. Religion: none. Politics: none. Lives in college. Has private means and gives wonderful lunch parties for favorite undergraduates. Hobbies: travel and collecting old glass. Dislikes: Christianity, girls, the poor, English cooking. Current worry: his figure.

To X, the word Greece suggests Reason, the Golden Mean, emotional control, freedom from superstition; to Y it suggests Gaiety and Beauty, the life of the senses, freedom from inhibitions.

Of course, being good scholars, both know that their respective views are partial; X cannot deny that many Greeks were attracted to mystery cults and addicted to habits upon which “the common moral sense of civilized mankind has pronounced a judgement which requires no justification as it allows of no appeal”; Y is equally aware that the Plato of the Laws is as puritanical as any Scotch Presbyter; but the emotional tie to the Greece of their dreams, formed in childhood and strengthened by years of study and affection, is stronger than their knowledge.

There could be no stronger proof of the riches and depth of Greek culture than its powers of appeal to every kind of personality. It has been said that everyone is born either a Platonist or an Aristotelian; but it seems to me that there are more contrasted and significant divisions than this, between, for instance, the lovers of Ionia and the lovers of Sparta, between those who are devoted to both Plato and Aristotle and those who prefer Hippocrates and Thucydides to either.

 II

The days when classical studies were the core of higher learning have now passed and are not likely, in any future we can envisage, to return. We have to accept as an accomplished fact that the educated man of today and tomorrow can read neither Latin nor Greek. This means, I think, that, if the classics are to continue to exert any educational effect at all, a change must be made in the emphasis and direction of Roman and Hellenic studies.

If Greek literature has to be read in translation, then the approach can no longer be an aesthetic one. The aesthetic loss in translation from one language into another is always immense; in the case of languages and cultures as far apart as Greek and English, it becomes practically fatal; one can almost say that the better a translation is as English poetry, the less like Greek poetry it is (e.g., Pope’s Iliad) and vice versa.

To begin with there is the prosodic difficulty; quantitative unrhymed verse and qualitative rhymed verse have nothing in common except that they are both rhythmical patterns. An English poet can have much fun attempting, as a technical exercise or an act of piety, to write quantitatively:

With these words Hermes sped away for lofty Olympos: And Priam all fearlessly from off his chariot alighted, Ordering Idaeus to remain i’ the entry to keep watch Over the beasts: th’old king meanwhile strode doughtily onward,

(Robert Bridges. Iliad, xxiv, 468-471)

But no one can read this except as a qualitative meter of an eccentric kind, and eccentricity is a very unhomeric characteristic.

Then there are the problems of word-order and diction; Greek is an inflected language where the sense does not depend on the position of the words in the sentence as it does in English; Greek is rich in compound epithets, English is not.

Lastly and most important of all, the poetic sensibility of the two literatures is radically different. Compared with English poetry Greek poetry is primitive, i.e. the emotions and subjects it treats are simpler and more direct than ours while, on the other hand, the manner of language tends to be more involved and complex. Primitive poetry says simple things in a roundabout way where modern poetry tries to say complicated things straightforwardly. The continuous efforts of English poets in every generation to rediscover “a language really used by men” would have been incomprehensible to a Greek.

In his introduction to Greek Plays in Modern Translation, Dudley Fitts quotes a translation of a bit of stichomythy from Medea.

MEDEA: Why didst thou fare to earth’s prophetic navel?

AEGEUS: To ask how seed of children might be mine.

MEDEA: ’Fore Heaven!—aye childless is thy life till now?

AEGEUS: Childless I am, by chance of some god’s will.

MEDEA: This with a wife, or knowing not the couch?

AEGEUS: Nay, not unyoked to wedlock’s bed am I.

This is, as he says, comically absurd, but what is the poor translator to do? If, for instance, he translates the last two lines into modern idiom, he must write:

MEDEA: Are you married or single?

AEGEUS: Married.

This is no longer funny, but it has completely lost an essential element of the original style, the poetic ornamentation of simple questions and answers by casting them in the form of riddles.

It is significant that, in spite of the familiarity with and enormous admiration for Greek poetry of many English poets in the past, very few indeed show any signs of having been influenced by it in their style of writing—Milton and possibly Browning by the tragedians, Hop-kins by Pindar, are the only names I can think of.

The attempt to translate the poetry of one language into another is an invaluable training for a poet, and it is to be hoped that new versions of Homer, Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Sappho, etc., will continue to be made in every generation, but their public importance is likely to be small.

Even when he is reading the epics or the plays, the average modem reader is going to find that a historical and anthropological approach is more fruitful than an aesthetic one.

Instead of asking “How good a tragedy is Oedipus?” or “Is such and such an argument of Plato’s true or false?” he will try to see all aspects of Greek activity, their drama, their science, their philosophy, their politics as interrelated parts of one complete and unique culture.

Accordingly, in selecting the material for this anthology, I have tried to make it an introduction to Greek culture rather than Greek literature. In a literary anthology it would be absurd to represent Greek tragedy by Aeschylus alone, omitting Sophocles and Euripides, but if one wishes to understand the form and idea of Creek tragedy, it is better to give a trilogy like The Oresteia than three separate plays by three authors; so too with all the other poetic selections which have been chosen for their representative character as literary forms rather than for their individual poetic excellences.

Again, in the extracts from the philosophers the intention has been not to give a comprehensive picture of Plato and Aristotle, but to show how Greek thinkers dealt with certain kinds of problems, for instance the problem of cosmology.

Lastly, Greek medicine and Greek mathematics are so essential parts of their culture, that they cannot be ignored even by a beginner.

The exigencies of space in a volume of this size exclude much important material, but I have only consciously excluded one author, for reasons of personal distaste. I believe, however, that I am not alone in finding Lucian, one of the most popular of Greek writers, too “enlightened” for a generation as haunted by devils as our own.

 III

There is no single Greek literary work of art as great as The Divine Comedy; there is no extant series of works by a single Greek literary artist as impressive as the complete plays of Shakespeare; as a period of sustained creative activity in one medium, the seventy-five-odd years of Athenian drama, between the first tragedies of Aeschylus and the last comedy of Aristophanes, are surpassed by the hundred and twenty-five years, between Gluck’s Orpheus and Verdi’s Otello, which comprise the golden age of European opera: nevertheless, the bewildered comment of any fifth century Athenian upon our society from Dante’s time till our own, and with increasing sharpness every decade, would surely be: “Yes, I can see all the works of a great civilization; but why cannot I meet any civilized persons? I only encounter specialists, artists who know nothing of science, scientists who know nothing of art, philosophers who have no interest in God, priests who are unconcerned with politics, politicians who only know other politicians.”

Civilization is a precarious balance between what Professor Whitehead has called barbaric vagueness and trivial order. Barbarism is unified but undifferentiated; triviality is differentiated but lacking in any central unity; the ideal of civilization is the integration into a complete whole and with the minimum strain of the maximum number of distinct activities.

It is impossible to say, for example, of a harvest dance of a primitive tribe whether it is aesthetic play, undertaken for the pleasure it gives the participants in performing it well, or religious ritual, an outward expression of an inward piety towards the powers who control the harvest, or a scientific technique for securing the practical effect of a better harvest: it is indeed foolish to think in such terms at all, since the dancers have not learned to make such distinctions and cannot understand what they mean.

In a society like our own, on the other hand, when a man goes to the ballet, he goes simply to enjoy himself and all he demands is that choreography and performance shall be aesthetically satisfying; when he goes to Mass, he knows that it is irrelevant whether the Mass be well or badly sung, for what matters is the attitude of his will towards God and his neighbor; when he plows a field, he knows that whether the tractor be beautiful or ugly or whether he be a repentant or a defiant sinner is irrelevant to his success or failure. His problem is quite different from that of the savage; the danger for him is that, instead of being a complete person at every moment, he will be split into three unrelated fragments which are always competing for dominance: the aesthetic fragment which goes to the ballet, the religious which goes to Mass, and the practical which earns its living.

If a civilization be judged by this double standard, the degree of diversity attained and the degree of unity retained, then it is hardly too much to say that the Athenians of the fifth century B.C. were the most civi lized people who have so far existed. The fact that nearly all the words we use to define activities and branches of knowledge, e.g. chemistry, physics, economics, politics, ethics, aesthetics, theology, tragedy, comedy, etc., are of Greek origin is proof of their powers of conscious differentiation; their literature and their history are evidence of their ability to maintain a sense of common interrelation, a sense which we have in great measure lost as they themselves lost it in a comparatively short time.

“... as their forefathers were they, those old seapirates, who with roving robbery built up their island lordships on the ruin of Crete, when the unforbearing rivalry of their free cities wrec’d their confederacy within the sevenscore years ’twixt Marathon and Issus; until from the pride of routing Xerxes and his fabulous host, they fell to make that most memorable of all invasions less memorable in the glory of Alexander, under whose alien kingship they conspired to outreach their own ambition, winning dominions too wide for domination; and were, with their virtue, dispersed and molten into the great stiffening alloy of Rome.”

(Robert Bridges. Testament of Beauty, I, 758-70)

The geography of Greece, where barren mountains separate small fertile localities from each other, encouraged diversity, migration to new colonies, and an economy of exchange rather than production for use. In consequence, the Greeks, who, when they first invaded the Aegean were not so very different from any other patriarchal military tribe—the kind of life described in the Iliad is much the same as that described in Beowulf—rapidly developed within a comparatively small area a great variety of forms of social organization, tyrannies and constitutional city-states in Ionia, feudal oligarchy in Boeotia, a militarist police state in Sparta, democracy in Athens, almost every possible kind, in fact, but one, the extended centralized state typical of major river-basin areas like Egypt or Babylonia. The initial stimulus, therefore, to comprehension, inquiry, speculation, and experiment was present; but this explains neither the extraordinary talent the Greeks displayed in these activities nor their capacity to absorb influences and make them their own: unlike the Romans, the Greeks never give the impression of being eclectics; everything they do and say is stamped with their distinctive character.

Greek culture, as a glance at the chronological table at the end of this introduction will show, had successively three centers, the Ionian seaboard, Athens, and Alexandria. Sparta remained outside the general cultural development in a fossilized state of primitivism, exciting in her neighbors a mixture of fear, repulsion, and admiration. Nevertheless, she made, indirectly through Plato, a contribution which for good or ill, has influenced the world as much as any other element in Greek culture, namely, the idea of a consciously planned education of its citizens by the state; indeed the very concept of the state as something distinct from the ruling class, from the individual, and from the community might be said to be derived from Sparta.

At the beginning of Greek literature stands Homer. If the Iliad and the Odyssey are better than the epics of other nations, this is due not to their content but to their more sophisticated imagination—as if the original material had been worked over into its present form under much more civilized conditions than existed among, say, the Teutonic peoples until their heroic age was too far behind them to seem real. It is difficult, however, to make objective comparisons, since the Teutonic epics had little further history; Homer became, through the Romans, one of the basic inspirations of European literature, without which there would be neither an Aeneid, a Divine Comedy, a Paradise Lost, nor the comic epics of Ariosto or Pope or Byron.

The next development after Homer took place largely in Ionia and for the most part in and around the courts of tyrants who were, of course, more like the Medicis than like a modem dictator.

The Ionian scientist and the Ionian lyric poets had one thing in common, a hostility to polytheistic myth. The former saw Nature in terms of law rather than arbitrary volition; the latter saw their feelings as their own, as belonging to a single personality, rather than as visitations from without.

Thales’ guess that all things are made of water was wrong; but the insight behind it, namely, that however many different realms of Nature there may be they must all be related was a basic presupposition without which science as we know it would be impossible. Equally influential was the assertion of Pythagoras, as a result of his work in acoustics, that’ all things are number, i.e. that the “nature” of things, that by virtue of which they are what they are and behave as they do, is not a question of what they are made of but of their structure, which can be described in mathematical terms.

The great difference between the Greek conception of Nature and later ones is that the Greeks thought of the universe as analogous to a city-state, so that for them natural laws, like human laws, were not laws of things, descriptions of how in fact they behave, but laws for things. When we speak of a falling body “obeying” the law of gravitation, we are unconsciously echoing Greek thought; for obedience implies the possibility of disobedience. To the Greeks this was no dead metaphor; consequently, their problem was not the relation of Mind to Matter, but of Substance to Form, how matter became “educated” enough, so to speak, to conform to law.

The lyric poets were equally important in their own sphere; for it was through them that Western civilization has learned to distinguish poetry from history, pedagogy, and religion.

The most famous phase of Greek civilization is, of course, that associated with Athens. If he knows nothing else about them, every man in the street has heard the names of Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and, if he is a little better informed, of Pericles, Demosthenes, and Thucydides. All but Homer are Athenian.

The Athenian period divides into two; the first is preceded by the political and economic establishment of the Athenian state as a mercantile democracy by Solon and Cleisthenes, and the demonstration of its strength through its victory over the Persian Invasion; the second is the product of political defeat, first by Sparta, then by Macedonia. The typical expression of the first period is drama, of the second philosophy.

In comparison with the preceding Ionian culture, Athenian drama is marked by a revulsion from luxury and frivolity towards austerity and simplicity, and by a return to myth. Above all, for the first and last time in history, an art, drama, became the dominant religious expression of a whole people, the dramatist the most important figure in their spiritual life. Compared with the Greek tragedians, Homer and Pindar seem secular writers, of educational value certainly for a ruling minority, but still primarily entertainers, subordinate in importance to the priest and the oracle. Like modem drama, which grew out of religious festivals such as Easter and Corpus Christi, Athenian drama was associated with the festivals of the Wine Press and of the Greater Dionysus. But, whereas modem drama was at first subordinate to the religious rituals and then developed a secular life of its own, leaving the festivals to themselves, Athenian drama, while being definitely works of art, whose value can be judged by vote, became the dominant religious exercise, of greater importance than sacrifices or prayers. In the nineteenth century and in our own the individual artistic genius has sometimes claimed a supreme importance and even persuaded a minority of aesthetes to agree with him; but only in Athens was this a universal social fact, so that the genius was not a lonely figure claiming exceptional rights for himself but the acclaimed spiritual leader of society.

The nearest modem equivalent is not any work of the theater, but a ball game or a bull-fight.

Greek tragedy returned to myth, but it was no longer the Homeric mythology; the Ionian cosmologists had done their work. The gods are no longer essentially strong and accidentally righteous; their strength is now secondary, the means by which they enforce the laws which they themselves keep and represent. In consequence, the mythology is subjected to strain; for, the more monotheistic it becomes, the greater the importance of Zeus, the less individual, the more allegorical, become the other gods. Furthermore, behind Zeus himself appears the quite unmythological concept of Fate. Now either the personal Zeus and the impersonal Fate must coalesce as the Creator God of the Jews, a step which the Greek religious imagination never took, or, in the end, Zeus becomes a Demiurge, an allegorical figure for the order in nature, and Fate becomes the true God, either as Fortune or as an impersonal Idea or First Cause, in which case drama ceases to be the natural vehicle for teaching about the nature of God and is replaced by the science of Theology.

It is partly for such reasons, perhaps, that the development from the piety of Aeschylus to the skepticism of Euripides is so rapid, and the period of Greek tragedy so short. As Werner Jaeger has pointed out, Sophocles stands a little apart from the other two in that, while their interests are basically the same, his concern was more with human character than with religious or social problems. For Greek tragedy to have developed further, it would have had to go on from Sophocles, abandon its relation to myth and festival, and become a frankly secular art; perhaps its very triumphs tied it too firmly to myth and festival to allow it to make the break which the Elizabethan drama, for instance, made. Thus, greatly as the Greek tragedians have been admired by later writers, they cannot be said to have exerted much direct literary influence. The influence of the philosophers is in striking contrast to this, for Plato and Aristotle between them established the basic premises of an intellectual life, the unity and the diversity of truth; moreover, they are responsible for the particular kinds of divisions to which we are accustomed. If, for example, one tries to read Indian philosophy, the great obstacle to understanding what it means is that the joints of man and nature, so to speak, are carved differently. Our cuts, our carving are Greek; and we find it hard for us to believe that there can be any others.

The final period of Greek culture, the Hellenist, or Alexandrian, returns to Ionian hedonism and materialism but without its relation to political and social life. The important achievements are technological. The literature, as typified by the Greek Anthology, is highly polished, pretty, but on the whole boring, at least to the present age, because of its immense influence on minor poetry since the Renaissance. To it we owe all the worst “classical” properties, the little rogue of a Cupid, the catalogue of flowers, Celia’s bosom, etc., etc.

Christendom was a product of Jewish historical religious experience and Gentile speculation upon and organization of that experience. The Greek mind is the typically Gentile mind, and it is at odds with the Jewish consciousness. As a Greek the Christian is tempted to a seesaw between worldly frivolity and a falsely spiritual other-worldliness, both of them, au fond, pessimistic; as a Jew he is tempted to the wrong kind of seriousness, to an intolerance which persecutes dissenters as wicked rather than stupid. The Inquisition was a product of a Gentile interest in rationality and a Jewish passion for truth.

The clearest historical example is the Crucifixion. In their book Talking of Dick Whittington Hesketh Pearson and Hugh Kingsmill report an interview with Hilaire Belloc in which he says of the Jews:

“Poor darlings, it must be terrible to be born with the knowledge that you belong to the enemies of the human race... because of the Crucifixion.”

I cannot believe that Mr. Belloc is an altogether stupid man. Nevertheless, his statement is on a par with Adam’s “The woman beguiled me and I did eat.” He can hardly be unaware that the Crucifixion was actually performed by the Romans, or, to make it contemporary, by the French (the English said, “Oh dear!” and consented; the Americans said, “How undemocratic!” and sent photographers) for the frivolous reason that Jesus was a political nuisance. The Jews who demanded it did so for the serious reason that, in their opinion, Jesus was guilty of blasphemy, i.e. of falsely claiming to be the Messiah. Every Christian is, of course, both Pilate and Caiaphas.

 IV

If there is any reaction to the Greeks which may be called typical of our age as compared with preceding times, it is, I think, a feeling that they were a very odd people indeed, so much so that when we come across something they wrote which seems similar to our own way of thinking, we immediately suspect that we have misunderstood the passage. It is the unlikeness of the Greeks to ourselves, the gulf between the kind of assumptions they made, the kind of questions they asked and our own that strikes us more than anything else.

Take, for instance, the following passage from the Timaeus:

“Such was the whole plan of the eternal God about the god that was to be, to whom for this reason he gave a body, smooth and even, having a surface in every direction equidistant from the centre, a body entire and perfect, and formed out of perfect bodies. And in the centre he put the soul, which he diffused throughout the body, making it also to be the exterior environment of it; and he made the Universe a circle moving in a circle, one and solitary, yet by reason of its excellence able to converse with itself, and needing no other friendship or acquaintance. Having these purposes in view he created the world a blessed god.”

Surely this kind of thinking is as extraordinary to us as any habits of an African tribe.

Even those of us whose mathematical equipment is of the most meager, have so imbibed the modem conception of number as an instrument for explaining nature, that we can no more think of ourselves back into a state of mind where numbers were regarded as physical or metaphysical entities so that one number was “better” than another than we can return to a belief in sympathetic magic. Nor is the Platonic assumption about the moral nature of godhead any less peculiar to us than his shape. We may or may not believe that god exists, but the only kind of god in which we can think of believing is a god who suffers, either involuntarily like the Pantheist god because he is emergent, or voluntarily like the Christian god because he loves his creatures and suffers with them; the kind of god who is both self-sufficient and content to remain so could not interest us enough to raise the question of his existence.

It is impudent of me to trespass at all inside a field where so many great and good men have spent their lifetimes. I can only try to limit the offense by confining my remarks to one aspect of Greek thought of which I am less ignorant than I am of others, namely to a comparison of the various Greek conceptions of the hero with our own, as an illustration of the distance between our culture and theirs.

 V.

The Homeric Hero: The Homeric hero has the military virtues of courage, resourcefulness, magnanimity in victory, and dignity in defeat to an exceptional degree. His heroism is manifested in exceptional deeds which can be judged by others who are forced to admit “He achieved what we could not have achieved.” His motive is to win admiration and glory from his equals whether they are on his side or the enemy’s. The code by which he lives is a code of honor which is not a universal requirement like law but an individual one, that which I require of myself and that which in view of my achievements I have a right to demand of others.He is not a tragic figure, i.e. he does not suffer more than others, but his death has exceptional pathos—the great warrior comes to the same end as the lowest churl. He exists only in the present moment when he comes into collision with another heroic individual; his future forms the past traditions of others. The closest modem equivalent to the Homeric hero is the ace fighter pilot. Because he is so often engaged in single combat, he gets to recognize individual pilots on the side of the enemy and war becomes a matter of personal rivalry rather than any political issue; in fact he has a closer relation to the enemy ace than he has to the infantry on his own side. His life is so full of risks and hairbreadth escapes, so almost certain to end in death, and the effects of good luck and bad luck, of a sudden engine failure or an unforeseen change in the weather, are so serious that chance takes on all the aspects of a personal intervening power. The sense of having good days when he is protected and bad days when he is being worked against and the conviction that he will die when Fate decrees but not before become almost necessary attitudes to life.

There is still however an essential difference between the fighter pilot and the Homeric hero; to make the analogy close one would have to imagine that all the countries of the world had been continuously at war for centuries and that being a fighter pilot had become a hereditary profession. For the assumption of the Iliad, as of all early epics, which is so strange to us, is that war is the normal condition of mankind and peace an accidental breathing space. In the foreground are men locked in battle, killing or being killed, farther off their wives, children, and servants waiting anxiously for the outcome, overhead, watching the spectacle with interest and at times interfering, the gods who know neither sorrow nor death, and around them all indifferent and unchanging, the natural world of sky and sea and earth. That is how things are; that is how they always have been and always will be.

Consequently, there can be no moral or historical significance about the result of any conflict; it brings joy to the victor and sorrow to the vanquished but neither could imagine raising the question of justice. If one compares the Iliad with, for example, Shakespeare’s Henry IV or Tolstoy’s War and Peace, one sees that the modem writers are deeply concerned first with historical questions: “How did Henry IV or Napoleon come to power?” “What were the causes of the civil or international war?” and secondly with general moral questions: “What is the moral effect of war on human beings?” “What virtues and vices does it encourage as contrasted with those encouraged by peace?” “Irrespective of the individuals on both sides, did the defeat of Hotspur and Napoleon promote or retard the establishment of a Just Society?” These are questions which to Homer would seem meaningless. He does, it is true, give a cause for the Trojan war, the Apple of Discord; but this is both a divine cause, i.e. outside human control, and a frivolous cause, i.e. Homer does not take it seriously but uses it as a literary device for beginning his tale.

He does make moral judgments about his heroes. Achilles should not have refused for so long to aid the Greeks because of his quarrel with Agamemnon nor should he have treated the body of Hector as he did, but these are minor blemishes which neither affect the outcome of the war nor the final proof of his heroism, namely that he vanquishes Hector.

The pathos of Hector’s death is simple: the nobler character is defeated; the pathos of Hotspur’s death is ironic: he is a much more sympathetic individual than Prince Hal, but he dies defending the wrong cause.

Further, in the Homeric world where war is the norm, there can be no criticism of the military hero as such. The wrath of Achilles could never be a tragic flaw in his character in the way that the wrath of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus is in his. Homer might well have described Achilles taking a bath but it would have been simply a description of a hero taking a bath not, as in Tolstoy’s description of Napoleon being bathed, a revelation that the military hero is an ordinary mortal just as weak as any of the thousands for whose death he is responsible.

Though it would be unfair to describe the Homeric hero as a mere puppet of the gods, his area of free choice and responsibility is pretty circumscribed. In the first place he is born, not made (often he is the son of an immortal father) so that though he does brave deeds, he cannot be called brave in our sense of the word because he never feels fear; in the second the situations in which he displays his heroism are given him; he can, on occasion, choose to fight or not to fight, this or that opponent, but he cannot choose his profession or his side.

The world of Homer is unbearably sad because it never transcends the immediate moment; one is happy, one is unhappy, one wins, one loses, finally one dies. That is all. Joy and suffering are simply what one feels at the moment; they have no meaning beyond that; they pass away as they came; they point in no direction; they change nothing. It is a tragic world but a world without guilt for its tragic flaw is not a flaw in human nature, still less a flaw in an individual character, but a flaw in the nature of existence.

The Tragic Hero: The warrior-hero of the Homeric epics (and his civilian counterpart, the athlete of the Pindaric odes) is an aristocratic ideal. He is what every member of the ruling class should try to imitate, what every member of the subject class should admire without envy and obey without resentment, the closest approximation to a god—the divine being conceived as the ideally strong—possible to man.The Tragic Hero, on the other hand, is not an ideal but a warning, and the warning is addressed not to an aristocratic audience, i.e. other potentially heroic individuals, but to the demos, i.e. the collective chorus. At the beginning of the play he appears in glory and good-fortune, a man of pedigree and achievement who has already demonstrated arete in the Homeric sense. By the end he has been plunged into exceptional suffering, i.e. he suffers more than the chorus, who are average citizens who have achieved nothing remarkable. He suffers because he has come into collision, not with other individuals, but with the universal law of righteousness. As a rule, however, the actual violation of which he is guilty is not his own conscious choice in the sense that he could have avoided it. The typical Greek tragic situation is one in which whatever the hero does must be wrong—Agamemnon must either kill his daughter or betray his duty to his army, Orestes must either disobey the orders of Apollo or be guilty of matricide, Oedipus must either persist in asking questions or let Thebes be destroyed by plague, Antigone must violate her duty either to her dead brother or to her city, etc. But the fact that he finds himself in a tragic situation where he has sinned unwittingly or must sin against his will is a sign that he is guilty of another sin for which the gods hold him responsible, namely the sin of hybris, an overweening self-confidence which makes him believe that he, with all his arete, is a god who cannot be made to suffer. Sometimes but not always he manifests this hybris in acts—Agamemnon walks on the purple carpet, Darius tries to bridge the Hellespont—but even if he does not, he must be assumed to be guilty of hybris, otherwise he would not be punished by being made guilty of other sins. Through witnessing the fall of the tragic hero from happiness to misery, the chorus learns that the Homeric hero is not the ideal man they should try to imitate or admire. On the contrary, the strong man is tempted by his strength into becoming the impious man whom the gods punish, for the gods are not gods because they are ideally strong but because they are ideally just. Their strength is only the instrument by which they enforce their justice.

The ideal man whom every member of the democracy should try to become is not the aristocratic heroic individual but the moderate law-abiding citizen who does not want to be stronger and more glorious than everybody else.

Here again, as in Homer, we find ourselves in a world which is quite alien to us. We are so habituated to the belief that a man’s actions are a mixed product of his own free choices for which he is responsible and circumstances for which he is not that we cannot understand a world in which a situation by itself makes a man guilty. Take the story of Oedipus, for instance. Here is a man who hears a prophecy that he is to kill his father and marry his mother, tries to prevent it coming true, but in vain. How would a modem playwright treat this? He would reason that the only way for Oedipus to make certain of escaping what is foretold is for him never to kill anybody and never to marry anybody. He would therefore begin by showing Oedipus leaving Thebes and making these two resolutions. He would then proceed to involve him in two situations, firstly, one in which he is done a mortal injury by a man, secondly one in which he falls passionately in love with a woman who returns his love, situations, that is, of temptation, in which he is torn between doing what he wants and breaking his resolve.

He yields to both temptations, he kills the man and marries the woman, excusing himself as he does so with a lie of self-deception, that is, instead of saying to himself, “There is a possibility, however slight, that they are my father and mother; therefore I must not risk it,” he says, “It is quite impossible that they should be my father and mother; therefore I may break my resolve.” Unfortunately, of course, the slight possibility turns out to be the actual fact.

In Sophocles nothing like this happens. Oedipus meets an old man on the road, they have a trivial quarrel, and he kills the old man. He comes to Thebes, solves the riddle of the Sphinx, and makes a political match. About these two deeds he feels no guilt nor is he expected to feel guilty. It is only when in fact they turn out to be his father and mother that he becomes guilty. At no time has he been conscious of being tempted to do what he knows he should not do, so that at no time is it possible to say, “That was where he made his fatal mistake.”

The original sin of the Greek tragic hero is hybris, believing that one is godlike. Nobody can be tempted into hybris except one who is exceptionally fortunate. Sometimes he can manifest his hybris directly, but it does not change his character in any way, only he is punished for it by being made by the gods to sin unwittingly or involuntarily.

The original sin of the modem tragic hero is pride, the refusal to accept the limitations and weaknesses which he knows he has, the determination to become the god he is not. A man, therefore, does not have to be fortunate, to be tempted into pride; a misfortune like Richard of Gloucester’s hunchback will do just as well. Pride can never be manifested directly because it is a purely subjective sin. Self-examination can reveal to me that I am lustful or envious but it can never reveal to me that I am proud because my pride, if it exists, is in the “I” which is doing the examining; I can, however, infer that I am proud because the lust and envy which I can observe in myself are caused by it and it alone.

The secondary sins of which our kind of tragic hero is guilty and which cause his fall are not, therefore, a divine punishment for his initial sin, but its effects and he is as responsible for them as he is for it. He is not an unwitting sinner but a self-deceiving one, who refuses his guilty conscience. When Orestes slays Clytemnestra he does not anticipate the arrival of the Furies; when the Macbeths plan their murders they try to persuade themselves that they will not suffer the torments of guilt which they really know in their hearts they are going to.

In Greek tragedy suffering is a visitation from Heaven, a punishment imposed upon the hero from without. Through enduring it he expiates his sins and ends reconciled to the law, though it is for the gods not him to decide when his expiation is complete. In modem tragedy, on the other hand, this exterior kind of suffering which humbles the great and erring and leads them to repent is not tragic. The truly tragic kind of suffering is the kind produced and defiantly insisted upon by the hero himself so that, instead of making him better, it makes him worse and when he dies he is not reconciled to the law but defiant, that is, damned. Lear is not a tragic hero, Othello is.

These two differences between Greek and modem tragedy in their conceptions, first of the relation of the hero’s original subjective sin of hybris or of pride to his secondary sinful acts, and secondly of the nature and function of suffering, produce different attitudes towards time.

Unity of time is not only possible but right and proper in Greek tragedy because the characters do not change, only their situation so that the dramatic time required is simply the time required for the situation to change. In modem tragedy, unity of time is possible as a technical tour-de-force but rarely desirable, since one of the dramatist’s principal tasks is to show how his characters not only are changed by changes of situation but also play active parts in creating these situations, and it is almost impossible to show this in a single uninterrupted passage of time.

The Erotic Hero: About three-quarters of modern literature is concerned with one subject, the love between a man and a woman, and assumes that falling in love is the most important and valuable experience that can happen to human beings. We are so conditioned to this attitude that we are inclined to forget that it does not go back beyond the twelfth century. It does not exist, for instance, in Greek literature. There we find two at titudes. There are plenty of lyrics of the serenade type -the “In delay there lies no plenty, then come kiss me sweet-and-twenty” kind of thing, expressing a simple, good-tempered, and unserious sensuality. There are also, as in the poems of Sappho or the story of Jason and Medea, descriptions of serious and violent sexual passion, but this is not regarded as something to be proud of but as a disaster, the work of merciless Aphrodite, a dreadful madness which makes one lose one’s dignity and betray one’s friends and from which any sane man or woman will pray to be spared. Our romantic conception, that sexual love can transform the lover’s character and turn him into a hero, was unknown.It is not until we come to Plato that we find descriptions of something like what we mean by romantic love spoken of with approval, yet the differences are still greater than the resemblances. In the first place it is assumed that this kind of love is only possible in a homosexual relation; and in the second, it is only approved of as the necessary first stage in the growth of the soul. The ultimate good is the love of the impersonal as universal good; the best thing that could happen to a man would be that he should fall in love with the Good immediately, but owing to the fact that his soul is entangled in matter and time, he can only get there by degrees; first he falls in love with a beautiful individual, then he can progress to love of beauty in general, then to love of justice, and so on. If erotic passion can or ought to be transformed in this way, then it was sound psychological insight on Plato’s part and not simply the cultural pattern of erotic life in Greece that made him exclude the heterosexual relation, for the latter leads beyond itself, not to the universal, but to more individuals, namely the love of and responsibility for a family, whereas, in the homosexual case, since the relation of itself leads nowhere, the love which it has aroused is free to develop in any direction the lovers choose, and that direction should be towards wisdom which, once acquired, will enable them to teach human beings procreated in the normal way how to become a good society. For love is to be judged by its social and political value. Marriage provides the raw material, the masculine eros the desire and knowledge to mold that material into its proper form.

The two great modem erotic myths, which have no parallels in Greek literature, are the myth of Tristan and Isolde, or the World Well Lost for Love, and the countermyth of Don Juan, the seducer.

The Tristan-Isolde situation is this: both possess heroic arete in the epic sense; he is the bravest warrior, she is the most beautiful woman; both are of noble birth. They cannot marry each other because she is already the wife of his king and friend, nevertheless they fall in love. In some versions they accidentally drink a love potion but the effect of this is not really to make them fall in love but rather to make them realize that they already have and to accept the fact as predestined and irrevocable. Their relation is not “platonic” in the conventional sense, but the barriers of marriage and circumstances give them few opportunities for going to bed together, and on each occasion they can never be certain that it will not be the last. The love they feel for each other is religiously absolute, i.e. each is the other’s ultimate good so that not only is sexual infidelity inconceivable, but all other relations to other people and the world cease to have any significance. Yet, though their relation is the only value that exists for them, it is a torment, because their sexual desire is only the symbolic expression of their real passion, which is the yearning of two souls to merge and become one, a consummation which is impossible so long as they have bodies, so that their ultimate goal is to die in each other’s arms.

Don Juan, on the other hand, is not an epic hero; ideally, his external appearance is that of the man who nobody notices is there because he is so utterly commonplace, for it is important to the myth that he, the man of heroic will and achievement, should look to the outward eye like a member of the chorus.

If Don Juan is either handsome or ugly, then the woman will have feelings about him before he sets to work, and the seduction will not be absolute, i.e. a pure triumph of his will. For that, it is essential that his victim should have no feelings of her own towards him, until he chooses to arouse them. Vice versa, what is essential for him about her is not her appearance but simply her membership in the class Woman; the ugly and the old are as good as the beautiful and the young. The Tristan-Isolde myth is unGreek because no Greek could conceive of attributing absolute value to another individual, he could only think in comparative terms, this one is more beautiful than that one, this one has done greater deeds than that one, etc. The Don Juan myth is unGreek, as Kierkegaard has pointed out, not because he sleeps with a number of women, but because he keeps a list of them.

A Greek could understand seducing a girl because one found her attractive and then deserting her because one met a more attractive girl and forgot the first one; but he could not have understood doing so for an arithmetical reason, because one had resolved to be the first lover of every woman in the world, and she happened to be the next integer in this infinite series.

Tristan and Isolde are tormented because they are compelled to count up to two when they long to be able only to count up to one; Don Juan is in torment because, however great the number of his seductions, it still remains a finite number and he cannot rest until he has counted up to infinity.

The great enemy of both is time: Tristan and Isolde dread it because it threatens change, and they wish the moment of intense feeling to remain unchanged forever, hence the love potion and the irremovable obstacle in the situation which serve as defense against change; Don Juan dreads it because it threatens repetition and he wishes each moment to be absolutely novel, hence his insistence that for each of his victims it must be her first sexual experience and that he only sleep with her once.

Both myths are dependent upon Christianity, i.e. they could only have been invented by a society which has been taught to believe a) that every individual is of unique and eternal value to God irrespective of his or her social importance in the world, b) that dedication of the self to God is an act of free-choice, an absolute commitment irrespective of feeling, made with infinite passion, and c) that one must neither allow oneself to be ruled by the temporal moment nor attempt to transcend it but make oneself responsible for it, turning time into history.

Both myths are diseases of the Christian imagination and while they have inspired a great body of beautiful literature, their influence upon human conduct, particularly in their frivolous watered-down modern versions, which gloss over the fact that both the romantic couple and the solitary seducer are intensely unhappy, has been almost wholly bad. Whenever a married couple divorce because having ceased to be a divine image to each other, they cannot endure the thought of having to love a real person no better than themselves, they are acting under the spell of the Tristan myth. Whenever a man says to himself “I must be getting old. I haven’t had sex for a week. What would my friends say if they knew,” he is re-enacting the myth of Don Juan. It is significant also—it might interest Plato though it would probably not surprise him—that the instances in real life which conform most closely to the original pattern of both myths are not, in either case, heterosexual; the Tristan and Isolde one actually meets are a Lesbian couple, the Don Juan a pederast.

The Contemplative Hero: The Ideal Man of Greek Epic is the strong individual; the Ideal Man of Greek Tragedy is the modest citizen with a reverence for the law of justice; the Ideal Man of Creek Philosophy has something in common with both: Like the latter he is one who keeps the Law but, like the former, he is an exceptional individual, not a member of the chorus, for to learn how to keep the Law has become a heroic task which is beyond the power of the average man. To the question “What is the cause of evil and suffering?” Homer can only answer, “I don’t know. The caprice of the gods perhaps”; Tragedy answers, “The violation of the laws of righteousness and justice by arrogant strong men”; Philosophy answers, “Ignorance of what the Law is which leaves the minds of men at the mercy of their bodily passions.”The Homeric hero hopes by brave deeds to win glory before he dies; the tragic chorus hopes by living modestly to escape misfortune as long as they live; the contemplative hero hopes for ultimate happiness of soul when he has succeeded in learning to know the true and eternal good, and so delivering his soul from the entanglements of his body and the temporal flux; and beyond this he must teach society how to attain the same freedom from injustice.

In theory, the possibility of doing this should be open to all alike but in practice it is limited to those souls whom the heavenly eros has inspired with a passion for knowledge, and whom temporal circumstances allow them to devote their lifetime to the search for wisdom; the stupid who cannot, the frivolous who will not, and the poor who have no time to understand are debarred. They may have valuable social functions to perform but it is not for them to say what the laws of society should be. That is the duty of the philosopher.

This ideal is stranger to us than it looks at first sight. We are familiar with two kinds of contemplative men: 

First, with the religious contemplative as represented by the various orders of monks and nuns or by the individual mystic. His aim is to know the hidden God, the reality behind all phenomena, but he thinks of this God as a person, i.e. what he means by knowledge is not objective knowledge about something which is the same for all minds and once perceived can be passed on to others by teaching, like the truths of mathematics, but a subjective relationship which is unique for every individual. A relationship can never be taught, it has to be voluntarily entered into, and the only possible method of persuading another to do it is personal example. If B is a friend of A and C is not, B cannot make C a friend of A by describing A, but if B, as the result of his friendship with A has become the kind of person C would like to be and is not, C may decide to try and make A’s acquaintance, too.

Objective knowledge is the field of another kind of contemplative, the intellectual, the scientist, the artist, etc., and the knowledge he seeks is not about any transcendent reality but about phenomena. The intellectual, like the religious contemplative, requires individual passion but in his case it is confined to the search for knowledge; towards the object of his search, the facts, he must be passionless.

What is puzzling to us about the Greek conception of the contemplative hero is that these two kinds of activity are inextricably mixed, sometimes he seems to talk of a transcendent God as if He were a passive object, at other times of observable phenomena, like the movements of the planets, as if they were persons for which one could feel personal passion. Nothing is more bewildering to us about Plato, for instance, than the way in which, in the middle of a piece of dialectic, he will introduce what he himself admits to be a myth but without any feeling on his part that it is a peculiar thing to do.

It is hard to say whether one should call the Greeks more anthropomorphic in their thinking than we or less. On the one hand, in Greek cosmology everything in nature is thought of as being alive; the laws of nature are not descriptions of how things actually behave, laws of, but, like human laws, laws for, laws which they ought to obey and can fail to obey properly. On the other, in Greek political theory, human beings are thought of as if they were merely the matter out of which through his techne the craftsman-politician fashions the good society as a potter makes a vase out of clay.

To the Greeks the essential difference between man and nature was that the former can reason if he wants to, whereas for us the essential difference is that man has a self, i.e. that he and, so far as we know, apart from God, he alone is conscious of existing, and this consciousness is his whether he wants it or not, whether he is intelligent or not. The Greeks therefore had no real conception of the will as distinct from desire, so that, though they had, of course, observed the psychological fact of temptation, that one can desire what one knows is wrong, they were at a loss as to how to explain it. The weakest point in Greek Ethics is its analysis of Choice. This is all the more serious because politics is not peripheral but central to Greek Philosophy; the formation of the Good Society comes first, the quest for personal salvation or for scientific truths about matter or imaginative truths about the human heart, second. Through identifying the active source of the Good with Reason not with Will, they doomed themselves to the hopeless task of finding the ideal form of society which, like the truths of reason, would be valid everywhere and for everyone, irrespective of their individual character or their historical circumstances.

A concept is either true or false. A mind which entertains a false concept may be brought through steps of argument to entertain the true one, but this does not mean that a false concept has grown into the true; there is always a point in the dialectic, like the moment of recognition in tragedy, when the revolutionary change happens and the false concept is abandoned with the realization that it always was false. The dialectic process may take time, but the truth it discovers has no history.1

To think of the political problem as a problem of finding the true form of organization leads either to political despair, if one knows one has failed to find it, or, if one thinks one has been successful, to a defense of tyranny for, if it is presupposed that people living in the wrong kind of order cannot have a good will and people living in the right kind cannot have a bad one, then not only will coercion be necessary to establish that order but also its application will be the ruler’s moral duty.

The Republic, the Laws, even the Politics, should be read in conjunction with Thucydides; only a political situation as desperate as that which the historian describes could have produced in the philosophers who were looking for cure at once a radicalism which would break completely with the past to build up society again ab initio and a pathological horror of disunity and change. Living as we do in an age of similar stasis on a world-wide scale, we have witnessed a recurrence on both the Right and the Left, at both the economic and the psychiatric epicenters, of similar symptoms.Further, we have seen with our own eyes the theory of creative politics put into practice, and the spectacle is anything but Utopian. This experience by forcing us to take Plato’s political dialogues seriously not as playful exercises in logic, has altered our attitude, I think, to the other dialogues. If there is an essential not an accidental relation between his metaphysics and his politics, and the latter seem to us disastrously mistaken, then there must be a crucial error in the former as well, which it is of the utmost importance that we detect, if we are to offer a positive substitute for the Platonic kind of solution to the political crisis.

The ComicHero: “Comedy,” Aristotle says, “is an imitation of men worse than the average; worse, however, not as regards any and every kind of fault, but only as regards one particular kind, the Ridiculous, which is a species of the Ugly. The Ridiculous may be defined as a mistake or deformity not productive of pain or harm to others.”The most primitive form of comedy seems to have been tales in which, firstly, Gods, and, secondly, heroes and rulers behave in an undignified and ridiculous manner, that is to say, no better than the average man who lacks their arete, but, indeed, rather worse. Such primitive comedy is associated with holidays of license, during which the resentments of the small and the weak against the great and the strong may be freely expressed, in order that on the morrow when the habits of respect are re-established, the air shall be clear.

When, as in Athens, a growing rationalism comes to think of the Gods as keeping their own laws, and political power comes to be concentrated in the hands of a few, comedy finds new victims and new themes.

It is no longer the rulers as a class, but particular public figures who are made butts of; it is not authority as such that is the subject but topical political issues. The laughter of the audience is not the compensatory outburst of the weak against those who are above the law, but the confident laughter of people who know their strength, that is, either the scorn of the normal majority for the eccentric or arrogant individual whose behavior is not so much above the law as outside it, or the polemical passion of one political party directed against its rival. The target of such comedy is the man who violates the ethical norm because he does not believe it is binding; he has, that is, no social conscience. As a result he comes into collision, not with the law itself—it would be beneath the dignity of the law to concern itself with those who do not recognize it—but with others as outside the law as himself. He suffers, but the audience do not because they do not identify themselves with him. His suffering, too, is educational; through it he is cured of his individualistic mania and learns to conform to the law, out of prudence, if not from conscience.

This second type of comedy was invented by the Greeks and developed in Europe into the comedy of humor, as in the plays of Ben Jonson, and the comedy of manners and problem plays. If one disregards their lack of genuine poetry, the Gilbert and Sullivan operas are the closest approximation in English to the Aristophanic type of comedy.

There is, however, a third type which the Greeks did not possess—the greatest example is Don Quixote—in which the comic figure is at the same time the hero; the audience admire the very man they laugh at. Such a kind of comedy is based on a sense that the relations of the individual and society to each other and of both to the true good contain insoluble contradictions which are not so much comic as ironic. The comic hero is comic because he is different from his neighbors; either, like Don Quixote, because he refuses to accept their values, or, like Falstaff, because he refuses to pretend, as they do, to one set of values while really living by another: at the same time he is a hero because he is an individual, and not to be an individual, to think and behave in a certain way simply because everyone else does, is equally a comic madness.

The tragic hero suffers, and the audience, because they identify themselves with him through admiration, suffers too; the comic butt suffers but the audience, since they feel superior, do not. The relations of the comic hero and the audience to suffering, on the other hand, are ironic; the audience see the hero thwarted and defeated, experiences which they would regard as suffering, but the whole point is that to the hero himself these experiences are nothing of the sort; on the contrary, he glories in them, either because he has no shame or because he regards them as proof of his being right.

The nearest approach to such a figure among the Greeks is, of course, Socrates. In his person he exhibits the contradiction, so disliked by Nietzsche, between his subjective arete of soul, and his manifest lack of objective arete; he, the best man, is the ugliest man. Further, he suffers death at the hands of society and does not regard his fate as a tragic one. To the Greeks, however, he is either, as he is to Aristophanes, a comic butt who is justly punished, or as he is to Plato, a tragic martyr who suffers because the wrong party was in power, the individual who represents the Right Society. The notion that any individual claim to be the exception is guilty of pride and that all societies and parties, good and bad, are in the wrong simply because they are collectives would have been incomprehensible to them, as would have been the Christian insistence that Jesus was either the Incarnate God or not a good man and that his condemnation was by due process of Roman law.

 VI

I have stressed the differences between Greek civilization and our own, firstly, because it seems to me one possible approach to an inexhaustible subject and one cannot take them all, and, secondly, because I can think of no better way of indicating what we owe to Greece than drawing distinctions, for, of all intellectual acts, that is, perhaps, the most characteristically Greek.

It is they who have taught us, not to think—that all human beings have always done—but to think about our thinking, to ask such questions as “What do I think?” “What do this and that other person or people think?” “On what do we agree and disagree. Why?” And not only did they learn to ask questions about thinking, but they also discovered how, instead of giving immediate answers, to suppose something to be the case and then see what would follow if it were.

To be able to perform either of these mental operations, a human being must first be capable of a tremendous feat of moral courage and discipline for he must have learned how to resist the immediate demands of feeling and bodily needs, and to disregard his natural anxiety about his future so that he can look at his self and his world as if they were not his but a stranger’s.

If some of the Greek questions turned out to have been incorrectly put, if some of their answers have proved wrong, that is a trivial matter. Had Greek civilization never existed, we might fear God and deal justly with our neighbors, we might practice arts and even have learned how to devise fairly simple machines, but we would never have become fully conscious, which is to say that we would never have become, for better or worse, fully human.

W. H. AUDEN