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Authors: Thomas Keneally
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trade, and not relief, as both sovereign and solution.
For nineteen years, from 1840 on, he was assistant secretary to the Treasury in Whitehall. It was in that role that he came to be responsible for what the British government devised for Irish relief and, to an extent, that he became an architect of the government’s policy. This task was merely a prelude – in the eyes of Whitehall officials and Westminster politicians – to his ultimate governorship of Madras from 1859, and the distinction he would achieve as a cabinet member of the British government of India, positions he occupied without the slightest hint of venality. He was cast in a new mould; neither a man of inherited wealth nor a nabob on the make.
Like the family of the historian Macaulay, Trevelyan was a spiritual child of William Wilberforce, the evangelical reformer who had campaigned successfully for the abolition of slavery in Britain and its possessions. But the secular influences on him came from the political economists of the day. The impact of a passage from John Stuart Mill such as the following would have coloured his view of the world and of how to deal with its ills: ‘In cases of actual scarcity,’ wrote Mill, ‘governments are often urged … to take measures ofsome sort for moderating the price of food.’ There remained, however, said Mill, ‘No mode of affecting it [price], unless by taking possession of all the food and serving it out in rations as in a besieged town.’
In the besieged town of Ireland, the rations were not going to be seized and served out. Adam Smith reinforced the concept: ‘A famine has never arisen from any other cause but the violence of government attempting, by improper means, to remedy the inconvenience of a dearth.’ Famines were matters in which governments should not try to intervene or attempt to achieve some sort of false justice in food markets. The best hope of salvation was to let the market do its mysterious and beneficent work. So, in the eyes of Trevelyan and his fellow thinkers, the famine resulting from the potato blight was a catastrophe that could not be substantially interfered with.
Another major influence on Trevelyan was the Reverend Thomas Malthus, a population theorist who declared a calamity in Ireland inevitable due to over-population. In his Essay on the Principles of Population , first published in 1798, Malthus forecast the unarguable cleansing in Ireland, though he moderated the idea in his Principles of Political Economy in 1836. But he had also famously written in an 1817 article: ‘The land in Ireland is infinitely more peopled than in England; and to give full effect to the natural resources of the country, a great part of the population should be swept from the soil.’ The Malthusian view served and enhanced the principles of political economy: resignation to what could not be prevented.
One of the reasons Malthus had an impact on Trevelyan,and other officials and politicians, was the fact that in the immediate aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, which ended in 1815, population growth in Britain as a whole had reached an unprecedented 11 per cent per annum, and poor relief expenditure – again in Britain as a whole – had risen to almost seven and a half million pounds per annum, compared with an annual expenditure of just over one million in 1776. Most of this expenditure, it should be said, was paid not by government but by a poor rate levied on land holders.
Combined with the two theories of inevitability, both the economic and the demographic, was the conviction that Providence had also provided for a great cleansing of Ireland. Certainly, the like-thinking cabinet of Lord John Russell, who became British prime minister in 1846, believed Trevelyan had done all he could to temper the sufferings of the Irish in the face of the severe but necessary workings of that divine dispensation. On 6 January 1847, Charles Trevelyan wrote, ‘It is hard upon the poor people that
For nineteen years, from 1840 on, he was assistant secretary to the Treasury in Whitehall. It was in that role that he came to be responsible for what the British government devised for Irish relief and, to an extent, that he became an architect of the government’s policy. This task was merely a prelude – in the eyes of Whitehall officials and Westminster politicians – to his ultimate governorship of Madras from 1859, and the distinction he would achieve as a cabinet member of the British government of India, positions he occupied without the slightest hint of venality. He was cast in a new mould; neither a man of inherited wealth nor a nabob on the make.
Like the family of the historian Macaulay, Trevelyan was a spiritual child of William Wilberforce, the evangelical reformer who had campaigned successfully for the abolition of slavery in Britain and its possessions. But the secular influences on him came from the political economists of the day. The impact of a passage from John Stuart Mill such as the following would have coloured his view of the world and of how to deal with its ills: ‘In cases of actual scarcity,’ wrote Mill, ‘governments are often urged … to take measures ofsome sort for moderating the price of food.’ There remained, however, said Mill, ‘No mode of affecting it [price], unless by taking possession of all the food and serving it out in rations as in a besieged town.’
In the besieged town of Ireland, the rations were not going to be seized and served out. Adam Smith reinforced the concept: ‘A famine has never arisen from any other cause but the violence of government attempting, by improper means, to remedy the inconvenience of a dearth.’ Famines were matters in which governments should not try to intervene or attempt to achieve some sort of false justice in food markets. The best hope of salvation was to let the market do its mysterious and beneficent work. So, in the eyes of Trevelyan and his fellow thinkers, the famine resulting from the potato blight was a catastrophe that could not be substantially interfered with.
Another major influence on Trevelyan was the Reverend Thomas Malthus, a population theorist who declared a calamity in Ireland inevitable due to over-population. In his Essay on the Principles of Population , first published in 1798, Malthus forecast the unarguable cleansing in Ireland, though he moderated the idea in his Principles of Political Economy in 1836. But he had also famously written in an 1817 article: ‘The land in Ireland is infinitely more peopled than in England; and to give full effect to the natural resources of the country, a great part of the population should be swept from the soil.’ The Malthusian view served and enhanced the principles of political economy: resignation to what could not be prevented.
One of the reasons Malthus had an impact on Trevelyan,and other officials and politicians, was the fact that in the immediate aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, which ended in 1815, population growth in Britain as a whole had reached an unprecedented 11 per cent per annum, and poor relief expenditure – again in Britain as a whole – had risen to almost seven and a half million pounds per annum, compared with an annual expenditure of just over one million in 1776. Most of this expenditure, it should be said, was paid not by government but by a poor rate levied on land holders.
Combined with the two theories of inevitability, both the economic and the demographic, was the conviction that Providence had also provided for a great cleansing of Ireland. Certainly, the like-thinking cabinet of Lord John Russell, who became British prime minister in 1846, believed Trevelyan had done all he could to temper the sufferings of the Irish in the face of the severe but necessary workings of that divine dispensation. On 6 January 1847, Charles Trevelyan wrote, ‘It is hard upon the poor people that
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