Charles Trevelyan and the ‘Great Opportunity’ — January 1848
Thus far, we have been concerned with the forms of discourse that shaped the British press’ reporting and commentary on the Famine. We have seen how culture, politics and economics contributed to the language, images and concepts that shaped the way the Famine was presented to the public. Behind these lay an even more important factor — power. Questions of power lie at the heart of any famine. Those without food have no power; those with food have potentially enormous power. In the case of famine-stricken Ireland, Britain, controlling the flow and distribution of food into and within the country, had power over Ireland. The exercise of this power was not only a question of feeding or not feeding those who were starving. Britain had, or thought it had, the power to change, to control, to remake the people of Ireland. This corresponds to Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘bio-power,’ the institutional disciplining of the human body through the state’s control of the social body. Bio-power involved
…propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause these to vary. Their supervision was effected through an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls: a bio-politics of the population….
The old power of death that symbolized sovereign power was now carefully supplanted by the administration of bodies and the calculated management of life.1
Individuals were disciplined in schools, barracks, workshops and factories. Segments of the population were studied and gradually controlled through inquiries into public health, vital statistics, housing and migration (140).
Thus, the real dynamics of Victorian political economy lay in its attempts to control large segments of the population, especially those at the margin — the poor. The whole apparatus of Britain’s Poor Law of 1834, for example, had been designed to force absolute state control upon those seeking public charity. They had to give up their independence and enter a prison-like workhouse, where families were separated and where the inmates were expected to earn their keep by doing degrading work. The whole atmosphere and regime was that of a prison. The only right an inmate retained was the right to leave, whereupon he or she surrendered forever any further claim to public relief. In Ireland even the public work projects of 1846 and 1847 and the ‘outdoor’ relief from soup kitchens that replaced them were simply less tidy demonstrations of the Government’s ‘bio-power.’ To those at the receiving end the exercise of this power must have seemed arbitrary. At one point all those in search of relief had to be enrolled in public works. Then these were abolished and ‘outdoor’ relief was granted in the form of soup kitchens. Then the soup kitchens were closed.
Whatever form they took, all famine relief efforts were carefully supervised, recorded and controlled, although the control was never nearly as tight as London bureaucrats wished. To varying degrees, all of the Government’s responses to the crisis in Ireland correspond to Foucault’s concepts of the administrative power over life and death. Such disparate measures as the famine-era coercion bills, the qualifications for relief, the evictions of tenants (carried out by police and soldiers), and even the export of food from Ireland were each in their own way measures of control over several million people with no food and no power. The purpose of this control was to force them to cease to live as they had and to make them adopt a new way of life, if, indeed, life was spared them.
Remarkably, one man sat at the center of the state’s exercise in bio-power as applied to the administration of famine relief. As the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, Charles Trevelyan was the department’s chief civil servant and permanent head. As such, he wielded considerable power, not through speeches in Parliament and cabinet meetings, but through the manipulation of paperwork. Standing outside of politics, Trevelyan nevertheless understood its mechanisms very well. He was not shy about pushing forward his own ideas and trying to subvert relief proposals of which he did not approve. He worked closely with those politicians whose ear he had, and he carefully funnelled information to sympathetic newspaper editors.
Neither the Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury, Lord John Russell, nor his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Charles Wood, personally handled the flow of documents related to the Irish Famine. Much of the responsibility for dealing directly with the day-to-day administration of the crisis was left to Trevelyan. It was he who decided who received money, when they received it, and how much they received. In a sense, he kept the books on the Government’s response to the Famine. Every request from every Relief Committee and Poor Law Union in Ireland, not to mention the higher-level appeals from Dublin Castle, crossed Trevelyan’s desk and came under his pen. Not only did Trevelyan carefully control most of the public funds going to Ireland (grants as well as loans), but he also insisted on control of the money from private contributions collected by the British Association. It was he, not the Lord Lieutenant in Dublin, who interpreted and carried out Government policy regarding famine relief.
Almost as remarkable as the power he wielded was Trevelyan’s decision to write about the ‘success’ of the Government’s efforts. In the January 1848 issue of the Edinburgh Review, a leading Whig journal, Trevelyan published a ninety-page account of ‘The Irish Crisis.’ Although a staunch supporter of the Whigs, the Review usually tried to maintain some degree of editorial distance between itself and the party. On the subject of Ireland the journal previously had published several articles by Nassau William Senior that had gone beyond the views of Russell and his supporters (Gray, 1999,63). Trevelyan’s piece, however, was an unabashed apologia for the policies of the Government, policies that he had helped to shape and to faithfully implement. Initially anonymous, ‘The Irish Crisis’ appeared later that year in book form under Trevelyan’s name. His article was the first narrative of the Famine, even though it came in the middle and not, as he optimistically assumed, at the end of the disaster.2 Through Trevelyan the Government got its story out early, a story in which it was the hero.
In the first paragraph of his Edinburgh Review article Trevelyan distanced himself from the suffering in Ireland by assuming the pose of one writing ‘with the calm temper of the future’ (229). Trevelyan did, in fact, believe that the Famine was over, and, writing from this fictitious vantage point, he could take on a lofty objectivity, as well as a reassuring tone. The Irish Famine, he confidently told his readers, would produce ‘a salutary revolution in the habits of a nation long singularly unfortunate….’ A ‘Supreme Wisdom,’ he asserted, had granted Ireland ‘permanent good out of transient evil’ (230). Trevelyan’s story was a moral one about laxity and bad habits overcome by good policy and righteous perseverance.
Trevelyan characterized his piece as ‘the history of the great famine of 1847.’ This may have been the first time the phrase ‘great famine’ was used in reference to Ireland, but by limiting it to 1847 he also truncated the event. Granted that, like most observers, Trevelyan did not expect the potato blight to return in 1848. Nevertheless, limiting the application of the fearful word ‘famine’ to one year suggests a desire to impose strict boundaries of responsibility upon the crisis. In fact, he stated that ‘a few months ago, an enlightened man,’ when asked about Ireland’s major problems, would have pointed to absenteeism, sectarian bigotry or ‘the Repeal cry.’ Political issues could be regarded as ‘curable,’ Trevelyan wrote, ‘But what hope is there for a nation which lives on potatoes?’ (230). While this was a dramatic beginning, Trevelyan’s rhetorical slight of hand managed to suggest that until the summer of 1847, two years after the appearance of the blight, severe hunger had not been a major problem in Ireland.
Anxious to establish a sense of inevitability about the Famine, Trevelyan argued that the potato had always been an unreliable source of food, not to mention a weak foundation for civilized behavior. He referred to a paper given by Joseph Sabine to the Horticultural Society of London in 1822. Sabine had maintained that the very facility with which the potato could be grown created a threat to civilization, as though the combination of fecundity and ease of cultivation would corrupt the cultivators. This argument appealed to Trevelyan’s Evangelical moralism: potatoes were too easy to grow, permitting too much leisure, a devil’s playground for anyone. In Trevelyan’s bourgeois imagination, a few weeks of planting and a few more digging the harvest meant that the Irish peasant had the rest of the year ‘to follow his own inclinations, without even the safeguards of those intellectual tastes and legitimate objects of ambition which only imperfectly obviate the evils of leisure in the higher ranks of society’ (231).
According to Trevelyan, potato cultivation also failed to develop the usual hierarchical relations between the classes. ‘The relations between the employer and the employed, which knit together the framework of society, and establish a natural dependence and good-will have no existence in the potato system of the Irish smallholder.’ Trevelyan reverted to the now-familiar comparison of the Irish to distant, exotic and primitive peoples. ‘The Irish smallholder lives in a state of isolation, the type of which is to be sought for in the islands of the South Sea, rather than in the great civilized communities of the ancient world’ (231).
Compared to the average Londoner, the Irish subsistence farmers no doubt seemed isolated. Yet, the men at the bottom of Ireland’s land pyramid often moved throughout their country and over to Britain in search of seasonal work. Moreover, those in the communal rundale settlements, as well as many tenants on smallholdings, were very dependent upon the imperial grain market to earn their rent.3
For Trevelyan, however, the isolation went beyond geography and economics. The Irish peasant seemed to evade imperial as well as proprietorial control. The problem, to use Foucault’s terminology, was one of bio-power. For Foucault, the state’s power over life lay in its control over ‘the body as a machine; its disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls…’ (139). By the mid-century England had produced a useful and relatively docile labor force, well integrated into industrial manufacture and agricultural labour. But Irish subsistence farmers failed to conform to the concept of the body as an extension of the machine. Outside of northeast Ulster, there were few factories to absorb excess Irish labor, and subsistence agriculture required, as we have seen, only a few tools. The problem, from the imperial viewpoint, was that the Irish tenant farmer was not really a part of what Foucault called ‘systems of efficient and economic controls.’ Their diet was monotonous, their material possessions few and their clothing often rags. Yet, unlike many English agricultural workers or mill hands, they were not constantly at the beck-and-call of ‘the master.’ If the lives of this egalitarian workforce consisted of a precarious striving to pay the landlord’s rent, then there was also occasional leisure, a distinct and orally rich culture in their own language, and a certain degree of independence.
In Trevelyan’s mind, such a situation could only lead to ‘poverty, discontent and idleness.’ He asserted that ‘The domestic habits arising out of this mode of subsistence were of the lowest and most degrading kind,’ as signified by pigs and poultry who were ‘inmates of the cabin’ (232). The author assured his readers that people who ate wheat and beef could retrench in periods of scarcity while potato eaters ‘have already reached the lowest point in the descending scale, and there is nothing beyond but starvation or beggary’ (233).
The Government would solve this problem by turning Ireland’s subsistence tenants into bread-eating agricultural labourers, the essential workforce for the kind of capitalistic agricultural economy it wished to create in the West of Ireland. This ties into Foucault’s bio-power, which, as he argues
…was without question an indispensable element in the development of capitalism; the latter would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic progress (140-41).
As we have seen, in order to argue that Whig policies had successfully and equitably dealt with the crisis, Trevelyan had to play down its extent. Part of his rhetorical strategy was to place the Famine within a context that sapped the events of 1846-47 of their terrible uniqueness. Trevelyan reviewed the partial and localized failures of the potato crop in 1822 and 1831, implying that they were somehow connected to the appearance of the potato blight of 1845, 1846 and 1847.4 This made the Famine look as if it were part of an inevitable sequence of events. Trevelyan did not realize or, perhaps, did not want to consider that Phytophthora infestans was a new disease that had no connection to earlier crop failures.
Trevelyan also referred back to the bliadhain an air or the ‘year of slaughter,’ 1741, a famine precipitated not by potato blight but by several of the coldest and driest years on record.5 Trevelyan was particularly interested in this event because, as he insisted, it ‘was not regarded with any active interest either in England or in any foreign country…. No measures were adopted either by the Executive or the Legislature for the purpose of relieving the distress caused by this famine’ (235). Trevelyan used this earlier disaster to establish a negative historical precedent, demonstrating that there was no reason to assume that famines should necessitate government intervention. Nevertheless, he did admit that food shortages in 1822 and 1823 had involved some public expenditures.
Instead of moving on to the crisis at hand, Trevelyan then launched into a very detailed discussion of Irish landholding methods, especially regarding entailed and encumbered estates. At this point the Irish landlords came in for their share of blame: ‘the small holding and potato system offered the inducement of large rents, obtained at the smallest possible amount of cost and trouble…the farms were covered with hovels and miserable cottiers, in order, through them, to create profit-rents.’ Trevelyan pointedly added that it was not just the landlords who profited from overpopulation. He insisted that ‘the emoluments of the Roman Catholic priesthood, including the bishops, depend not only on the extent of the population, but also on its continued increase…’ (239).6
Trevelyan concluded this section of the article with an attack on the ‘evil’ of the ‘law of Entail, and the Incumberances.’ He argued that forcing the sale of indebted estates represented ‘the masterkey to unlock the field of industry in Ireland’ (244-45). He lamented the failure of the Encumbered Estates Act of 1847.
After describing the problems of overpopulation, dependence on the potato, the nature of Irish landholding and the evils of encumbered estates, Trevelyan finally, seventeen pages into the article, mentioned the actual potato blight that appeared in the autumn of 1845. The first harvest in September and October escaped, but ‘the people’s crop,’ usually dug in winter, was ‘tainted….[I]t was often found, on opening the [storage] pits, that the potatoes had become a mass of rottenness’ (246). Trevelyan followed this image of destruction immediately with irrelevant reassurances that ‘The wheat crop was a full average, oats and barley were abundant; and of turnips, carrots and green crops, including a plentiful hay harvest, there was a more than sufficient supply’ (246). That phrase, ‘sufficient supply,’ is typical of the difficulty that many British commentators, not only Trevelyan, had in acknowledging the full extent of the disaster in Ireland. Sufficient for whom? Certainly not those described by Father Theobald Mathew who had written to Trevelyan: ‘the wretched people were seated on the fences of their decaying gardens, wringing their hands, and wailing bitterly the destruction that had left them foodless’ (246). Father Mathew’s foodless people, acknowledged on the one hand, were then deftly erased by Trevelyan’s shift of context from Ireland to the Continent. ‘The potato disease was very destructive in Holland, Belgium, France and the West of Germany.’ In Ireland, however,
In the third year [1847] the disease had nearly exhausted itself. It appeared in different parts of the country, but the plants generally exerted fresh vigour and outgrew it. The result, perhaps, could not have been better. The wholesome distrust in the potato was maintained, while time was allowed for making the alterations which the new state of things required (247).
This manipulation of words, whether by design or through wishful thinking, represented a denial of reality. The ‘wholesome distrust of the potato’ was Trevelyan’s way of recognizing the huge drop in potato acreage without acknowledging the disastrous consequences for the food supply in the autumn of 1847. He ignored the fact that such a drastic reduction in potato production, even if largely free of blight, meant that the death rate for ‘Black ‘47’ was the highest of the famine years. The Famine as a death-dealing event was, however, never confronted in Trevelyan’s narrative. In fact, death was rarely mentioned, and, while full of facts and figures, mortality rates are absent from his history. Nevertheless, the high mortality rates of 1847 must be counted among the ‘alterations’ for which time allowed. Trevelyan’s ‘new state of things’ referred to his belief that Ireland was shifting to a grain-based economy. It was on this dubious basis that Trevelyan established his good news early in his narrative: the Famine was over, and Ireland was on the road to reconstruction.
Having established this reassuring outcome, Trevelyan then returned to earlier events, describing the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 and Peel’s importation of Indian corn from North America. Trevelyan credited Peel with ordering £100,000 pounds worth of maize for the winter and early spring of 1845-1846. He pointed out the advantage of selecting a new kind of foodstuff: ‘Owing to the prohibitory duty, Indian corn was unknown as an article of consumption in the United Kingdom. Private merchants, therefore, could not complain of interference with a trade which did not exist…’ (249).
Trevelyan pointed out two problems with the imported Indian meal, however. First, most Irish peasants were not used to preparing and eating it. Secondly, there was no question of simply giving people the meal. Free food would have undercut their own efforts to help themselves. Food had to be purchased. However, many of the hungry had no money. Typically, Trevelyan blamed this inconvenient situation upon the failure of potato cultivation to develop a more complex infrastructure of work and market distribution.
If the Irish poor had been in the habit of buying their food as is the case in England, the object [of introducing a new source of nutrition] would have been attained when a cheap substitute had been provided for the potato; but as the laboring class in Ireland had hitherto subsisted on potatoes grown by themselves, and money-wages were almost unknown, it was necessary to adopt some means of giving the people a command over the new description of food. This was done by establishing a system of public work, in accordance with the previous practice on similar occasions, both in Ireland and in other countries… (250; italics added).
The word ‘command’ suggested, falsely, that the Irish peasantry had been given some power over their food supply. Since wages on the works consistently lagged behind the cost of the Indian meal, such a claim was ludicrous.
The public works that were initiated in 1846 had always been intended as a temporary and limited response to a situation. Peel’s Government had assumed that the conditions would improve with that year’s harvest. Taking over from Peel, the Whigs, ideologically opposed to such schemes, were confident that they could close down the public works by the end of summer. However, the massive destruction of the potato crop in the fall of 1846 forced them to reopen the works and to admit far larger numbers than anyone had envisioned. To make matters worse, the winter of 1846-1847 was one of the coldest in recent years, with unusual amounts of snow. Those who wanted relief, poorly dressed under the best of circumstances, had to work in terrible weather for insufficient amounts of food. This was not a matter on which Trevelyan wished to elaborate.
He was quick, however, to point out other problems in using public works as the principal form of emergency relief. Those working on the relief projects were expected to buy the imported corn meal, initially from government distribution points. However,
the country was so entirely destitute of the resources applicable to this new state of things, that often, even in large villages, neither bread nor flour was to be procured; and in country districts, the people had sometimes to walk twenty miles before they could obtain a single stone of meal (253-54).
The local Relief Committees were to act as temporary substitutes for the missing corn factors. Yet, as Trevelyan pointed out, although the wages in the beginning were above the usual rate for rural workers, ‘at the existing prices of food, they were insufficient for the support of a family, melancholy proof of which was afforded by daily instances of starvation in connexion with the Relief Works’ (257). This last sentence contains one of those rare instances in which Trevelyan had recourse to the word ‘starvation’ in the article.
According to Trevelyan’s figures, by March 1847 734,000 persons were employed daily, supporting nearly three million persons, assuming about four individuals per family. Over one-third of the nation was dependent upon relief. Although the purpose of the works was to feed the destitute, Trevelyan was appalled at these numbers. ‘The general failure of the potato crop [in the autumn of 1846] spread despondency and alarm from one end of Ireland to the other, and induced every class of persons to throw themselves upon the Government for aid’ (254). Like many observers, Trevelyan was convinced that the numbers on relief were swollen by corruption.
The attraction of money wages regularly paid from the public purse…led to a general abandonment of other descriptions of industry…. Landlords competed with each other in getting the names of their tenants placed on their lists; farmers dismissed their labourers, and sent them to the [relief] works; the clergy insisted on the claims of their members…the fisheries were deserted… (256).
Most disturbing to Trevelyan was the neglect of tillage, the first symptoms of which appeared in the spring of 1846, and which were worst ‘in those districts where the Relief works were carried on to the greatest extent’ (250-51). Those areas were generally in the West of Ireland where the soil was poorest and where the numbers of sub-tenants totally dependent upon the potato were greatest. Yet it was unlikely that Trevelyan’s apprehension about the ‘neglect of ordinary tillage’ concerned the tenants’ potato beds, which, to his way his way of thinking, represented the wrong sort of crop in the first place; rather he meant that the peasants were not labouring in their landlords’ grain fields. Trevelyan and the Government assumed that there was enough demand for agricultural labour, especially in the poor lands of the West, to supply large-scale, if not quite full, employment. Trevelyan made it clear that he and the Government expected the landlords to provide work for the peasants after the public works were closed (256). The demands of Irish agriculture, however, had never been able to provide sufficient employment to the bulk of the peasantry.
To Trevelyan, the public works schemes were a disaster. ‘The strain on the springs of society from this monstrous system of centralization was fearful in the extreme’ (255). Although there had never been enough work for the cottiers and conacre farmers in rural Ireland, Trevelyan and Government leaders were fearful that public relief would undercut the rural economy, such as it was. In Trevelyan’s terms, the Government faced a dilemma: ‘If the people were retained in the works, their lands must remain uncultivated. If they were put off the works, they must starve…’ (257; italics added). The Government opted to reduce the relief lists. In March of 1847 the lists were arbitrarily cut by twenty percent, followed by further monthly reductions until the works were closed on 15 August 1847.
In this context, Trevelyan’s phrase, ‘they must starve,’ is key, not only to his discussion of the Famine, but the discursive approach taken by many newspapers and journals. Trevelyan was not, of course, expressing intent. It was not his or the Government’s policy to starve people. Instead, he was suggesting a providential sense of inevitability. Thanks to egregious egregious errors of the past (for which neither he nor the Government were responsible) starvation would occur. If there was any agency at work, it was those errors — and Divine retribution for them. No person or persons of any authority were responsible. Since people ‘must starve,’ Government policy was not to blame. Nor, given the assumed inevitability of the situation, could the Government have prevented starvation, although its relief efforts were meant to mitigate it. Starvation was thus ‘naturalized.’7 Trevelyan’s language, moreover, suggests that the decision to end public works was taken with some awareness that even the phased closing of the works would endanger some of those totally dependent upon them for food.
Trevelyan’s intention in this part of his article was to explain, first, why the Government had resorted to public works as an emergency measure, and, then, to justify phasing them out. However, it was not just the public works that were abandoned. Trevelyan was also anxious to explain why the Government ended its importation of corn meal, the distribution of which had been based upon employment in the public works. Trevelyan stated that ‘merchantile confidence’ in the grain trade was destroyed by the ‘prospect of the Government throwing into the market supplies of food of unknown extent…. The trade was paralyzed…’ (253). As so often with Trevelyan, this is a case of theory overriding facts. A few pages earlier he had already pointed out that corn meal was a new commodity, a substitute for the missing potato, not a competitor with established grains that had rarely been part of the peasant diet. Trevelyan, however, was anxious to eliminate any argument in favor of government intervention in the markets. He insisted that ‘The Government again interfering would inevitably have created a necessity for that interference, on a scale which it would have been quite beyond the power of the Government to support.’ He then outlined the Government’s measures to limit the cost of relief:
1st. That no orders for supplies of food would be sent by the Government to foreign countries. 2ndly. That the interference of the Government would be confined to those western districts of Ireland in which, owing to the former prevalence of potato cultivation, no trade in corn for local consumption existed. And 3rdly. That even in these districts the Government depots would not be opened for the sale of food, while it could be obtained from private dealers at reasonable prices… (253).
Trevelyan stuck grimly to this last proscription, in spite of pleas from his own representatives in Ireland to open the depots. Peel had intended his original, secret importations of maize as a hedge against hoarding and high food prices. In the wake of the failed harvest of 1846, grain prices rose sharply in Ireland, but Trevelyan kept to minimalist policies. Government purchases of Indian meal declined after October 1846, being limited to sources from within the United Kingdom, and stored primarily in warehouses in Britain. Grain purchases ceased altogether in January 1847.8
At this point in his narrative, Trevelyan complained that ‘The plunder of bakers’ shops and bread carts, and the shooting of horses and breaking up of roads, to prevent the removal of provisions, were matters of daily occurrence’ (264). As prices rose, there were growing calls for the Government to ‘permit the grants of public money…to be employed in reducing the price of provisions to that of ordinary years.’ Trevelyan’s argument against this idea — high prices made people carefully husband their food — suggests the logic of a man who had himself never known acute hunger. Moreover, in spite of his earlier praise for the abundant harvest of 1847, he now claimed that ‘The entire stock of food for the whole United Kingdom was insufficient, and it was only by carefully husbanding it, that it could be made to last to harvest’ (265, 266). Unfortunately, the burden of ‘husbanding’ the United Kingdom’s stock of food would fall largely upon those already malnourished and facing starvation in Ireland.
Trevelyan argued that ending the importation of maize was intended to preserve the Irish grain markets (which he had earlier judged to be too thinly developed), and he presented the closing of the public works as a bold and necessary attempt to separate ‘improvements’ from ‘relief.’ It is clear that as a large-scale relief scheme, the works had been expensive and inefficient. The ‘gigantic efforts’ of the past year, if not checked, Trevelyan explained, would ‘exhaust and disorganize society throughout the United Kingdom, and reduce all classes of people in Ireland to a state of helpless dependence.’ Thus, provision for ‘extreme destitution’ had to be made ‘in some less objectionable mode.’ As a result, ‘great efforts and great sacrifices were required to provide another and a better subsistence’ for the poor (297-98).
Trevelyan argued that the basic infrastructure for relief should rest solely upon the Poor Law unions. However, he recognized that the numbers of destitute far outstripped the capacity for ordinary in-door relief, which was limited to those accepted into the workhouses. Therefore, as a transitional measure to sustain the poor until the autumn harvest in 1847, the Government, having noticed the effectiveness of the soup kitchens run by the Quakers the previous year, would provide food as a form of ‘outdoor relief.’ The workhouses would dispense cooked food, primarily soup, to eligible people, who would take it home to their families.
Most importantly for Trevelyan, with all relief operating under the Poor Law, the costs would be paid for out of the local rates, with some provision for Government grants to the most destitute areas. In other words, Irish property alone would pay for Irish poverty. Under this system by July 1847 3,020,712 persons received daily rations (2,265,534 adults and 755,178 children). Trevelyan did not comment on the fact that approximately the same number of people were fed soup as had been sustained by the public works a few months earlier, although the works lists were supposedly vastly inflated by ‘greed.’ Obviously, by the summer of 1847 the conditions in Ireland had not improved over the previous year. Over one-third of Ireland was still dependent upon some sort of relief. Nevertheless, the soup kitchens began closing in August. This meant denying food to hungry people. Trevelyan, however, described this as a process in which ‘This multitude was again gradually and peaceably thrown on its own resources at the season of harvest, when new and abundant supplies of food became available, and the demand for labour was at its highest’ (269). This meant, in fact, that by October 1847, when the last of the soup kitchens closed and there was no longer a demand for agricultural labour, food was available only to those who had money to buy it.
To Trevelyan’s bureaucratic mind, one informed purely by paper rather than any personal inspection of Ireland, the Irish ‘crisis’ of 1847 was over.
The famine was stayed. The ‘affecting and heart-rending crowds of destitute’ disappeared from the streets; the cadaverous, hunger stricken countenances of the people gave place to looks of health; deaths from starvation ceased; and cattle-stealing, plundering provisions, and other crimes prompted by want of food, were diminished by half in the course of a single month (269).
Thus was the year that became known as ‘Black’ 47’ because of its high mortality rates, brought to a happy conclusion.
Equally gratifying to Trevelyan was the fact that the expense of the soup scheme had been ‘moderate’ (269). Just how moderate, Trevelyan was too modest or, perhaps, too embarrassed to state. Christine Kinealy points out that the cost of a full ration fell from 2½d to 1d, due to the increase in food imports into Ireland in 1847. As a result, of the £2,255,000 voted by Parliament for the Temporary Relief Act, only 1,724,731l 17s 3d was spent (152).
Throughout his narrative, Trevelyan attended to the dual nature of his task: he was anxious to justify the Government’s relief efforts, and, at the same time, to explain why it had refused to explore other, more extensive and possibly generous methods of aid. One particularly difficult issue was the Government’s refusal to distribute seed potatoes, as well as seeds for most types of grain. Since part of the problem in 1846, as Trevelyan had described it, was to get land back into production and expand cultivation, the distribution of seed might have seemed like a natural remedy. Not so, Trevelyan patiently explained. Once it was known that the Government would take unto itself ‘the responsibility of this delicate and peculiar branch of rural economy,’ the existing seed stock would have been ‘merely’ consumed. Indeed, ‘the quantity consumed in food…would greatly exceed the quantity supplied by means of [government] interference.’ Therefore the Government did not distribute types of seed ‘already in extensive use’ but rather seed for flax, Scotch barley ‘bere’ and vegetables (but not potatoes). Even so, Trevelyan insisted that rumors regarding extensive seed distribution led to ‘criminal apathy’ (272).
Trevelyan also rejected suggestions that the Government hire the destitute to drain the bogs, thereby providing useful employment, while expanding the stock of arable lands. The problem was, he explained, that ‘the mass of people would throw themselves on those works as they did upon the roads, taking it for granted that the means of payment were inexhaustible, and that less labour would be exacted than in employment offered with a view to private profit’ (308). Moreover, the landlords would feel themselves absolved from improving their own lands. Finally, such government-sponsored reclamation would simply invite a return to the old habits of overpopulation and subdivision of holdings (308). Ireland had to be changed rather than merely fed.
There also had been scattered calls for the Government to facilitate peasant ownership of modest-sized holdings. Trevelyan rejected this on moral, rather than ideological grounds.
A peasant proprietary may succeed to a certain extent, where there is a foundation of steadiness of character, and a habit of prudence, and a spring of pride, and a value for independence and comfort; but we fear that all these words merely show the vain nature of schemes of peasant proprietorship for Ireland.
Moreover, the old tendencies leading to overpopulation would still remain. Thus even ‘mere security of tenure is of no avail, without the capital, and skill, and habits of life, and above all, the wholesome moral qualities required to turn this advantage to good account’ (309; italics added). It was hardly news to the British public that Paddy lacked the moral fiber to succeed at anything without close supervision. He had to be turned into a supervised wage labourer, since his character suited him for nothing better.
Trevelyan devoted several pages to describing the donations made by private charities from Britain and North America. Perhaps, having repeatedly justified the strict limits to Treasury involvement in Ireland, he was anxious to suggest that food and funds were available from non-governmental sources (although he did not point out that he controlled the disbursement of most of this money). This led him into a discussion of emigration, since some charitable groups and even some landlords had funded emigration on a very limited scale. Again, Trevelyan felt obliged to defend Government policy, this time regarding the refusal to use public funds to subsidize emigration. He repeated Russell’s argument that the United Kingdom could not be seen dumping their paupers upon the United States and the colonies (289). Trevelyan was adamant that instead of sending its Irish problem abroad, the Government had from the first dedicated itself to helping ‘the present population to maintain itself comfortably at home by the exercise of its industry’ (396).
Throughout his article, Trevelyan emphasized the necessity for Irish property to pay for Irish poverty. He forthrightly rejected the idea that support for the famine-stricken Irish could have been construed as imperial in scope (279). It was a local problem demanding local solutions and paid for by local taxes. ‘The owners and holders of the land…had permitted or encouraged the growth of the excessive population which depended on the precarious potato, and they alone had it in their power to restore society to a safe and healthy state’ (278). The moralistic, punitive attitude that lay behind so much of Trevelyan’s rhetoric became clear as he argued that Irish ratepayers should repay at least half of the money the Treasury sent to the Relief Committees. Not only had the landlords’ greed created the problem in the first place, but their Relief Committees had failed to guard their lists against abuse and fraud.
Indeed, as Trevelyan began to wrap up his account, he seemed at pains to assure his readers that strict rules governing the operation of the Poor Law Unions had been set and were rigidly adhered to. He insisted that repayment of Treasury loans made to the Unions, having twice been postponed, had to be made, although the numbers being fed in the western Unions were rising. Members of Poor Law Commissions who failed to do their duty to control expenses were threatened with dismissal (298-99). The workhouse Boards of Guardians were responsible for setting rates high enough to pay for necessary relief in each area. In Unions where the peasants’ failure to pay rents had reduced the income of the landlords and large tenants some of these boards refused to strike new rates. Trevelyan sternly explained that five Boards, after failing to adhere to his directions, had been dismissed and replaced (300).
In passing, Trevelyan mentioned that ‘no person is to be relieved either in or out of the workhouse, who is in occupation of more than a quarter acre of land’ (299). The ‘Quarter Acre’ clause had been added to the Poor Law act of 1847.9 No person renting more than a quarter of an acre could receive relief until they gave up their holding. The idea was to force the destitute to choose between maintaining (and presumably working) the land or receiving public relief. It was a choice between land or food. As Christine Kinealy points out, interpretation of the clause varied greatly, especially as to how a smallholder surrendered his land. Some landlords took advantage of the vagary of the 1847 law and used it to evict their tenants, since they were responsible for the rates of any holdings valued under four pounds. Although the act was liberalized slightly in 1848, there were instances in which starving people were evicted (Kinealy, 221-223).
Trevelyan’s account of his administration of relief in Ireland is a striking example of the exercise of Foucault’s ‘bio-power.’ The feeding of the Irish was less important than the reordering of the Irish. ‘A principle of great power has thus been introduced into the social system of Ireland,’ wrote Trevelyan. ‘The day has gone by for letting things take their course, and landlords and farmers have the plain alternative placed before them of supporting the people in idleness [through the Poor Law rates] or in profitable labours’ (301). Trevelyan’s logic was impeccable: landlords could keep down the numbers on relief, and thus reduce their rates, by employing their former tenants. As in so many other instances, the theory had little to do with the grim reality on the ground.
Throughout the essay, Trevelyan depicted the relief situation (rather than the actual suffering of the people) as a threat to the order and structure of Irish society. Eager to see control reasserted at every level, he was confident that the landlords (or their successors) would employ the people, oversee their work, ‘and as the people are invited to exert themselves under the eye of their natural employers, the healthy relation of master and labourers becomes established throughout the country’ (307). Accomplishing this would not be easy.
The fearful problem to be solved in Ireland, stated in its simplest form, is this: — A large population subsisting on potatoes which they raised for themselves, has been deprived of that resource, and how are they to be supported? The obvious answer is, by growing something else. But that cannot be, because the small patches of land which maintained a family when laid down to potatoes, are insufficient for the purpose when laid down to corn…and corn cultivation requires capital and skill, and combined labour, which the cottier and conacre tenants do not possess. The position occupied by these classes is no longer tenable, and it is necessary for them to become substantial farmers or to live by the wages of their labour. They must still depend for their subsistence upon agriculture, but upon an agriculture conducted according to new and very improved conditions. Both the kind of food and the means of procuring it have changed The people will henceforth principally live upon grain…which they will purchase out of their wages… (303-304).
Trevelyan assumed that the Irish peasantry would take one of two paths. They could become ‘substantial farmers’ (for which they had neither funds, equipment nor training), or they could live ‘by the wages of their labour’ (for which there was no large-scale demand). Either way, the Irish crisis was ‘solved.’ Trevelyan had presented his readers with a triumph of rhetoric and theory that had no basis in reality for hundreds of thousands of Irish people. The chance of creating a wage-earning, bread-eating culture in time to save the cottiers and conacre farmers who occupied the bottom of Ireland’s rural economy, and who were at risk of dying, was illusionary. It was also utterly fraudulent, unless the Government never intended to really save them in the first place. Nowhere in Trevelyan’s narrative did he actually state that it was his or the Government’s main purpose to save the greatest number of lives.
For all of his ability to cite facts and figures (when it suited him), the meaning Trevelyan drew from his experience administering the disaster in Ireland was moral rather than purely economic. He claimed that the experience ‘proved…that local distress cannot be relieved out of national funds without great abuses and evils….’ Anything else led to a ‘general scramble.’ Government relief was a ‘false principle [that] eats like a canker into the moral health and physical property of the people’ (312-13). In a situation such as Ireland presented, government officials were overwhelmed in trying to control abuses. ‘There is only one way in which the relief of the destitute ever has been, or ever will be conducted consistently with the general welfare, and that is by making it a local charge’ (313; italics original). Moreover, ‘Relief ought to be on the lowest scale necessary for subsistence…Relief should be made so unattractive as to furnish no motive to ask for it, except in the absence of every other means of subsistence’ (314). This doctrine had, of course, been the foundation of the English Poor Law of 1834, and Trevelyan saw no reason to alter it in the face of widespread hunger and starvation in Ireland.
Ireland itself had learned a great lesson, according to Trevelyan. The ‘fearful calamities’ of the past two years had awakened Ireland out of its ‘dream,’ entertained by all classes, that the Government would assist them in the event of need. Now, Trevelyan exalted, Ireland had understood that ‘the proper business of Government is to enable private individuals of every rank and profession in life, to carry on their several occupations with freedom and safety, and not itself to undertake the business of the landowner, merchant, money-lender, or any other function of social life’ (315).
Ireland, so long a conundrum to England, was ‘at last understood.’ In words that must surely have occasionally puzzled, if not amused, some among the future generations of English politicians, Trevelyan exalted, ‘Irish affairs are no longer a craft and mystery. The abyss has been fathomed’ (314). For its part, in spite of its own severe economic problems, England had shouldered the burden laid upon it by the crisis in Ireland, ‘without a murmur by the great body of the people’ (317). Trevelyan said nothing about the forbearance of newspaper editors.
The degree of Trevelyan’s own understanding of what was taking place in Ireland may be seen in his confident statement that ‘The culture of corn has to a great extent been substituted for that of the potato; the people have become accustomed to a better description of food than the potato.’10 Trevelyan went on to claim that ‘conacre, and the excessive competition for land, have ceased to exist….’ Choosing his words carefully, he then noted, ‘the small holdings, which have become deserted, owing to death, or emigration, or the mere inability of the holders to obtain a subsistence from them in the absence of the potato, have to a considerable extent, been consolidated with the adjoining farms…’ (317-18; italics added). Although this passage does contain one of the author’s rare uses of the word ‘death,’ the passive voice robs these sad events of any agency. The phrase ‘have become deserted’ renders the whole process quite mysterious, completely lacking actors and intent. The word ‘evictions’ might have clarified things. By such rhetorical slights of hand Trevelyan was able to keep at bay the full horror of the disaster he was overseeing. Once again language erased reality.
It was not only the peasants who were disappearing. Some of the landlords were being forced out as well, or so Trevelyan seemed to hope. Despite the failure of Parliament to adopt an effective encumbered estates bill in 1847, Trevelyan claimed to discern the ‘much-desired change in the ownership of the land’ (319). This would lead, he predicted, to the appearance of new middle-class owners, ‘more likely to become resident and improving proprietors than their predecessors… (319).
In the end, Trevelyan saw the hand of God at work in Ireland. Admitting that Ireland had not always been well treated by England in the past, in recent times ‘nearly every practicable remedy has been applied’ to the political friction between the two countries. Yet,
The deep and inveterate root of social evil remained, and this had been laid bare by a direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence, as if this part of the case were beyond the unassisted power of man. Innumerable had been the specifics which the wit of man had devised; but even the idea of the sharp but effectual remedy by which the cure is likely to be effected, had never occurred to any one. God grant that the generation to which this great opportunity has been offered may rightly perform its part, and that we may not relax our efforts until Ireland fully participates in the social health and physical prosperity of Great Britain, which will be the true consummation of their union (320; italics added).
Throughout this period it was not only the severity of the potato blight, but also its unprecedented and unpredictable reappearance that devastated Ireland and made administration of the Famine extremely difficult. Trevelyan and the Whigs may be forgiven for not anticipating the return of the blight following its apparent retreat in the spring of 1847. Yet, their refusal to react to the staggering fact that only a small portion of the old potato acreage had been planted in 1847 meant that the shortfall in food would continue, especially in the West. Nor did the Government’s policy take into serious consideration the cumulative effect of season after season of malnutrition upon several millions of Irish men, women and children. The subsistence farmers as a class had been devastated. Their smallholdings would soon be lost to them, as evictions changed the landscape of the country.
Trevelyan’s rush to triumph left too many hostages to fortune, and not everyone was convinced by his rosy vision of the future. Clarendon, the Lord Lieutenant, privately commented, ‘we are a very long way from those halcyon days with which Trevelyan winds up his article’ (Gray, 1999, 291). Indeed, the blight returned with the moderate expansion of potato acreage in 1848. Although most of Ireland was blight-free, the disease remained in the western-seaboard counties until 1852. Destitution, hunger and starvation, exacerbated by evictions, continued west of the Shannon. In October of 1848 Lord Monteagle suggested to the editors of the Edinburgh Review that perhaps Trevelyan should follow through with another article titled, ‘The Relapse’ (Gray, 1999, 305).
It is too easy to make Charles Trevelyan into the archvillain of the Irish Famine. In his essay ‘Apologia for a Dead Civil Servant’ Austin Bourke points out that Trevelyan was a dedicated and talented bureaucrat, who energetically served whatever government was in power. The relative success of Peel’s policies in the critical but not catastrophic nine months or so after the appearance of the blight in 1845 certainly owned something to Trevelyan’s diligence, although as Peter Gray points out, he also dragged his feet in carrying out certain policies (Bourke, 170-73; Gray, 1999, 135). Cecil Woodham-Smith noted that, later in his career, Trevelyan faced periodic famines in India, which he dealt with in a ‘less rigid and more humanitarian manner.’ Woodham-Smith speculates that ‘his Irish experience may be said to have had a softening effect’ (415). Bourke suggests that the goad civil servant, ‘Freed from the dead weight of Russell…resumed in India the more humane and flexible stance which he had shown in Ireland under Peel’ (Bourke, 177).
It is important to remember, as Bourke insists, that it was Russell’s policies and those of his Whig Government that Trevelyan served. While the Whig doctrine of political economy had only recently come to dominate public policy, its basic political and moral assumptions were not new. During extremely bad harvests in Britain in 1795, Edmund Burke urged the then Prime Minister William Pitt against interference in the market. Once the people were ‘habituated’ to being fed, Burke argued, ‘even but for one half year, they will never be statisfied to have it otherwise.’He maintained that, ‘It is not in breaking the laws of commerce, which are the laws of nature, and consequently the laws of God, that we place our hope of softening the Divine displeasure, to remove any calamity under which we suffer or which hangs over us’ (Bourke, 172). This statement could have been written fifty years later by Trevelyan, who, in fact, sent copies of Burke’s Thoughts on Scarcity to his relief officers (Kinealy, 53). The sentiments also reflected the thinking of Trevelyan’s immediate superior at the Treasury, Charles Wood, and of Lord John Russell, as well.
Nevertheless, whatever Trevelyan might have learned about famine relief in hindsight, in dealing with the Irish Famine he was in a unique position to articulate and drive the policies of his masters. He did it so effectively that Christine Kinealy has argued that ‘Treveylan, perhaps, more than any other individual represented a system of response which increasingly was a mixture of minimal relief, punitive qualifying criteria, and social reform’ (350).
Notes:
1. Foucault, 1980, 139-40; italics original. Foucault describes the emergence of ‘bio-politics’ as accompanied by ‘anatomo-politics of the human body,’ as represented by the various ‘disciplines’ of the army, schools and apprenticeships. He sees these two forces, bio-politics and anatomo-politics, beginning in the seventeenth century. Within his concept of bio-power Foucault distinguishes between ‘anatomo-politics,’ the control of the individual body, as referred to in the passage quoted in the text, and ‘bio-politics,’ state control over the lives of whole segments of the population; see 139-40.
2. In a footnote on pages 229-30 Trevelyan states that his narrative ends in September of 1847. He promised later articles if events demanded them.
3. Trevelyan attacked the communal rundale system because it did not encourage private property and, therefore, made ‘industriousness and thriving responsible for shortcomings of the idle and unproductive, effectively destroying the spring of all improvement’; 240.
4. Patrick Fitzgerald has tabulated the shortfalls in food production throughout Irish history. Although some of those in the nineteenth century prior to the introduction of the potato blight did result in excess mortality, none approached the catastrophic level of the second half of the 1840s; see Fitzgerald, passim.
5. The terrible famine of 1740-41 began when a European-wide cold wave hit Ireland around Christmas of 1739 and froze the potatoes in their shallow storage pits. For the next year the weather was cold and dry. In terms of the proportion of the population affected, the resulting death rate may have rivaled that of the 1840s famine, which continued over a much longer period. See David Dickson, 53-55.
6. This was a constant Protestant criticism of the Roman Catholic clergy. Protestants had often blamed Catholic priests for encouraging the careless growth of the peasant population in order to raise their incomes. It is curious to see Trevelyan return to this theme in a very different context near the end of the article. Praising the clergy of both faiths for having dedicated themselves to the destitute, he then admitted that Protestant clergy were well supported, both by donations and tithes, while Catholic priests were ‘reduced to great straits…. The fees on marriages and baptisms, which are [their] principal source of income…almost entirely ceased in some parts of the country’; 316. In the context of the Famine, Trevelyan’s simple statement implied devastating criticism of the Roman clergy in Ireland.
7. In Language in the News Roger Fowler (1991) states that ‘The ideological function of conversation [which includes the rhetorical approaches taken by writers] is to naturalize the terms in which reality is represented, and the categories those terms represent’; 57.
8. Food prices did not start to decline until April of 1847. See Kinealy, 76-79.
9. The clause is also known as the ‘Gregory Clause,’ after Sir William Gregory, an Irish landlord who proposed this amendment in order to help his fellow proprietors. Gregory later married Isabella Augusta Persse, who, as Lady Gregory, played a leading role in the literary revival around the end of the century. It is ironic that Lady Gregory eventually spent much of her time collecting stories from old peasants in the Galway workhouse, members of the class that had been the principal victims of her husband’s clause.
10. The peculiar quality of Trevelyan’s thought may be seen in the footnote that accompanies this statement. Acknowledging that the Irish peasantry had found Indian meal difficult to eat, Trevelyan asserted that the problem lay in the custom of peasantry to make up in bulk for the potato’s ‘deficiency of nutritive qualities’; 317. Thus their distended stomachs rendered them unsatisfied with their rations of Indian meal. Apparently the man in charge of Irish relief had never bothered to look into the nutritional superiority of the potato over most vegetables, especially maize.
He did acknowledge that most of the poor did not know how to prepare the meal. However, the problems with Indian meal as a substitute food went beyond its relative unfamiliarity in Ireland. Maize is not as nutritious as the potato. Moreover, before it can be eaten in the form of cooked porridge, it should be finely milled with steel grinders. At the time the peasants began receiving Indian meal this was not widely known, nor were there enough steel milling machines available on the west coast of Ireland. As a result, the rough-milled meal often contributed to dysentery, being sometimes referred to as ‘Peel’s brimstone,’ as it was under Peel that the corn was first imported; L. Kennedy, et al., 120; Kinealy, 47-48.