October 9, 1846 – English Noble Charles Trevelyan Shuts Down Irish Famine Relief

Following the potato blight of 1845 and 1846, the Irish were starving to death in large numbers. Ironically, there was plenty of food produced in Ireland, but it was all marked for export (a practice enforced by British soldiers). For the British, mandating that the food had to remain on Irish soil to feed the hungry (for free!) was contrary to their belief in laissez faire, i.e., unfettered free markets and ergo unfettered profits for the English.

Britain’s Prime Minister Lord John Russell put his chief economic advisor, Sir Charles Trevelyan, in charge of dealing with Irish starvation. Treveylan laid out his policy in a letter on this day in history to an Anglo-Irish landlord, Thomas Spring-Rice, Lord Mounteagle.

He wrote:

It forms no part of the functions of government to provide supplies of food or to increase the productive powers of the land. In the great institutions of the business of society, it falls to the share of government to protect the merchant and the agriculturist in the free exercise of their respective employments, but not itself to carry on these employments; and the condition of a community depends upon the result of the efforts which each member of it makes in his private and individual capacity. …”

Charles Trevelyan

He even contended that culling the numbers of the Irish was all part of Divine Providence:

I hope I am not guilty of irreverence in thinking that, this being altogether beyond the power of man, the cure has been applied by the direct stroke of an all-wise Providence in a manner as unexpected and unthought as it is likely to be effectual.”