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'Shovell ing out your paupers':

The British State and IrishFamine Migrat ion 1846-50P. Gray

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To cite this art icle: P. Gray (1999): 'Shovelling out your paupers': The Brit ish Stateand Irish Famine Migration 1846-50, Patterns of Prejudice, 33:4, 47-65

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PETER GRAY 47

PATTERNS OF PREJUDICE, vol. 33, no. 4, 1999/0031-322X/47-65/011064SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi)

ABSTRACT Gray considers the determinants of British policy towards emigration(and particularly towards state-assisted colonization) from Ireland during the

Great Famine of 1845-50. He surveys the idea of colonization as advocated byCharles Buller in 1843, and its varying appeal (changing over time) in Ireland,

Britain and the settlement colonies of the British empire. He also considers the issuein the light of pro- and anti-Malthusian interpretations of Irish population pressure,and the emergence of the alternative idea of internal colonization. Gray argues that

the failure of the state to adopt an emigration policy in 1846-50 as part of itsresponse to the Famine was the consequence of a combination of anti-Irish

prejudice in Britain and the colonies (which was sharpened by the arrival of largenumbers of economic refugees in 1847 and the political conspiracies of 1848), andthe prevalence of an economic doctrine that prioritized the need for Irish self-help

and moral transformation over state assistance. He traces the debate overcolonization within the Whig government headed by Lord John Russell, and

concludes that some form of assisted emigration was a feasible policy measure, andthat its rejection had adverse consequences in terms of additional famine mortality.

KEYWORDSAustralia, Britain, Canada, colonization, emigration, famine, Grey,immigration, Ireland, Irish, Russell

In April 1843 the leading British liberal Charles Buller spoke in Parlia-ment in favour of systematic colonization as a remedy for both short-term distress and the longer-term structural inadequacies of British and Irishsociety. Colonization would produce, he declared, an extension of civilizedsociety, in contrast to that mere emigration which aimed at little more thanshovelling out your paupers to where they might die, without shocking theirbetters with the sight or sound of their last agony.1

Bullers speech, which was widely reported and circulated in pamphletform, was a high point in the intellectual and political movement for system-atic colonization. It was received with enthusiasm by much of the liberalpress and parliamentary opinion as embodying a policy programme which

PETER GRAY

Shovelling out your paupers: The BritishState and Irish Famine Migration 1846-50

1 Quoted in Colonisationthe only cure for national distressMr Charles Bullers speech,Frasers Magazine, vol. 27, July 1843, 749.

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48 Patterns of Prejudice 33:4

combined the amelioration of social conditions at home with the consolida-tion of a liberal British empire of settlement overseas. Following the theoristsEdward Gibbon Wakefield and Robert Torrens, Buller argued that, if prop-erly regulated by the state, mass colonization of British overseas territoriescould be achieved at no net cost to the treasury. The added value given tocolonial land by the application of surplus British capital and labour wouldsoon repay the loans necessary to tranship the settlers. The 1830s experimentsin South Australia had demonstrated, he claimed, what could be done; if ap-plied on a large scale to the other territories suitable for settlement in Aus-tralia and New Zealand, British North America and southern Africa, thebenefits to those assisted, to those remaining at home and to the empire at

large would be incalculable. Leaving emigration to private enterprise or spo-radic landlord assistance would, in contrast, do little for those who left, and atbest would only strengthen the potentially hostile American republictherecipient of most of the voluntary emigration of the 1840s.

The application of the idea of systematic colonization to Ireland wasnot newRobert Torrens had long been a consistent advocate of a coloniza-tion plan to create a New Erin on the settlement frontier of the empire2but Bullers speech brought the idea to the forefront of parliamentary debate.Not all agreed with Bullers proposals; the Conservative prime minister, Sir

Robert Peel, while sympathetic, remained instinctively hostile to state inter-vention, while the colonial secretary, Lord Stanley, was wholly indifferent.However, Buller had been a junior minister in the closing days of the lastWhig government in 1841 and had already won the public support of LordHowick, who had spoken out on colonial reform in the 1830s and, havinginherited the title Earl Grey from his father in 1845, looked set to be a majorforce in any new Whig government. The partys leader, Lord John Russell,also declared himself in favour of some measure of emigration to address thecondition of England question.3

As Peels Conservative government began to disintegrate amidst right-wing revolts over the prime ministers Irish reform policy and his decision torepeal the Corn Laws, it was increasingly clear that a Whig-liberal govern-ment with some commitment to a policy of colonization would come to power.Indeed, when Russell became prime minister in July 1846, both Buller andGrey entered the government, the latter in the all-important post of colonialsecretary with full responsibility for emigration policy. All eyes now turnedto the new government to see if its opposition pledges would be realized.

Thus, on the eve of the Great Irish Famine, colonization as a social policyhad entered the political domain, had been thoroughly theorized, debated,experimented upon and publicly endorsed by senior ministers as a programme.

2 Robert Torrens, Systematic Colonization: Ireland Saved, without Cost to the Imperial Treas-ury, 2nd edn (London: Trelawney Saunders 1849).

3 Russell to Palmerston, 24 December 1844: University of Southampton, Palmerston(Broadlands) Papers, GC/RU/86/1.

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PETER GRAY 49

The failures of the Irish potato crop, and especially the up to nine-tenths lossthat coincided with the advent of the Russell government in July 1846, ap-peared to bring to a head the much-rehearsed arguments over Irish socialmalaise, and to render urgent any policy that might reduce that countryspopulation while avoiding mass famine mortality. The colonization debate of1846-50 was thus primarily an Irish one; while a trade slump brought deterio-rating English and Scottish working-class conditions in 1847-9, it was by nomeans as severe as the crisis of 1839-43, and emigration from Britain in thelater 1840s was relatively light. Colonization remained high on the agendas ofthe settlement colonies themselves, but with increasing contention over theorigin and characteristics of immigrants.

Some explanation then is required for the governments failure duringthe Famine to transform its members previous approval of the principle ofcolonization into a tangible relief policy for Ireland, either by the effectiveregulation of the private emigration traffic, or the implementation of policiesthat would have helped more than a nominal number of state emigrants orprovided employment and facilities for those arriving at their destination. In-stead of such an orderly colonization, these years witnessed horrors infinitelyworse than anything Buller had envisaged arising from mere emigration.

The arguments here build on the outstanding work on emigration policy

published by Oliver MacDonagh some forty years ago.4

Of the two aspects ofstate activity with which MacDonagh deals, onethe regulation of emigranttraffic by means of the Passenger Acts and the corps of emigration officersneeds little addition. His account of an emerging regulatory bureaucracyswamped by the scale of the unforeseen disaster of 1847, hampered by inad-equate resources and responding to the humanitarian outcry by adopting re-strictions which were unenforceable, has been developed at length in his worksand endorsed by subsequent research.5 Of more interest here is an issue whichMacDonaghs thesis of a pragmatic pattern of government growth does not

account for: the debate over assisted emigration within the British and Irishpolitical elite and public opinion. It is necessary to go beyond MacDonaghsanalysis (which relies too heavily on arguments about weak personalities andtoo loose a usage oflaissez-faire as an explanation of government inaction) touncover something of the ideological constructions and political constraintsthat contributed considerably to the Irish disaster of 1846-50.

4 Oliver MacDonagh, Irish emigration to the United States of America and the British colo-nies during the Famine, in R. D. Edwards and T. D. Williams (eds), The Great Famine: Stud-ies in Irish History 1845-52 (Dublin: Browne and Nolan 1956), 319-90.

5 Oliver MacDonagh, The regulation of the emigrant traffic from the United Kingdom 1842-55, Irish Historical Studies, vol. 9, 1954, 162-89; MacDonagh, Emigration and the state, 1833-55: an essay in administrative history, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser.,vol. 5, 1955, 133-59; MacDonagh,A Pattern of Government Growth 1800-60: The Passenger

Acts and Their Enforcement (London: Macgibbon and Kee 1961), 166-221; Frank Neal, Liv-erpool, the Irish steamship companies and the Famine Irish, Immigrants and Minorities, vol.5, 1986, 28-61.

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50 Patterns of Prejudice 33:4

The debate over emigration and colonizationEssentially this debate had three focal points. The first, in the famine periodat least, was Ireland, where food shortage and social collapse rendered somepolicy response imperative on the part of the imperial government. This wasaccepted, at least rhetorically, by Russell, who on taking office publicly com-mitted all the resources of the Treasury to relieving the famine-stricken Irish,and promised to consider colonization as one such measure.6 While assistedemigration as a relief mechanism faced many practical obstacles in the form ofraising finance, procuring shipping, ensuring employment in the colonies andcontrolling ship-borne diseases, recent research has suggested that, if it hadbeen adopted on even a modest scale, it could well have had a marked impact

on famine mortality.7

Second, the Irish problem was also a British one, in so far as it provokedmass migration across the Irish Sea, with all the associated problems of feveroutbreaks, pressure on the poor rates and a disruption of the British labourmarkets that most alarmed British public opinion, especially in the ports ofentry and their hinterlands. The logic of the Act of Unionembodied in theimplementation of full free trade between the islands by the 1820srenderedillegitimate the creation of formal obstacles to Irish immigration. Before theFamine, government rhetoric about common citizenship had combined both

with British commercial interest in the free flow of cheap (and frequentlyseasonal) Irish labour and with rapidly falling fares on the highly competitiveIrish Sea steamship lines to promote such population movements. But theinflux from late 1846 of vast numbers of economic refugees (classified in anarbitrary fashion as paupers) provoked a political campaign, particularly inLiverpool and Glasgow, for deterrent quarantine restrictions and higher fares.This campaign failed to sway a London government obsessed with the sanc-tity of free labour markets, but alterations to the law of settlement in 1847 didpermit boards of guardians to repatriate Irish paupers applying for outdoor

relief under the Poor Law with much less difficulty and expense. Some 63,000were returned from Liverpool in 1846-53 (most being summarily dumped onthe Dublin quays to fend for themselves), along with much smaller numbersfrom other cities. This number represented around 10 per cent of all Irishpaupers disembarking in Liverpool in these years; most evaded repatriationby steering clear of the official mechanisms of parish relief or by trampinginland, but only at an increased risk in terms of mortality.8 There is little doubt

6 Hansards Parliamentary Debates, 3rd ser., vol. 88, 777-8 (17 August 1846).7 Cormac Grda, Black 47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy and

Memory (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1999), 120-1. See also Cormac Grda andKevin ORourke, Mass migration as disaster relief: lessons from the Great Irish Famine,European Review of Economic History, vol. 1, 1997, 3-27.

8 Copy of a Letter Addressed to HM Secretary of State for the Home Department, by EdwardRushton, Esquire, Stipendiary Magistrate for Liverpool, 21 April 1849, Parliamentary Papers(P.P.) 1849 (266), vol. 47, 53. For a full account, see Frank Neal, Black 47: Britain and the

Famine Irish (Basingstoke: Macmillan 1998), 217-38.

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PETER GRAY 51

that the xenophobia aroused by the mass Irish pauper immigration of 1847led the state to be more cautious in its attitude towards colonization andrelief expenditure in general.

The third point of focus was the colonies themselves. The Colonial Of-fice in London and the local executive officers and colonial assemblies gener-ally agreed on the desirability of stimulating migration from the UnitedKingdom which would be sufficient to develop local resources and consoli-date the colony against threats either of encroachment from other states (as inthe Canadian fear of American annexation) or of native hostility (brought tothe forefront by the Maori revolt in New Zealand in 1845). Indeed, the secre-tary of the New Zealand Societya convinced Wakefieldianpronounced

that the convulsions in New Zealand and Ireland arose equally from a failed,because insufficiently systematic, colonization of both countries.9 In early1847 the governor of New South Wales wrote in support of a petition fromthe landowners and employers of the colony, urging the immediate despatchof large numbers of agricultural workers to meet an acute shortage of labour.The credit from the sale of land debenturesunderpinned by the expectationthat increased agricultural labour would raise the value of colonial landswas offered to meet the cost of transhipment.10 The Australian representa-tives were enthusiastic: No amount of emigration, they declared, can equal

the amount of animal food the colony can produce, and there is a boundlessextent of fertile land capable of grain cultivation.11 Whereas the debate in theUnited Kingdom over emigration from Ireland was primarily negative andfocused on the perceived evils of Irish society, the colonial perspective (andthat shared by the Wakefieldian advocates of colonization) was generally op-timistic. Colonization promised to be a self-supporting mechanism wherebyBritish civilization would be extended to the world. Providence seeminglyintended that Britains imperial destiny be fulfilled in the nineteenth century,and had provided the means to realize this end. In the words of the Anglo-

Irish landowner Aubrey De Vere: It is not for nothing that to England hasbeen committed the sway of an empire on which the sun never sets, at thatprecise period at which scientific discoveries have won their latest triumphsover space and time.12 Liberal Protestant Irish landlords such as De Vere andLord Monteagle sincerely believed that the interests of the colonies and Ire-land were complementary and mutually realizable through systematic colo-nization.

9 W. Bridges,New Zealand and Ireland. Colonial Economy: Embracing a New Mode of Com-bining Land, Labour and Capital, in the Development of Our Colonial Resources (London:D. M. Aird [1845]). For Wakefields influence, see [Edward Gibbon Wakefield], The BritishColonization of New Zealand; Being an Account of the Principles, Objects and Plans of the

New Zealand Association (London: J. W. Parker 1837).10 Despatch of Governor FitzRoy to Earl Grey, 30 January 1847, Papers Relative to Emigration

to the Australian Colonies, P.P. 1847-8 (50-II), vol. 47, 211-13.11 New South Wales Legislative Council, Address to Governor FitzRoy, 22 September 1847,

Papers Relative to Emigration to the Australian Colonies, P.P. 1847-8 (986), vol. 47, 487-9.12 [Aubrey De Vere], Colonization, Edinburgh Review, vol. 91, January 1850, 61.

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52 Patterns of Prejudice 33:4

This consensus on the desirability of colonization did not rule out pointsof disagreement between its supporters. The irritation felt by Wakefield andhis allies over the states reluctance to comply with the minutiae of their finely-tuned schemes led to some sharp exchanges.13 More importantly, the interestsof the colonial administrations could conflict sharply with the policy favouredin London or Ireland. Colonies were concerned primarily with the attractionof the best possible immigrants (preferably the young, fit and single) and theminimization of the social costs associated with the aged, infirm or totallyimpoverished. There was also a growing concern about the political loyaltyand social desirability of Irish Catholic immigrants, especially once the massflight from the island began in late 1846, and nativist hostility was further

reinforced on both sides of the Atlantic in reaction to the widely-publicizedIrish revolutionary conspiracies of 1848.14

Colonial variations could be marked. Canada and New Brunswick, thecheapest and nearest colonial destinations for mass voluntary emigration fromthe British Isles, rapidly reconsidered their attitudes towards Irish settlementin the course of 1847, eventually appealing to the Colonial Office to stem thetide of paupers unused to labour, mendicants with large families, averse fromevery industrious pursuit, whole cargoes of human beings in a state of desti-tution and in every stage of disease.15 The Australian colonies, on the other

hand, too far away and expensive to be within the reach of the voluntaryemigrant, could afford to maintain a more tolerant attitude towards the Irish.16

Indeed, the colonial assembly of New South Wales, which had encountereddifficulty in attracting sufficient immigrants, welcomed the potato blight asan opportunity. So great was the labour shortage, it declared, that it may beacknowledged to be an object of not less solicitude with us to receive, than itis with our fellow subjects to get rid of, that part of their redundant popula-tion, for whom nothing remains in their native land but the prospect of mis-ery and hopeless starvation.17 If the Australians hoped that by playing on the

Irish situation they could extract British treasury funds for additional assistedemigration, they were to be disappointed. Passage money continued to berestricted to what was available from the colonial land fund, and the numbers

13 See for example the petulant attack on Grey in Edward Gibbon Wakefield,A View of the Artof Colonization [1849] (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1914), 24-36.

14 See John Belchem, Nationalism, republicanism and exile: Irish emigrants and the revolutionsof 1848, Past and Present, vol. 146, 1995, 103-35.

15 Petition of the mayor, aldermen and citizens of Montreal, 23 June 1847, Papers Relative toEmigration to the British Provinces of North America, P.P. 1847-8 (50), vol. 47, 14. The Mon-treal petitioners complained that they lacked the powers given to Liverpool to repatriate suchIrish paupers.

16 At an average cost of between 10 and 11 per head, emigration to Australia was about threetimes the cost of passage to Canada; Return from Each of the British Colonies of the Amountof the Land Revenue and the Particulars of Its Application towards the Introduction of Emi-

grants, P.P. 1847-8 (345), vol. 47, 679.17 Report from the Select Committee on Immigration (New South Wales), 11 September 1847,

Papers Relative to Emigration to the Australian Colonies, P.P. 1847-8 (986), vol. 47, 489-94.

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PETER GRAY 53

of Irish bound for Australia peaked in 1849 at only 6,783 (32.7 per cent of thatyears total). The emigration commissioners, who selected the fittest emigrantsto be sent to the Antipodes, insisted on balancing the Irish with a higherproportion of English and Welsh settlers. The numbers of Irish assisted in1848 was under 10 per cent of the total shipped out from the commissionsdepots, at a time when Ireland comprised one-third of the United Kingdomspopulation.18

Malthusian doctrine and the Irish FamineThe redundancy of Irish population asserted by the Australian assemblywas not universally accepted in Britain and Ireland: it was bitterly contested

during the famine years whether the island was over-populated. Behind thisdebate lay conflicting conceptions of the nature and origins of Irish povertyand of the means necessary to eliminate it. Few English observers before orduring the Famine questioned that the islands population was pressing heav-ily (and indeed from 1846 overwhelmingly) on its current ability to feed andemploy its people. The point at issue was whether reducing the population orrendering more productive the resources of the country should be given pri-ority in policymaking.

Before the 1840s the former opinion commanded greatest authority.

Growing awareness after 1815 of the problems of economic stagnation andpoverty in Ireland encouraged the application of orthodox Malthusian con-ceptions of the interconnection of population growth, poverty and positivechecks.19 The third generation of classical economistsMcCulloch, Torrensand Nassau Seniorwere more hopeful about Irish economic improvement,but only in the context of a massive restructuring of Irish rural society thatincluded some programme of emigration.20 Every major official investigationinto Irish poverty from 1826 pointed to the same conclusion, and the PoorInquiry Commission report of 1836 pronounced an emigration scheme half-

funded by the state to be essential for the commencement of Irish ameliora-tion.21 Senior, the leading economist of his day and a close associate of thereports author, Archbishop Richard Whately of Dublin, was in no doubt

18 Returns Exhibiting the Emigration from the United Kingdom between the Years 1846 and1850 Inclusive, P.P. 1851 (680), vol. 40, 443.

19 Popular Malthusianism needs to be distinguished from Malthus himself, who wrote relativelylittle on Ireland; he did not envisage any catastrophe on the scale of the Famine but, although

generally pessimistic about Irish prospects, thought emigration merely a temporary pallia-tive. Cormac Grda, Malthus and the pre-Famine economy, in Antoin E. Murphy (ed.),Economists and the Irish Economy (Blackrock: Irish Academic Press 1984), 75-95.

20 See Peter Gray,Famine, Land and Politics: British Government and Irish Society 1843-1850(Dublin: Irish Academic Press 1999), 8-12.

21 Third Report of the Commission for Inquiring into the Condition of the Poorer Classes inIreland, P.P. 1836 (35), vol. 30, 17, 26. The Devon Commission report of 1845 repeated thiscall for assisted emigration as part of a wider comprehensive plan; Report from HM Commis-sioners of Inquiry into the State of the Law and Practice in Respect to the Occupation of Landin Ireland, P.P. 1845 (605), vol. 19, 28-9.

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54 Patterns of Prejudice 33:4

that much of the Irish population was redundant and in need of removalbefore agriculture could be modernized (that is, reconstructed along the idealEnglish model of a tripartite division of labour between solvent landowners,capitalist large farmers and proletarianized landless labourers).22 If Senior laterbecame more sceptical about the efficacy of state action, the potato blightfurther convinced him that Irish over-population was tending to abolish thevery idea of property, and that the removal of the surplus of two millionpeople was vital.23 The potato failure persuaded even some of those previ-ously sceptical of the over-population thesis of its validity. William Blacker,an Armagh land agent and outspoken advocate for the efficiency of smallfarms, felt obliged to admit that the necessary shift from a potato-based to a

more land-extensive cereal subsistence rendered emigration inevitable.24

The doctrine of surplus Irish population was not unchallenged beforeor during the Famine. The Ulster radical William Sharman Crawford regu-larly condemned the idea and with it the necessity for emigration. In reply toBullers speech of 1843 he denounced colonization as the transportation ofthe people and a drain on the life-blood of the country. Land reform and freetrade, he argued, would provide the means necessary to give employment andsupply food to all in need.25 Unlike Blacker, Crawford remained implacablyopposed to what he denounced as the detestable doctrine of the Malthusian

economists and the extermination it entailed.26

Most Irish nationalists andradicals shared Crawfords sentiments: the Young Irelander Thomas Davishad denounced a previous proposal for Australian colonization from Irelanddrawn up by Torrens in 1839 as a huge exterminating engine for sendingaway our masses.27 This hostile opinion remained the nationalist orthodoxythereafter.

Perhaps more surprising, but of central importance, was the growingcritique of Malthusianism among many British liberals. As early as 1837 LordHowick rejected as erroneous the Senior-Whately orthodoxy that emigra-

tion was essential for Irish development, and proposed instead a poor law andpublic works.28 This was indeed the policy adopted by the majority of the

22 Senior to Lansdowne, 10 May 1837: National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, Nassau SeniorPapers (NSP), C188.

23 Senior to Lansdowne, 2 December 1848: NSP, C218; [Nassau Senior], The relief of Irishdistress, Edinburgh Review, vol. 89, January 1849, 221-68.

24 Colonization from Ireland: Report of the Select Committee of the House of Lords on Coloni-

zation from Ireland, P.P. 1847 (737), vol. 6, 238-9.25 Annual Register, vol. 85, 1843, 66.26 William Sharman Crawford, Depopulation Not Necessary: An Appeal to the British Members

of the Imperial Parliament against the Extermination of the Irish People, 2nd edn (London:C. Gilpin 1850), 9.

27 [Thomas Davis], Emigrationno remedy, The Citizen, vol. 1, December 1839, 73-83. Davisin turn drew on the arguments for Irish under-population and for the vibrancy of small farmsin William Sharman Crawford,A Defence of the Small Farmers of Ireland (Dublin: JoshuaPorter 1839).

28 Howick to Senior, 14 March, 18 May 1837: NSP, C118, C120.

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PETER GRAY 55

then Whig cabinet, although the plan for public works on railway projectsfailed to make it through Parliament. The argument that Ireland was less over-populated than its resources were under-utilized came increasingly into voguein the 1840s, and mirrored the rise of the Anti-Corn Law League with itsanti-protectionist and anti-landlord rhetoric. This was a point on which thearistocratic leadership of the Whig party was increasingly divided. While allwere committed to upholding the just rights of property, the leadership di-vided increasingly into those moderate liberals who were sceptical of ex-treme free trade doctrine and concerned at its social implications (a groupwhich not surprisingly included the Irish landlords Palmerston, Lansdowneand Clanricarde), and those more advanced Whigs who sought to put them-

selves at the head of (and thus to channel) the seemingly irresistible rise ofmiddle-class opinion. Gentry politicians who had political bases in industrialor commercial regionssuch as Charles Wood in the West Riding of York-shire, Grey himself in the North-east,29 and to some extent Russell in the Cityof Londonincreasingly felt obliged to respond to their constituents expec-tations. In the case of Grey and Wood, this was seconded by an ideologicalcommitment to the archetypal Victorian middle-class attitudes of personalpiety, a moralist tendency to hold individuals responsible for their social con-dition and an optimistic belief that progress was inevitable so long as people

adhered to the virtues of industry, thrift and respectability.30

Central to thismoralist ideological worldview was that the Irish peasant was inferior, notinherently because of his race, but because of his (remediable) moral and be-havioural inadequacies. The Irish landlord class (mostly of English and Scotsorigin) was deemed to be equally or, given their more elevated social positionand responsibilities, more delinquent. All classes could be reformed by a com-bination of the imposition of rigidly moral administrative mechanisms (suchas the new English Poor Law) and subjecting Irish society to the full force ofnatural laws.

As British opinion hardened against Irish landlords in the wake of theDevon Commission report into Irish landholding in 1845, the mismanage-ment and improvidence of the landed class rather than over-population cameto be regarded as the true cause of the plight of the Irish poor. To the Whig-radical Morning Chronicle of 22 February 1845 Irish landlords were guilty ofwholesale, unmitigated murderwe can designate the system by no othertermwhich has converted Ireland into a lazar-house of disease and destitu-tion, and a charnel-house of death. Thomas Campbell Foster, the TimesCommissioner whose forthright opinions were reprinted in sundry other

journals, was equally damning of landlord practice and effusive on the poten-tial Irish wealth that was latent in the soil. Extensive emigration, he declared

29 As Lord Howick he was MP for Sunderland 1841-5.30 For Woods character and ideas, see John Anthony Jowett, Sir Charles Wood (1800-85): A

Case Study in the Formation of Liberalism in Mid-Victorian England, M.Phil. 1981, Univer-sity of Leeds.

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56 Patterns of Prejudice 33:4

in October 1845, was the very last measure that should be advised or re-sorted to.31 Such Manchester School optimism was premised on a labourtheory of value that regarded capital as merely accumulated labour and whichdenied that there was a fixed wages-fund limiting the number that could beprofitably employed at any one time. What Ireland needed, Foster and his(numerous) allies claimed, was vigorous entrepreneurship and disciplined ex-ertion. To many the blight appeared providentially intended to sweep awaythe obstacles of protectionism, landlord exploitation and peasant indolence,all of which were held to be grounded on the unnatural dependence of theIrish poor on the potato system.32 For these critics, Irish backwardness wasgrounded in moral and behavioural deviance from British norms: the Irish

people (each class in its respective sphere) needed to be dragged into Britishnessthrough enforced self-reliance.Some economically heterodox liberals such as John Stuart Mill and

William Thornton proposed the internal colonization of Ireland by puttingthe poor to work on reclaiming their own plots from wasteland, althoughmoralist liberals regarded this degree of intervention in property rights asillegitimate. Thorntons Over-Population and Its Remedy, published in early1846, was a landmark in this literature. Thornton argued that it was possibleto prevent the operation of the Malthusian population-trap by reforming the

social structure in the interest of the peasant. The least objectionable and mostpracticable way of introducing land reform was through an extensive stateprogramme of Irish wasteland reclamation, settling some 200,000 families asfreeholders or peasant proprietors on small but viable plots. This body ofyeomanry would be given an incentive to exert themselves and restrain theirnumbers by the prospect of property-owning, while the remainder of thepeasantry would be relieved by the diminution of competition for land andemployment.33 Radical reviewers criticized Thornton for refusing to aban-don Malthusian theory in its entirety, but most responded enthusiastically to

his denial of general over-population, and his proposed remedies for Ireland.Thorntons scheme of wasteland reclamation became the most popular

radical response to the Irish crisis in the late 1840s, and was taken up byeconomists like Mill and Poulett Scrope as well as by numerous British andIrish pamphleteers. For the anti-Malthusian Scrope, such a scheme combinedwith a generous poor law would create the preconditions for prosperity, for itwas notorious that Ireland possesses the means within herself of maintainingand employing twice or four times the number of her existing population.34

31 The Times, 17 October 1845.32 See, for example, The Nonconformist, 19 August 1846.33 William Thornton, Over-Population and Its Remedy, or, an Inquiry into the Extent and Causes

of Distress Prevailing amongst the Labouring Classes of the British Islands and into the Meansof Remedying It (London: Longman 1846).

34 Poulett Scrope to Russell, 23 June 1846: Public Record Office, London (PRO), Russell Pa-pers, PRO 30/22/5A, ff. 267-74; G. Poulett Scrope, Extracts of Evidence . . . on the Subject ofWaste Lands Reclamation (London: Ridgway 1847).

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Here, then, was a policy proposal that offered an alternative mode of prepar-ing the ground for the reconstruction of Irish society: an internal coloniza-tion to rival the overseas colonization advocated by the Malthusians andIrish landowners.

External or internal colonization?Faced with this choice of external or internal colonization, the governmentchose to adopt neither. State inaction could be read as the consequence ofeither indifference or adherence to laissez-faire, or of preference for othermodes of social reconstruction. Given the considerable attention devoted tothe problem of Ireland in the press and Parliamentand the widespread con-

sensus that social reconstruction and moral reformation were vital if Irelandwas not to be constantly liable to the recurrence of faminecomplete inac-tion seemed unacceptable to public opinion and most ministers. Relief meas-ures to limit mass starvationpublic works, soup kitchens or the augmentedPoor Lawwere all intertwined with and subordinated to a reconstructiveagenda. Except in the area of the food trade, laissez-faire is of limited use inexplaining the policy adopted during the Irish crisis.

Lord Greynow Whig colonial secretaryheld a complex mix of manyof the opinions outlined above; in 1843, for example, he had argued in the

same speech that there was no real want of capital in Ireland, that temporarypublic works were desirable, but that Bullers systematic colonization planswere applicable to Ireland.35 His period in government from 1846-52 wouldreveal which of these generalizations would, in practice, take precedence.

From the Whigs resumption of power in the summer of 1846, state-assisted emigration from Ireland was constantly urged by Lord Monteagle,the former Whig chancellor of the exchequer and an Irish landowner, but nolonger a member of the government. Monteagles standing with the govern-ment was almost immediately undermined by a row with the treasury (now

dominated by Wood as chancellor and the rigidly moralist Charles Trevelyanas assistant secretary) over the completion of Irish relief works. Grey, as partof this political circle, dismissed Monteagles memo on emigration but, con-scious of the need for a degree of personal consistency, added that he wouldconsider the subject. His letter to Russell emphasized his primary concerns:Irish landowners would only be aided if they helped themselves, and the in-terests of the colonies must remain paramount.36 Thus far, Grey saw eye toeye with the prime minister, who was critical of what he regarded asMonteagles sole objectthe relief of Irish landlords from the pressure oftheir cottier tenantryand who agreed that we should . . . endeavour toimprove the condition and moral habits of the Irish before we people ourcolonies with them.37

35 Hansards Parliamentary Debates , 3rd ser., vol. 70, 877-93 (10 July 1843).36 Grey to Russell, 16 October 1846: PRO, Russell Papers, PRO 30/22/5D, ff. 216-17.37 Russell to Grey, 15 October 1846: Durham University Library, Grey Papers.

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58 Patterns of Prejudice 33:4

Russells views of the Irish poor were coloured by the prejudices of theimperial ruling caste, but in his case these were softened by a Foxite Whigpolitical tradition which placed a high priority on Irish reform and which wasantagonistic to what was perceived as a corrupt landed ascendancy. The primeminister was fundamentally anti-Malthusian, believing that Ireland was capa-ble of producing sufficient better-quality food for its existing population anda considerable export surplus. The future is no doubt perilous, he told Woodin October 1846, but if there is capital in Ireland as I believe there is, thecountry will be made to produce food for eight millions of Irish, and fourmillions of English in a few years.38 Russell differed from Grey in believingthat the improvement of physical conditions should run parallel to moral

improvement, as reflected in the ameliorative plans drawn up with Lord Lieu-tenant Bessborough in the run-up to the 1847 parliamentary session. In deny-ing that Ireland as a whole was over-populated, Russell argued that an extensiveprogramme of wasteland reclamation was essential to assist social transition.39

He and Bessborough regarded emigration as a subsidiary matter, of signifi-cance only in relieving specific localities rather than ameliorating the nationalsituation. The state might consider facilitating landowners to assist certainfamilies to emigrate, but young and energetic men and women would be neededin Ireland to rebuild its agriculture.40 Bullers 1843 arguments had not, how-

ever, been forgotten; if emigration was to be of use, Russell believed, it wouldhave to be systematic, as there was no use in sending them from starving atSkibbereen to be starving at Montreal.41 Some provision at least was desir-able for the reception of those who did cross the Atlantic.

Grey and Buller were allocated the task of preparing a policy of emigra-tion, but it soon became clear that neither was enthusiastic, although for dif-ferent reasons. Buller, influenced by his friend John Stuart Mill, wasincreasingly convinced that a major wasteland reclamation scheme, creatingpeasant proprietors, if combined with an efficient poor law, would be the best

response. I dont believe, he wrote in early 1847, that Ireland has a muchlarger population than it might very soon want, and I dont see the wisdom ofspending millions to send Irishmen away from the spot where they may beprofitably employed.42 Bullers interventionism had found in the idea of in-ternal colonization an attractive alternative for the exercise of his political

38 Russell to Wood, 15 October 1846: Cambridge University Library, Hickleton Papers, A4/56/1 (microfilm). He remained of this opinion in January 1847, seeHansards Parliamentary

Debates, 3rd ser., vol. 89, 449 (25 January 1847).39 See Gray, 158-63.40 Bessborough to Russell, 3 November 1846: PRO, Russell Papers, PRO 30/22/5E, ff. 19-20.41 Russell to Bessborough, 29 December 1846, in G. P. Gooch (ed.), The Later Correspondence

of Lord John Russell 1840-78, 2 vols (London: Longmans, Green and Co. 1925), i.168-9.42 Buller memo, Thoughts on the Irish measures of the government, n.d. [1847]: Durham Uni-

versity Library, Grey Papers. Buller thought Canada unsuitable for colonization, and ex-pressed interest in Greys plan only in so far as it might prove a precedent for his Antipodeanvision; Buller memo, n.d. [December 1846], in A. Doughty (ed.), The Elgin-Grey Papers1846-52, 4 vols (Ottawa: Government of Canada 1937), iii.1100-6.

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energies. It was Russells misfortune that Bullers ill-health and prematuredeath in 1848, following Bessboroughs death in May 1847, deprived him ofseveral key allies.

Grey, meanwhile, was becoming ever more committed to the rigid mor-alist orthodoxy shared by his brother-in-law Charles Wood and by CharlesTrevelyan, that if the state intervened, it should not be to create employmentor to give more than what was regarded as the barest minimum of faminerelief, but to construct mechanisms that would coerce the various classes inIreland into meeting their moral responsibilities: the landed to realize the po-tential resources of the country, and the poor to adopt a disciplined attitudeto waged work. For moralists, extending the Irish Poor Law to place the costs

of relief solely on Irish land became the top priority in 1847. In their eyes thepurpose of the Poor Law was not primarily to keep the destitute alive, but topenalize those who were falling short of their respective duties; any stateassistance therefore threatened to impede the vital machine for transformingIrish behaviour.

Greys feeling by late 1846 was that any emigration from Ireland shouldbe voluntary: that is, undertaken at the emigrants own risk and responsibilityor assisted by landlords seeking to consolidate their estates for the purposesof agricultural improvement. State interference should be restricted to mak-

ing arrangements to protect colonial interests from the inevitable evils thatmight follow mass voluntary or landlord-assisted emigration. His basic policywas laid down in a November 1846 letter to the home secretary, Greys cousinand usual political ally, Sir George Grey: the government could not under-take to convey emigrants to Canada, or even pay part of the cost. The reasonwas less the expense to the treasury than the moral hazard this would entail:Nothing is so clear, he wrote

from what we know of the disposition of the people who emigrate as that if under

regulations however strict the government were to undertake to provide convey-ances for emigrants to British America, the shoals who now find their own waythere would at once throw themselves upon the public, and endeavour to get sentout for nothing.

What the state might do was to arrange for village settlements to be createdfor groups of landlord-assisted immigrants, in areas where public works orother employment was available. This would prevent the colonial labour mar-kets and towns from being swamped by the Irish, and could be places for

training in working discipline. Grey, who had long favoured the endowmentof the Catholic Church in Ireland as a potential agency of social control, addedhe thought it wise that Catholic clergy be allocated to the village settlementsas leaders.43 Greys senior administrator at the Colonial Office, T. F. Elliot,

43 Grey to Sir George Grey, 16 November 1846, and Grey memo Emigration, 15 December1846, in Doughty (ed.), iii.1079-81, iii.1086-9.

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60 Patterns of Prejudice 33:4

took a similar view, warning that state assistance risked rendering a naturalemigration into one that was artificial.44

The village settlement scheme was ill-considered and ill-fated. Cana-dian response was negative, and the colonial land companies refused to co-operate with a plan they considered wholly impracticable.45 Irish landownersmeanwhile declared the scheme irrelevant and demanded substantial state aidto meet the imperial crisis resulting from the potato failure.46 Landed opin-ion coalesced in 1847 around a scheme for the state-assisted emigration oftwo million from Ireland to Canada, proposed by the young Conservative J.R. Godley,47 and became increasingly shrill as the governments Poor Lawamendment bill moved towards implementation. This reluctance to bear the

responsibilities of property in turn hardened the hostility of British liberalopinion to such initiatives. The Times expressed relief that the villages schemehad been abandoned by the opening of the parliamentary session, and de-clared that any Irish assisted emigration to Canada would be a crime againstits Saxon inhabitants.48 Such racialization of the Irish threat was more pro-nounced in that paper than most others from the outset of the Famine, but itbecame more widespread in the British and North American press in responseto the influx of Irish famine refugees in 1847. Aware of such sentiment, Greywas content to let drop a policy to which he had little attachment.49

The scale of the prospective voluntary emigration across the Atlanticin 1847 was grossly underestimated by the Colonial Land and EmigrationCommissioners, who were responsible under Grey for the regulation of thetraffic. T. F. Elliot estimated at the start of the year that it was physicallyimpossible for more than 50,000 to be conveyed to British North America, anumber that could probably be absorbed in the colonial labour market (theactual number landed in 1846 had been some 25,000). In fact more than 106,000were to embark in 1847many flying in panic from famine and feverofwhom 17,445 (a wholly unprecedented 16 per cent) were officially recorded

as dying en route or shortly after arrival.50 Unprepared for the catastrophe,

44 T. F. Elliot to Lansdowne, 23 January 1847, in Doughty (ed.), iii.1096-7.45 MacDonagh, Irish emigration, 344-5; T. F. Elliot, Memorandum on villages, 23 January

1847, in Doughty (ed.), iii.1110-13.46 [Anon.], The Measures Which Alone Can Ameliorate Effectually the Condition of the Irish

People (London: Hatchard 1847), 50-68; T. St Leger Alcock, Observations on the Poor ReliefBill for Ireland, and Its Bearing on the Important Subject of Emigration (London: Ridgway1847).

47 John Robert Godley,An Answer to the Question What Is to Be Done with the UnemployedLabourers of the United Kingdom? (London: Stewart and Murray 1847); Colonization fromIreland: Report of the Select Committee of the House of Lords on Colonization from Ireland,P.P. 1847 (737), vol. 6, 183-205; Copy of the memorial addressed by noblemen, gentlemenand landed proprietors to Lord John Russell, 23 March 1847, Colonization from Ireland:Report of the Select Committee of the House of Lords on Colonization from Ireland, 776-91.

48 The Times, 26 January, 7 April 1847.49 Grey to Elgin, 2 February 1847, in Doughty (ed.), i.10-12.50 Colonial Land and Emigration Commissioners, Return of the tonnage of vessels which cleared

out with passengers for North America etc., 23 January 1847, and T. F. Elliot, Memorandum

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the authorities at the ports of departure and arrival were overwhelmed. Medi-cal inspection of emigrants, and enforcement of the 1842 Passenger Acts re-strictions regarding overcrowding and supplies of food and water, had onlybeen erratically enforced before 1847, when both became a nullity. Similarly,the quarantine stations at the British North American portsGrosse le forQuebec and Partridge Island for St John, New Brunswickwere rapidly over-whelmed. By the end of May 1847 forty ships were queuing in the St Law-rence waiting to disembark, while Grosse le held over 1,100 patients sufferingin terrible conditions. Ultimately up to 200,000 would be spent on the reliefof immigrants in Canada in 1847, but this was still inadequate and tardy, espe-cially as Grey insisted relief in North America be subject to the same test of

less-eligibility as that permitted under the Irish Poor Law.51

The failure of policyCould the government have done more to reduce the sufferings of the mi-grants of 1847? This question cannot be separated from an evaluation of thefamine relief measures adopted in Ireland itself. It was the epidemics of feverand dysentery resulting from a collapse of income, malnutrition and massflight in search of relief or escape that led to so many deaths. More rigorousinspection, or the introduction of the commissioners suggestions for more

stringent Passenger Acts, would have excluded many fever-carriers, but at theprice of raising the cost of the crossing beyond the abilities of the poor, andworsening the conditions in Liverpool and the Irish ports.52 This was anywayruled out by Grey as an impediment to natural movement.53 It was onlyafter the humanitarian outcry that followed the publication of Stephen DeVeres firsthand account of steerage conditions on the Canada crossing thatthe Passenger Acts were strengthened in 1848 and 1849, and even then theimprovements were more marked on paper than in practice.54

What the government could not afford to ignore was the anger expressed

by Canadian opinion at the conditions witnessed in 1847, and the fever epi-demic that had accompanied the influx of the Irish poor and rapidly spread tothe North American cities. Public bodies petitioned the imperial authoritiesnot to permit the helpless, the starving, the sick and diseased, unequal andunfit as they are to face the hardships of a settlers life, to embark for theseshores.55 From May of that year Lord Elgin, the governor, regularly reported

on villages, 23 January 1847, in Doughty (ed.), iii.1110-13; Eighth General Report of theColonial Land and Emigration Commissioners, P.P. 1847-8, (961), vol. 26, 15.51 Grey to Elgin, 19 July 1847, in Doughty (ed.), i.57.52 Colonial Land and Emigration Commissioners to Hawes, 20 November 1847, in Doughty

(ed.), iv.1324-39.53 MacDonagh, Irish emigration, 345-8.54 Grey to Elgin, 27 January 1848, Stephen De Vere to T. F. Elliot, 30 November 1847, in Doughty

(ed.), iv.1339-47; MacDonagh, The regulation of the emigrant traffic, 167-76.55 Address of the Legislative Assembly of Canada, 25 June 1847, Papers Relative to Emigration:

Part I: British Provinces in North America, P.P. 1847-8 (50), vol. 47, 13.

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62 Patterns of Prejudice 33:4

to London on a widespread concern that the stronger restrictions imposed onimmigrants by the US authorities were channelling the poorest and least ableto Canada.56 Anger was also directed at the inhuman Irish landlords whowere clearing their estates, particularly at Lord Palmerston, whose shiploadsof assisted emigrants from Sligo arrived in New Brunswick and Quebec latein the season.57 Canadian outrage at such a high-profile case of landlord-as-sisted emigration did not bode well for any state project. The Toronto Exam-inerdeclared on 20 November: Is this province to be turned into one vastlazarhouseour country swamped, our energies blastedour prospects ru-ined in order to relieve the great landgluttons of Europe from the just conse-quences of their own misdoings and crimes?58

Conscious of the dangers to political stability in Canada, where French-Canadian separatism and pro-US radicalism continued to threaten Britishhegemony, Grey reluctantly accepted the case for Canadian compensationfor immigration expenditure, and agreed to allow the provincial assemblies tolegislate to protect themselves from any repeat of the 1847 influx by increas-ing the immigration taxes and bonds charged on shipping agents. The taxwas doubled to 10s. per capita for ships placed in quarantine, and a graduatedscale of extra charges was placed on ships arriving after 1 September.59 Thisraised fares to Canada above those to New York, and had the desired effect:

Irish migration to Canada in 1848 fell by three-quarters to around 25,000,and there were few complaints of destitution in that year.60

Grey pointed to the scale of voluntary emigration of 1847 as a vindica-tion of state inaction, but the emigration debate was kept alive by the worsen-ing distress in Ireland, and the repeated claims by advocates of assistance thatthe chaotic exodus had not extended to the very poorest who were most inneed of help. Evidence given by Godley, Father Mathew and Aubrey De Vereto the House of Lords select committee on colonization from Ireland in thesummer of 1847 gave hope to landlord opinion, but also provoked the sarcas-

tic outrage ofThe Times, which demanded an exclusively British coloniza-tion instead.61 Grey, Wood and Trevelyan were convinced that the new PoorLaw must now operate without hindrance, but other ministers felt that someremedial auxiliaries were essential. From the middle of 1847 Russell himselfbegan to advocate much more strongly state assistance to emigration as partof a wider series of comprehensive measures. Whig-liberal landlords withwestern properties, such as Palmerston and Redington, had supported this

56 Elgin to Grey, 7 May 1847, in Doughty (ed.), i.34-7.57 Elgin to Grey, 13 July, 12 November 1847, in Doughty (ed.), i.58-9, 79-80.58 Cited in Donald MacKay,Flight from Famine: The Coming of the Irish to Canada (Toronto:

McClelland and Stewart 1990), 290.59 Grey to Elgin, 18 November 1847, in Doughty (ed.), i.78-9; Eighth General Report of the

Colonial Land and Emigration Commissioners, P.P. 1847-8 (961), vol. 26, 14-17.60 Elgin to Grey, 28 June 1848, in Doughty (ed.), iv.1372-5.61 [John Anster], Colonization from Ireland,North British Review , vol. 8, February 1848, 421-

64; The Times, 14 October 1847.

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62 Palmerston to Grey, 20 December 1846: Durham University Library, Grey Papers; Redingtonto Labouchere, 20 January 1847: West Sussex Record Office, Chichester, Bessborough Pa-pers, F. 337. For Palmerstons efforts to reduce the population on his Sligo estates throughassisted emigration, see Report of the Select Committee of the House of Lords on Coloniza-tion from Ireland; Together with Minutes of Evidence, P.P. 1847 (737), vol. 6, 159-68.

63 Hansard Parliamentary Debates , 3rd ser., vol. 92, 899 (1 June 1847). State-assisted emigrationwas regarded by Irish landed opinion as a vital precondition for Irish improvement; LordRosse, Letters on the State of Ireland, 2nd edn (London: J. Hatchard 1847), 24-5; [Isaac Butt],The famine in the land. What has been done, and what is to be done, Dublin University

Magazine, vol. 29, April 1847, 529-35.64 Russell memo, State of Ireland, July 1847: PRO, Russell Papers, PRO 30/22/6D, ff. 84-7;Clarendon to Russell, 12 July 1847: Bodleian Library, Oxford, Clarendon Deposit Irish (CDI),letterbook I; Russell to Grey, 2 August 1847: Durham University Library, Grey Papers.

65 Grey to Elgin, 19 April, 16 June 1847, in Doughty (ed.), i.24-5, 47-8.66 F. Hincks, Memo on the projected Halifax and Quebec rail road, 18 December 1848, in

Doughty (ed.), iv.1425-7.67 Grey to Elgin, 22 March 1848, in Doughty (ed.), i.126-7; Lord Grey, and his plans of coloni-

sation,Frasers Magazine, vol. 35, June 1847, 738-49.68 Grey to Elgin, 27 July 1848, in Doughty (ed.), i.206-8.

consistently,62 but Russell had until then been suspicious of assisted emigra-tion proposals as a manoeuvre by landlords to avoid meeting their personalresponsibilities.

It was only when wastelands reclamation was abandoned as a leadingremedial measure due to parliamentary and cabinet obstruction that Russellturned to emigration in earnest, in the hope that the expressions of parlia-mentary sympathy for the principle from leading Conservatives would renderit politically practicable.63 In July 1847 Grey was urged to prepare a plan tofacilitate emigration through the provision of employment on the Halifax-Quebec railway project as the first step.64 The railway was regarded as a workof imperial interest vital if the British North American colonies were to be

further integrated and put into a position to compete with the United States.Grey also believed it important but, true to his moralist preoccupations, in-sisted that as the colonies would be the chief beneficiaries the bulk of the costmust be met from Canadian resources.65 His reservations and the fiscal diffi-culties which followed the British financial crisis of October 1847 and theonset of recession in the Canadian timber trade ensured that little progresswas made. The Canadian administration continued to plead poverty through-out the following years.66 Reluctant to abandon the railway, Grey toyed againwith the idea of concentrations of cheap immigrant labourin this case to be

under strict military disciplinebut this idea was a spin-off from a policydesigned to stabilize the situation in New Zealand, and was not popular inCanada.67 Grey admitted that his primary interest in the military labourersscheme arose from the attraction of using cheap labour for Canadian worksand by strict discipline civilizing what he termed the semibarbarian immi-grants from the Irish West.68

The government generally had responded to the good harvest, fallingfood prices and absence of potato blight in autumn 1847 with complacency.However, Trevelyans claim that the Famine was over was soon exploded.

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64 Patterns of Prejudice 33:4

While the winter of 1847-8, which witnessed the collapse of the Poor Law inmuch of the West, convinced Wood and Grey of the imperative of adheringstrictly to moralist dogma, it impelled the prime minister and Lord Clarendon(the new lord lieutenant) to look desperately for measures of amelioration.Amidst this increasing polarization, a developing rapprochement betweenMonteagle and some members of the government resulted in greater consid-eration being given to a comprehensive scheme, including some measure ofemigration, in 1848.69 Two great obstacles remained: finding the requisite fundsand obtaining cabinet agreement to a coherent plan. Grey remained hostileon the grounds of the expense to Britain, the indignation of the colonies andthe continuing need for Ireland to be compelled to save herself through moral

exertion.70

By the end of 1847 the parameters of relief and emigration policy wereestablished; the following two years were marked by the failure of the primeministers half-hearted proposals and the collapse of any relief expenditure inIreland above purely nominal levels. Neither the majority of Irish landlordsnor the British taxpayers were prepared to find the resources to keep the starv-ing of Ireland alive or assist them to leave their stricken country to find em-ployment elsewhere. Russell continued to be undermined within his owncabinet by moralistic ideologues such as Grey, who in turn conspired with

the editor ofThe Times in late 1848 to stir up a populist campaign againstcolonization from Ireland.71 Russells threat of resignation if the cabinet re-jected his final assisted-emigration proposal in early 1849 was ignored; theprime ministerone of the weakest of the nineteenth centurywas no matchfor a combination of anti-Irish prejudice and hard-line Manchester Schooldogma. Greys line now became punitive: assisted emigration would do noth-ing but let the Irish off the moral hook by removing the vital incentives forself-improvement.72

A social experiment?Ultimately state-assisted emigration from Ireland accounted for a numeri-cally insignificant fraction of the over one million who left between 1846 and1851. Only several thousands were assisted to emigrate from a number ofIrish unions under the revised Poor Law regulations of 1849. A few hundredmore evictees were directly aided by the Board of Woods and Forests to leavethe Crown estates of Ballykilcline and Kingwilliamstown for North America.An additional modest experiment in assisting some 2,000 Irish orphan girls toemigrate to Australia, at colonial expense, was terminated in 1850 after com-

69 Russell to Clarendon, 2 October 1847: CDI, Box 43, and Clarendon to Grey, 29 November1847: CDI, letterbook I.

70 Grey to Clarendon, 4 December 1847: Durham University Library, Grey Papers.71 Russell to Clarendon, 20 December 1848: CDI, Box 43, and Clarendon to Russell, 6 January

1849: CDI, letterbook III; The Times, 26 December 1848, 3 January 1849.72 Grey memo, Remarks on emigration, poor law and Ireland, 18 December 1848: Durham

University Library, Grey Papers.

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plaints about their unsuitability for domestic service.73 Landlord-assistedemigrants added a few thousands more, but despite the high-profile activitiesof Palmerston, Lansdowne and a handful of others, the vast majority of thosewho left did so with no more assistance than the remittances provided by therelatives and friends who had preceded them.74

Arguably the failure to adopt an emigration policy for Ireland in 1846-50 paralleled precisely the failure to implement an effective relief policy and arealistic (i.e. state-assisted) reconstruction programme. This failure was rec-ognized by many contemporaries, including (however belatedly and incoher-ently) the prime minister. Ireland was ultimately the victim of anideologically-driven social experiment, which was underpinned by a range of

popular attitudes from colonialist racism through a providentialist theodicywhich predicted ultimate good from the transitory evil of crop failure, to amiddle-class hostility towards landlords in general, and Irish ones in particu-lar. The moralism shared by Grey, Wood and Trevelyan triumphed due to itscoherent vision, its entrenched position in the treasury, the vibrant support itreceived from British public opinion and the uncertainties and divisions of itsopponents.

The horrors of the famine era gave ideologues like Grey no reason toquestion their assumptions. Looking back on his period in office in 1852, he

expressed self-satisfaction with the policy adopted. The governments refusalto assist emigration to Canada or to provide employment on arrival had beenjustified, he argued, by results. Irish emigration had become a spontaneousself-regulating flow, with private remittances substituting for a Wakefieldianland fund as its driving force, and thus obviating any need for unnaturalinterference by the state.75 The introduction of free trade in 1846, introducingthe wholesome operation of the natural laws of society, had also removedthe necessity of supporting any mass assisted emigration to Australia by un-leashing the dynamism of the British economy and stimulating the demand

for labour.76 This complacency should not be confused with indifference; thefailure of an emigration policy reflected, as in so much else of the Britishresponse to the Irish Famine, the triumph of a vacuous and callous dogma.

PETER GRAY is a lecturer in history at the University of Southampton. He is the authorofThe Irish Famine (1995) andFamine, Land and Politics: British Government andIrish Society, 1843-1850 (1999).

73 Christine Kinealy, This Great Calamity: The Irish Famine 1845-52 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan

1994), 309-27. For the Ballykilcline case, see Robert J. Scally, The End of Hidden Ireland:Rebellion, Famine and Emigration (New York: Oxford University Press 1995).74 David Fitzpatrick estimates that up to 8 per cent of immigrants arriving at Qubec in 1846-50

had received some assistance from landlords, the state or charities. American ports of entrywould have seen far fewer. David Fitzpatrick, Emigration, 1801-70, in W. E. Vaughan (ed.),

A New History of Ireland, Vol. 5: Ireland under the Union, I: 1801-70 (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press 1989), 592.

75 Earl Grey, The Colonial Policy of Lord John Russells Administration, 2nd edn, 2 vols (Lon-don: R. Bentley 1853), i.239-45.

76 Ibid., i.329-35.

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