clear that at least half the crop of potatoes in Ireland was infected, ‘either destroyed or unfit for the food of man’, that the same would hold next year, and that this spelled doom for Irish peasants, who unlike the English or Scottish relied almost entirely on potatoes for food. On the brink of a major crisis and with all the accumulated arguments in its favour, the pressure to allow the free entry of grain into Ireland had been enormous.
To pass his repeal of Corn Laws, Peel had relied on support from the Whigs, almost as angry with him for stealing their signature issue as the Tories were for his somersault on it. Both parties conspired to topple him the next year. The Whigs won the election that followed, and Wilson was among the new arrivals: sent from Westbury in Wiltshire, a constituency Radnor had found him, in which he beat the West Indian planter Matthew Higgins by 21 votes. Months later Wilson was appointed to the India Board. The Economist was now edited from the heart of government, just as the new Whig regime faced full-scale famine in Ireland. What role did the Economist play in the official response to it? In accordance with the laissez-faire outlook of the ministers in charge of the emergency, cheap provisions were expected to flow from the act of repeal straight into Ireland.70 Would these suffice? Late in November 1847 the Economist grew alarmed at rumours that a grant of £3 million was about to be made to Ireland to allow it to buy food, urging its countrymen to reflect that this would increase the price of grain, not the supply, causing hardship in England to alleviate it in Ireland. ‘Charity was a natural English error.’ But it could be corrected. The only ways to mitigate scarcity were ‘to procure more food or eat less’. Or to at last throw open the ports, in which case, ‘any supply that America could afford would then be brought hither by the regular course of trade, and employment – not eleemosynary aid – would enable people to purchase it.’71 The result of following the Economist’s prescriptions was a utopian social experiment on par with the better-known holocausts of the twentieth century.72 During the worst of the famine years of 1845–1849, one and a half million people died out of a population of 8 million, and another million fled.
The British government showed its commitment to the invisible hand of the market throughout, with the Economist critical of even the smallest departure from its rigours. In 1845–1846 Peel had shown insufficient firmness. He had ordered small batches of Indian corn to be bought discreetly by Baring Brothers in North America, as a reserve to keep prices in check; but the severity of the famine forced him to release small dribbles at select government depots. In 1846–47 the Russell administration, in which Wilson served, announced that it would buy no more foreign grain: Charles Wood, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Charles Trevelyan, Assistant Secretary, blamed Peel’s purchases the year before for paralysing trade by deterring dealers and merchants from importing adequate supplies on their own.73 No forgiveness was to be shown to small tenants unable to pay rent, or who faced starvation if they did. Under no circumstances were exports to be restricted, as some in Ireland were demanding. True, even as people scrounged for nettles, thousands of tons of wheat, oats, cattle, pigs, eggs and butter were sailing out of the country. Yet this was all for the best. For in a free trade world the high prices these articles obtained abroad would allow merchants to buy and import cheap food to make up the lost potatoes.74 In practice what private enterprise there was in Ireland never imported enough, or at prices most could afford.
The correspondence between high officials was laden with nostrums lifted from the Economist, as the paper itself acknowledged when reviewing a parliamentary selection of them in 1847. But this only spurred it to attack compromises made on humanitarian grounds, in full knowledge of the errors committed. ‘We totally deny that what is wrong in principle can be right in practice. If a principle be true there can be no exception to its application, and least of all can it be abandoned or neglected in an extreme case.’75 The paper was aware that Adam Smith had sanctioned public works in like situations. But it doubted if he would still approve, and defended him from a hostile pamphlet, The True Cure for Ireland, which called it ‘perfect folly to be dancing a Will-o’-the-wisp dance, after the abstract principles of political economy, as laid down by Adam Smith, for it ought to be remembered he wrote for a country advanced in social position and high civilization.’ On the contrary, retorted the Economist, ‘Smith wrote for all time, and of all time’.76
Wilson not only ensured that his paper constantly firmed up civil servants and politicians over Ireland: he soon enlisted them to craft the Economist itself. George Villiers, the fourth Earl of Clarendon, and one of his original backers, was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in the spring of 1847. He was in constant touch with Wilson, feeding him data on the famine – from potato yields to confidential reports on Irish Poor Law returns intended for cabinet eyes only. On taking up his post in relatively optimistic mood, Clarendon asked for Economist articles on landlord-tenant relations. Did Wilson have ‘any hints’ on the ideal form of lease? A few months later he asked him to ‘prepare the public mind’ for his plans to effect large scale emigration out of Ireland. As one ostensibly liberal policy after another failed to do any good, however, both began to despair of the whole race. A crackdown was needed.77
When a number of landlords were assassinated in the winter of 1847, Clarendon became convinced an armed insurrection was brewing and threatened to resign unless he was given extraordinary powers to protect life and property. The Economist supported him: the ‘special duty’ of government in such a country was not to tamper with the labour or money markets but to counter the turbulence that ‘had driven away capital’; ‘the more dangerous the state of society becomes the more necessary it is that order and security should be enforced.’78 A Coercion Bill received the royal assent in December, and as Engels observed, ‘the Lord Lieutenant was not slow in taking advantage of the despotic powers with which this new law invests him.’79 In the summer of 1848, Clarendon wrote to Wilson that the bill was a ‘complete success’, thanking him for articles ‘exhibiting your accurate knowledge of Ireland and friendly feeling towards myself’. As for the country he was ruling, he felt ‘like the governor of an ill-guarded jail … they have been made a nation of political gossips instead of agricultural labourers, and as they sow idleness so they reap misery’.80
When an uprising did occur that summer it was not the work of the starving masses, as officials had feared, but of a small band of intellectuals in Tipperary calling themselves Young Ireland, easily subdued by local constables. They were ‘the laughing stock of the world’, jeered the Economist. Still, the precautions taken by government – suspending habeas corpus, dispatching an extra 15,000 troops and ordering the fleet to patrol the coast – were sensible.81 The Economist urged their extension for twelve months and that martial law be declared. Trials by jury should be cancelled: military tribunals alone could be relied on to punish rebels. ‘It is liberty, not despotism, which acts as an irritant to the Irish constitution. It simply, as doctors say, does not agree with it. The oriental element – mental prostration before power – is paramount.’ ‘Powerful, resolute, but just repression’ would render the Irishman ‘not only submissive, but content’. It continued:
These suggestions will sound strange in English and in liberal ears. But it is time the truth should be spoken boldly out that the ideal of equal laws for England and Ireland is a delusion, a mockery and a mischief … not till Ireland has been trained and inured to respect and obey the law by years of rigid and severe enforcement, will she have learnt those lessons of justice, honesty, truth, and subordination, which can alone entitle her, by sharing English virtues, to share English liberties and English institutions.82
This was enough to make even Clarendon hesitate: ‘I would like to hear how your articles have been received by the middle classes in England, and whether they are prepared to go your lengths. Pray let me know this as it may to a certain extent guide my proceedings.’ Clarendon had earlier voiced doubts about the lengths to which Wilson was taking laissez-faire in Ireland, feeling that repression must be coupled with relief, and by 1849 he implored Russell not to leave the Irish, in Trevelyan’s phrase, to ‘the operation of natural causes’.83
