Mid-July - Potato blight is first reported in Belgium, quickly spreads to Holland & France and by mid August is found in Southern England. Makes it's first appearance in Ireland along the east coast in Wexford & Wicklow. By mid-September there are widespread adverse reports. [The recently published Devon Commission Report asserted 4.7 million Irish rely on the potato as their principle source of subsistence and some 3 million eat 'nothing but potatos and water'.]
Early August - Prompted by the release of the Devon Inquiry Thomas Campbell Foster is dispatched by the Times as 'an independent commissioner' to report on the agrarian situation in Ireland. His articles were more widely read and reviewed than the Devon report itself and constituted an important framework within which the Irish situation was appraised by the public and policy makers alike in the early months of the famine. In summary, he argued social change could only be affected by a resident and active landlord class as nothing could be expected from 'the corrupt middleman' and 'degraded tenantry'. Pre-existing property rights were sacrosanct and no tenant rights should be extended beyond some degree of compensation for improvements (ie Sharman Crawford's proposal of an extension down south of the 'Ulster Custom' was rejected out of hand), Change must come from above, landed classes had hitherto neglected their duties for reasons of 'wilful negligence', 'financial embarassment' and 'intimidation'; further prohibitions on subdivision would compel remaining middlemen to give up their positions & legislation should be introduced to deal with 'embarassments' to facilitate the transfer of land. Such measures would " ...let the life blood and energy, and enterprise of capitalists into the lifeless masses of large, encumbered, unimproved, helpless estates. The will become real owners of the land, and will give employment upon it, and stimulate industry. Employment will bring peace. Industry will bring wealth." Only the state could provide the required security wherein these measures may be enacted and this enatiled necessarily strong coercive action.
9th August - Parliamentary Session for 1845 closes. Proroguing of parliament was to be a consistent source of grievance for many Repeal M.P's and the Irish nationalist press; the crisis for them evidently requiring the ongoing attention of Westminster.
13th October - Peel to Sir James Graham (Home Secretary); "The accounts of the state of the potato crop in Ireland are becoming very alarming. Lord Heytesbury says the reports which reach the government are very unsatisfactory .. there is such a tendency to exaggeration and inaccuracy in Irish reports that delay in acting upon them is always desirable, but I foresee the necessity that may be imposed upon us at an early period of considering whether there is not that well grounded apprehension of actual scarcity that justifies and compels the adoption of every means of relief which the exercise of of the prerogative of legislation may afford. I have no confidence in such remedies as the prohibition of exports or the stoppage of distilleries. The removal of the impediments to import is the only effective remedy."
17th October - Peel to (Protectionist) Lord Lieutenant Heytesbury; "The remedy, is the removal of all impediments to the import of all kinds of human food - that is the total and absolute repeal for ever of all duties on all articles of subsistence".
"What the Irish puplic thought about the impending famine, and what they said about it was, that the oat crop was unusually fine and more than sufficient to feed the whole population, and that it should be kept in the country for that purpose. A most obvious remedy; but the Premier had other plans in his head, and could not see this one, because he would not. Like Nelson on a memorable occasion, he persisited in keeping his telescope to the eye that suited his own purpose. He does not condescend to give a reason for his views, he only expresses them. He had no confidence in the old-fashioned remedy of keeping food in the country, but he did put his trust in the remedy of sending 3,000 miles for Indian corn - a food which, he elsewhere admits he fears the Irish cannot be induced to use. He thought it quite right, and in accordance with political science, to allow, or rather to compel Ireland, threatened with famine, to sell her last loaf and then go to America to buy maize, the preparation of which she did not understand. Political economists will hardly deny that people ought not to sell what they require for themselves - that they should only part with surplus food. But to sell wheat and oats, and oatmeal and flour with one hand and buy Indian corn with the other to avoid starvation could be hardly regarded as the act of a sane man. "There had been - it was hinted, and we believe truly, In Lord John Russell's letter from Edinburgh - some talk in the cabinet, and there was some discussion in the press, about opening the Irish ports by proclamation. Opening the Irish ports! Why the real remedy, had any interference with the law been necessary, would have been to close them - the torrent of food was running outwards." So did the leading Tory periodical (Quarterly Review) put this obvious truth some months later."
- from Canon John O' Rourke's History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847, Ch. III, pg 98. [First published in 1874, O' Rourke's account long remained the standard academic study of the famine and was eclipsed in popularity, in Ireland at least, only by Mitchel's Last Conquest of Ireland (perhaps).]
28th October - First meeting of the Mansion House Committee set up by Dublin Corporation to investigate and suggest remedies to the imminent crisis. O' Connell proposes the following resolutions be adopted and presented via special delegation to the Lord Lieutenant (Heytesbury);
(1) the immediate cessation of all distilling and brewing,
(2) the export of provisions of every kind to foreign countries should be imediately prohibited adducing examples of Belgium, Holland, Russia and Turkey who had all closed their ports for export in analogous circumstances. [He excluded England and the rest of the UK from this criterion]
(3) A loan of £1.5 million to be raised on the proceeds of Irish Woods and Forests (estimated at £74,000 per annum) to be used as a 'sinking fund' from which to purchase food on international markets.
(4) Further monies to be raised by taxing absentees 50% and resident landlords 10% [Value of absentee rental is estimated at between £3m and £6m. There doesn't appear to be any reliable figures available but the gross rental of Ireland at this time is about £14m and the rate of absenteeism reckoned at between a fifth and a third.]
(5) Relief works to be established in each county &
(6) Projected railway works to be commenced forthwith, 'so that the people be put to work from one end of the country to the other, and let them be paid in food'
(7) That public granaries ought to be established in various parts of the country, the corn to be sold to the people at moderate prices.
31st October - Emergency cabinet meeting called by Peel; "Can we vote public money for the sustenance of any considerable portion of the peopleon account of actual or apprehended scarcity and maintain in full operation the existing restrictions on the free import of grain? ... I am bound to say, declared Peel, "my impression is we cannot".
3rd November - Mansion House deputation to the Viceroy's residence in the Phoenix Park is received 'coolly'. As O' Rourke describes it (Ch.II, pg.75); "As they were about to withdraw, O' Connell made an observation about distilleries. Lord Heytesbury, not condescending to mention him by name, said, that the observation of the gentlemen who had spoken was one deserving of much consideration, and one which had not been overlooked by the government, when it had the matter under discussion; and again began bowing them out, "which", writes one of those present, was distinctly understood, and the deputation retired."
4th November - 'They may starve! Such in spirit, if not in words, was the reply given yesterday by the English Viceroy to the deputation which prayed that the food of this kingdom be preserved, lest the people thereof perish" - Following day's leader from the Freeman's Journal.
Early November - Peel secretly authorises purchase of £100,000 worth of American Indian corn (maize) via Baring Bros. These supplies would eventually arrive between February and June 1846 to be released onto the market to coincide with the traditional 'hungry months' of June, July & August. £46,000 of maize and oatmeal were also purchased in England. Between freight, kiln-drying and grinding the total outlay amounted to £185,000. Government supplied food thus secured amounted to some 44 million lbs (20,000 tons) of Indian corn and oatmeal, a quantity thought sufficient to feed 490,000 persons for three months at a rate of 1lb per day.
A Central Relief Commission was next set up to oversee the distribution of this meal co-ordinating with (it was assumed & expected) locally raised landlord-led relief committees. Peel was pinning his hopes on a vigorous response from the landed gentry; "Our main reliance must be placed on the co-operation of the landed interest with local aid". The precedents were not favouable however. In the last food crisis, the partial famine of 1839, Capt Chads, officer in charge of relief, wrote; "after having visited the most distressed areas from Bantry to Lough Swilly .. there had hardly been a single instance in which adequate relief might not have been afforded to the poor without calling for aid from Government but the landlords were looking to their future rents only and setting aside the calls of justice, duty and humanity"
The government were not to bear the burden of charges, rather the meal would be distributed from special depots at cost price to the local relief committees who would in turn sell it on to the poor - free distribution was only to be considered in cases of extreme want. The money for food purchases was to be rasied locally by voluntary subscriptions. An estimated 3 million tons of potatos had been lost so this amount of Indian corn was never going to adequately replace the deficit; the intention all along was to reign in prices by providing an alternative food supply through slow release of quantities of grain during the crucial three month gap before the early August potato harvest. Indian corn was also extremely cheap, costing 50% than oatmeal (roughly £15 a ton) during the summer months of 1846.
15th November - Peel appointed Lindley and Playfair Commission to investigate the extent of loss to the potato crop report that 'one half of the actual potato crop of Ireland is either destroyed or remains in a state unfit for the food of man'. They also noted that one eigth of the crop would be required for seed to plant next season's crop, leaving only 3/8 of the 1845 crop available for consumption.
[This 'pessimistic' report went a long way to speedily mobilise relief efforts as noted by Irish academic P.M. A Bourke (A Visitation of God?) but a dire prognosis would certainly suit Peel's next gambit to try and convince Parliament that the loss of the potato crop necessitated a complete repeal of the Corn Laws. Throughout this marathon debate which consumed Westminster from January to June 1846 Peel had to contend with Tory protectionist assertions that (a) the extent of the blight's damage was exaggerated and (b) even were it the case, it did not logically follow that the only recourse was to lift import duties across the British Isles; in other words the threat of food price inflation was exaggerated.]
19th November - The Mansion House Committee to which hundreds of respondents around the country had sent letters claims to have ascertained 'beyond the shadow of doubt that considerably more than one third of the entire potato crop has been entirely destroyed'. [Roughly one third has been the generally accepted figure]
.................................................................................................
Value of Irish Agricultural Output at current prices c. 1845 :
Crops
Wheat - £4.9m, Oats - £8.1m, Barley - £1.8m, Flax - £1.3m, Potatos - £8.8m, Other - £2m.
Total value of crops: £26.8m
Livestock
Cattle - £4.7m, Butter and milk - £4.8m, Pigs - £3.4m, Sheep - £.8m, Eggs - £.9m, Other - £.8m
Total value of livestock: £15.9m
Total Output: £42.7m
(figures from Cormac O' Grada, Poverty, Population and Agriculture, 1801-45, A New History of Ireland, Vol V, Ireland Under the Union, pg.123.)
Taking the loss of one third of an enlarged potato crop estimated at £3m (marginally more acres were sown for potato production in 1845 than previous years [6% more according to constabulary returns]) this gives us a total percentage loss in overall agricultural value of about 7%. Was this, or should this have been enough to cause widespread famine?
"Understanding hunger and starvation as consequences of shifting social and political relationships does not deny their reality. Rather, it examines the context of these phenomena in search of an explanation in structural terms, of class, mode of production, political power, or change in these relationships". - Louise Tilly, "Food Entitlement, Famine and Conflict", Journal of Interdisciplinary History 14, no.2 (1983): 333-49.
...............................................................................................................
3rd December - Freeman's Journal reports retail potato prices had more than doubled and grain prices were at least a third higher than the averages for 1843 and 1844.
Mid-December - Peel presses the Irish executive to draft a coercion bill to combat the expected rise in agrarian tension. Notices had already been posted on church doors in Clare, Limerick, Louth and Cavan telling the people to pay no rent and thrash no corn on account of the potato failure. In Ennis,"resident aristocracy and absentee noblemen" were threatened if they did not come forward with plans to help and in Tipperary bands of men visited tenants instructing them to pay no rent. This was the bill that would bring down his government; though the majority who voted against it had no real interest in what was transpiring in Ireland, rather they wished to give Peel the boot for betraying a core tenet of Conservative politics; the protection of the English agricultural interest. Opposition within his own cabinet, led by Stanley, against his proposals to repeal the Corn Laws forces Peel to tender his resignation. Russell is unable to from a government and Peel is recalled by the Queen. The weeks of uncertainty led to much speculation in nationalist circles with Archbishop MacHale, Young Ireland and the Irish Chartist leader Feargus O' Connor pre-emptively denouncing any future alliance between O' Connell and the Whigs. The seeds were already being sown for the future secession of Young Ireland from the O' Connellite Repeal movement.
22nd January - "Sir, the immediate cause which led to the dissolution of the Government in the early part of last December, was that great and mysterious calamity which caused a lamentable failure in an article of food on which great numbers of the people in this part of the United Kingdom, and still larger numbers in the sister kingdom, depend mainly for their subsistence. That was the immediate and proximate cause, which led to the dissolution of the Government. But it would be unfair and uncandid on my part, if I attached undue importance to that particular cause. It certainly appeared to me to preclude further delay, and to require immediate decision—decision not only upon the measures which it was necessary at the time to adopt, but also as to the course to be ultimately taken with regard to the laws which govern the importation of grain." - Peel rising in the House to address the issue of Corn Law Repeal, framed here as a necessary measure in light of the Irish (and English) potato blight. Bitter and acrimonious exchanges would characterise this debate over the course of the next several months.
23rd January - First of Peel's four remedial measures for Ireland are introduced into parliament; these are the Public Works (Ireland) Bill, the County Works Presentments (Ireland) Bill, the Drainage (Ireland) Bill and the Fishery Piers and Harbours (Ireland) Bill. The first two provided the framework within which ameliorative public works would be carried out under the directing auspices of the Board of Works and the grand juries (county-level authorities). Projects carried out by the Board of Works would be supplemented by a 'half-grant' whereby the government would provide a donation half the value of the estimated cost; the rest would have to be paid back by the ratepayers over thirty years. Grand jury projects would be funded entirely by government loans - £134,000 was advanced under this scheme while the more generous terms offered by the schemes under the Board of Works atrracted work proposals worth £434,000. The Drainage Bill, while passed, turned out to be a dead letter and projects to renew piers and harbours only attracted £10,000 worth of investment. The other direct measure relating to Ireland, the Protection of Life (Ireland) was kept alive artificially until the 25th June until it was axed by the anti-Peel coalition.
Importantly, the promised Landlord and Tenant (Ireland) Bill which was to arrive on the foot of the Devon Commission's Report never materialised until late in the session. It was then shelved by Russell's incoming administration citing the lack of remaining house time to consider it properly. As will be seen it fared no better in the 1847 session. For many of it's supporters (Sharman Crawford, Smith O' Brien, Poulett Scrope) this bill could have provided direly needed legislation to guarantee some sort of fixity of tenure in the face of ever increasing famine related evictions. It's earliest introduction in the house had been in the 1844 session (usually referred to as Stanley's Tenant Compensation Bill) but was 'auto-sabotaged' by it's unsympathetic framer (Stanley held extensive estates in Ireland) through the mechanism of introducing a stipulation whereby the legal standing of improvements would be asessed by an independent Dublin-based commission; a move very much anathema to a typical landlord's conception of proprietorial rights. It is widely acknowledged that Stanley himself was aware that such a clause would never pass the landlord-dominated House of Lords and so, as predicted, it disappeared into a select committeee.
17th February - (from Hansard)
MR. O'CONNELL rose to call the attention of the House to the state of famine and disease in Ireland. His intention was to move—
That this House will, on Monday next, resolve itself into a Committee of the whole House, to take into consideration the State of Ireland, with a view to devise means to relieve the Distress of the Irish People;"—and it was a Motion to which he respectfully demanded the utmost attention of the House. ... It was certain that there was a fearful prospect of a most calamitous season before the people of Ireland. The extent of that calamity had been disputed, and there had been a time when there was a prospect of some portion of it being possibly averted; but he believed that hope had now quite vanished. The calamity was pressing, was imminent—more pressing, more imminent, and more fearful than that House was aware of. In order to understand it, it was right that the House should be made aware of the state of Ireland before the calamity, had impended.
[Which O' Connell proceeds to do over the course of a lengthy speech outlining the vulnerability of the small tenant farmer, the rise of agrarian crime, the questionable policy of maintaining food exports, the willingness of Ireland to raise revenue from it's own resources (tax absenteeism etc), the inevitable impact of fever and typhus, the conditions faced by evictees, the alarming rise in food prices & basically critiquing the overall lack of preparedness of the government to face the oncoming crisis. Tory protectionists at this time were downplaying 'alarmist' reports from Ireland in order to undermine Peel's argument that Corn Law repeal was rendered necessary by an incipient food crisis that could embrace the entire United Kingdom]
.......In no part of Europe, I repeat, is there such suffering as in Ireland. There there are five millions of people always on the verge of starvation. I have shown you from Government documents—from an enormous load of documents, taken from, and referring to, all parts of Ireland, that its people are threatened—that they are in the utmost danger of a fearful famine, with all its concomitant horrors. I may be asked what I propose? I answer, that I call upon all the Members of this House to join in the most energetic measures to stop the impending calamity. You cannot be too speedy—you cannot be too extensive in your remedies. It may be said that I am here to ask money to succour Ireland in her distress. No such thing. I scorn the thought. I am here to say Ireland has resources of her own. You have a revenue from the woods and forests of Ireland. You spent 74,000l. within the last few years on Trafalgar-square. Let that revenue represent a capital of a million or a million and a half. .... The workhouses would make very good hospitals for the sick. That fever prevails in Cork, Tralee, and Killarney, I have proved to you; it has raged to a frightful extent in Limerick; the number of patients in the infirmaries has increased; the lanes of Dublin are full of fever. You are not to be guided in such a case as this by ordinary rules. It is a case beyond every rule. The people are not to blame. It has pleased Providence to inflict this calamity upon them; it is your business to mitigate that calamity as much as possible.......
Great evils require great remedies; the remedy ought to be commensurate with the evil; and I am speaking from the depth of my conviction when I declare that in my conscience I believe the result of neglect on the part of this House in the present instance will be deaths to an enormous amount. On the grounds which I have stated, I request the appointment of a Committee of the whole House, if with no other effect, at least for the purpose of convincing the Irish people that their calamities are not disregarded. I don't blame the Government for what they have done, and for what they purpose to do. They have had my humble support. I have not been peddling for objections to their measures. I am prepared to give an honest support to any plans which the Government may bring forward for the purpose of mitigating the effects of the scarcity. Yet, those which have been propounded are miserable trifles; they would do for ordinary times and for an ordinary scarcity; but they will not answer when death is abroad. The details into which I felt it my duty to enter have made my statement necessarily a dry one; and, for the extreme patience with which I have been heard, I beg to express to the House my own thanks and the thanks of the Irish people. The hon. and learned Gentleman concluded by proposing his Motion.
13th March - Sir James Graham announces in the Commons the establishment of a Board of Health in Dublin. Fever hospitals were required to be set up in Unions were the need existed. This was not a permanent measure and was designed to expire in September. "In all the provinces, almost in every county .. dysentery has made it's appearance attended by fever in many instances".
On the same day, 300 tenants are evicted from the Gerrard Estate in Ballinglass, Co. Galway, to make way for a bullock pasture.
17th March - Subscriptions to local relief committees were so slow coming in that Trevelyan directed that lists of landlords who failed to subscribe should be sent to the Lord-Lieutenant. Few relief committees did so, partly out of fear of provoking the ire of the resident magnate & partly because of residual tensions related to their composition; many RC priests & repealers were on local committees and were naturally distrusted by landlords who instead averred that they were taking personal steps to ensure their tenants security. In all, the relatively small sum of £98,000 was raised by the local committees during Peel's administration, a fact which further emboldened the Whig administration to shift the burden of relief more squarely (and compulsorily) on their shoulders.
23rd March - "Condition of Ireland" debate commences in the Lords.
Earl Grey's opening salvo is worth recording;
"The noble Earl opposite, in bringing forward on behalf of Her Majesty's Government the different measures that have been proposed with respect to Ireland, has disclosed to us a state of society which it is indeed awful to contemplate; a state of society in which there is no security for life or property; a state of society in which the usual wretchedness of the population has been so aggravated by the partial failure of the potato crop, that famine and pestilence must stalk through the land, unless those measures which Parliament has adopted to counteract those evils should fortunately arrest their progress.
This is the state of things described by Her Majesty's Government; and unhappily this is no accidental, no extraordinary, no unlooked-for calamity. It is but an aggravation, and perhaps no very great aggravation, of the habitual condition of Ireland. The evils of that unhappy country are not accidental, not temporary, but chronic and habitual. The state of Ireland is one which is notorious. We know the ordinary condition of that country to be one both of lawlessness and wretchedness. It is so described by every competent authority. There is not an intelligent foreigner coming to our shores, who turns his attention to the state of Ireland, but who bears back with him such a description. Ireland is the one weak place in the solid fabric of British power—Ireland is the one deep (I had almost said ineffaceable) blot upon the brightness of British honour. Ireland is our disgrace. It is the reproach, the standing disgrace, of this country, that Ireland remains in the condition she is. It is so regarded throughout the whole civilized world. To ourselves we may palliate it if we will, and disguise the truth; but we cannot conceal it from others.
There is not, as I have said, a foreigner—no matter whence he comes, be it from France, Russia, Germany, or America—there is no native of any foreign country different as their forms of government may be, who visits Ireland, and who on his return does not congratulate himself that he sees nothing comparable with the condition of that country at home. If such be the state of things, how then does it arise, and what is its cause? My Lords, it is only by misgovernment that such evils could have been produced: the mere fact that Ireland is in so deplorable and wretched a condition saves whole volumes of argument, and is of itself a complete and irrefutable proof of the misgovernment to which she has been subjected. Nor can we lay to our souls the "flattering unction" that this misgovernment was only of ancient date, and has not been our doing. It is not enough in our own excuse to say, "No wonder this state of things exists: the Government of Ireland before the Union was the most ingeniously bad that was ever contrived in the face of the world; it was the Government of a corrupt minority, sustained by the superior power of this great country in oppressing and tyrannizing over the great body of the nation; that such a system of government could not fail to leave behind it a train of fearful evils from which we are still suffering at the present day."
To a certain extent, no doubt, this is true. No man has a stronger opinion than I regarding the iniquitous system of misgovernment in Ireland prior to the Union. But the Union is not an event of yesterday. It is nearly half a century since that measure passed. For nearly fifty years, now, Ireland has been under the immediate control of the Imperial Parliament. Since it has been so, a whole generation has grown up, and is now passing away to be replaced by another; and in that time, I ask you, what impression has been made upon the evils of Ireland? It is true some good has been done. I gladly acknowledge that many useful measures have been adopted, which have, I hope, contributed in some respects to the improvement of Ireland; but none of these measures have gone to the root of the social disease to which Ireland is a prey; in the worst symptoms of which no amelioration whatever can be observed: the wretchedness and misery of the population have experienced no abatement.
Upon that point I can quote high authority. I find that the Commission presided over by a noble Earl, whom I do not now see in his place (the Earl of Devon), reported the year before last, that "improvement was indeed beginning to take place in agriculture; but there had been no corresponding advance in the condition and comforts of the labouring classes." By the Report of that Commission we are informed, that the agricultural labourers are still suffering the greatest privations and hardships, and still depend upon casual and precarious employment for their subsistence; that they are badly fed, badly clothed, badly housed, and badly paid for their labour; and the Commissioners conclude this part of their Report by saying—
We cannot forbear expressing our strong sense of the patient endurance which the labouring classes have generally exhibited under sufferings greater, we believe, than the people of any other country have ever endured.This is an authentic statement, and comes from a Commission appointed only the other day to inquire into the state of the people of Ireland.
It is a Report describing the state of things in that country before the failure of the potato crop, and the Commissioners tell you that the sufferings of the great mass of the people of that country are greater than those of the population of any other country in Europe. This is indeed a fearful statement, coming from such authority. But there is another symptom of the condition of Ireland, which seems to me even more alarming than the prevalence of distress—I mean the the general alienation of the whole mass of the nation from the institutions under which they live, and the existence in their minds of a strong deep feeling of hostility to the form of government under which they are placed. This feeling, which is the worst feature in the case, seems to be rather gaining strength than to be diminishing. I am led to that opinion by what I heard two years ago fall from the Secretary of State for the Home Department in the House of Commons. I heard that right hon. Gentleman—and it was a statement which made a deep impression upon me—I heard the right hon. Gentleman, in answer to a speech made by a noble Friend of mine, distinctly admit that we had military occupation of Ireland, but that in no other sense could it be said to be governed; that it was occupied by troops, not governed like England. Such was the admission of the Secretary of State for the Home Department.
And now, my Lords, I ask you, is that a state of things which ought to continue? And I ask is not such a state of things, so clearly established by authorities so high and indisputable, a good ground for inferring that there is something wrong in the policy which has been hitherto pursued towards Ireland; and that some measures different in character, and more effectual than those we have been in the habit of trusting to, are necessary to meet the exigency?" (He goes on in this vain for another two hours! - as Secretary for War and the Colonies under Russell, Grey would go on to introduce important reforms granting greater local autonomy and self-government to the colonies).
23rd March - In response to angry criticisms against the Gerrard evictions and the mooted revival of a landlord/tenant bill Lord Brougham speaks out in defense of landlord prerogatives in the House of Lords;
"Their Lordships could not interfere with the rights of property, the most sacred of all rights, on which society itself depended, the corner-stone of the whole social edifice—the line of demarcation which separated the savage from the civilized state of society. ... But then he found that there were speculators, and practical speculators too, who not only suffered to pass across their imagination the abstract idea that property might be interfered with; but who so far carried that idea into execution as an object of their desire, or used it for the purpose of deluding their dupes in their own country—ignorant men as compared with them, but hardly more thoughtless and unreflecting than they—as to propound Bills on the subject in Parliament, of which he had heard for the first time that night. He could hardly have believed it possible that in the middle of the 19th century, and in a British House of Commons, there should have been propounded what was called by the gentle and euphonious term of fixity of tenure, but which meant thereby an Act of Parliament to rob the owner of land of his property, and to confer it on the occupant his tenant."
25th June - Corn Law repeal is passed by the House of Lords & marshalled by Disraeli and Bentinck Tory Protectionists helped by Whigs and Irish Repealers bring Peel's government down on the Irish coercion bill (Protection of Life in Ireland Bill). Old Tory party now split into 'Peelites' and 'Protectionists'.
"In the simplest terms the purpose of the Corn Laws was to keep up the price of home-grown grain. Duties on imported grain guaranteed English farmers a minimum and predictable price, and the burden of a higher price for bread was borne by the labouring classes, in particular by the millions of factory workers and operatives toiling in the new great industrial cities. It was asserted that if the Corn Laws were repealed all classes connected with the land would be ruined and the traditional social structure of the country destroyed, and in the "rising wrath of Tories and landlords" all interest in Ireland was submerged"". - Cecil Woodham Smith, The Great Hunger
"The importance of bread in British economic history has recently been highlighted in a monograph by Christian Petersen who describes the period 1770-1870 as 'the age of the wheat loaf'. Although the (Anti-Corn Law) League is hardly mentioned by Petersen, bread was an omnipresent theme in its publications and speeches. Leaguers read the Anti-Bread Tax Circular; over and over again they saw replicas of the three loaves that showed the British to be less well fed than Poles and Frenchmen; and they sang hymns that condemned the bread-taxers. In our own day it is difficult to understand the importance of bread when it is not only an optional but a problematic item of diet. In his study of bread riots during the eighteenth century E.P. Thomson has shown how crucial bread was, not only in the national dietary, but in the popular culture of England; the labouring poor, he wrote, 'lived very largely on bread', especially of the wheaten and white varieties that were commonly believed to be necessary for a working man's diet. The purchase of bread, John Burnett writes, became more difficult for the town dweller in the nineteenth century when 'up to half the earnings of working class families went on bread alone' and the price 'fluctuated widely within short periods'."
- Paul Pickering, The People's Bread: A History of the Anti-Corn Law League
" the misfortune of the workers in the summer insurrection of 1842 was precisely that they did not know whom to fight against. The evil they suffered was social - and social evils cannot be abolished as the monarchy or privileges are abolished. Social eveils cannot be cured by the People's Charter, and the people sensed this.. Social evils need to be studied and understood, and this the mass of workers has not yet doe up until now. The great achievement of the uprising was that England's most vital question, the final destiny of the working class, was, as Carlyle says, raised in a manner audible to every thinking ear in England. The question can no longer be evaded. England must answer it or perish." - Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class of England (1844)
"Too often the Chartists have been assessed solely on the issue of the vote. In fact the Chartists wanted much more than this. What they fought for was il-defined and even at times contradictory. But to the extent they had a vision, it was alwqays of a different kind of society, one in which workers controlled their own lives without a constant sense of anxiety about how they might feed themselves and their children or survive the next economic slump. Many Chartists spoke of the Charter as being a 'knife and fork'question and of the 'Charter and something more'. "
Mark O' Brien, Perish the Priviliged Orders: A Socialist History of the Chartist Movement
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