JVw2T9jZ

1
2https://www.independent.ie/entertainment/books/was-the-famine-genocide-by-the-british-28954929.html
3	Was the Famine genocide by the British?
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5	The Famine was our Holocaust. During the mid-19th Century, Ireland experienced the worst social and economic disaster a nation could suffer. A quarter of the island's population starved to death or emigrated to escape truly appalling conditions.
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7	...The maxim of the Young Ireland leader John Mitchell was that "God sent the potato blight but the English created the Famine".
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9	...Feeding so many was already a problem before the Famine with bulk of the Irish population surviving on a subsistence diet.
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11	Coogan demonstrates that the British government was not oblivious to the plight of Ireland. The Whatley Commission on Irish poverty in 1833 had suggested that large-scale emigration to the colonies be encouraged and proposed that fisheries be developed and land be reclaimed among other measures.
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13	Had these recommendations been implemented, it would have done much to mitigate against the scale of the disaster which engulfed Ireland just over a decade later.
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15	Coogan's research gives credence to this view and he expertly catalogues a shocking combination of ambivalence, incompetence and malignance on the part of British policymakers.
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17	...Laissez-faire economics argued against the morality of assisting the poor because of the consequent risk of stultifying initiative and self-help among the Irish peasantry. One of laissez-faire's most influential proponents, Thomas Malthus, warned that extending relief would swallow the resources of the entire nation and consequently the poor had "no claim of right to the smallest portion of food".	
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19	Coogan's research shows how too often British policymakers put an adherence to a callous economic theory above their humanitarian responsibilities.
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21	It would be a mistake to dismiss Coogan's work as a green-tinted history. He is not ungenerous to Robert Peel, the British prime minister at the time of the outbreak of the Famine and for so long the bête noire of Irish nationalists.
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2425% Irish population dead, knew problem was coming but ignored, cited theories of Malthas
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27	...Coogan suggests that Peel did, in fact, attempt to alleviate the horrific situation in Ireland by facing up to the challenge of Corn Law reform and by making £100,000 available for the secret purchase of Indian corn in America.
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29	Coogan also points out that Peel's successor, John Russell, was outraged by the "lynch law of Irish landlords" in ruthlessly pursuing evictions at a time when this was akin to a sentence of death.
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31	Russell's efforts to offer legislative protection to Irish cottiers were, however, stymied by a powerful cabal in his own cabinet of Lord Palmerstown, the Marquis of Clanricarde and Lord Lansdowne, all of whom owned huge estates in Ireland.
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34prime ministers Peel and Russell made attemp to solve, said to have been blonked by cabal including Lord Palmserstown and Lord Landsowne
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37	...Coogan's work is a damning indictment of Charles Trevelyan, the assistant secretary to the Treasury, who was effectively in charge of Famine relief in Ireland.
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39	Trevelyan, today, is remembered more in sorrow than in anger in the classic song 'The Fields of Athenry', but he surely ranks alongside Cromwell as one of the greatest villains in Irish history.
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41	Trevelyan was motivated by racialism, laissez-faire dogmatism and anti-Catholicism. Coogan highlights in a variety of ways how Trevelyan's policies consigned a generation of Irish people to death or exile.
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44Trevelyan sent in charge of famine relief but ended up killing more
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47	But Trevelyan is most conclusively condemned in the dock of history by his own words.
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49	The man whose policies held sway over the fate of a starving population wrote : "The judgment of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated . . . the real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people."
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52admitted to wanting famine
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54	...The Famine created an underbelly of resentment that helped poison Anglo-Irish relations until recent times.
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56
57------
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60https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1997/09/17/irelands-famine-wasnt-genocide/ac7f1aa9-123c-47ac-a9b0-7c2cab697d37/
61	IRELAND'S FAMINE WASN'T GENOCIDE
62	By Timothy W. Guinnane September 17, 1997
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64	Students returning to high schools this fall will encounter another example of a recent and unwelcome development in public education. Several states have mandated that the Great Irish Famine of 1845-1850 be taught in their high schools as an example of genocide, sometimes in courses originally intended for the study of the Holocaust. More states are considering enacting similar measures. These mandates reflect the efforts of a small number of Irish American leaders who have pushed this line for ideological reasons. 
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67https://www.amazon.com/Vanishing-Irish-Timothy-W-Guinnane/dp/0691043078
68	The Vanishing Irish
69	by Timothy W. Guinnane 
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71
72hmmm
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75
76------
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79https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-famine-plot-englands-role-in-irelands-greatest-tragedy--by-tim-pat-coogan-and-the-graves-are-walking-the-great-famine-and-the-saga-of-the-irish-people-by-john-kelly/2013/01/12/22971008-3d7b-11e2-a2d9-822f58ac9fd5_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.bae9f38a578b
80	‘The Famine Plot: England’s Role in Ireland’s Greatest Tragedy ’ by Tim Pat Coogan and ‘The Graves are Walking: The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People’ by John Kelly 
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82	By Peter Behrens January 12, 2013
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84	Those days are gone. And these days, as Tim Pat Coogan writes in “The Famine Plot,” “poverty and emigration [have] remained continuing themes in Ireland,” and the country has been learning all over again that “its defenses were too fragile to cope with the longstanding Irish vices such as clientalism and corruption.” What Coogan suggests — and this is just one of many intriguing points made in his book — is a linkage between the recent Irish collapse, Irish feelings of helplessness and that demographic and moral disaster of the Irish 1840s: the potato famine, otherwise known as the Great Hunger. 
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86	What happened in 1840s Ireland, and why, and who was responsible, is also the subject of John Kelly’s cogent and forceful popular history, “The Graves Are Walking.” Kelly and Coogan have both written polemics against the British government of the day and its inadequate response to Ireland’s nightmare. They sustain their arguments with sound materials. Kelly, an American, is cool and prosecutorial in tone. He has the facts, ma’am, and his book is an accessible, engrossing history of horror. Coogan, the Irish author of controversial popular biographies of Michael Collins and Eamon de Valera, as well as a history of the Irish Republican Army, is fiercer and angrier. He sounds like the witness who saw the crime. 
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88	A fungus, phytophthora infestans, ravaged the Irish potato crop. But potato crops were infected elsewhere in northwest Europe during that decade. There was phytophthora infestans, but no famine, in Belgium, France and Scotland. Why did Ireland starve while Belgium did not? 
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90	Coogan’s pages spark and sputter with a deep, lingering, well-cherished rage at the British government and laissez-faire attitudes and policies adopted by Prime Minister Lord John Russell and civil servant Sir Charles Trevelyan . It was British reluctance to interfere with the supposed workings of the free-market economy that allowed famine to continue in Ireland at a time when the country was producing and exporting tons of food to England. 
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93gives some insight into how they think, basically "if you die from famine you deserve it", I guess some malthusian argument like it's natural selection
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95
96	Ireland’s history as a conquered nation shaped a disastrous system of land tenure, which resulted eventually in a large population dependent on a single crop. These were the conditions that turned crop failure into famine. But for many in London, it was the feckless Irish themselves — especially the proliferating, starving cottier class, crowded onto the most marginal lands in southwest Ireland — who were the core of the problem.
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98	The prevalent British view of the famine, Coogan writes, was that it resulted from “a flaw in the Irish character — the fecklessness and laziness that produced the potato economy also produced the other ills that afflicted the unhappy country.” Famine was horrible but seen from some corners of Whitehall as a necessary evil: a harsh but efficient solution to Irish overpopulation and disorganization, and the laziness supposedly inculcated by overdependence on the too-easy-to-cultivate potato. From London’s point of view, Ireland needed the taut discipline of a rigorously maintained free market — and a couple of million fewer Irish. Only then could the country’s disastrous system of landholding be straightened out, the “congested districts” relieved of population pressure and Irish society modernized along with Irish agriculture. 
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100	...Did the British government cause the famine? One way to consider the question is to pose another one. Did the George W. Bush administration cause Hurricane Katrina? No, nature did. But perhaps 300 years of American history had created a situation whereby a particular group of people, African Americans in the poorest quarters of New Orleans, were more vulnerable than most to that storm.
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103why is wapo printing this?
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106	And perhaps the administration, for political and historical reasons, was not inclined to be closely in touch with or responsive to the well-being of that population. Perhaps the inadequacy of the initial response to the natural disaster was compounded by streaks of racial prejudice and ideological blind spots, as well as by good old-fashioned incompetence.
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108	Natural forces cause hurricanes. And crop failures. In Ireland and in America, however, it is history that shapes a government’s intellectual, practical and political response, when Mother Nature flexes her sovereign power. 
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115from "The Famine Plot" pg 1
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118	...Ireland's tragedy at the time of the Famine was that, through conquest, she had no government of her own.
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120	...The experience of the largest Dublin cemetery, Glasnevin, is instructive. The cemetary was and is meticulous about records, but as the Famine progressed, the sheer weight of numbers forced the cemetery authorities to choose between accepting unidentified corpses for burial and leaving them to rot outside the cemetery gates. Bodies were normally accepted for burial only when properly certified and the identity vouched for by a relative or a respected personage such as a minister of religion. In one year of the Famine, however, 1849, recorded deaths, which had been 5,944 in 1845, rose to 10,047 and unidentified bodies amounted to another 10,000.
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122	...The silence of Irish historians about the official hate creation and the stimulation of anti-Irish prejudice that accompanied the Famine was, and to a large extent still is, remarkable. (Take Curtis, for example.) To put it mildly, Irish historians as a class have not done justice to the Famine. The colonial cringe seems to have informed the approach of many of them. From the mid-1960s onwards, as the Troubles in Northern Ireland worsened, revisionism became a matter not of revising opinions in the light of new research or new insights but of dealing with the political climate created by the war in Northern Ireland.
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125continuing Irish-England conflict helped cover-up complicity in famine
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128	...Another very important factor conditioned Irish historians' approach to assessing the Famine. Professor Joseph Lee has written as follows: "The external examiners in all Irish Universities came from England. Irish historians of that generation were bound to be conscious of the widespread English assumption that they might be prone to wild flights of Celtic fancy that any claims that sounded remotely exaggerated were in danger of being dismissed as extravagent. There may therefore have been a tendency to counter this image by insisting on the sobriety of one's scholarship."
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131huge problem of most people's understanding of the world today--don't understand how evil people can be and how many of them there are in positions of influence
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134authors writing makes it sound like he doesn't suspect any sort of wider misanthropic plot
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137pg 9
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139	"My lords, it is only by its government 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 . . . such a system of government could not fail to leave behind it a train of fearful evils from which we are suffering at the present day.
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141	We have a 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."
142
143	-Extract from a speech by Earl Grey, son of a former prime minister and, during the Famine, colonial secretary, speaking to the House of Lords during the early stages of the Famine on March 23, 1846
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145
146	...It was backyardism that gave rise to Ireland's three damnations: colonization, proximity, and religion.
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148	Raids by Irish pirates and disputes between representatives of the Irish church and the religious on the larger island who took their tone from Rome made minor outbreaks of hostility relatively commonplace between the two islands long before Columbus discovered America. But for our purposes it may be noted that the era of a more organized and sustained attempt at the colonization of Ireland could be said to have begun with the Normans. An Irish king, Diarmuid McMurragh, King of Leinster, invited the Normans to Ireland to help him in a dispute that arose when he kidnapped the wife of another chieftain.
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150	The pope of the day was an Englishman: Adrian, who was advised by another Englishman, John of Salisbury. Adrian granted Henry II a Papal Bull, Laudabiliter, legitimizing the Norman invasion. The papal deal with Henry II in effect ushered in a prolonged era of two forms of colonialism, those of Mother England and of Mother Church. The Irish were to be saved from the barbarity of their ways by a combination of Vatican directive and Norman steel.
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152	From the Vatican's point of view, the attraction of this arrangement lay in the fact that Rome would exert its authority through the appointment of hand-picked bishops, rather than having to struggle to assert its influence over powerful Irish abbots, who hitherto had often bee appointed by their families who controlled church lands and monastaries.
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155this guy probably isn't a propagandist
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157
158	The attraction for the Normans was straightforward--it gave them access to Irish land which, with their advances in agriculture, they were able to exploit far more profitably than were the cattle-herding Irish. And so Christ and Ceasar came to be hand in glove. Unfortunately, when Henry VIII defied the pope by divorcing his wife to marry Annne Boleyn, the gloves came off between king and pope, with disastrous results for the Irish.
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160	From the time of Henry VIII's breaking with Rome, England became a Protestant nation and Ireland remained a Catholic one. Thus, apart from the inveitable attempts by a larger country to subordinate a smaller neighbor, England's religious wars became superimposed on Ireland also. Not alone would the Catholic Irish lose their lands; they would also be forced to pay for the upkeep of the Portestant clergy.
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162	...The old English Catholics, who had settled peaceably enough in Ireland from Norman days onward to an extent that it was said they became more Irish than the Irish themselves, now became bracketed with the native Irish as objects of detestation not for merely Henry VIII, but for those who came after him, notably his daughter Elizabeth and Oliver Cromwell.
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164	Significantly for our story Lord Chichester, Queen Elizabeth's chief advisor, wrote: "I have often said, and written, it is Famine which must consume [the Irish]; our swords and other endeavors work not that speedy effect which is expected for their overthrow." Oliver Cromwell added a variant to the Chichester approach as he went through Ireland with a Bible in one hand and a sword in the other exulting in the doing of God's work by the combined slaughter of both the Irish and old English. Cromwell coined the slogan "to Hell or to Connacth" as he drove Catholics from the good lands to the barren boggy areas of the West.
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166	If ever one required and object lesson as to the validity of a saying I first heard in Vietnam--"When elephants fight it is the grass that gets tramped and the people are the grass"--one need look no further than Ireland.
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168	The victory of William of Orange over the Catholic King James II in 1690 at the Battle of the Boyne finally broke Catholic power in Ireland and is still fervently celebrated by the Protestants of northeastern Ireland, in the province of Ulster. This exemplifies the confusions and contradictions that can ensue when a small country gets caught up in power politics. The pope sought a Williamite victory, as part of his larger European designs (mainly against Louis XIV of France), and ordered that a Te Deum be rung from all churches. More importantly, Pope Innocent XI also secretly gave William large sums of money, a fact that would have shocked both Protestant and Catholic protagonists and that was withheld from the public until documents came to light in 2008. They showed that the pope had contributed some three and a half million in today's euro values toward the purchase of swords and muskets to what in effect became the enslavement of the Catholic Irish.
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171this guy is great
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177https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williamite_War_in_Ireland
178	The Williamite War in Ireland (1688–1691) (Irish: Cogadh an Dá Rí,[2][3][4] meaning "war of the two kings"), was a conflict between Jacobites (supporters of the Catholic King James II of England and Ireland, VII of Scotland) and Williamites (supporters of the Dutch Protestant Prince William of Orange) over who would be monarch of the Kingdom of England, the Kingdom of Scotland and the Kingdom of Ireland. It is also called the Jacobite War in Ireland or the Williamite–Jacobite War in Ireland.
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180	The cause of the war was the deposition of James as King of the Three Kingdoms in the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688. James was supported by the mostly Catholic "Jacobites" in Ireland and hoped to use the country as a base to regain his Three Kingdoms. He was given military support by France to this end. For this reason, the war became part of a wider European conflict known as the Nine Years' War (or War of the Grand Alliance). Some Protestants of the established Church in Ireland also fought on the side of King James.[5][6]
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182	James was opposed in Ireland by the mostly Protestant "Williamites", who were concentrated in the north of the country. William landed a multi-national force in Ireland, composed of English, Scottish, Dutch, Danish and other troops, to put down Jacobite resistance. James left Ireland after a reverse at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 and the Irish Jacobites were finally defeated after the Battle of Aughrim in 1691.
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184	William defeated Jacobitism in Ireland and subsequent Jacobite risings were confined to Scotland and England. However, the War was to have a lasting effect on Ireland, confirming British and Protestant rule over the country for over two centuries. The iconic Williamite victories of the Siege of Derry and the Battle of the Boyne are still celebrated by (mostly Ulster Protestant) unionists in Ireland today.
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186	...Glorious Revolution
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188	The war in Ireland began as a direct consequence of the Glorious Revolution in England. James II of England and Ireland, VII of Scotland, who was a Roman Catholic, attempted to introduce freedom of religion for Catholics and bypass the English Parliament to introduce unpopular laws. For many in England, this was an unpleasant reminder of the rule of Charles I, whose conflict with the Parliament led to the outbreak of the English Civil War. The breaking point in James' relationship with the English political class came in June 1688 when his second wife gave birth to a son, which opened the prospect of an enduring Catholic Stuart dynasty. This fear led some political figures to conspire to invite William III, stadtholder of the main provinces of the Dutch Republic and husband of James’ daughter Mary Stuart, to invade England.[7]
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191https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1582225/Vatican-bans-book-revealing-secret-of-pope.html
192	The authors said the problems arose because they found documents in both the Vatican Secret Archive and the Italian State Archives which suggest that William of Orange was receiving huge sums of money from Rome.
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194	In 1672, Louis had occupied the Netherlands. William led the resistance and, allied with Catholic Spain and Austria, drove out the French.
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196	William, who became King of Britain in 1689, has been revered in Ulster for centuries for his "Glorious Revolution", which drove James II, a Roman Catholic, from the throne.
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198	He gives his name to the loyalist Orange Order.
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200	Mr Sorti and Ms Monaldi said they found documents from a papal envoy discussing the "large sums" that William owed Pope Innocent XI.
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202	Corresponding documents from Innocent's family records show that the Holy See sent 150,000 scudi to William via an intermediary. The sum, equivalent to more than £3.5 million today, equalled the Vatican's annual budget deficit.
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205more like POPE GUILTY
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212https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)
213	Since the Acts of Union in January 1801, Ireland had been part of the United Kingdom. Executive power lay in the hands of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and Chief Secretary for Ireland, who were appointed by the British government. Ireland sent 105 members of parliament to the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, and Irish representative peers elected 28 of their own number to sit for life in the House of Lords. Between 1832 and 1859, 70% of Irish representatives were landowners or the sons of landowners.[8] 
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216owners of Land in Ireland highly suspicious (according to rest of this article), had policies that contributed to famine significantly
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218much of irish rep in Parliament were landowners or related to them
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221	...In the 17th and 18th centuries, Irish Catholics had been prohibited by the penal laws from purchasing or leasing land, from voting, from holding political office, from living in or within 5 miles (8 km) of a corporate town, from obtaining education, from entering a profession, and from doing many other things necessary for a person to succeed and prosper in society. The laws had largely been reformed by 1793, and the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829 allowed Irish Catholics to again sit in parliament. 
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224until 1793 and up to 1829, Irish Catholics had been barred from purchasing land, voting, getting education, "entering a profession", and "many other things necessary for a person to succeed and prosper in society." Largely reformed by 1793, allowed to sit in parliament by 1829.
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227	Landlords and tenants
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229	During the 18th century, the "middleman system" for managing landed property was introduced. Rent collection was left in the hands of the landlords' agents, or middlemen. This assured the landlord of a regular income, and relieved them of direct responsibility, while leaving tenants open to exploitation by the middlemen.[11]
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231	Catholics, the bulk of whom lived in conditions of poverty and insecurity despite Catholic emancipation in 1829, made up 80% of the population. At the top of the "social pyramid" was the "ascendancy class", the English and Anglo-Irish families who owned most of the land, and held more or less unchecked power over their tenants. Some of their estates were vast; for example, the Earl of Lucan owned over 60,000 acres (240 km2). Many of these landlords lived in England and were known as absentee landlords. The rent revenue—collected from "impoverished tenants" who were paid minimal wages to raise crops and livestock for export[12]—was mostly sent to England.[13]
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233	In 1843, the British Government considered that the land question in Ireland was the root cause of disaffection in the country. They established a Royal Commission, chaired by the Earl of Devon, to enquire into the laws regarding the occupation of land. Daniel O'Connell described this commission as "perfectly one-sided", being composed of landlords, with no tenant representation.[14] In February 1845, Devon reported:
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235	    It would be impossible adequately to describe the privations which they [the Irish labourer and his family] habitually and silently endure ... in many districts their only food is the potato, their only beverage water ... their cabins are seldom a protection against the weather ... a bed or a blanket is a rare luxury ... and nearly in all their pig and a manure heap constitute their only property.[15]
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237	The Commissioners concluded they could not "forbear expressing our strong sense of the patient endurance which the labouring classes have exhibited under sufferings greater, we believe, than the people of any other country in Europe have to sustain".[15] The Commission stated that bad relations between landlord and tenant were principally responsible.
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240after laws subjugating Irish, I guess switched to landlord-tenant system
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242kindof like fuedal system? would have to work the land to pay the rent, most of it sent to landowners back in England
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245	...The ability of middlemen was measured by the rent income they could contrive to extract from tenants.[11] They were described in evidence before the Commission as "land sharks", "bloodsuckers", and "the most oppressive species of tyrant that ever lent assistance to the destruction of a country".[11] The middlemen leased large tracts of land from the landlords on long leases with fixed rents, which they then sublet as they saw fit. They would split a holding into smaller and smaller parcels so as to increase the amount of rent they could obtain. Tenants could be evicted for reasons such as non-payment of rents (which were high), or a landlord's decision to raise sheep instead of grain crops. A cottier paid his rent by working for the landlord.[17] 
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248middlemen said to have been tyranical and important part of this system, tried to extract as much from tenants as possible
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250
251	...Landlords in Ireland often used their powers without compunction, and tenants lived in dread of them. Woodham-Smith writes that, in these circumstances, "industry and enterprise were extinguished and a peasantry created which was one of the most destitute in Europe".[15] 
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254landlords had basically life and death power over tenants and would wield it over them tyranically
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256
257	...In 1845, 24% of all Irish tenant farms were of 0.4–2 hectares (1–5 acres) in size, while 40% were of 2–6 hectares (5–15 acres). Holdings were so small that no crop other than potatoes would suffice to feed a family. Shortly before the famine the British government reported that poverty was so widespread that one-third of all Irish small holdings could not support their families after paying their rent, except by earnings of seasonal migrant labour in England and Scotland.[18] Following the famine, reforms were implemented making it illegal to further divide land holdings.[19]
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259	The 1841 census showed a population of just over eight million. Two-thirds of those depended on agriculture for their survival, but they rarely received a working wage. They had to work for their landlords in return for the patch of land they needed to grow enough food for their own families. This was the system which forced Ireland and its peasantry into monoculture, since only the potato could be grown in sufficient quantity. The rights to a plot of land in Ireland could mean the difference between life and death in the early 19th century.[12]  
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262holdings were so small that had to grow potatoes to feed family. Before famine about 1/3rd of Irish small holdings couldn't support families after paying rent
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265ended up with most of crop a single species of potato (how did that happen?)
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267
268	...The expansion of tillage led to an inevitable expansion of the potato acreage and an expansion of peasant farmers. By 1841, there were over half a million peasant farmers, with 1.75 million dependants. The principal beneficiary of this system was the English consumer.[22]
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270    	The Celtic grazing lands of ... Ireland had been used to pasture cows for centuries. The British colonised ... the Irish, transforming much of their countryside into an extended grazing land to raise cattle for a hungry consumer market at home ... The British taste for beef had a devastating impact on the impoverished and disenfranchised people of ... Ireland ... pushed off the best pasture land and forced to farm smaller plots of marginal land, the Irish turned to the potato, a crop that could be grown abundantly in less favorable soil. Eventually, cows took over much of Ireland, leaving the native population virtually dependent on the potato for survival.[24] 
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273using a lot of the land for cows instead of feeding people also said to contribute to famine (how did that happen?)
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275
276	...The Gardeners' Chronicle announced: "We stop the Press with very great regret to announce that the potato Murrain has unequivocally declared itself in Ireland."[38] Nevertheless, the British government remained optimistic over the next few weeks, as it received conflicting reports. Only when the crop was lifted in October did the scale of destruction become apparent.[41] Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel wrote to Sir James Graham in mid-October that he found the reports "very alarming", but reminded him that there was, according to Woodham-Smith, "always a tendency to exaggeration in Irish news".[42]
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279press reported on blight in Sep 1845. British gov remained optimistic until crop lifted in October and scale of destruction became apparent. in mid-October, Peel wrote reports "very alarming" but that there was "always a tendency to exaggeration in Irish news."
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282crop loss estimated to be between 1/3rd and 1/2 of cultivated acreage.
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284
285	...In early November 1845, a deputation from the citizens of Dublin, including the Duke of Leinster, Lord Cloncurry, Daniel O'Connell, and the Lord Mayor, went to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Lord Heytesbury, to offer suggestions, such as opening the ports to foreign corn, stopping distillation from grain, prohibiting the export of foodstuffs, and providing employment through public works.[47] Lord Heytesbury urged them not to be alarmed, that they "were premature", that scientists were enquiring into all those matters,[fn 3] and that the Inspectors of Constabulary and Stipendiary Magistrates were charged with making constant reports from their districts; and there was no "immediate pressure on the market".[46] 
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288Early November, Deputation from Dublin went to Lord Lieutenant of Ireland Lord Heytesbury with ideas like open ports to foreign corn (why were they closed?), stop distillation from grain, prohibit exports, and provide employment through public works. Heytesbury said not to be alarmed and they were "premature" and that things were being investigated.
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290	
291	On 8 December 1845, Daniel O'Connell, head of the Repeal Association, proposed several remedies to the pending disaster. One of the first things he suggested was the introduction of "Tenant-Right" as practised in Ulster, giving the landlord a fair rent for his land, but giving the tenant compensation for any money he might have laid out on the land in permanent improvements.[49] O'Connell then pointed out the means used by the Belgian legislature during the same season: shutting their ports against the export of provisions, but opening them to imports. He suggested that, if Ireland had a domestic Parliament, the ports would be thrown open and the abundant crops raised in Ireland would be kept for the people of Ireland. O'Connell maintained that only an Irish parliament would provide for the people both food and employment, saying that a repeal of the Act of Union was a necessity and Ireland's only hope.[49] 
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294Early December, Daniel O'Conell, head of Repeal Association, proposed tenant rights and food imports would help remedy impending disaster. He maintained that Irish having an Irish parliament was the way to do this.
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296
297	Mitchel raised the issue of the "Potato Disease" in Ireland as early as 1844 in The Nation, noting how powerful an agent hunger had been in certain revolutions.[50] On 14 February 1846, he put forward his views on "the wretched way in which the famine was being trifled with", and asked whether the Government still did not have any conception that there might be soon "millions of human beings in Ireland having nothing to eat".[51] 
298
299	...Mitchel later wrote one of the first widely circulated tracts on the famine, The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps), in 1861. It established the widespread view that the treatment of the famine by the British was a deliberate murder of the Irish, and it contained the famous phrase: "The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the Famine."[54] Mitchel was charged with sedition because of his writings, but this charge was dropped and he was convicted by a packed jury under the newly enacted Treason Felony Act and sentenced to 14 years transportation to Bermuda.[55]
300
301
302the writer Mitchel said the government was ignoring famine and this might lead to revolution
303
304Mitchel was notable for establishing view in Ireland that famine was deliberate murder of Irish by British 
305
306Mitchel is interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Mitchel
307
308
309	...Historian F. S. L. Lyons characterised the initial response of the British government to the early, less severe phase of the famine as "prompt and relatively successful".[62] Confronted by widespread crop failure in November 1845, Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel purchased £100,000 worth of maize and cornmeal secretly from America[63] with Baring Brothers initially acting as his agents. The government hoped that they would not "stifle private enterprise" and that their actions would not act as a disincentive to local relief efforts. Due to poor weather conditions, the first shipment did not arrive in Ireland until the beginning of February 1846.[64] The initial shipments were of unground dried kernels, but the few Irish mills in operation were not equipped for milling maize and a long and complicated milling process had to be adopted before the meal could be distributed.[65] In addition, before the cornmeal could be consumed, it had to be "very much" cooked again, or eating it could result in severe bowel complaints.[64] Due to its yellow colour, and initial unpopularity, it became known as "Peel's brimstone".[66]
310
311
312why did Peel have to "secretly" buy corn from America? How did it become unpopular?
313
314	
315	In October 1845, Peel moved to repeal the Corn Laws—tariffs on grain which kept the price of bread artificially high—but the issue split his party and he had insufficient support from his own colleagues to push the measure through. He resigned the premiership in December, but the opposition was unable to form a government and he was re-appointed.[67] In March, Peel set up a programme of public works in Ireland,[68] but the famine situation worsened during 1846, and the repeal of the Corn Laws in that year did little to help the starving Irish; the measure split the Conservative Party, leading to the fall of Peel's ministry.[69] On 25 June, the second reading of the government's Irish Coercion Bill was defeated by 73 votes in the House of Commons by a combination of Whigs, Radicals, Irish Repealers, and protectionist Conservatives. Peel was forced to resign as prime minister on 29 June, and the Whig leader, Lord John Russell, assumed the seals of office.[70] 
316
317
318Peel tried to repeal tariffs on grain but split party. He resigned then was re-appointed (what was going on here?)
319
320set up public works March 1845
321
322forced to resign over "irish coercion bill" and replaced by Russel
323
324
325	The measures undertaken by Peel's successor, Russell, proved comparatively inadequate as the crisis deepened. The new Whig administration, influenced by the doctrine of laissez-faire,[71] believed that the market would provide the food needed, and they refused to intervene against food exports to England, then halted the previous government's food and relief works, leaving many hundreds of thousands of people without any work, money, or food.[72] Russell's ministry introduced a new programme of public works that by the end of December 1846 employed some half million Irish and proved impossible to administer.[73] 
326
327
328Russel said to have believed laissez-faire (along lines of Malthus?) would solve situation in ireland and his government refused to intervene on food exports
329
330	
331	Charles Trevelyan, who was in charge of the administration of government relief, limited the Government's food aid programme because of a firm belief in laissez-faire.[74] He thought that "the judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson". 
332
333
334Charles Trevelyan was in charge of gov relief but decided to limit food aid because of firm belief in "laissez-faire". Said famine was God teaching Irish a lesson.
335
336
337------
338
339
340https://www.nature.com/news/pathogen-genome-tracks-irish-potato-famine-back-to-its-roots-1.13021
341	Weigel’s team also found nothing in the nuclear genomes of the famine strains to explain their ferocity. In fact, the strains lack a gene found in modern strains of P. infestans that overcomes the plant’s resistance genes. And, surprisingly, the famine strain seems less lethal than the P. infestans strains that now cause US$6 billion in crop damage per year. “It seems rather that the potatoes were unusually susceptible,” he says.
342
343
344strain that caused famine less lethal than others, points to potatoes being "unusually susceptible"
345
346	
347	Meanwhile, a team led by Tom Gilbert and Mike Martin, evolutionary geneticists at the University of Copenhagen, looked more closely at such genes after sequencing the nuclear genomes of five herbarium strains of P. infestans. In unpublished work, the team identified numerous genes that differ between the historical samples and modern strains, including many disease genes that were missing from the famine strains. Their work also suggests that P. infestans may have been exported to Europe more than once during the famine.
348
349
350strain may have been exported to Eruope (I thinks saying from U.S. to europe) more than once during the famine
351
352
353	“What happened was that this pathogen had never seen cultivated potatoes before,” says Bill Fry, a plant pathologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. It spread through potato fields like wildfire in Ireland and other countries where potatoes were grown intensively. “It destroyed the tops, it destroyed the tubers, and there was nothing for this very poor part of the population to eat.”
354
355
356planting lots of potatoes close together contribute too?
357
358
359...
360
361
362https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3667578/
363	Contrary to previous inferences (Ristaino et al., 2001; May and Ristaino, 2004), the 19th century strains are closely related to the modern US-1 lineage, but are characterized by a single, distinct mtDNA haplotype, HERB-1. Finally, from estimates of the divergence times of the different lineages, we were able to associate key events in P. infestans evolution with historic records of human migration and late blight spread.
364
365	...Using the collection dates of the herbarium samples and isolation dates of the modern P. infestans strains, we estimated that type I and type II mtDNA haplotypes diverged close to the beginning of the 16th century (Figure 6 and Table 3). This coincides with the first contact between Americans and Europeans in Mexico, which potentially fuelled P. infestans population migration and expansion outside its center of diversity. This major event in human history might thus have been responsible for wider dissemination of the P. infestans pathogen in the New World, several centuries before its introduction to Europe. In addition, the divergence estimates allowed us to date the split between P. mirabilis and P. infestans about 1300 ya. Even though this was firmly during the period of pre-Columbian civilization, what led to their relatively recent speciation remains unknown.
366
367
368blight DNA in famine can be distinguished from more common strain so I guess that means can track it
369
370found that a strain spread across U.S. after first encounter between Europeans and Americans in Mexico
371
372	
373	...We therefore propose a revision of the previous scenario, which posited that a single P. infestans lineage migrated around 1842 or 1843 from Mexico to North America, from where it was soon transferred to Europe, followed by global dissemination and persistence for over hundred years (Goodwin et al., 1994). Our data make it likely that by the late 1970s, direct descendants of HERB-1 had either become rare or extinct. On the other hand, the close relationship between HERB-1 and US-1 suggests that the US-1 lineage originated from a similar source as HERB-1, with our divergence estimates indicating that the two lineages separated only in the early 19th century. Given the much greater genetic diversity at the species’ likely origin in Mexico, it seems unlikely that HERB-1 and US-1 spread independently from this region. An alternative scenario is that a small P. infestans metapopulation was established at the periphery of its center of origin, or even outside Mexico, possibly in North America, some time before the first global P. infestans pandemic. The first lineage to spread from there was HERB-1, which persisted globally for at least half a century. Subsequently, the US-1 lineage expanded and spread, replacing HERB-1 (Figure 11).
374
375
376found there was more genetic diversity at origin, but small population established somewhere outside Mexico, and this is common ancestor of HERB-1 (blight in Irish famine) and US-1 (common one today)
377
378
379	...Our analyses not only highlight how knowledge of the genetics and geographic distribution of modern strains is insufficient to correctly infer the source of historic epidemics (Goodwin et al., 1994), but they also reveal the shortcomings of inferences that are based on a very small number of genetic markers in historic strains (Ristaino et al., 2001; May and Ristaino, 2004). With our much richer dataset, we could demonstrate that the late blight outbreaks during the 19th century were a pandemic caused by a single P. infestans lineage, but that this lineage was not the direct ancestor of the one that had come to dominate the global P. infestans population during much of the 20th century. Infected plant specimens stored in herbaria around the world are thus a largely untapped source to learn about events that affected millions of people during our recent history.
380
381
382think I get it--since US-1 not a descendant of HERB-1, can track where HERB-1 spread to. It's more like a small offshoot that was spread around and not the main strain of the organism.
383
384
385
386http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8791.full
387	The potato late blight pathogen was introduced to Europe in the 1840s and caused the devastating loss of a staple crop, resulting in the Irish potato famine and subsequent diaspora. Research on this disease has engendered much debate, which in recent years has focused on whether the geographic origin of the pathogen is South America or central Mexico. Different lines of evidence support each hypothesis. We sequenced four nuclear genes in representative samples from Mexico and the South American Andes. An Andean origin of P. infestans does not receive support from detailed analyses of Andean and Mexican populations. 
388
389
390a debate on origin of blight pathogen (why?)
391
392
393anyway, sounds like Europeans who first met Americans in Mexico spread it somewhere else in North America, then it was spread to Ireland
394
395
396https://www.livescience.com/57363-irish-potato-blight-originated-in-south-america.html
397	Irish Potato Blight Originated in South America
398
399	...The researchers found that both New World and Old World blight outbreaks were caused by pathogens with an SSR lineage that they dubbed FAM-1. (Previous research by another group had suggested the culprit was a different genetic variant called HERB-1, but that variant was not exclusive to the P. infestans pathogen, Ristaino wrote.)
400
401	After analyzing the patterns of mutations in these samples, the researchers used computer models to determine the probability of scenarios that could have led to those patterns. They determined that the most likely scenario was that the pathogen strain originated from a South American ancestor and then split into U.S. and Mexican strains.
402
403
404https://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/07/world/testing-links-potato-famine-to-an-origin-in-the-andes.html
405
406https://news.ncsu.edu/2015/11/famine-pathogen-south-america/
407
408https://www.sciencealert.com/ireland-s-great-potato-famine-started-in-south-america-researchers-find
409
410http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0168381
411
412debate still going?
413
414
415...
416
417more on history of potato and the blight pathogen:
418
419https://www.history.com/news/after-168-years-potato-famine-mystery-solved
420	First domesticated in southern Peru and Bolivia more than 7,000 years ago, the potato began its long trek out of South America in the late 16th century following the Spanish conquest of the Inca. Though some Europeans were skeptical of the newly arrived tuber, they were quickly won over by the plant’s benefits. Potatoes were slow to spoil, had three times the caloric value of grain and were cheap and easy to grow on both large farms and small, backyard lots. When a series of non-potato crop failures struck northern Europe in the late 18th century, millions of farmers switched to the more durable spud as their staple crop.
421
422	Nowhere was dependency on the potato more widespread than in Ireland, where it eventually became the sole subsistence food for one-third of the country. Impoverished tenant farmers, struggling to grow enough food to feed their families on plots of land as small as one acre, turned to the potato en masse, thanks to its ability to grow in even the worst soil. Requiring calorie-heavy diets to carry out their punishing workloads, they were soon consuming between 40 and 60 potatoes every day. And the potato wasn’t just used for human consumption: Ireland’s primary export to its British overlords was cattle, and more than a third of all potatoes harvested were used to feed livestock.
423
424	By the early 19th century, however, the potato had begun to show a tendency toward crop failure, with Ireland and much of northern Europe experience smaller blights in the decades leading up to the Great Famine. While the effects of these failures were largely ameliorated in many countries thanks to their cultivation of a wide variety of different potatoes, Ireland was left vulnerable to these blights due to its dependence on just one type, the Irish Lumper. When HERB-1, which had already wreaked havoc on crops in Mexico and the United States, made its way across the Atlantic sometime in 1844, its effect was immediate—and devastating. Within a year, potato crops across France, Belgium and Holland had been affected and by late 1845 between one-third and one-half of Ireland’s fields had been wiped out. The destruction continued the following year, when three-quarters of that year’s harvest was destroyed and the first starvation deaths were reported.
425
426	As the crisis grew, British relief efforts only made things worse: The emergency importation of grain failed to prevent further deaths due to Ireland’s lack of working mills to process the food; absentee British landlords evicted thousands of starving peasants when they were unable to pay rent; and a series of workhouses and charity homes established to care for the most vulnerable were poorly managed, becoming squalid centers of disease and death. By 1851 1 million Irish—nearly one-eight of the population—were dead from starvation or disease. Emigration from the country, which had steadily increased in the years leading up to the famine, ballooned, and by 1855 2 million people had fled, swelling the immigrant Irish populations of Canada, the United States, Australia and elsewhere. Even today, more than 150 years later, Ireland’s population has still not recovered its pre-famine level. Those that stayed behind, haunted by their country’s suffering, would form the basis of an Irish independence movement that continued into the 20th century.
427
428
429https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_potato
430	Sailors returning from the Andes to Spain with silver presumably brought maize and potatoes for their own food on the trip.[9] Historians speculate that leftover tubers (and maize) were carried ashore and planted: "We think that the potato arrived some years before the end of the 16th century, by two different ports of entry: the first, logically, in Spain around 1570, and the second via the British Isles between 1588 and 1593 ... we find traces of the transport of potatoes travelling from the Canaries to Antwerp in 1567 ... we can say that the potato was introduced there [the Canary islands] from South America around 1562 ... the first written mention of the potato [is] ... a receipt for delivery dated 28 November 1567 between Las Palmas in the Grand Canaries and Antwerp."[10]
431
432	...The English privateer Sir Francis Drake, returning from his circumnavigation, or Sir Walter Raleigh's employee Thomas Harriot[12] are commonly credited with introducing potatoes into England. 
433
434	...The potato first spread in Europe for non-food purposes. It was first eaten on the continent at a Seville hospital in 1573. After Philip II received potatoes from Peru, he sent harvested tubers to the pope, who sent them to the papal ambassador to the Netherlands because he was ill. Clusius indirectly received his tubers from the ambassador; he planted them in Vienna, Frankfurt, and Leyden, and is the person who widely introduced the plant to Europe.
435
436	...In France and Germany government officials and noble landowners promoted the rapid conversion of fallow land into potato fields after 1750. The potato thus became an important staple crop in northern Europe. Famines in the early 1770s contributed to its acceptance, as did government policies in several European countries and climate change during the Little Ice Age, when traditional crops in this region did not produce as reliably as before.[11][15][16] 
437
438	...In France, at the end of the 16th century, the potato had been introduced to the Franche-Comté, the Vosges of Lorraine and Alsace. By the end of the 18th century it was written in the 1785 edition of Bon Jardinier: "There is no vegetable about which so much has been written and so much enthusiasm has been shown ... The poor should be quite content with this foodstuff."[18] It had widely replaced the turnip and rutabaga by the 19th century.[19]
439
440
441https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoine-Augustin_Parmentier
442	Antoine-Augustin Parmentier (French pronunciation: ​[ɑ̃twanə.oɡystɛ̃ paʁmɑ̃tje]; Montdidier 12 August 1737 – 13 December 1813) is remembered as a vocal promoter of the potato as a food source for humans in France and throughout Europe. His many other contributions to nutrition and health included establishing the first mandatory smallpox vaccination campaign (under Napoleon beginning in 1805, when he was Inspector-General of the Health Service)
443
444	...Potato publicity stunts
445
446	Parmentier therefore began a series of publicity stunts for which he remains notable today, hosting dinners at which potato dishes featured prominently and guests included luminaries such as Benjamin Franklin and Antoine Lavoisier, giving bouquets of potato blossoms to the King and Queen, and surrounding his potato patch at Sablons with armed guards to suggest valuable goods — then instructing them to accept any and all bribes from civilians and withdrawing them at night so the greedy crowd could "steal" the potatoes.
447
448	...Acceptance of the potato
449
450	In 1771 Parmentier won an essay contest in which all the judges voted the potato as the best substitute for regular flour.[5] This was before a time France needed a replacement for wheat, so Parmentier continued to face criticism and lack of acknowledgment for his work. The first step in the acceptance of the potato in French society was a year of bad harvests, 1785, when the scorned potatoes staved off famine in the north of France. In 1789 Parmentier published Treatise on the Culture and Use of the Potato, ..."printed by order of the king", giving royal backing to potato eating, albeit on the eve of the French Revolution, leaving it up to the Republicans to accept it.[7] In 1794 Madame Mérigot published La Cuisinière Républicaine (The [Female] Republican Cook), the first potato cookbook, promoting potatoes as food for the common people.[7][8][9]
451
452
453https://books.google.com/books?id=ekmLpQC9JWkC&pg=PA90&lpg=PA90
454	In the 18th century France potatoes were avoided like the plague, despite efforts by Marie-Antoinette to make the potato more fashionable by wearing potato blossoms in her hair.
455
456	However, the French pharmacist Antoine Augustin Parmentier believed the potato could be the answer for French farmers ...Paramentier often mentioned the name of Michel-Guillaume de Creveceur in his writings. The latter ...had written a best-selling book called Letters from an American Farmer and under the pseudonym of "Normannus Americanus" he wrote a pamphlet on growing potatoes in the American colonies.
457
458	Benjamin Franklin suggested that Parmentier should hold a banquet at Les Invalides with potatoes in every course ...The idolised Dr Franjklin, always wearing his marten fur cap, attended as the guest of honour. He feasted on every course and gave it a rave review.
459
460
461https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_potato
462	...The annual potato crop of France soared to 21 million hectoliters in 1815 and 117 million in 1840, allowing a concomitant growth in population while avoiding the Malthusian trap. Although potatoes had become widely familiar in Russia by 1800, they were confined to garden plots until the grain failure in 1838–39 persuaded peasants and landlords in central and northern Russia to devote their fallow fields to raising potatoes. Potatoes yielded from two to four times more calories per acre than grain did, and eventually came to dominate the food supply in Eastern Europe. 
463
464	...In the German lands, Frederick the Great, king of Prussia, strove successfully to overcome farmers' skepticism about the potato, and in 1756 he issued an official proclamation mandating its cultivation. 
465
466	...The crop slowly spread across Europe, such that, for example, by 1845 it occupied one-third of Irish arable land.[citation needed] Potatoes comprised about 10% of the caloric intake of Europeans.[citation needed] Along with several other foods that either originated in the Americas or were successfully grown or harvested there, potatoes sustained European populations.[21]
467
468	...Potatoes became popular in the north of England, where coal was readily available, so a potato-driven population boom provided ample workers for the new factories. Marxist Friedrich Engels even declared that the potato was the equal of iron for its "historically revolutionary role".[13]
469
470	...A lack of genetic diversity from the low number of varieties left the crop vulnerable to disease. In the early 1800s, a strain of potato blight (Phytophthora infestans) known as HERB-1 began to spread in the Americas, especially Central and North America destroying many crops. The blight spread to Europe in the 1840s where, because of an extreme lack of genetic diversity, the potato crops were even more susceptible. In Northern Europe there were major crop losses lasting throughout the rest of the 19th century. Ireland in particular, because of the extreme dependence of the poor, especially western Ireland, on this single staple crop, was devastated by the blight's arrival in 1845.[24][25]
471
472
473blight maybe more "man" than "God" than one might think
474
475
476
477https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Potato_Failure
478	The effect of the crisis on Ireland is incomparable to all other places, causing one million deaths,[citation needed] up to two million refugees, and spurring a century-long population decline. Excluding Ireland, the death toll from the crisis is estimated to be in the region of 100,000 people. Of this, Belgium and Prussia account for most of the deaths, with 40,000–50,000 estimated to have died in Belgium, with Flanders particularly affected, and about 42,000 estimated to have perished in Prussia. The remainder of deaths occurred mainly in France, where 10,000 people are estimated to have died as a result of famine-like conditions.[2]
479
480
481here's an article on I guess where it started in New England, dated Oct 2 1844:
482
483https://www.newspapers.com/image/404606731/?terms=potato%2Bblight
484	THE DISEASE IN POTATOES
485
486	There is no topic of conversation more common or more interesting, at this time, among farmers, than the disease which seems to have affected the potato crop in New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, COnnecticut, and Massachusetts.
487
488	...A writer in a late number of the Utica Gazette, thinks that the disease is the effect of an insect. This is not the general opinion. THe disease has been on the increase for several years, and has excited great interest in Scotland, Germany and Russia.
489
490	...The loss last season from rot in potatoes, in this State [Massachusetts], exceed several hundred thousand dollars, and we fear that this year it will fall but little below one million.
491
492	...Vermont:
493
494	"Our crops are all good, excepting potatoes. There is not only a blast upon them, but a disease which renders them unfit for use: in many fields, nine-tenths are rotten, or are beginning to rot. Many hogs are said to have died in consequence of eating them. Such a thing never was known before here. ...The Millerites say it is a judgment sent from God, for not believing their peculiar doctrine; but it seems *their* potatoes don't escape, but share the same fate of the unbelievers."
495
496	Rot in Potatoes.--We continue to have accounts from various quarters of what is supposed to be a disease among potatoes. This is certainly uncommon in New England, though in New York the same complaint was made last season.
497
498	The summer has been uncommonly dry near Boston, yet the potato crop is quite as good as common: and we hear of but few instances of rot in potatoes here. In Worcester county, and through-out New Hampshire, the summer has been more wet, and there we find more cases of the rot.
499
500	We cannot account for this uncommon attack on this useful plant: we must have more facts, to give us a clue to the cause. If the season had been uncommonly wet, we should suspect that might have some influence. We are inclined to think we do not revert often enough to first principles: our potatoes deteriorate by planting the tubers for a long course of years, as all know who have paid attention to it. 
501
502	...Nearly or quite the entire crop of potatoes in this region is lost! When dug they are found to be diseased and rotten.
503
504
505a lot of crops lost according to reports, one report gives bad advice saying "it was probably just too wet" and dismisses idea of disease, another said it was a matter of concern in Germany, Scotland, and Russia
506
507
508in Sep 1844 were discussing "rot of the potato" in England: https://www.newspapers.com/image/400890842/?terms=potato%2Bblight
509
510
511kindof interesting 12 march 1842  in English paper:
512
513https://www.newspapers.com/image/392902996/?terms=potato
514	THE POTATO.
515
516	The potato is hardly second to whet in its importance to man; and although it has been reviled as the mother of pauperism, or stigmatised as the great cause of Irish misery, it will always continue to contribute to the nations of the earth a most essential part of their daily bread.
517
518
519apparently got reputation "reviled" in association with pauperism, stigmitised in association with Irish
520
521
522goes on to say there is bad managment being done in cultivating potatoes, reccomendations on how close to plant potatoes
523
524
525May 19 1843 article in English paper saying some potatoes have become deformed, wondering if "from the soil or the seed:" https://www.newspapers.com/image/395486608/?terms=potato
526
527a guy named "Sir Charles Lemon" was investigating it, also mentioned here: https://www.newspapers.com/image/409682632/?terms=potato%2Bdisease
528
529here's what he wrote in "Royal Agricultural society:" https://books.google.com/books?id=Z5oEAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA431&lpg=PA431&dq=Sir+%22Charles+Lemon%22+potatoes&source=bl&ots=R0wGco2ttB&sig=RV3PQP3Iea6Kx8VGtIqjTHgBHBU&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiIudn94tvaAhUPNd8KHf7mCosQ6AEITTAJ#v=onepage&q=Sir%20%22Charles%20Lemon%22%20potatoes&f=false
530
531I guess their potatoes had genetic defects, but they wouldn't have been able to figure that out at that point in history
532
533
534April 20, 1844, a guy did some research in England and concluded a potato disease people were worried about "must be attributed to the potato itself:" https://www.newspapers.com/image/395997701/?terms=potato%2Bdisease
535
536
537Jul 13 1842 article in Dublin, "Freeman's Journal":
538
539https://www.newspapers.com/image/385245932/?terms=potato%2Bdisease
540	THE DISTRESS-THE GOVERNMENT-THE LANDLORDS.
541
542	Although public attention has at length been awakened to the prevalent destitution, we regret that there are no reasonable hopes of its speedy removal. The weather for the last fornight has been such as greatly to retard, if providentially it has not permanently injured, the growing crops, more especially the potato crops, on which the poor so exclusively depend for food. 
543
544	...If the poor are driven to an over-early use of the growing potato crop, two things will assuredly result. This year they will be the victims of fever and disease; the next will again find them a prey to deplorable distress, as greivous as that under which they now suffer. We regret to learn that already in the district of Kilgeever, of which our readers have heard o much, the people are running for subsitence to the potato fields.
545
546
547https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman%27s_Journal
548	The Freeman's Journal was the oldest nationalist newspaper in Ireland. It was founded in 1763 by Charles Lucas and was identified with radical 18th-century Protestant patriot politicians Henry Grattan and Henry Flood. This changed from 1784 when it passed to Francis Higgins (better known as the "Sham Squire")[1][2] and took a more pro-British and pro-administration view. In fact Francis Higgins is mentioned in the Secret Service Money Book as having betrayed Lord Edward FitzGerald. Higgins was paid £1,000 for information on FitzGerald's capture.[3]
549
550	In the 19th century it became more nationalist in tone, particularly under the control and inspiration of Sir John Gray (1815–75).
551
552	The Journal, as it was widely known as, was the leading newspaper in Ireland throughout the 19th century. Contemporary sources record it being read to the largely illiterate population by priests and local teachers gathering in homes. It was mentioned in contemporary literature and was seen as symbolising Irish newspapers for most of its time. By the 1880s it had become the primary media supporter of Charles Stewart Parnell and the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP).
553
554
555kinda weird
556
557seems like they shoulda known this was coming
558
559
560this is interesting: Glasgow Herald, Aug 12 1844:
561
562https://www.newspapers.com/image/409188973/?terms=potato%2Bdisease
563	DISCUSSION ON THE FAILURE IN THE POTATO CROP.
564
565	...the subject chosen for discussion was the nature and causes of the disease in potatoes. Go where they would, where failure existed, they would find that every farmer had a reason of his own for it. But it was not opinions, but facts and explanations that were wanted... He had made much inquiry into this subject, and found that the disease in potatoes was not confied to this country nor indeed to Europe. It existed in Germany, in North and South Russia, in Enmakr, in the United States, in North and South America--in short, the epidemic appears to have made the range of the world. When facts like these were known, they would see that the idea of curing the disease by importing potatoes from America was a very fallacious one; and it showed them that to cure it they must adopt some other fundamental principie. He had received volumes, which had been written on the subject, from Germany, Russia, and the United States, as well as various communications from intelligent agriculturists. ...The Learned Professor then read a letter from Mr. Girdwood, factor to the Marquis of Bute, of which the following are extracts:--
566
567	"Allow me in this way to state to you what has occured in my experience, both in this year and last, in reference to the disease in potato, which, without suggesting any remedy, only shows more strongly its mysterious capriciousness. ...they succeeded well in 1841 and 1842, and I had every reason to expect they were going to turn out valuable field varieties. Last year, however, (1843) they were almost a total failure; still the few that did grow were preserved, have been planted this year, and have become healthy and vigorous. Again, on the same field last year, (1843) a plot of smooth beds showed symptoms of disease, in fact there was a good many blanks, and the whole plot was stunted and weakly."
568
569
570	...In reference to the taint in potatoes, he might state that there was no failure 30 years ago, although it was often roughly treated; now disease existed in almost every country where the potat was cultivated whether in Europe or America. The oldest varities, viz., the rought red and common red are most subject to disease; the cups, one of the newest sorts, blossoms, but seldom bears apples in Scotland; it is one of the most healthy kinds, but within the last two years has begn to fail in Ireland. 
571
572	...Under these circumstances he saw no alternative but to get a fresh supply of seed--and the sooner the better--from Peru, or any other native country of the potato, where fresh plants have been allowed to come up every successive year. Unless something were done the potato might degenerate altogether.
573
574	...while men of science, like Professor Johnston, could digest that information, and reconcile what appeared inconsistent; and he had no doubt, notwithstanding the forebodings of Mr. Stirling, that the cultivation of so invaluable an article of food as the potato, would be greatly improved and extended. (Cheers.)
575
576	The meeting then separated.
577
578
579a lot written on "epidemic" on potatoes by 1844, some observers say started in scotland in 1843, a lot written in Germany, Russia, and U.S. Question up in air whether potato cultivation could continue. Someone had idea (who?) of importing potatoes from the U.S. to fix it, but it was pointed out that wouldn't make sense since epidemic there.
580
581
582Aberdeen Journal Scotland Nov 27, 1844:
583
584https://www.newspapers.com/image/393153035/?terms=potato%2Bdisease
585	ON DISEASE OF THE POTATO.
586
587	So much has been said and written of the disease incident to the potato, that it is difficult to make any new observation or experiment. A gentleman, who has carefully considered the subject, states as follows:--
588
589	"The innocent potato itself is more sinned against than sinning. It is drawn and mangled, cut and disfigured, and weitering in its wounds is thrown into the earth, to live or die, without regard either to the state of the weather, or the state of the seed--things carefully considered in the sowing of every other crop. I hold that whatever is opposed to nature is wrong in practice. I do not mean to uphold the doctrine, that splits, or cut potatoes, will not grow; but I mean to say, they will occasionally, and often do, fail, while the whole or unmutilated potato never does.
590
591
592were they growing potatoes by cutting them up instead of seeds?
593
594would think asexual reproduction of potatoes would make them more susceptible to disease
595
596Glasgow Herald Jul 8 1844:
597
598https://www.newspapers.com/image/409188227/?terms=potato%2Bdisease
599	Potato Blosson.--We observe that a letter has been addressed to the editor of the Hereford Times, by Mr. W. Godsall, strongly recommending all persons interested in the potato crop, especially cottagers, to pull off the flowers diligently as soon as they appear. We beg to second that reccomendation. All experience shows that flows of the potato are produced at the expense of that organisable matter which gives its value to the tuber, and which is diminished in quantity in proportion to the number of flowers that have been fed. For flowers must exist and feed on something, and that something is what would, if not removed by the flowers, descend beneath the ground and collect intself in the tubers. ...The man who makes his potato ground feed flowers prevents its feeding his children. Every ounce of matter consumed by the flowers is so much taken for the consumption of the family. We cannot just now lay our hands on any precise evidence of how much is lost in this way. Mr. Godsall assumes it to amount to many hundred weights, or even a ton an acre; but he is in all probability under the mark.
600
601
602
603...
604
605
606https://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/ireland-1845-to-1922/the-great-famine-of-1845/
607	In 1844, a new form of potato blight was identified in America. It basically turned a potato into a mushy mess that was completely inedible. The American blight was first identified in France and the Isle of Wight in 1845. The summer of 1845 was mild but very wet in Britain. It was almost the perfect weather conditions for the blight to spread. The blight is still with us and is called ‘Phytophthora Infestans’ – an air carried fungus.
608
609	The people of Ireland expected a good potato crop in 1845. The weather had appeared to be favourable and in many senses, the farming community of Ireland expected a bumper harvest. However, when it came to digging up the potatoes, all they got was a black gooey mess. In fact, the expected bumper crop turned out to be a disaster. There was a 50% loss of potatoes in this year. The rural community had no way of countering this. Each family grew what they needed for that year and few had any to keep for times of trouble. In fact, the problem got worse. The crop of 1846 was all but a total failure and there was a very poor harvest in 1847. Three disastrous years in succession presented Ireland with huge problems.
610
611	The advice given to those affected by the potato blight bordered on the absurd. One scientist advised people to get hold of chloric acid and manganese dioxide. This mixture should have been been added to salt and applied to the diseased area of the potato. Even if the farmers had the opportunity to obtain such chemicals, they would have produced chlorine gas used to poison troops in World War One!
612
613
614more bad advice given to famine victims
615
616
617	...There were some good landlords. Vaughan in County Mayo is recognised as one, but he was simply overwhelmed by the extent of the poverty. Tenants on neighbouring estates came to his land for help but Vaughn was swamped by the sheer numbers involved. Ironically, those landlords who can be classed as compassionate suffered as a result of those who did nothing.
618
619	Some landlords resorted to forced emigration of their tenants in an effort to ‘solve’ the problem in Ireland. In October 1847, the ship ‘Lord Ashburton’ carried 477 Irish emigrants to North America. 177 of these people came from one estate owned by an absentee landlord. They were so poor that they were all but naked for the journey and 87 had to be clothed by charity groups in America before they could leave the ship. On this particular voyage, 107 people died of dysentery and fever. The ‘Quebec Gazette’ described the ‘Lord Ashburton’ and all that it represented as “a disgrace to the Home Authorities.” The absentee landlord who had forced 177 of his tenants onto the ship was Lord Palmerston, the British Foreign Secretary at this time, and one of the most famous of Britain’s politicians in the Nineteenth Century.
620
621
622Palmerston sketchy guy landowner in ireland and involved in emigration of Irish to U.S. where conditions compared to slave trade: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3133615?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
623
624
625	...Ironically, the famine did not help those who stayed on the land. With far fewer people to work the land, it might be thought that landlords would be less harsh on their tenants as they had a vested interest in having their land worked. This did not happen. Landlords used the opportunity to ‘rationalise’ their estates and there were more evictions even after the famine had ended.
626
627
628so far sounds like they knew famine was coming, knew potato sustained poor in Europe and had reputation of that, instead of trying to fix problem gave them advice that would kill them, did nothing, depopulated Ireland and sent millions to U.S. where they were treated with racism too
629
630
631
632conquered Irish with help from Pope, planned on starving, kept subjugated with laws and impoverished, set up landlord fuedal systema and forced to grow potatoes on small land, ended up reliant on one species of potato by time of famine
633
634potato blight widely reported in U.S. 1843-44
635
636an alarm had been raised about disease in potato crops around Europe and Russia by 1844, loss of potato cultivation contemplated
637
638someone had the idea of fixing blight by importing from America and strain was found to be imported more than once from America in later genetic research
639
640by the time reports of major loses of 1/3rd to 1/2 in Ireland, British gov reccomended not to do anything "prematurely", ignored proposals for importing food
641
642
643
644...
645
646
647I guess Aruthur Chichester came up with the idea:
648
649https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Chichester,_Arthur_(1563-1625)_(DNB00)
650	Of any sympathy with the Irish character there is no trace in Chichester's letters. Like every Englishman of that day, he had no other recipe for Irish misery than the enforced adoption of English habits. 'We follow,' he wrote on 5 Oct., 'a painful, toilsome, hazardous, and unprofitable war, by which the queen will never reap what is expected until the nation be wholly destroyed or so subjected as to take & new impression of laws and religion, beins; now the most treacherous infidels ot the world, and we have too mild spirits and good consciences to be their masters. He is a well-governed and wary gentleman whom their villany doth not deceive. Our honesty, bounty, clemency, and justice make them not any way assured to us ; neither doth the actions of one of their own nation, though it be the murder of father, brother, or friend, make them longer enemies than until some small gift or buyinff [?] be given unto the wronged party.' With these sentiments Chichester had nothing but commendation to bestow on Mountjoy's mode of carrying on the war. 'I wish,' he wrote on 14 March 1602, 'the rebels and their countries in all parts of Ireland like these, where they starve miserably, and eat dogs, mares, and garrons where they can get them. No course . . . will cut the throat of the grand traitors, subject his limbs, and bring the country into quiet, but famine, which is well begun, and will daily increase. When they are aown, it must be good laws, severe punishment, abolishing their ceremonies and customs in religion, and lordlike Irish government, keeping them without arms more than what shall be necessary for the defence of the honest, and some port towns erected upon these northern harbours that must bridle them, and keep them in perpetual obedience.'
651
652
653------
654
655
656seems like many in British elite wanted to kill Irish, and this had been a pattern for many years
657
658more broadly, hints that those involved in promoting famine were targetting the poor in general--potato was imported but only a few species, spread across europe and apparently became afllicted with genetic problems, became known as staple food for the poor. It was after this that the famine spread suddenly, to which these crops were susceptible.
659
660At the same time, theories of malthus were used to justify slaughter of poor, and suspect people were taking helm of revolutions by poor against hated elite, which blossomed breifly around 1848 before being crushed. France became and empire again under Napaleon III.
661
662Promoting global maladies that especially affect poor might be pattern among elite, including in recent times--for example, William Booth and contemporaries misinterpreted reports on global warming in press and sought to downplay alarm about it, and global warming is expected to be a calamity much more for the poor.
663
664I guess a general pattern is they will promote calamities that aren't expected to affect them too much: war, famine, certain kinds of pestillence. e.g. in WWI iirc it was mostly the poor who got drafted, while the elite benefited by gaining new political power in anti-war effort, replacing old aristocricy with their people in revolutions 
665
666
667although, hatred of the poor can't explain motivations entirely--British policies created poverty in Ireland in the first place, and some of the people who helped them were at least not rich. Global warming would also destroy many beach-front properties, a favorite of the rich. Logic would have it that the best way to "get rid of the poor" would not be to kill them but bring them prosperity and fortune. Under Communism, the reaction to laisaize-faire policies like this, technically nobody was "poor" yet the killings continued.
668
669
670------
671
672
673https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)
674	In January 1847, the government abandoned this policy, realising that it had failed, and turned to a mixture of "indoor" and "outdoor" direct relief; the former administered in workhouses through the Irish Poor Laws, the latter through soup kitchens. The costs of the Poor Law fell primarily on the local landlords, some of whom in turn attempted to reduce their liability by evicting their tenants,[73] a practice that was facilitated by the "Cheap Ejectment Acts".[75] 
675
676
677a lot of the policies ended up causing emigration from ireland
678
679
680	In June 1847 the Poor Law Amendment Act was passed which embodied the principle, popular in Britain, that Irish property must support Irish poverty. The landed proprietors in Ireland were held in Britain to have created the conditions that led to the famine.[76][77] However, it was asserted that the British parliament since the Act of Union of 1800 was partly to blame.[76] This point was raised in The Illustrated London News on 13 February 1847: "There was no law it would not pass at their request, and no abuse it would not defend for them." On 24 March, The Times reported that Britain had permitted in Ireland "a mass of poverty, disaffection, and degradation without a parallel in the world. It allowed proprietors to suck the very life-blood of that wretched race".[76] 
681
682
683landlords and parliamente were blamed for creating conditions for famine at the time--what were charges?
684
685
686	...Records show that Irish lands exported food even during the worst years of the Famine. When Ireland had experienced a famine in 1782–83, ports were closed to keep Irish-grown food in Ireland to feed the Irish. Local food prices promptly dropped. Merchants lobbied against the export ban, but government in the 1780s overrode their protests.[79] No such export ban happened in the 1840s.[80]
687
688	Throughout the entire period of the Famine, Ireland was exporting enormous quantities of food. In the magazine History Ireland (1997, issue 5, pp. 32–36), Christine Kinealy, a Great Hunger scholar, lecturer, and Drew University professor, relates her findings: Almost 4,000 vessels carried food from Ireland to the ports of Bristol, Glasgow, Liverpool, and London during 1847, when 400,000 Irish men, women, and children died of starvation and related diseases. She also writes that Irish exports of calves, livestock (except pigs), bacon, and ham actually increased during the Famine. This food was shipped from the most famine-stricken parts of Ireland: Ballina, Ballyshannon, Bantry, Dingle, Killala, Kilrush, Limerick, Sligo, Tralee, and Westport. A wide variety of commodities left Ireland during 1847, including peas, beans, onions, rabbits, salmon, oysters, herring, lard, honey, tongues, animal skins, rags, shoes, soap, glue, and seed. The most shocking export figures concern butter. Butter was shipped in firkins, each one holding 9 imperial gallons; 41 litres. In the first nine months of 1847, 56,557 firkins (509,010 imperial gallons; 2,314,000 litres) were exported from Ireland to Bristol, and 34,852 firkins (313,670 imperial gallons; 1,426,000 litres) were shipped to Liverpool, which correlates with 822,681 imperial gallons (3,739,980 litres) of butter exported to England from Ireland during nine months of the worst year of the Famine.[81] The problem in Ireland was not lack of food, which was plentiful, but the price of it, which was beyond the reach of the poor.[82]
689
690	The historian Cecil Woodham-Smith wrote in The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845–1849 that no issue has provoked so much anger and embittered relations between England and Ireland "as the indisputable fact that huge quantities of food were exported from Ireland to England throughout the period when the people of Ireland were dying of starvation".[83] John Ranelagh writes that Ireland remained a net exporter of food throughout most of the five-year famine.[84] However, both Woodham-Smith and Cormac Ó Gráda write that, in addition to the maize imports, four times as much wheat was imported into Ireland at the height of the famine as exported.[85][86] 
691
692
693ended up exporting a lot of food during famine. Exports were stopped in famine of 1782-83 but this wasn't done for great famine
694
695
696	...William Smith O'Brien—speaking on the subject of charity in a speech to the Repeal Association in February 1845—applauded the fact that the universal sentiment on the subject of charity was that they would accept no English charity. He expressed the view that the resources of Ireland were still abundantly adequate to maintain the population, and that, until those resources had been utterly exhausted, he hoped that there was no one in "Ireland who will so degrade himself as to ask the aid of a subscription from England".[46] 
697
698
699O'Brien said Ireland would accept no English charity--why?
700
701seems like some leaders in Irish independance movement at the time would make for a prop to harden hearts of English people
702
703
704	...Landlords were responsible for paying the rates of every tenant whose yearly rent was £4 or less. Landlords whose land was crowded with poorer tenants were now faced with large bills. Many began clearing the poor tenants from their small plots, and letting the land in larger plots for over £4 which then reduced their debts. In 1846, there had been some clearances, but the great mass of evictions came in 1847.[98] According to James S. Donnelly, Jr., it is impossible to be sure how many people were evicted during the years of the famine and its immediate aftermath. It was only in 1849 that the police began to keep a count, and they recorded a total of almost 250,000 persons as officially evicted between 1849 and 1854.[99]
705
706	Donnelly considered this to be an underestimate, and if the figures were to include the number pressured into "voluntary" surrenders during the whole period (1846–1854), the figure would almost certainly exceed half a million persons.[100] While Helen Litton says there were also thousands of "voluntary" surrenders, she notes also that there was "precious little voluntary about them". In some cases, tenants were persuaded to accept a small sum of money to leave their homes, "cheated into believing the workhouse would take them in".[98]
707
708	West Clare was one of the worst areas for evictions, where landlords turned thousands of families out and demolished their derisory cabins. Captain Kennedy in April 1848 estimated that 1,000 houses, with an average of six people to each, had been levelled since November.[101] The Mahon family of Strokestown House evicted 3,000 people in 1847, and were still able to dine on lobster soup.[102]
709
710	After Clare, the worst area for evictions was County Mayo, accounting for 10% of all evictions between 1849 and 1854. The Earl of Lucan, who owned over 60,000 acres (240 km2), was among the worst evicting landlords. He was quoted as saying that "he would not breed paupers to pay priests". Having turned out in the parish of Ballinrobe over 2,000 tenants alone, he then used the cleared land as grazing farms.[103] In 1848, the Marquis of Sligo owed £1,650 to Westport Union; he was also an evicting landlord, though he claimed to be selective, saying that he was only getting rid of the idle and dishonest. Altogether, he cleared about 25% of his tenants.[104]
711
712	In 1847, Bishop of Meath, Thomas Nulty, described his personal recollection of the evictions in a pastoral letter to his clergy:
713
714	    Seven hundred human beings were driven from their homes in one day and set adrift on the world, to gratify the caprice of one who, before God and man, probably deserved less consideration than the last and least of them ... The horrid scenes I then witnessed, I must remember all my life long. The wailing of women – the screams, the terror, the consternation of children – the speechless agony of honest industrious men – wrung tears of grief from all who saw them. I saw officers and men of a large police force, who were obliged to attend on the occasion, cry like children at beholding the cruel sufferings of the very people whom they would be obliged to butcher had they offered the least resistance. The landed proprietors in a circle all around – and for many miles in every direction – warned their tenantry, with threats of their direct vengeance, against the humanity of extending to any of them the hospitality of a single night's shelter ... and in little more than three years, nearly a fourth of them lay quietly in their graves.[105] 
715
716
717landlords ended up evicting people who couldn't pay rent, many who would end up dead
718
719irish independance movement had point in that if Irish got back their land, probably many lives could have been saved
720
721
722	...The "Gregory clause", described by Donnelly as a "vicious amendment to the Irish poor law", had been a successful Tory amendment to the Whig poor-relief bill which became law in early June 1847, where its potential as an estate-clearing device was widely recognised in parliament, although not in advance.[78] At first, the poor law commissioners and inspectors viewed the clause as a valuable instrument for a more cost-effective administration of public relief, but the drawbacks soon became apparent, even from an administrative perspective. They would soon view them as little more than murderous from a humanitarian perspective. According to Donnelly, it became obvious that the quarter-acre clause was "indirectly a death-dealing instrument".[108] 
723
724
725"Gregory clause" was that anyone occupying more than 1/4 acre of land was not eligable for relief
726
727guy who put it in sketchy, also friends with many confederates before U.S. civil war
728
729
730------
731
732
733https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-malthus-is-still-wrong/
734	If by fiat I had to identify the most consequential ideas in the history of science, good and bad, in the top 10 would be the 1798 treatise An Essay on the Principle of Population, by English political economist Thomas Robert Malthus. On the positive side of the ledger, it inspired Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace to work out the mechanics of natural selection based on Malthus's observation that populations tend to increase geometrically (2, 4, 8, 16 …), whereas food reserves grow arithmetically (2, 3, 4, 5 …), leading to competition for scarce resources and differential reproductive success, the driver of evolution.
735
736
737"Essay on the Principle of Population" said to be influential by malthus
738
739
740	On the negative side of the ledger are the policies derived from the belief in the inevitability of a Malthusian collapse. “The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race,” Malthus gloomily predicted. His scenario influenced policy makers to embrace social Darwinism and eugenics, resulting in draconian measures to restrict particular populations' family size, including forced sterilizations.
741
742	In his book The Evolution of Everything (Harper, 2015), evolutionary biologist and journalist Matt Ridley sums up the policy succinctly: “Better to be cruel to be kind.” The belief that “those in power knew best what was good for the vulnerable and weak” led directly to legal actions based on questionable Malthusian science. For example, the English Poor Law implemented by Queen Elizabeth I in 1601 to provide food to the poor was severely curtailed by the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, based on Malthusian reasoning that helping the poor only encourages them to have more children and thereby exacerbate poverty. The British government had a similar Malthusian attitude during the Irish potato famine of the 1840s, Ridley notes, reasoning that famine, in the words of Assistant Secretary to the Treasury Charles Trevelyan, was an “effective mechanism for reducing surplus population.” A few decades later Francis Galton advocated marriage between the fittest individuals (“What nature does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly man may do providently, quickly and kindly”), followed by a number of prominent socialists such as Sidney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, Havelock Ellis and H. G. Wells, who openly championed eugenics as a tool of social engineering.
743
744
745malthus ideas combined with social darwinism and eugenics to justify things like forced sterilization policies
746
747
748
749Trevelyan openly called famine a good thing from malthusian reasoning
750
751Shaw and H.G. Wells also malthus fans?
752
753
754https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Essay_on_the_Principle_of_Population
755
756
757seems pretty obvious causing a famine would only make the problem Malthus wrote about worse... what was up with Trevelyan? other "malthusians?"
758
759
760------
761
762
763"The Famine Plot:"
764
765
766pg 13
767
768	
769	...Irish trade was crippled by the partial conquest. Instead of being developed, valuable cattle, fishing, and woolen industries were taxed out of existence when they came into competition with either British trading interests or her military concerns, which led her to disrupt Irish trade with both France and America.
770
771	As a result, Ireland in the nineteenth century was a poverty-stricken land to which famine was a frequent visitor.
772
773
774Seems doubtful policymakers actually acted out of belief in "laissez-faire" economic policies like Wikipedia says. There was also a food tariff that contributed to the famine that they didn't want to get rid of.
775
776goes on to say Ireland had many famines, including 1741 famine that killed 1/8th of population 
777
778
779	...At the time it was frequently said that the 1789 rebellion was secretly encouraged by direction of the English prime minister William Pitt so that it would go off half-cocked before the Society of United Irishmen could succeed in their aim of uniting Catholic, Protestant, and Dissenter against the Crown. Certainly English policy seemed directed at fermenting rather than aborting rebellion. 
780
781
782worth looking at later--British empire supposedly pioneers in tyranny
783
784
785	...The hatred of the Protestants for the Catholics was such taht the commanding English general Abercrombie became so revolted by the people he was defending that he had as little to do with them as he possibly could. For their part the Catholics occasionally responded to the floggings and hangings with atrocities of their own. In Scuallabogue in County Wexford for example, the insurgents burned down a church containing hundreds of captured Protestant women and children.
786
787
788is this a pattern? Protestants rebel against catholic church, co-opted, become British Empire and hate Catholics; communists rebel against imperialism, co-opted, become Soviets and hate imperialists, etc. Like figure people won't suspect ideology doesn't mean beans to them
789
790
791pg 19
792
793	...The majority of the peasentry, perhaps as many as 3 million peopled, lived in conditions in which a considerate owner would not have placed a dog.
794
795	The bulk of the peasants' accomodation consisted of mud cabins covered in straw or what was known as "scraws" cut from the top of bogs or rough fields. Any improvements to their holdings, either to the cabins or say to the drainage of their fields, would have resulted in rents being increased. The law was on the landlords' side, and the renters of land were tenants at will who could be ejected with ease from either large or small holdings.
796
797
798couldn't improve land holding or rent increased
799
800
801	...The peasentry reckoned that their lives could not possibly be worse married than unmarried and as a result something of a population explosion occurred. Between 1741, the date of the last big famine, and the coming of the blight in 1845 the population of Ireland *tripled.* Feeding so many was clearly a challenge.
802
803
804this where malthusian arguments came from?
805
806Britain population roughly tripled in same period, why no famine there?
807
808
809pg 24
810
811gang fights said to be going on before time of famine (anything interesting there?)
812
813
814pg 25 tithe system in place like old Catholic church, led to "tithe war" in 1838
815
816	
817	...Faction fighting was a relatively short-lived and open form of violence. But agrarian violence, and its accompanying secret societies, was far more sinister and more widespread. Agrarian secret societies grew directly out of the appalling land situation. The powerful Caravat group, formed from landless men who wanted rents reduced and wages increased, fought with the Shanavests, who were generally representative of larger farmers and wanted to keep rents high and wages low.
818
819
820"secret societies" also mentioned in wiki article, said they killed some landlords during famine
821
822pg 29
823
824says Dublin was more fancy, had an upper class
825
826
827pg 32 London aware of poverty problem in Ireland, public debates on waht to do
828
829	
830	...The English debate discussed not merely how or whether to assist the poor but laissez-faire, the prevailing doctrine of non-interference with trade. The debate was influenced by widespread Victorian attitudes that poverty was a self-inflicted wound, incurred through bad habits.
831
832
833this prevailing mood at the time? among some political factions I guess
834
835
836	Political economists debated earnestly on the morality of aiding the poor because of the consequent risk of stultifying initiative and self-help among the lower orders. The real problem of course was cost, but the protagonists couched their arguments in moralistic terms. More and more as the debate progressed, one finds that the authorities cited by protagonists tended to lace their arguments with a dose of providentialism.
837
838	Providence, the divine will, was declared to have a large bearing on the subject, as it generally does when the rich debate the poor, or the strong confront the weak. It was the era in which in America the indigenous Americans were going down before a similar doctrine: Manifest Destiny.
839
840
841I guess concluded that povert and famine was "divine will" or something? see a lot of quotes like that
842
843
844	A central figure in the debate was a classical economist. Nassau William Senior, the first professor of political economy at Oxford University, preached, among other things, that it was not the duty of the State to alleviate poverty that came about through the fault of the individual. English poor law owed a great deal to his theories and, during the Famine, Whig apologists would see to it that the idea of Irish culpability for Irish poverty would become widespread among the British public. "Lazy beds" was used as a term of derision to indicate that the Irish even brought their laziness to bear on their potato cultivation. Nassau Senior criticized Irish landlords for neglecting "the duty for the performance of which Providence created [them,] the keeping down population."
845
846
847Nassau William Senior cited as important in debate, ideas used in arguments to British public that Irish responsible for poverty there
848
849couldn't find much quoting him in newspaper search--more of a "behind the scenes" guy?
850
851
852https://archive.org/stream/americanslavery00sumngoog/americanslavery00sumngoog_djvu.txt
853	American slavery: repr. of an article [by N.W. Senior, entitled Slavery in the United States]
854
855	...Publication date 1856 
856
857	...The strife is no longer local, hut national. 
858	Even now, while 1 spcuk, portents hang on all the 
859	arches of the horizon, threatening to darken the broad 
860	land, which already yawns with the mutterings of 
861	civil war. The fury of the propagandists of Slavery, 
862	and the calm determination of their opponents, are 
863	now diffused from the distant territory over wide- 
864	spread communities, and the whole country, in all 
865	its extent — marshalling hostile divisions, and fore* 
866	shadowing a strife, which, unless happily averted by 
867	the triumph of freedom, will become war — fratricidal, 
868	parricidal war — with an accumulated wickedness be- 
869	yond the wickedness of any war in human annals ; 
870	justly provoking the avenging judgment of Provi- 
871	dence and the avenging pen of history
872
873
874Nassau some kind of British foreign policy prophet?
875
876he is really sketchy
877
878although this was a speech by Charles Sumner in his book..
879
880
881	...Mr. Sumner's speech will be made more intelligible 
882	to an English reader by the following extract from a 
883	sermon preached by the Kev. Dudley Tyng in Phila- 
884	delphia, on the 29th June, 1856 : — 
885
886	On that day more 
887	than one thousand armed men from an adjoining 
888	State invaded the Territory, drove judges and legal 
889	voters from the polls, and, by fraudulent ballots, 
890	elected a man of their own. On the 30th of March, 
891	1855, the inhabitants of Kansas were to have elected 
892	their Territorial Legislature. More than four thou- 
893	sand armed men from the same State again invaded 
894	the Territory, took possession of the polls and elected 
895	their own candidates, some of them residents of their 
896	own State. The recent investigations of the Con- 
897	gressional Committee have proved that of five thousand 
898	five hundred votes cast on that day, less than one 
899	thousand were of actual residents of the Territory. 
900
901	Surely it was bad enough tp see a Legislature im- 
902	posed on them by force and fraud. But what sort of 
903	laws did they pass ? Hear and ask yourselves whether 
904	we live in the Nineteenth Century, and in a free and 
905	Christian Republic. They re-enacted in a mass all 
906	the slave laws of Missouri
907
908	...Mr. Everett's appointment at St. James's hung in suspense because he was suspected of having uttered, somewhere, a sentiment hostile to slavery and its interests. The country is one vast Dionysius's ear. Every whisper in the closet is trasmitted and punished.
909
910	Before parting to-night, let me ask any doubting friend, if there be one here, what provocation more he proposes to wait for? They have added slave states by a coup d'etat; will you wait until they have added Cuba or Central America ? They have tried to force slavery on Kansas; will you wait until they have succeeded ? They have violated one solemn compact; how many more must they violate, before you will assert your right? They have struck down a senator in his palce. Some of their presses have designated the next victim; will you wait until he has fallen >"
911
912	Mr. Dana  was right. Mr. Brooks was not expeleld from the Senate. His only punishment was a fine of 300 dollars. This is the value set in Washington on freedom of debate. Any ruffian willing to pay 60l. may waylay and disable an opponent.
913
914	THE END.
915
916
917dunno what to make of this but weird how he wrote on it and seems like the kind of guy who would be happy to see civil war
918
919
920here's a journal of his "conversations with distinguished persons": https://archive.org/stream/conversationswi02senigoog/conversationswi02senigoog_djvu.txt
921
922
923his "science of political economy" book talked about population kindof like malthus:
924
925
926https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.274838/2015.274838.An-Outline_djvu.txt
927	The Causes 'which Limit Population. 
928
929	Having explained the sense in wMcii we use the word wealth, and 
930	stated, or rather recalled to the recollection of our readers, the general 
931	desire to obtain additional wealth with the least possible sacrifice, we 
932	now proceed to consider the second of the four elementary propositions 
933	on which the Science of Political Economy is founded ; namely, that 
934	the population of the world, or, in other words, the number of persons 
935	inhabiting it, is limited only by moral or physical evil, or by fear of 
936	the deficiency of those articles of wealth which the habits of the 
937	individuals of each class of its inhabitants lead them to require. 
938
939	It is now generally admitted, indeed it is strange that it should 
940	ever have required to he pointed out, that every species of plant or 
941	animal which is capable of increase, either by generation or by seed, 
942	must be capable of a constantly increasing increase ; every addition 
943	to its numbers being capable of affording a source of still further 
944	additions ; or, in other words, that wherever there is a capacity of 
945	increase, it must he a capacity of increase not by mere addition, but 
946	by multiplication ; or, to use the short foi*m in which the proposition 
947	is usually stated, not in an arithmetical, but in a geometrical ratio.
948
949	...that their number may double every twenty-five yeai's. 
950	At this rate the inhabitants of every Country would, in the course of 
951	every five centuries, increase to above a million times their previous 
952	number, xlt this rate the population of England would, k five bun- 
953	dred years, exceed fifteen million millions : a population wMcli would 
954	not allow tliem standing room. Sueli being the human powers of 
955	increase, the question is, By what checks is their expansion con- 
956	trolled ? How comes it that the population of the world, instead of 
957	being now a million times as great as it was five hundred years ago, 
958	apparently has not doubled within that time, and certainly has not 
959	quadrupled ? 
960
961	Mr. Malthus has divided the checks to population into the preventive 
962	and the positive. The first are those which limit fecundity, the 
963	second those which decrease longevity. The first diminish the number 
964	of births, the second increase that of deaths. And as fecundity and 
965	longevity are the only elements of the calculation, it is clear that Mr. 
966	Malthus’s division is exhaustive. The positive check to population is 
967	physical evil. The preventive checks are pi’omiscuous intercourse and 
968	abstinence from marriage. The first is moral evil; the second is, 
969	with a very few exceptions, so few indeed that they do not affect the 
970	result, founded on an apprehended deficiency of some of the things 
971	to which we have given the general appellation of wealth. All the 
972	preventive and positive checks may therefore be distributed under 
973	prudence, moral evil, and physical evil. We will first consider the 
974	positive check. 
975
976	We have seen that this check includes all the causes which tend, 
977	in any way, prematurely to shorten the duration of human existence : 
978	such as unwholesome occupations, severe labour, or exposure to the 
979	seasons, bad or insufficient food or clothing, bad nursing of children, 
980	excesses of all kinds, the corruption of the air from natural causes, 
981	or from large towns, wars, infanticide, plague, and famine. Of these, 
982	some arise from the laws of nature, and others from the crimes and 
983	follies of man : all are directly and immediately felt in the form of 
984	physical evil, though many of them ai‘e the result, more or less 
985	remotely, of moral evil. 
986
987	The final and irresistible mode in which physical evil operates is 
988	the -want of the necessaries of existence : death produced by hardship 
989	or starvation. This is almost the only check to the increase of the 
990	irrational animals ; and as man descends towards their condition, he 
991	falls more and more under its influence. In the lowest savage state 
992	it is the principal and obvious check ; in a high state of civilization it 
993	is almost imperceptible ; hut is unperceived only in consequence of 
994	the operation of its substitutes. 
995
996	...Among nations imperfectly civilized, the widest and 
997	the most wasting of the positive checks is predatory war. A district 
998	exposed to it is likely to suffer all the others. Mere fear of invasion 
999	must generally keep the great body of its inhabitants pent up in 
1000	crowded and consequently unwholesome towns ; it must confine their 
1001	cultivation to the fields in the immediate neighbourhood of those 
1002	towns, and, if it does not destroy, must so much impede their com- 
1003	merce as to render it useless as a source of subsistence ; and when 
1004	the invasion does come, it is often followed by the complete extirpation 
1005	of the in vaded community. This is the check wdiich has kept Africa, 
1006	and the central parts of Asia, in their comparatively unpeopled state. 
1007
1008	...it is certain that if each 
1009	individual were to expend to the utmost extent of his means, the 
1010	whole capital of the Country vvould he gradually wasted away, and 
1011	general misery would he the result. But it appears equally certain, 
1012	that if each individual were to confine his expenditure to mere 
1013	necessaries, the result would be misery quite as general and as 
1014	intense. 
1015
1016	We have seen that the powers of population, if not restrained by 
1017	prudence, must inevitably produce almost every form of moral and 
1018	physical evil. In tJie case which we are supposing’, the wants of 
1019	society would be confined to the food, raiment, and shelter essential 
1020	to the support of existence ; and they would all consist of the cheapest 
1021	materials. At present, among civilized nations, the cultivation of the 
1022	land employs only a portion of its inhabitants, and, generally speaking, 
1023	as a nation increases in wealth, a smaller and smaller proportion; in 
1024	England not one third ; and a great part of the labourers so employed 
1025	are producers of luxuries. Indeed, as potatoes afford a food five or 
1026	six times as ixbuudant as corn, and more than twenty times as abun- 
1027	dant as meat, and, as far as can he judged by the appearance and 
1028	poxvers of the lower Irish, quite as wholesome, meat and corn may be 
1029	considered luxuries, to the extent in which they are more expensive 
1030	than potatoes. Nor, consistently with the existence of private pro- 
1031	perty, and of the desire of xvealth, can the mode of cultivation he 
1032	directed to the obtaining the largest possible return. The object is 
1033	to obtain the largest return that is consistent with profitable farming ; 
1034	but, in the pursuit of this object, quantity of produce must often be 
1035	sacrificed to economy of labour or time. 
1036
1037	If there were no desire for any thing beyond necessaries, both the 
1038	existing partition of the land, and the existing division of labour, would 
1039	be varied. No family would wish to occupy more land than the small 
1040	plot necessary to afford them potatoes and milk. Supposing them to 
1041	give to it the utmost nicety of garden cultivation, its management 
1042	wotfid still leave them time to produce the coarse manufactures 
1043	necessary for their own use. The whole of the population would be 
1044	agricultural. 761,348 families so employed at present in England, 
1045	althougli their labour is far from being directed to the production of 
1046	the greatest possible amount, provide, xvithout much assistance from 
1047	importation, subsistence for the whole of our 2,745,336 families. If 
1048	all were so employed, and if quantity of produce were their sole 
1049	object, it is probable that in ordinary seasons the soil of England, 
1050	instead of fifteen millions, could feed at least sixty millions of people ; 
1051	and that of Europe, instead of two hundred, eight hundred millions. 
1052	And that, in the absence of any checks more powerful than those 
1053	experienced in the United States of America, the population of 
1054	Europe might in fifty years amount to eight hundred millions. Indeed 
1055	it is probable that, under the circumstances which we are supposing, 
1056	the increase in Europe would be for a considerable time rather more 
1057	rapid than that which has taken place in America. Preventive checks 
1058	would not exist ; marriages could not be hindered or even delayed by 
1059	prudence, since there could he no reason to anticipate want ; the habit 
1060	of early marriages would put an end to profligacy ; and, as all oui' 
1061	habits would be eminently healthy, the positive checks would be 
1062	reduced to their minimum. 
1063
1064	So far the picture is rather pleasing ; it exhibits a state of society, 
1065	not rich certainly, nor refined, but supporting a very numerous popu- 
1066	lation in health and strength, and in the full enjojinent of the many 
1067	sources of happiness connected with early marriage. But it is obvious 
1068	that this could not last for ever; it could not last indeed for two 
1069	hundred and fifty years. By that time the population of Europe 
1070	would amount to above three million millions ; a number which the 
1071	wildest imagination cannot conceive capable of existing simultaneously 
1072	in tlie w-hole earth. 
1073
1074	Sooner or later, thcj'efore, the increase must bo checked ; ami we 
1075	have seen that prudence is the only cheek that does not involve vice 
1076	or misery. But such is the force of the passions which prompt to 
1077	marriage, and such is each man’s reliance on his own good conduct 
1078	and good fortune, that the evils, whatever they may ])e, the appre- 
1079	hension of wdiieli forms the prudential check, are frequently incurred. 
1080	Where that evil is the loss of luxuries, or even of decencies, it is 
1081	trifling in the first case, and bearable in the second. But, in the 
1082	case which we are supposing, the only prudential check would be an 
1083	apprehended deficiency of necessaries; and that deficiency, in the 
1084	many instances in which it would actually be incurred, would be the 
1085	positive check in its most frightful form. It would be incurred not 
1086	only in consequence of that miscalculation of chances to which all 
1087	men are subject, and certainly those not the least so who are anxious 
1088	to marry, but through accidents against which no human prudence 
1089	can guard. A single bad harvest may he provided against, but a 
1090	succession of unfavourable seasons (and such successions do occur) 
1091	must reduce such a people to absolute famine. When such seasons 
1092	afiect a nation indulging in considerable superfluous expenditure, they 
1093	are relieved by a temporary sacrifice of that superfluity. The grain 
1094	consumed in ordinary years by oiu- breweries ard distilleries is a store 
1095	always at hand to supply a scarcity, and the same may be said of 
1096	the large quantity of food raised for the support of domestic animals, 
1097	but applicable to buman subsistence. To those resources may be 
1098	added the importation from abroad of necessaries instead of luxuries 
1099	and the materials of luxury, of corn, for instance, instead of "wine. 
1100
1101
1102I think he's trying to say that supporting a large population comes at the expense of enjoyment for others
1103
1104
1105	...We believe that there are few portions of Europe the inhabitants of 
1106	which would not now be richer if their mimhers were fewer, and would 
1107	not he richer hereafter if they were now to retard the rate at which 
1108	•their population is increasing. No plan for social improvement can 
1109	he complete unless it embrace the means hotli of inereasing the pro- 
1110	duction of wealth and of preventing population from making a pro|)or- 
1111	tionate advance. The former is to he effected by legislative, tiio 
1112	latter by individual prudence and forethought. The former must he 
1113	brought about by the governing classes of society ; the latter depends 
1114	almost entirely on the lower.
1115
1116	...It is obvious that if the present state of the world, compared Avith 
1117	its state at our earliest records, be one of relative poverty, the ten- 
1118	dency of population to increase more rapidly than subsistence must 
1119	be admitted. 
1120
1121
1122goes on to say America, Ireland, and China are too populous
1123
1124
1125	...It is not on the accidents of soil or climate, or on the existing 
1126	accumulation of the material instruments of production, hut on the 
1127	quantity and the diffusion of this immaterial capital, that the wealth 
1128	of a Country depends. The climate, the soil, and the situation of 
1129	IreUnd have been described as superior, and certainly are not much 
1130	interior, to our own. Her poverty has been attributed to the want of material capital; but were Ireland now to exchange her native 
1131	population for seven millions of our English North Countrymen, they 
1132	would quickly create the capital that is wanted. And were England, 
1133	North of Trent, to he peopled exclusively by a million of families from 
1134	the West of Ireland, Lancashire and Yorkshire would still more rapidly 
1135	resemble Connaught. Ireland is physically poor because she is morally 
1136	and intellectually poor, because she is morally and intellectually 
1137	uneducated. And while she continues uneducated, while the ignorance 
1138	and violence of her population render persons and property insecure, 
1139	and prevent the accuniulation and prohibit the introduction of capital, 
1140	legislative measures, intended solely and directly to relieve her poverty, 
1141	may not indeed be inetfectual, for they may aggravate the disease, the 
1142	symptoms of which they ai’e meant to palliate, but imdoubtediy fldll 
1143	be productive of no permanent benefit. Knowledge has been called 
1144	power; it is far more certainly wealth. Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, 
1145	and the Northern coast of Africa, were once among the richest, and 
1146	are now among the most miserable Countries in the world, simply 
1147	because they have fallen into the hands of a people without a sufficiency 
1148	of the immaterial sources of wealth to keep up the material ones. 
1149	“In wbat way,” asks Adam Smith, ‘‘has Europe contributed to the 
1150	grandeur of the colonies of America ? In one \vay, and in one way 
1151	only, sbe has contributed a great deal. Magna vi'm77i mater. She 
1152	bred and formed the men who were capable of achieving such great 
1153	actions, and of la 3 dng the foundation of so great an empire ; and there 
1154	is no other quarter of the world of which the policy is capable of 
1155	forming, or has ever actually and in fact formed such men. The 
1156	colonies owe to Europe the education and great view's of their active 
1157	and enterprising founders, and some of the greatest and most important 
1158	of them owe to her scarce any thing else.” 
1159
1160
1161I think he's trying to say Ireland is poor and Britian is not as poor because Britain is better than Ireland
1162
1163
1164https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/search/archives/9b2b079d-86fa-35c9-943f-e02fcf0375c3
1165	Correspondence, 1830-1863: Letters to Nassau William Senior from Richard Whately (Drummond Professor of Political Economy in the University of Oxford 1829-1831, and Archbishop of Dublin, 1831-1863), Lord Melbourne, Lord John Russell and others. Also contains letters from Nassau Senior to Archbishop Whatley, the Marquis of Landsdowne, Compte de Tocqueville and others. Among topics discussed or referred to are the property tax, the abolition of transportation, the state of the Irish poor and Irish affairs generally, the evils of the labour rate system, the national education system, the Corn Law question, the amendment of the Poor Law and the American Civil War.
1166
1167
1168things he was interested in
1169
1170
1171	...Nassau William Senior (1790-1864), economist, was born at Compton Beauchamp, Berkshire, educated at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford from where he graduated in 1812. In 1819 he was called to the Bar and became one of the leading Classical economists of the period. He was a major contributor to economic theory and a proponent of laissez-faire. In 1825 he became the first Drummond professor of political economy at Oxford, holding the post till 1830 and again between 1847 and 1862. He was most influential in nineteenth century political affairs and an active participant in Whig politics; he was one of the commissioners responsible for the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. 
1172
1173
1174http://spartacus-educational.com/Lpoor1834.htm
1175	In 1833 Earl Grey, the Prime Minister, set up a Poor Law Commission to examine the working of the poor Law system in Britain. In their report published in 1834, the Commission made several recommendations to Parliament. As a result, the Poor Law Amendment Act was passed. The act stated that:
1176
1177	(a) no able-bodied person was to receive money or other help from the Poor Law authorities except in a workhouse;
1178
1179	(b) conditions in workhouses were to be made very harsh to discourage people from wanting to receive help;
1180
1181	(c) workhouses were to be built in every parish or, if parishes were too small, in unions of parishes;
1182
1183	(d) ratepayers in each parish or union had to elect a Board of Guardians to supervise the workhouse, to collect the Poor Rate and to send reports to the Central Poor Law Commission;
1184
1185	(e) the three man Central Poor Law Commission would be appointed by the government and would be responsible for supervising the Amendment Act throughout the country.
1186
1187	William Cobbett warned the legislators in the House of Commons that "they were about to dissolve the bonds of society" and to pass the law would be "a violation of the contract upon which all the real property of the kingdom was held". Cobbett particularly objected to the separation of families, and to workhouse inmates being forced to wear badges or distinctive clothing. Thomas Attwood argued that workhouses would become "prisons from the purpose of terrifying applicants from seeking relief". 
1188
1189
1190https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poor_Law_Amendment_Act_1834
1191	The Act has been described as "the classic example of the fundamental Whig-Benthamite reforming legislation of the period".[1] Its theoretical basis was Thomas Malthus's principle that population increased faster than resources unless checked, Thomas Malthus's "iron law of wages" and Jeremy Bentham's doctrine that people did what was pleasant and would tend to claim relief rather than working.[2]
1192
1193    ...Of those serving on the Commission, the economist Nassau William Senior identified his ideas with Malthus while adding more variables, and Bishop John Bird Sumner as a leading Evangelical was more persuasive than Malthus himself in incorporating the Malthusian principle of population into the Divine Plan, taking a less pessimistic view and describing it as producing benefits such as the division of property, industry, trade and European civilisation.
1194
1195
1196------
1197
1198"The Famine Plot:"
1199
1200pg 33
1201
1202
1203	A Royal Commission, of which Nassau Senior was a member, issued a report in 1834, which became the New Poor Law Act of 1834. He was a confidant of the prime minister's and cabinet members and through his writings in such journals as The Edinburghe Review became one of the most influential voices raised in the great debate concerning how Irish poverty should be tackled. In England, Nassau Senior is remembered as being a very pleasant man who became a lifelong friend of, among others, Alexis de TOcqueveill, who was deeply sympathetic and insightful concerning Irish problems.
1204
1205	In Ireland, however, he is chiefly remembered for a comment passed by the great English educationalist Benjamin Jowett, the Master of Balliol, who said that he had no time for political economists since he overheard Nassau Senior say that even if one million people were to die in the Irish famine it would do no good.
1206
1207	Since the days of the Famine people have debated as to whether Nassau Senior's comments were either taken out of context, or whether they should be regarded as epitomizing official England's lack of feeling for Irish suffering. The latter would appear to be the case. We have the evidence of the prime minister responsible for dealing with the Irish catastrophe, Lord John Russel, to indicate that the million-deaths view was not confined to Nassau Senior but was widespread among his associates.
1208
1209	Many years after the Famine had ended, Prime Minister Reussel wrote to his friend Chchester Fortescue MP on the improved state of Ireland at that time, 1868. He said:
1210
1211		The remedies have been due partly to the divine Providence and partly to human exertions. Many years ago the Political Economy Club of London came, as I was told, to a resolution that the emigration of two million of the population of Ireland would be the best cure for her social evils. Famine and emigration have accomplished a task beyond the reach of legislation or government; and Providence has justly afflicted us by the spectacle of the results of the entire dependence on potato cultivation, and by the old fires of disaffection which had been lighted in the hearts of Irishmen, and are now burning with such freshness on the bank of the Hudson and the Potomac.