Yeah - why not!

His 1848 book The Irish Crisis, in which he claimed that the crisis was over, set forward his thesis as a justification for his Irish policy: "The only hope for those who lived upon potatoes was in some great visitation of providence to bring back the potato to its original use and intention as an adjunct, and not as the principal article of national food and by compelling the people of Ireland to recur to other more nutritious means of aliment, to restore the energy and the vast industrial capabilities of that country."28
This viewpoint had already found its expression in one of The Times's more notorious editorials on the Famine as panic was spreading through Ireland at the realization that the blight was striking again: "For our part, we regard the potato blight as a blessing. When the Celts once cease to be potatophagi, they must become carnivorous. With the taste for meats will grow the appetite for them; with the appetite, the readiness to earn them. With this will come steadiness, regularity, and perseverance; unless, indeed, the growth of these qualities be impeded by the blindness of Irish patriotism, the short-sighted indifference of petty landlords, or the random recklessness of Government benevolence."29
Readers are invited to compare this editorial with Trevelyan's comment to Lord Monteagle mentioned in his letter in chapter 6.
Bolstering the argument, Sir Charles Wood told the House of Commons, "No exertion of a Government, or, I will add, of private char¬ity, can supply a complete remedy for the existing calamity. It is a national visitation, sent by providence." This sentence provides a distillation of the effects of the political economists' debate and the Treasury's justification for allowing the Irish to starve.
The relevance of this exchange of high-sounding economic rhetoric among themselves by English theoreticians who, generally speaking, knew so little about Ireland that they could have found their way to Dublin's Sackville Street only with great difficulty, was that it provided an ominous bank of ideas for Trevelyan and others to draw upon when it came to com¬bating—or not combating—the famine.
As the Famine worsened, Trevelyan would thunder, and I quote for a second time, "every system of poor relief must contain a penal and repulsive
element, in order to prevent its leading to the disorganisation of society if the system is such as to be agreeable either to those who relieve or to those who are relieved, and still more if it is agreeable to both, all tests of destitu¬tion must be at an end."30 The task of the Treasury subsequently would be to insist more strictly on "sound principle."31
The teachings of Adam Smith took on a literally fatal hue when they moved out of the smoking rooms of London clubs and became the prin¬ciples on which the giving or withholding of food was to be based. Every commissariat officer and clerk dealing with the Famine was issued with a special edition of Adam Smith's 'Digression Concerning the Corn Trade and Corn Laws" from his 1776 An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. The point Trevelyan wanted driven home was that price control—that is, providing cheap food—would produce "instead of the hardships of a dearth, the dreadful horrors of a famine." Staff dealing with relief were also urged along the non-intervention path by being given extracts from Edmund Burke's "Thoughts and Details on Scarcity."
When these utterances fell on what was to Trevelyan "the stony ground of humanitarian objection," he had the offending officials removed. Throughout the crisis he harried dissenting officials like Edward Twiselton with memoranda concerning their performances, seeking better account keeping, more minute reports, and so forth. In short, the armory of the Treasury was deployed to ensure that the dictates of political economy and reform of the Irish land system took precedence over the relief of starvation.
While the foregoing ideas clearly found a strong echo in British famine policy initiatives, The Times wrote complacently in 1848, "A Celt will soon be as rare on the banks of the Shannon as the red man on the banks of Manhattan."
And so, to sum up, what was the purpose behind all this manipulation of public opinion? Could it be argued that the Whig policy toward Ireland in the Famine years was merely a bungled attempt at relief, that the policies followed had a genocidal outcome but not a genocidal intent? The verdict that should have emerged from these pages by now is an unequivocal no! John Mitchel's stark analysis that God sent the blight but the English created the Famine rings true.
Trevelyan's reliance on "natural causes" and Wood's admission to Monteagle as to what the cabinet really wanted to achieve are only two tiny tips of an iceberg. Whig policy was directed at getting the peasants off the land, and if it took mass death to achieve that objective, so be it.
Behind the rhetoric of The Times editorials and the utilization of eco¬nomic jargon and extreme Protestant prejudice to stem the flow of relief, even for the feeding of children or the provision of clothing for the naked, the underlying thrust of Whig policy had the aim of clearing man from the fields and replacing him with the bullock. Defenders of the Whigs have argued that Trevelyan and Woods could not be accused of a deliberate at¬tempt to commit genocide because they were men of conscience and after the Famine, their consciences did not trouble them. Trevelyan, his defenders would argue, was not a Cromwell, only a civil servant carrying out govern¬ment policy.
The conscience argument is absurd. The Irish peasants, if they were considered at all, rated no higher than Untermenschen. Cromwell regarded the slaughter of Catholics not as a matter to trouble the conscience but as an act for the glory of God. Trevelyan was not a mere civil servant; he was the architect and executor of government policy, a policy that sheltered behind the economic dogma that the laws of business were the laws of God.
Article 2 of the UN Convention on Genocide defines genocide as mean¬ing "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethical, racial or religious group," by means that include the following:
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to the members of the group.
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions calculated to bring about its destruction in whole or in part.
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Article 3 includes under "Punishable Acts":
"Direct and public incitement to commit genocide" and "complicity in genocide."
Certainly in the years 1846-1851 responsible Whig decision makers were complicit in genocide and did direct public incitement, as the columns of The Times sadly confirm only too well, toward furthering that end. Just as there are those who still attempt to deny man's role in global warming, there are those who would still attempt to defend the Whigs' role on the grounds that the UN Convention on Genocide stems from 1948, not 1848. To them I end by saying there is another, even older command on which the UN declaration draws, and it is not disputed: Thou shalt not kill.