ABSTRACT
Grote’s memo continues the Board’s contentious remarks to the investigating committee. In an appalling lack of self-awareness, the senior member suggests that the Board of Revenue were only following the advice Trevelyan infamously followed during the Great Famine in Ireland, that is, not to interfere in so-called natural economic processes. The Government could not, therefore, calculate, as it did on the former occasion, on finding the private trade, by means of which the people ordinarily supplied with food, proceeding as usual, and on being able to add more or less at its discretion, to the resources which that trade afforded. The question which so anxiously occupied the Home Government in 1846, and which was finally dealt with by adopting measures confining their interference in Ireland to a minimum, did not till the end of May, come before the reader in the same form.
