ABSTRACT
Fergusson was a member of the Conservative party from Scotland and an Under-Secretary in India from 1866–1867. Fergusson’s ‘disgust’ that ‘so little should have been done at the moment and on the spot to prevent’ famine indicates the problem of depending on laissez-faire economics (non-interference) in times of a calamity like the Orissa Famine. Everybody must entertain a feeling of sorrow almost amounting to disgust that under the highly vaunted British Government such terrible events should have occurred, and that so little should have been done at the moment and on the spot to prevent them. It was not by seeking for a victim that justice would be done in a matter.
