Then, as the distress must chiefly occur
amongst the poor Catholics, who were repealers, it was, they assumed,
the business of repealers and agitators to look to them and relieve
them. The Premier himself was not free from these feelings. In the
memorandum which he read to the Cabinet on the 1st of November, amongst
many other things, he says: "There will be no hope of contributions from
England for the mitigation of this calamity. Monster meetings, the
ungrateful return for past kindness, the subscriptions in Ireland to
Repeal rent and O'Connell tribute, will have disinclined the charitable
here to make any great exertions for Irish relief."[65] There was even,
I fear, something behind all this--the old feeling of the English colony
in Ireland, that it was no business of theirs to sustain the native
race, whose numerical strength they regarded, now as ever, to be a
standing threat and danger to themselves.
The sentiments of the leading journals of the Tory party quite coincided
with this view. They kept constantly asserting that the ravages of the
potato blight were greatly exaggerated; and they eagerly seized on any
accidental circumstance that could give them a pretext for supporting
this assertion.
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