The Noetics and the English Poor Law debate

A Royal Commission to Inquire into the Poor Law in England and Wales was established in February 1832. The pivotal role of ideas advanced by the younger gentry and liberal tories of the day in the production of its report in 1834, and the Act of the same year has been highlighted by Mandler. Nassau Senior, Mandler reminds us, was co-author of the report in 1834 with Edwin Chadwick. However, Chadwick, unlike Senior, was ‘an outsider and effectively an isolate’ – most commissioners ‘were neither Benthamites nor liberals nor even whigs, but liberal tories’ (1990: 82). Offer has noted that ‘by the 1820s, a liberal tory position was emerging that fused economic liberalism fuelled by the Scottish enlightenment with political authoritarianism’ (2006a: 13). In intellectual form, this placed natural theology above revelation and combined it with political economy. It was nurtured particularly at Oriel College, Oxford by the so-called Noetics, the word coming from the Greek meaning ‘reasoners’ (Matthew, Reference Matthew1990).

The Noetics believed that ‘human improvement consisted, not in the attainment of higher standards of material comfort or higher states of happiness, but in the striving for higher levels of virtue’, with scarcity encouraging the practice of prudence and industry, which in time ‘leads to a division of property and ultimately a division of ranks, according to unequal exertions’ (Mandler, Reference Mandler1990: 87). Governments cannot create virtue, only individuals themselves can do this. However, ill-conceived legislation can unintentionally encourage vice. Wealth acts as a sign of virtue and can lead to even higher moral achievement through the practice of benevolence.

Liberal tories instilled with Noetic beliefs were a dominant alliance in the 1820s and early 1830s, holding positions in the Church of England and the law, and as tory MPs. Nassau Senior's connections before 1830 had been liberal tory, but he ‘had been assiduously worming his way into high ministerial circles since the day the whigs took office’ (Mandler, Reference Mandler1990: 97). Senior headed the list of the eight members appointed to the royal commission, which also included Bishop Sumner of Chester. The essence of the commission was Noetic and at least ten of the twenty-five assistant commissioners were friends or former students of Whately or Senior. Although Senior refused a position on the subsequent permanent commission established to operate the reformed poor law, the liberal tory Thomas Frankland Lewis was appointed Chairman to help sell the reforms to anxious country gentlemen, assisted by fellow commissioners John George Shaw Lefevre, a trusted civil servant, and George Nicholls (1837b), commended in the report for prior reforms in poor law policy in Nottinghamshire, with a bitter Chadwick granted only the limited administrative role of secretary.

Mandler's aim in exploring the role of the ‘modernising gentry’ inspired by the debates within Christian political economy was to challenge the orthodox account of the new poor law as ‘a milestone on the road to classical liberalism, imposed upon landed society by “middle-class innovators, inventors and investors”’ (Reference Mandler1987: 131). Rather, he argued, it should be viewed as an example of the evolution of the traditional landlord ideology into a ‘modernized gentry ethos for the nineteenth century’ (Reference Mandler1987: 133).

For the Noetics, unlike the Benthamites, their end was not utility but the propagation of virtue. The two groups did however come to agree on the principle of ‘less eligibility’ – the Benthamites through their concern for the ‘wage fund’ and the Noetics from anxiety over the ‘virtue fund’. This theoretical justification and practical plan for relief which preserved the social and political structures and accepted liberal enterprise was greeted warmly by the new capitalist country gentry. At a fundamental level Noetics believed that:

Richard Whately and the development of Christian political economy

Richard Whately (1787–1863) was born in London and educated at Oriel College where he then became a Fellow in 1811 and Bampton Lecturer in 1822. At Oxford, he met Nassau Senior which led to a life-long friendship. In 1829, he became the second incumbent of the Drummond Chair of Political Economy, taking over from Senior when the Oxford Noetics were at their most prominent and influential. At this time, he was also rector of Halesworth in Suffolk where, as recorded by Brent (Reference Brent2004), ‘he founded an adult school and weekly lecture, and was active in his local poor-law union. He advocated the abolition of relief for the able-bodied poor unless they were employed by parish officers on work of a public nature’. Whately wrote on theological and philosophical topics, strongly opposed slavery and transportation and supported Catholic emancipation.

In 1831, he was appointed Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin, which precluded him from serving on the English Poor Law Commission. A year after arriving in Ireland, Whately founded the Chair of Political Economy at Trinity College, Dublin, which promoted the growth and status of economics as a recognised discipline in Ireland. In addition, Whately played a leading role in the new national Irish educational system, leading calls for a non-sectarian system and writing many of the principal schoolbooks on theology and economics of the time see Goldstrom, Reference Goldstrom1966. He also helped establish the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland in 1847. Whately's intellect and drive were allied with an uncomfortable social persona: De Giustino has concluded that Whately's habits of conversation were disturbing and intimidating: ‘In common rooms and at college dinners, Whately's presence was enough to discomfort the polite, anger the complacent, and embarrass the bashful’ (Reference De Giustino1995: 220).

Whately became a major contributor to the development of Christian political economy as a distinct ideology. Upon his election to the Chair of Political Economy at Oxford, he wrote to a friend ‘it seems to me that before long, political economists, of some sort or other, must govern the world’. However, he challenged those utilitarian radicals who were presenting political economy and Christianity as mutually exclusive: ‘The anti-Christians are striving hard to have this science to themselves, and to interweave with it their own notions; and if these methods are not met, the rising generation will be at the mercy of these men in one way or another – as their disciples, or as their inferiors’ (Reference Whately1866: Vol. 1, 67). Waterman has outlined the genesis of this new ideology:

Christian political economy contained the idea of a market economy whose general outcomes arose in the absence of conscious human planning through individuals acting in their own self-interest. While others had taken personal interests, choices and competition for granted, for Whately the market economy was the most interesting thing about economics, and he proposed that the science should be called ‘catallactics’, as it was solely concerned with exchange.Footnote ¹ He even went so far as to say that man could be defined as ‘an animal that makes Exchanges’ (1855: 4). Whately believed that, when allied with natural theology, political economics yielded strong evidence of God's divine will as providing for ‘the progress of society’ (1855: 52). As Lloyd has noted, Whately viewed exchange as ‘the means to a peculiarly human mode of sociality by which the very division of labor or function is the means to improvement of the species’ (Reference Lloyd2007: 325). Civilisation advanced through the unintended but socially beneficial consequences of buying and selling; but these consequences of individual pains and pleasures would have been impossible without a divine instructor. Hilton has discussed Whately's position on the scope for social progress in relation to the evangelicals: ‘His belief in man's social instinct went right against evangelical assumptions as to natural and original depravity . . . Far from ennobling, distress invariably depraved its victims. Whately was scornful of the stock evangelical explanation of suffering, based on man's probationary state’ (1988: 55). To Whately, reasoning along these lines implied provision by God for man's moral degradation rather than of an open and free catallaxy designed to encourage individual moral growth.

In Whately's hands, ‘Christian political economy’, therefore, was not to be confused with earlier evangelical thought or later Christian socialism. At least some poverty and social inequality were regarded as inevitable, and indeed designed to bring out the virtues of charity and compassion. Wealth was recognised as a sign of moral value, being obtained through industry and prudence. Competition, marriage and private property were all preordained. An inability to create virtue through coercion or legislative compulsion in this self-regulating and divinely designed economy was also central to Whately's social theory. Whately believed all individuals possessed an innate ‘moral sense’ that was educable and progressive, facilitating man's ability through judicious exercise of free will to be increasingly virtuous and social. When men did act together as a ‘society’, progress without calamity was possible but danger remained if lessons were ignored: ‘We have, indeed, a certain moral faculty implanted in us which is intended to help us to the distinguishing of right and wrong; this, like all our other faculties, is capable of improvement, and liable to corruption’ (1864: 9). Carol Poster has noted that Whately's ‘rhetorical and logical theories’ were aspects of a theology ‘in which human reason and moral sense were considered parts of the divine economy, implanted by God, leading to God, and created in his image’ (2006: 70).

Whately also borrowed from the leading phrenologist George Combe in developing his belief in the non-uniform nature of man. Each person had different tendencies and qualities, and if they were educated to cultivate their own personal strengths and overcome their weaknesses, this would help them to lead distinct, more productive and virtuous lives. Phrenology also helped explain why there were these differences between men in the first place (they were part of God's design to facilitate progress through diversity) and helped justify the resulting inequalities between those who had made the most and least of their ‘God given’ talents. Hilton states: ‘By emphasizing the need for self-education and development, Whately and Combe were able to retain a dualistic conception of man's nature’ (1988: 202) as both capable of reason and as possessing varying potentials for development. Free trade would thus show the natural inequalities of individual men, and give maximum effect to the exercise of their relatively different faculties. Whately saw no contradiction between phrenology and Christianity and defended it ‘from those who attacked it as ungodly’ (Parsinnen, 1974: 1). Whately's optimistic post-millennial theological outlook coincided with Combe's reading of the world; for Hilton, Whately ‘mediated Combean ethics most fully with political economy’ (1988: 201; see also Combe, Reference Combe1831–32).

Although Whately was a firm believer in a distinctively hopeful theory of man's progress, he was also, as Ingold has noted, ‘amongst the most prominent of the degenerationists’ (Reference Ingold1986: 378). Whately held that the development ‘of any community in civilization, by its own internal means, must always have begun from a condition removed from that of complete barbarism; out of which it does not appear that men ever did or can raise themselves’ (1855: 70). This meant that, for Whately, savages had degenerated from formerly advanced societies that had been given divine guidance at some earlier time.

The concept of degeneration was as much about moral as physical decline, as the idealist philosopher Henry Calderwood later noted: ‘Physical deterioration may be the consequence, but immoral indulgence is the cause. The possibilities of the higher nature reach downwards as well as upwards’ (Reference Calderwood1881: 298). Those that claimed that a ‘state of nature’ or a ‘natural state’ of man was living like a savage were in Whately's opinion wrong: ‘The natural state of Man must, according to all fair analogy, be reckoned not that in which his intellectual and moral growth are as it were stunted, and permanently repressed, but one in which his original endowments are, I do not say, brought to perfection, but enabled to exercise themselves, and to expand, like the flowers of a plant’ (1855: 82).

In 1861, Whately raised a related concern about Darwin's On the Origin of Species. In an attempt to defend and maintain the Christian foundation of man as unique and separate, especially from other animals, Whately commented:

Whately's unease with the emerging ideas of social evolution was in stark contrast to the views of his former pupil, the liberal theologian Baden Powell (see Corsi, Reference Corsi1988). In his final book, The Order of Nature, published in 1859, Powell had taken the scientific arguments for man's existence to the limit of Noetic acceptability by proposing that God was merely the architect, rather than the artificer of all. This attempt to push God's role in the world further and further back in time and influence was, for Whately, no more than deism and contrary to all his core beliefs regarding the Creator's central role in man's civilisation. Corsi (Reference Corsi2004) has noted that ‘Powell's outspoken denial of miracles, and his enthusiastic comments on Darwin's theory in “On the study of the evidences of Christianity” . . . marked the breaking up of relations with Whately’.

The appointment of the Royal Commission in Ireland

Between 1800 and 1840, there were eight select committees and royal commissions which surveyed different aspects of the state of Irish society and economy. In addition, English and European tourists, taking advantage of improvements in communications with Ireland, published reflections on their travels. Pamphlets either championed a specific panacea or recommended an ambitious programme of reforms. In the opinion of McDowell, ‘nearly all this remedial literature is strongly marked by two features – a realistic and gloomy appreciation of existing circumstances, and an abounding optimism concerning the acceptability and value of the plans advocated’ (Reference McDowell, Dudley Edwards and Desmond Williams1994: 40).

There were repeated calls for a compulsory rate on Irish property to fund poor relief, petitions and bills were presented to parliament from both Irish and English constituencies championing an Irish Poor Law or, at the very least, a system of relief for the aged and infirm. Irish commentators and politicians demanded some form of public relief for the destitute since they were currently left dependent on charity, and their English counterparts demanded action because they were becoming increasingly aware of the wide-scale poverty which existed in Ireland. There was also concern among English MPs about the increasing numbers of Irish immigrants who were arriving in England seeking employment and who, unable to find work, then claimed relief and could not subsequently be forced to return to Ireland since there was no poor law to receive them. On the 2 April 1833, Peel, as Leader of the Opposition, proposed that the government should appoint a commission to inquire into the state of the poor in Ireland and decide whether poor laws were applicable or not. (Peel had been the Chief Secretary for Ireland between 1812 and 1818 and Home Secretary 1822–27, and 1828–30.) Within a month, on the 2 May 1833, the Chancellor Viscount Althorp announced a Royal Commission for Inquiring into the Condition of the Poorer Classes in Ireland.

There were originally eight members in addition to Whately, who was appointed Chairman after being recommended by Senior: the Reverend James Carlile, John Corrie, Fenton Hor, Archbishop Daniel Murray, James Lenox William Nape, Richard More O’Ferrall, William Battie Wrightson and Charles Vignoles. Lord Killeen was added in November 1835 to replace Richard More O’Ferrall who had resigned earlier in August. James Ebenezer Bicheno and Anthony Richard Blake also joined the Commission at the same time. Whately, Blake, Carlile and Murray were also members of the National Board of Education. The commissioners were all unpaid except for Bicheno and Corrie.

R. B. McDowell has recorded a brief summary of each of the members:

Bicheno had already written strongly against introducing a poor law to Ireland after a tour of the country in 1829, believing that it had had a negative effect on the key virtue of charity in England and asserting that any extension to Ireland, where charity was especially strong, would prove disastrous:

Whately's views on a poor law for Ireland had also been made clear in his evidence to the select committee on emigration in 1831, given shortly after he had been appointed as Archbishop of Dublin. Whately had stated that some people out of a ‘sincere but mistaken benevolence’ had called for an Irish Poor Law, but without perceiving ‘the tendency of the system to produce far more distress than it alleviates, by diminishing industry, forethought, and charity; and by degrading the pauper into a condition of that approaching that of a slave, fed, not according to the value of his exertions, but to his wants, and accordingly impelled to labour only by the fear of punishment’ (1855: 192). He continued: ‘I am convinced that to encourage industry, and frugality, and forethought, among them, by whatever means it can be effected, would be most important; and that providing them with a certainty of relief, on even the lowest scale, whenever they were out of work, would tend to extinguish what there is among them of industry and frugality’ (1855: 196–7). Whately did accept that relief afforded to the aged and sick did not cause dependency to the extent that it did among those in want but able-bodied.

The Royal Commission's reports

It took nearly two years for the commission to release its first report in July 1835: ten pages and bereft of recommendations but also with an extensive appendix examining what relief seven different categories of the destitute were receiving in different localities. The commission sought ‘to prevent the existence of destitution’ rather than merely devising ‘means of alleviating misery after it had arisen’ (HMSO, 1835: xii), considering it imprudent to recommend measures which might lead to new evils:

Five months later, Whately revealed to Senior that the secretary to the commission, John Revans, who strongly supported extending the English Poor Law, had proposed that he should write the final report: ‘Revans wants to draw up the report, professing his design to “blow up all the resolutions we have passed”’ (National Library of Wales, Senior Collection, C/548). Instead, however, Whately himself and Blake were to undertake that task. In another heated letter (C/558), Whately expressed his continued concern about the ‘viper Revans’, who had been sowing ‘dissention’ as ‘revenge for not having been allowed to draw up the report’, and visiting Dublin Castle to ‘raise prejudices against our proceedings’.

In January 1836, the second report (HMSO, 1837a) covering six pages was sent to the government; it was signed by Whately, Murray, Vignoles, Carlile, Hort, Corrie, Naper and Wrightson together with Killeen, Blake and Bicheno. Once again no recommendations were forthcoming. Instead, the focus was on an examination of the various institutions already established by law for the relief of the poor: medical institutions (subdivided into infirmaries, dispensaries, fever hospitals and lunatic asylums); houses of industry; foundling hospitals; and provisions for officers of health and the support of deserted children.

After coming under increasing pressure from the government, the commissioners released their third and final report in early March 1836, two-and-a-half years after beginning their inquiry. This report was signed by Whately, Murray, Carlile, Hort, Corrie, Naper, Wrightson, Killeen, Blake and Bicheno. Vignoles declined to sign: his reasons were outlined by him in a letter to the Home Secretary – his main ground for dissent being that no right to relief was to be offered (see National Archives, HO 73/63/3). The commissioners noted that while it had been suggested that they ‘recommend a poor law for Ireland similar to that of England’, they dissented from this suggestion chiefly on the grounds of the different and peculiar conditions of Ireland: ‘We are of the opinion that the provision to be made for the poor in Ireland must vary essentially from that made in England. The circumstances of the two countries differ widely; and the legislation, we submit, should have reference to circumstances as well as to principles’ (HMSO, 1836b: 5).

If workhouses were established, they would in principle need to provide employment and accommodation for vast numbers of the unemployed (the commissioners estimated the number of unemployed at 585,000, and their dependants 1,800,000, making a total of 2,385,000). While the English workhouse scheme required employment to be available, in Ireland ‘we see that the labouring classes are eager for work, that work is not there for them, and that they are therefore, and not from any fault of their own, in permanent want’ (italics added) thus ‘the workhouse system, as applied to them, must prove illusory’ (HMSO, 1836b: 5).Footnote ² The commissioners also challenged the point that while England, with the poor laws, had flourished, Ireland, without them, was in a state of semi-barbarism: ‘Because extraordinary strength has withstood poison, it does not follow that poison should be prescribed as a remedy for weakness.’ Unlike the English, the Irish for nearly the whole of the eighteenth century had been ‘governed by a code, the policy of which was to keep them in poverty and ignorance, and which was perfect for its purpose’ (HMSO, 1836b: 8). These penal laws had left behind ‘habits and dispositions’ that were opposed to moral and material improvement.

Relief should be provided for the impotent; the able-bodied unable to find work, however, ‘should be secured support only through emigration, or as a preliminary to it’ (HMSO, 1836b: 8). Another reason to offer emigration was because the ‘suffering labourers in Ireland . . . do not desire workhouses, but they do desire a free passage to a colony where they may have the means of living by their industry’ (HMSO, 1836b: 9). Emigration ‘depôts’ were to be established and those who were fit for emigration would be selected there. Those unfit for emigration would be ‘provided for under the directions of the Poor Law Commissioners’ (HMSO, 1836b: 27). This imprecision concerning those deemed unfit for emigration was used later to discredit the commissioners’ report. There was also to be a range of agricultural schools to improve production and efficiency and a Board of Improvement to direct land reclamation projects.

The commissioners stressed that it was only through the wise exercise of the responsibilities of those in power that the poor could become industrious, taught the value of comforts and the exertions required to obtain them. This concept of social relations derived directly from the Noetic beliefs that those who had gained wealth had done so through the exercise of virtue, and that they should act as (moral and material) beacons for the poor. The commissioners went on to emphasise that increased wealth did indeed result in increased responsibilities to society: ‘In proportion as such persons are raised high, they have high duties to perform; they are endowed with wealth and intelligence, not for self-indulgence, or for effecting any sordid object of ambition, but as trusts for the good of their fellow-creatures’ (HMSO, 1836b: 31).

Unhappy with the commissioners wide ranging measures and lack of direct relief for the able-bodied, Lord John Russell, the Home Secretary, decided to send one of the permanent Poor Law Commissioners in England, George Nicholls, to investigate if the reformed poor law could be quickly and safely extended to Ireland. After a six week tour of the country in the summer of 1836, he reported back that the new poor law was suitable for transfer to Ireland (HMSO, 1837b). The Irish reports had overlooked the force of the proposed and deterrent loss of liberty for prospective recipients. Following a further two reports in 1837 and 1838 (HMSO, 1837c, 1838a), the An Act for the More Effectual Relief of the Destitute Poor in Ireland based on his recommendations was passed in July 1838 (HMSO, 1838b).

Centrality of Christian political economy

It is clear that once Whately and the commissioners had accepted that any distinction between poverty and destitution was impractical in Ireland, they were forced to develop a different and much wider set of measures more suited to the country's particular needs and circumstances. Whately was the main author and staunchest defender of the commissioners’ recommendations. It was paramount that any measures proposed should encourage the growth of each individual's moral sense and at all costs avoid the perceived dangers to character through creating vice by giving direct relief to the able-bodied. Compared to other contemporaries, Whately brought to the table an assured optimism borne out of the knowledge that had he earlier drawn the teeth of any perceived determinism in his fellow clergyman Thomas Robert Malthus's theory of the growth of population (a point discussed later in this section).

Whately's Christian political economy, applied to Ireland and the Irish, thus regarded people and society not mechanistically but in interactive and organic terms. Individuals possessed logic and the power to make moral choices, and compulsion by government, through the misguided application of the English Poor Law, was no alternative to conscious and interdependent efforts by individuals towards their own and thus collective moral improvement. It was wiser to draw on Christian theology allied with science to provide education and prospects (either at home or abroad) for personal development and adequate rewards for practising virtue through individual choice, rather than to try to ‘force’ or compel change through the workhouse system.

The explicit reasons for rejecting the extension of the reformed English Poor Law to Ireland, given in the commissioners’ third report, were the potentially huge costs given the large number of unemployed able-bodied and the fact that attempts to draw a distinction between destitution and poverty would be impossible to implement. Whately was also convinced that if relief, even if initially limited to workhouses, was ever granted, the desperate situation in Ireland would eventually result in these institutions being overwhelmed and outdoor relief being introduced; this would be disastrous not only financially but more importantly morally.

Most modern commentators have viewed the debate around extending the poor law to Ireland either as essentially political or economic in nature, thus missing the central role and influence of Christian political economy and its concern with divinely planned possibilities for progress driven by conceptions of vice and virtue. However, the economistic perspective in particular, when joined with an assumption that a linear trend of ‘progress’ in ideas underpins movement in intellectual history, has led Whately to be presented as a precursor of Keynesianism. This view of Whately is hard to sustain given the lack of evidence to suggest that in any modern sense theoretical economics was the driving force of Whately's social theory.Footnote ³ Whately was not, in the manner of Keynes, pointing to social conditions arising as a consequence of incentives to hoard money and reduce consumption on the part of the holders of capital or promoting an early form of a ‘public stimulus’ on economistic grounds. Indeed, Whately would have strongly disagreed with Keynes's ‘thrift paradox’; increasing virtue and the opportunities for its expression and reward was central to all his recommendations for Ireland, any structural reforms or public spending were designed primarily to achieve this end with any subsequent economic benefits secondary in importance. As already noted, his only direct criticism of the landlords was one centred on virtue, not economics, when he reminded them that those of high status and wealth had a (divinely ordained) duty to act ‘for the good of their fellow-creatures’. Whately's economic thought ‘is intimately bound up with his theology’ (Vance, Reference Vance, Collini, Whatmore and Young2000: 183).

Whately's concerns with the danger of degeneration in Ireland, and in the importance of exercising the mental faculties to achieve virtue, help explain his support for emigration to environments where moral and mental progress could be achieved. He had once noted that ‘the cerebral organs . . . are, like other parts of the body, developed and strengthened by being exercised, and impaired and shrunk by inactivity’ (1855: 46). Whately had even warned Senior that if a poor law was adopted in Ireland all his ‘labours in England’ would have been ‘of no avail’ as ‘the dead corpse’ (Ireland) would ‘poison the living body’ (England) because the workhouses would be overwhelmed, outdoor relief would be demanded and unbearable costs would be incurred (Reference Whately1866: Vol. 1, 400). Whately's belief in the uniqueness of Irish circumstances explains why he was willing to go so far in providing government support and schemes whilst at the same time denying relief to the able-bodied in a workhouse-based regime. In order to help prevent moral and economic degeneration, Whately decisively opted for structural reforms of those social conditions which impeded the exercise of virtue.

Although Whately was concerned with overpopulation and underemployment in Ireland, he firmly believed that, with the correct structures and guidance, man had the ability and capacity to avoid scarcity, degeneration and collapse. He had already identified an ambiguity in Malthus on population and degeneration (in his Introductory Lectures on Political Economy, 1831). Whately noted that the doctrine that:

By a ‘tendency’ towards a particular result can be meant either ‘the existence of a cause which, if operating unimpeded, would produce that result’, or ‘the existence of such a state of things that that result may be expected to take place’ (Reference Whately1855: 164–5). It is clear that for Whately in Ireland this ‘state of things’ associated with what is the relevant second sense of ‘tendency’ was open to change, as society progresses. Contrary to Malthus’ imputation (or rather those misunderstanding his argument), the evidence suggests in fact that ‘subsistence has a tendency to increase at a greater rate than population’ (1855: 165). With the appropriate laws and arrangements in place in Ireland, combined with the leadership of the most wealthy and virtuous and the individual development of intellectual and moral faculties, degeneration need not be the inevitable outcome.

It seems clear that another reason why the third report went so far in recommending additional auxiliary measures was that Whately truly believed that past misgovernment had so badly damaged Ireland's economic and social development that these temporary collateral aids were necessary. Only once this dose of special medicine had worked, and individuals (as free moral and economic agents) were playing their full role in the (divinely designed) ‘normal’ economic catallaxy, could the poor in Ireland come to be regarded (and treated) like those in the rest of the United Kingdom.

In 1847, at the height of the famine, when parliament was debating whether to extend the poor law to enable the guardians to provide outdoor relief, Whately's position remained as staunch as a decade previously:

This firm stance adopted by Whately in the face of millions of malnourished Irish further strengthens the argument that he would never have compromised his views on the dangers of providing outdoor relief to the able-bodied. Instead, he chose to recommend different measures, in his eyes less damaging to, and indeed encouraging, individual levels of virtue. Recognising that something had to be done, Whately reverted to his reason and logic and recommended further inquiry. This was to be combined with an immediate and ‘well organized and vigorous system of emigration’, which he felt would have been much easier to implement ‘had the recommendations of the Poor-Inquiry-Commission of 1836 been attended to at the time’ (Reference Whately1847: 35).Footnote ⁴ However, the government again chose to ignore Whately's advice and the numbers of those emigrating with government assistance were dwarfed by those doing so by their own means and/or with money sent from relatives who had previously emigrated.