Peter Gray concludes a coruscating study of the response of British government and public opinion to the Famine by saying that "if any general conclusion can be drawn, it is that the Whig-liberal government as a whole, and even its moralist ideologues, were less responsible for the social sufferings of the later 1840s than an attitude of mind that suffused the British political public, and set the parameters of state activity. The belief that the blight was a providential visitation, sent to bring Ireland into a higher state of social and moral organisation through a necessary measure of pain, shaped contemporary attitudes and subsequent apologetics."
Although one "anonymous dignitary" of the Church of England held that the Famine could not be providential as it was the product of man-made laws, providentialist interpretations predominated. Even scientists who recognised blight as a fungus saw it as evidence of divine intervention. "Extreme" evangelicals saw it as "the punishment of an angry providence" while for many it represented God's punishment for the increase granted to Maynooth under the Maynooth Act. For many charity preachers the Famine was seen as bringing the benefit of pious introspection, while a number of ultra-protestants saw toleration of Catholicism as a national sin which was being punished.
Thinking on the "present dearth" was greatly influenced by the "Christian economists", a group whose principal aim was the identification of the moral nature of economic laws. It believed a "natural" economic law ought to be permitted to operate and that this would require the removal of all government restrictions on economic activity. Edmund Burke's Thoughts and Details on Scarcity was quoted as an elaboration of their beliefs and this work, allied to the evangelicalism of the Clapham Sect, underlay the thinking of the most celebrated moralist of the Famine, the assistant secretary at the Treasury, Charles Trevelyn, who argued that scarcity was "the check which God and nature have imposed on the too rapid consumption of an insufficient supply of any article".
Gray points to important differences and distinctions between evangelicals but such is the overlap between them and the classical economists that the specifically theological aspects of their beliefs are often difficult to discern. This is especially true of the "moderate evangelicals", among whom Peel was the leading member. This group tended toward the view that the divine will operated through the natural laws of cause and effect rather than through direct intervention. Thus Peel sought to remove government barriers to Irish trade, believing the Irish land system would then adjust itself to become a "natural" economy operating in accord with providential laws.
LORD John Russell's premiership from 1846-1852 makes him the central figure in this study. Irish landlords had few admirers in England but were particularly disliked by Russell and the Foxite Whigs, the faction in the Commons most sympathetic to Daniel O'Connell and to the plight of Irish tenants. "The grinding treatment of the poor by the landlords of the last century has brought down a heavy retribution on the well-meaning proprietors of the present day," he wrote to Clarendon, the Lord Lieutenant, and he believed the Irish economy, if properly managed, could feed not only Ireland but much of England as well. In spite of all this Russell failed to mitigate the Famine. Foxites were a cabinet minority and he had formidable opponents such as Clarendon - who used his connections with the London Times to create a toleration for coercion - and Earl Grey, the colonial secretary, who shared an ideological position with Trevelyn. English opinion against Ireland hardened as the blight renewed itself and, as Isaac Butt pointed out, the fact of there being one United Kingdom exchequer was ignored as Ireland was depicted as a drain on the English treasury.
The dominant faction in the government saw the Famine as an opportunity rather than a disaster. A "liberal moralist" majority prevailed over Russell, thus achieving its aim of reconstructing the Irish economy through the operation of what it perceived as a natural law.
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