For my own part, and speaking according to my limited vision, I do not believe those efforts of the Federals will be successful. No man can say that … - John Russell, 1st Earl Russell

When Lord Grey came into office, and the Whigs, after sixty years of exclusion, began a new scheme of Irish policy, there were two prominent evils in the government of Ireland. The first was the corrupt and intolerant system of administration called Protestant Ascendancy; the second, the Irish Church Establishment. The first of these evils—called by Burke, Non regnum sed magnum latrocinium [not a kingdom but a grand theft]; and by Fox, a miserable monopolising minority—was quite as great a grievance to the people of Ireland as the second. It drove into rebellion such men as Lord Edward Fitzgerald, the Emmets, and Wolfe Tone. By a series of what were called by Irish statesmen 'ripening measures,' the disaffected classes were irritated, goaded, spurred into insurrection; and when they had rebelled, were tortured, massacred, and shot, till the spirit of disloyalty, if not extirpated, was terrified and subdued. Hence a state of government, which was described by Lord Redesdale as one law for the rich and another for the poor, and both equally ill administered.

[I]t may be easily imagined that when those who are best off, in the most prosperous years, earn scarcely sufficient, those who had then been on the brink of famine, must have been unable to resist the flood of destitution and wretchedness which has over-whelmed them by the failure of the potato crop. Such has been unfortunately the case in the present year, during the visitation of a calamity which is, perhaps, almost without a parallel, because it acts upon a very large population, a population of nearly 8,000,000—for the Irish have gradually increased to that amount—while the famine is such as has not been known in modern times; indeed, I should say it is like a famine of the thirteenth century acting upon the population of the nineteenth.

Many years ago the Political Economy Club of London came, as I was told, to a resolution that the emigration of two millions of the population of Ireland would be the best cure for her social evils. Famine and emigration have accomplished a task beyond the reach of legislation or government; and Providence has justly afflicted us by the spectacle of the results of the entire dependence on potato cultivation, and by the old fires of disaffection which had been lighted in the hearts of Irishmen, and are now burning with such fierceness on the banks of the Hudson and the Potomac. The census of 1834 gave the population of Ireland as 7,954,760; that of 1861, as 5,798,957. Thus two millions have been removed by the great famine of 1847-8 and the drain of emigration of the last twenty years.