The following year, the famine got much worse, in two important respects. The potato crop failed even more severely than the year before. Suddenly, close to 4 million Irish [more than half the population] were threatened with starvation. [3] Compounding the problem, the Peel government was defeated, and the Whig Government under Lord John Russell came to power. Sir Charles Trevelyan, a free-trader through and through, was the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the administrator direcly responsible for Irish relief efforts.

             Believing that the Irish famines were truly not serious and mostly a result of laziness and backwardness on the Irishman's part, Trevelyan took little action to stop or mitigate the famine. A staunch believer in free trade and capitalism, he believed that the free market should be allowed to function as normally and unencumbered as possible. As A.J.P. Taylor, a noted British historian, caustically lambasted more than 40 years ago:.

             It is easy to understand how Trevelyan and the rest thought that they were doing their duty. They were handling human beings as ciphers on a bit of paper. They looked up the answers in a textbook of economics without ever once setting eyes on the living skeletons of the Irish people. They invented a distinction between those who were starving because of the potato blight and those starving from normal distress. They excused the Irish for being hit by the blight once. They condemned them for persisting in planting potatoes after blight appeared - as though the Irish could do anything else. Most of all, the enlightened men feared that the whole social structure would topple down if men and women were once given food which they could not pay for. [4].

             While Taylor's account is mostly accurate, it should be noted that in the end, Trevelyan funded the setting up of some soup kitchens. But by the time this relief was fully in place, the famines were mostly over, and thus, very few were saved.