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.  The chief Dublin Conservative journal, the Evening Mail, on the 3rd of November, writing about the murder of Mr. Clarke, “inclines to believe that the agrarian outrage had its origin in a design to intimidate landlords from demanding their rents, at a season when corn of all kinds is superabundant, and the partial failure of the potato crop gives a pretence for not selling it.  And if we recollect,” it continues, “that the potato crop of this year far exceeded an average one, and that corn of all kinds is so far abundant, it will be seen that the apprehensions of a famine in that quarter are unfounded, and are merely made the pretence for withholding the payment of rent.”  Such was the language of a newspaper supposed largely to express landlord feeling in Ireland, and supposed, too, to be the chief organ of the existing Government, represented by Lord Heytesbury.

Later on in the month, a Protestant dignitary, Dean Hoare of Achonry, wrote a letter to the Mansion House Committee, in which, whilst he gave substantially the same views of the potato failure as hundreds of others, he complained in a mild spirit of the people in his locality as being “very slow” to adopt the methods recommended for preserving the potatoes from decay.  Another Tory journal of the time, since amalgamated with the former, made this letter the pretence of an attack on the Mansion House Committee, accusing it of withholding Dean Hoare’s letter, because it gave a favourable account of the state of the potato crop, and an unfavourable one of the peasantry—­charging it with “fraud, trickery and misrepresention,” and its members with “associating for factious purposes alone.”  In reply, it was clearly shown that the Committee did not withhold the Dean’s letter, even for an hour, and as clearly shown that the Evening Packet, the journal in question, antedated his letter by a day, in order to sustain its charge of suppression.

The Packet also omitted those portions of the letter which represented the loss of the potato crop as extensive, and which called on the Government to employ the people.[66]

The Freeman’s Journal of the 24th of November, in commenting on the way in which its Tory contemporary dealt with Dean Hoare’s letter, says:  “The Packet, in its last issue, has returned to its appointed task of denying that the failure of the potato crop is so extensive as to demand extraordinary measures on the part of the Government.”  Although, at the time, this could be nothing more than a bold guess, it is highly probable that the writer of it hit the mark, for in his memoirs, published by his literary executors, Earl Stanhope and Lord Cardwell, we find the Premier, in the middle of October giving this caution to the Lord Lieutenant:  “I need not recommend to you the utmost reserve as to the future, I mean as to the possibility of Government interference."[67]