During the height of the famine Trevelyan deliberately dragged his feet in disbursing direct government food and monetary aid to the Irish due to his strident belief in laissez-faire economics and the free hand of the market.[3] In a letter to an Irish peer, Lord Monteagle of Brandon, a former Chancellor of the Exchequer, he described the famine as an "effective mechanism for reducing surplus population" as well as "the judgement of God" and wrote that "The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people".[4][5][6]