t is
above Goldsmith the historian, or Blackstone the constitutional lawyer
is above Blackstone the poet. Judging of Chesterfield's conduct in the
Irish Viceroyalty by Chesterfield's past career, men would have been
entitled to assume that his sympathies would go altogether with the
governing race in Ireland. With them were the wealth, the rank, the
fashion, the elegance, the refinement. With them was the easy-going
profession of State religion--just the sort of thing that suited
Chesterfield's ways. What sympathy could such a man as he have with
the Celtic and Catholic Irishman? Why should he care to be popular
with such a population? Even such gifted, and, on the whole, patriotic
Protestants as Swift only sympathized with the Catholic Celts as an
Englishman living in Virginia, in the old plantation days, might have
sympathized with the population of negro slaves. Chesterfield might
have entered on his formal task in the temper of graceful levity and
high-bred languid indifference. He might have allowed the cultured and
respectable gentlemen who were his permanent officials to manage things
as they had long been doing before his time, pretty much in their own
way. He might have given them politely to understand that so long as
they spared him any trouble in his unthankful task he would back them
up in anything they did. He {248} might have made it plain to the
Protestant gentry and the Castle folk that his sympathies were all with
them; that he desired only to mix with them; and that it really did not
much matter what the outer population in Ireland thought of him or of
them. Thus he would easily have become the darling of Dublin Castle;
and to most Irish Viceroys the voice of Dublin Castle was the voice of
Ireland; at all events, the only voice in Ireland to which they cared
to listen.

[Sidenote: 1745--The state of Ireland]

What did Chesterfield find in Ireland when he came to undertake the
task of government in Dublin Castle? He found a people oppressed
almost beyond endurance by a cruel and barbarous system of penal laws
directed against the profession and the practice of the faith to which
they were passionately devoted. No people in the world's history, not
even the Scottish Covenanters, were more absolutely absorbed by the
zeal of their faith than the Irish Catholic Celts. The Penal Laws were
devised and were being worked with the avowed intention of extirpating
either the faith or the race--or,