better still, the faith and the race.
"The Irish," said Dr. Johnson, "bursting forth," as his biographer
tells us, "with a generous indignation," "are in a most unnatural
state, for we see there the minority prevailing over the majority.
There is no instance, even in the ten persecutions, of such severity as
that which the Protestants of Ireland have exercised against the
Catholics." The Revolution, which had brought liberty of worship to
England, had only brought harsher and more cruel repressive legislation
against liberty of worship in Ireland. Where Chesterfield got the
ideas which he carried out from the first in his government of Ireland
it is hard to understand. He must have had that gift of spontaneous
sympathy which is the very instinct of genius in the government of a
people among whom one has not been born, among whom one has scarcely
lived. His mind seems to have taken in at a glance the whole state of
things. Talleyrand said of Alexander Hamilton, the great American
statesman, that {249} he had "divined Europe." Chesterfield had
apparently divined Ireland.

The twin curses of Ireland at the time were the Penal Laws and the
corrupt administration of Dublin Castle. Chesterfield determined to
strike a heavy blow at each of these evil things. He saw that the
baneful class ascendency which was engendered by the Penal Laws was as
bad in the end for the oppressors as for the oppressed. He saw that it
was poisoning those who were administering it as well as those against
whom it was administered. He could not abolish the Penal Laws or get
them repealed. No man in his senses could have hoped to get the
existing Parliament either of England or of Ireland to do anything then
with the Penal Laws, except perhaps to try to make them a little more
severe and more tormenting. Chesterfield did not waste a thought on
any such device. He simply resolved that he would not put the Penal
Laws into action. It has been said of Chesterfield's administration in
Ireland that it was a policy which, with certain reservations, Burke
himself might have originated and owned. Chesterfield took the
government entirely into his own hands. He did his very best to
suppress the jobbery which had become a tradition in the officialism of
Dublin Castle. He established schools wherever he could. He tried to
encourage and foster new branches of manufacture, and to give a free
way to trade, and a stimulus to all industrial arts and