crafts. He
showed himself a strong man, determined to repress crime and outrage,
but he showed himself also a just and a merciful man, determined not to
create new crimes in the hope of repressing the old offences. The
curse of Irish repressive government has always been its tendency to
make fresh crimes, crimes unknown to the ordinary law. Chesterfield
would have nothing of the kind. More than that, he would not recognize
as offences the State-made crimes which so many of his predecessors had
shown themselves ruthless in trying to repress. The confidence of the
people began to revive under his rule. The Irish {250} Catholic began
to find that although the Penal Laws still existed, in all their
blood-thirsty and stupid clauses, he might profess and practise his
religion without the slightest fear of the informer, the prison, the
transport ship, or the hangman. Chesterfield asked for no additional
troops from England. On the contrary, he sent away some of the
soldiers in Ireland to help the cause of the empire on the Continent.
He was buoyant with a well-grounded confidence; and there was something
contagious in his fearless generosity and justice. The Irish people
soon came to understand him, and almost to adore him. He was
denounced, of course, by the alarmists and the cowards; by the Castle
hacks and the furious anti-Catholic bigots. Chesterfield let them
denounce as long and as loudly as seemed good to them. He never
troubled himself about their wild alarms and their savage clamor.

[Sidenote: 1745-1746--Chesterfield's recall]

Probably no Irishman who ever lived was a more bitter and
uncompromising enemy of English rule in Ireland than John Mitchel, the
rebel of 1848. His opinion, therefore, is worth having as to the
character of Chesterfield's rule in Dublin Castle. In his "History of
Ireland," a book which might well be more often read in this country
than it is, Mitchel says of Chesterfield: "Having satisfied himself
that there was no insurrectionary movement in the country, and none
likely to be, he was not to be moved from his tolerant courses by any
complaints or remonstrances. Far from yielding to the feigned alarm of
those who solicited him to raise new regiments, he sent four battalions
of the soldiers then in Ireland to reinforce the Duke of Cumberland.
He discouraged jobs, kept down expenses. . . . When some savage
Ascendency Protestant would come to him with tales of alarm, he usually