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, 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.