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 He could not abolish the Penal Laws or get them repealed.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 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]