Before he was thirty, the younger Robert Peel had gained a valuable experience in administrative work by a term of six years (1812-1818) as Chief Secretary for Ireland. Here, as in the preparation of his studies at Oxford and of his speeches for the House of Commons, he was painstaking, methodical, thorough, and energetic. In fact he applied to the public business the same sterling qualities which had made his father and grandfather successful merchants and manufacturers. His most notable reform in Ireland, which was then in a sad condition of disorder, was the replacement of military rule by a well-organized civil force of police, acting under the orders of the magistrates. He favored a more liberal scheme of popular education for the unhappy island, but his Tory prejudices stood in the way of relieving the Catholics of their disabilities. Because of his avowed opposition to this demand, and his bitter hostility to O'Connell, the champion of the cause, Mr. Peel--"Orange" Peel, as the Catholic Irish nicknamed him--had the satisfaction of being returned to Parliament in 1817 for the University of Oxford, perhaps the most ultra-Tory constituency in the three kingdoms. In January, 1822, Peel entered the cabinet of Lord Liverpool as Home Secretary. From the first he showed that his mind was not impenetrable to the legal reforms which earnest men had long been advocating, but to which the Tories had turned a deaf ear. The reform of the criminal law, which still carried the harsh statutes of an unquiet age, had been ably championed by Romilly, Mackintosh, and others, but it was Peel's way first to oppose, then to admit the principle of the reform, and finally to enact it into enduring law. On his initiative, in 1823, "nearly one hundred felonies were removed from the list of capital crimes, and judges were empowered to withhold the death penalty in all cases except murder, when the culprit appeared deserving of mercy." Other acts originating with him consolidated and unified the vast and complex body of criminal statutes so as to simplify procedure, and facilitate the ends of justice. Some conception of his services in this particular may be gained from the fact that "he secured the repeal of two hundred and seventy-eight acts relating to the criminal law, embodying their useful provisions in eight acts."