It  is  curious  to  observe  how  much,  and  how  little,  Lord  Mulgrave
has  achieved  for  Ireland.
How  much  ! — when  we  look  to  the  course  which  he  has  pursued  in
purifying,  as  far  as  discretion  dictated  and  opportunity  allowed,  the
magistracy   of   the   country — in   fearlessly  dismissing  from  time  to
time  the  blusterers  and  bigots  who  had  abused  their  power,  and  pro-
voked to  strife  the  peasantry  they  should  have  protected  from  aggres-
sion— in  boldly  bringing  the  justice  himself  to  justice,  and  bidding
his  victim  be   of  good   heart — in  refusing  to  entrust  the  magisterial
ofiice  to  clergymen  simply  as  clergymen,  when  their  presence  on  the
bench  was  not  needful  to  the  administration  of  justice,  but  was  natu-
rally productive  of  discontent  and  suspicion — in  revising  the  lists  of
the  sheriff's,  by  which  the  infamy  of  the  jury-system  has  been  abated
— in  declining  to  dispatch   the  military  on   civil  errands,  provoking
the  persecuted  tithe-debtor  to  resistance,  and  sprinkling  the  path  to
the   Protestant   church   with  Catholic  blood — in  vindicating  the  law
by  putting  it   in   force  wherever   violated,  and,   by  the   detection  of
criminals,  lessening  the  actual  amount  of  crime  even  when  it  seemed
to   have  increased — in  reforming,  with   this  view,   the   constabulary
system,  which  had   been  the   promoter   rather  than  the   detector  of
offences,  and  so  uniting  in  it  Catholic  and  Protestant  as  to  give  both  an


]44  THE  RIGHT  HON.  THE  EARL  OF  MULGRAVE.
