to nationality by making men men see that their strength lay within themselves, that they had at their command the means to win respect, and if they would enjoy that respect they must show that they were entitled to it. It somewhat altered the relation that they imagined existed between themselves and the English. New England years before had seen a "Great Awakening" that was religious and appealed to spiritual emotion; this was a second "Awakening" whose message was political. Another cause, quite unconnected with any of those already mentioned, was now operating to create colonial discontent with the mother-country. New England, as we have already seen, was of unmixed English blood, but both the Middle and the Southern colonies were rapidly filling up with Scotch and Irish. Religious persecution and commercial oppression drove the Scotch-Irish of Ulster across the Atlantic; the same motives that impelled Pilgrims and Puritans and Cavaliers to find in the colonies new homes were now to bring about a migration that was only again to be equaled when America called the famine-stricken Irish of the nineteenth century to plenty. English manufacturers, jealous of the woolen and linen industries of Ulster, ruined them by Acts of Parliament; a tion. Undecided claims and doubtful rights, which under the influence of wisdom and humility might have been easily compromised, imperceptibly widened into an irreconcilable breach. Hatred at length took the place of kind affections, and the calamities of war were substituted in lieu of the benefits of commerce.” — Ramsay: The History of the American Revolution, vol. 1, p. 185. spirit of persecution again possessed the Church of England, and civil and religious liberty was denied the Irish Presbyterians. There was hope for them nowhere except in the colonies, and between 1730 and 1770 five hundred thousand had cut themselves adrift and begun a new life in America. Very few of them came to New England; the majority went to Pennsylvania and spread through the Shenandoah Valley into the Carolinas. In 1770, we are told, they formed a third of the population of Pennsylvania,1 and at the time of the Revolution they constituted a sixth of the population of all the colonies.2 There were also in Pennsylvania a great many Germans, "who had known not a little of Old World oppression," and a not inconsiderable sprinkling of Welsh. The Irish came to America bitter and desperate men, rebels at heart against the British Government, and vengeful, eager to retaliate. A century earlier the Puritans had fled from England to escape religious persecution, but they were not driven out 1 "The number of foreigners, principally Germans, imported into this province or colony, in the course of about twenty-five years last past, has been so excessive that if it is not limited by a Provincial Act, or by the dernier resource, an Act of the British Parliament, the Province and Territories of Pennsylvania may soon degenerate into a foreign colony, endangering the quiet of our adjacent colonies." - Douglas: A Summary of the British Settlements, vol. 11, p. 326. 2 Cf. Coman: The Industrial History of the United States, p. 58; Fiske: Old Virginia and Her Neighbours, vol. II, p. 390 et seq. 3 Winsor: Narrative and Critical History, vol. v, p. 216. Cf. Ibid., vol. III, p. 515; Lodge: A Short History of the English Colonies in America, p. 227 et seq. by starvation. "Thirty thousand Protestants left Ulster for a land where there was no legal robbery, and where those who sowed the seed could reap the harvest." The same causes sent forth the Catholics from the southern provinces. "Agriculture was the national pursuit, but the men employed in it were steeped in poverty and misery; and this poverty and misery were traceable to English law and the English connection as its fountain head." The Catholics, who formed the majority of the population, in the seventeenth century and for two hundred years later, were deprived of all natural and political rights. By a statute of William and Mary, Roman Catholics were not allowed to act as the guardians of their own or of any other person's children. Laws of the same reign prohibited the marriage of Catholics with Protestants; Catholics were not allowed to be solicitors, nor were they permitted to be employed as gamekeepers. By a statute of Anne, the Protestant son of a Catholic father was to be taken from his father and confided to the care of a Protestant relation; a Catholic could not purchase real estate or hold land on a lease longer than thirty-one years; he could not inherit real property from a Protestant; he was disqualified from holding any office, civil or military. The history of Ireland under English rule is one of the most 1 Froude: The English in Ireland, vol. 11, p. 125. * Duffy: Young Ireland, vol. 11, p. 141. Cf. Lecky: A History of England in the Eighteenth Century, chap. VII, passim. shameful the world has known. Irish Catholics were treated as strangers in their own country. "The House of Lords, the House of Commons, the right of voting for representatives in Parliament, the magistracy, all corporate offices in towns, all ranks in the army, the bench, the bar, the whole administration of government or justice, were closed against Catholics. The immense majority of the people of Ireland were simply hewers of wood and drawers of water to their Protestant masters, who still looked upon themselves as mere settlers, who boasted of their Scotch or English extraction, and who regarded the name of Irishman as an insult."1 Hatred, kept down by fear, festered in the hearts of the children of the soil,2 and it was with this hatred festering in their hearts that the Irish came to America, Protestants and Catholics fiercely hating each other, but united in a fiercer hatred of the English who had made them exiles. The Germans, escaped from Old-World oppression and charged with a vague spirit of liberty, although they had no wrongs to revenge against the British, dimly felt that to resist the authority of the British Government was to encourage the Irish to fight the battle against tyranny. The immigrant has always been the radical; the reaction from monarchical institutions and the stifling weight of aristocratic class privileges and unequal conditions 1 Green: A Short History of the English People, p. 787. has made him a fiercer "democrat" than the native; democrat in name, although he has no comprehension of the real political philosophy of democracy or its social significance. Thus we see why the Irish in America, in the days when they were new to the soil and political excitement ran high, were always the fiercest agitators; why their place was taken by the later German arrivals; why an extreme school of socialism finds few disciples among native Americans, but must rely for support on the foreigner who has not yet become naturalized, or who has been in America such a short time that he is still foreign to the spirit of his environment. In the preRevolutionary days, wherever these Ulster Irishmen and Germans settled, there was always created a revolutionary nidus; a coldness toward English rule was kept up, an observant Swedish traveler remarked; it was a coldness soon to be transformed into passionate heat under the fierce fire of hate "by the many foreigners such as Germans, Dutch, and French settled here, and living among the English, who commonly have no particular attachment to old England.”1 There was still another reason to make the colonists feel that the support of the mother-country was less vital than it had been. The rashness and impetuosity of youth is the characteristic of all virile colonization, for an outpost of empire is made bold and self-reliant, audacious and resourceful, by |