Protestant parts of Ulster of the principles which held the field in other parts of Ireland made for prosperity in that province by tending towards an economic condition of the labour market, unimpeded by artificial restrictions, arising from religious differences and imposed at the hands of employers of labour.  Another factor in the contentment of the Ulster Presbyterians under the varying vicissitudes of Irish government is to be found in the history of the Regium Donum.  The Scottish settlers in 1610 having brought with them their ministers, the latter were put in possession of the tithes of the parishes in which they were planted.  These they enjoyed till the death of Charles I., but payments were stopped on their refusal to recognise the Commonwealth.  Henry Cromwell, however, allowed the body L100, which Charles II. increased to L600, per annum, but towards the end of his reign, and during that of James II., it was discontinued.  William III. renewed the grant, increasing it to L1,200, and it was still further augmented in 1785 and 1792.  After the Union Castlereagh largely increased the amount of the Regium Donum, and completely altered its mode of distribution, making it in fact contingent on the loyalty of the parson to the Union.  The spirit in which it was granted is well shown in a letter in Castlereagh’s memoirs, in which the writer, addressing the Chief Secretary just after the votes had been passed by Parliament, declared—­“Never before was Ulster under the dominion of the British Crown.  It had a distinct moral existence before, and now the Presbyterian ministry will be a subordinate ecclesiastical aristocracy, whose feeling will be that of zealous loyalty, and whose influence on those people will be as purely sedative when it should be, and exciting when it should be, as it was the reverse before.”  Those who blame Pitt for not having carried through his schemes of concurrent endowment, and who see in his failure to do so, one reason for the ill success of his policy of Union, must admit the importance of the fact that the Presbyterian clergy were pensioners of the State.  A notion of the extent to which they were subsidised may be inferred from the fact that by the Commutation Clauses of the Church Disestablishment Act of 1869, the Dissenters secured as compensation for the loss of the Regium Donum and other payments a sum of L770,000, while the equivalent amount paid in lieu of the Maynooth grant to the Catholics—­numbering at least eight times as many—­amounted to only L372,000.

It was Froude who declared that if the woollen and linen industries had not been hampered there would now be four Ulsters instead of one.  Even in the days before restrictions were placed on the production of Irish linen for the better encouragement of the English trade, the North of Ireland was far ahead of the rest of the country in the matter of flax-spinning, and this pre-eminence was mainly due to the fact that the climate there is more suited to that plant than in other parts of Ireland.