measure of expropriation, the Pilgrim Fathers landed in New Plymouth.  Puritan Massachusetts—­with its offshoots, Connecticut, New Haven and Rhode Island—­as well as Catholic Maryland, were formally established between 1629 and 1638, and Maine in 1639, at a period when the politically inspired proscription of the Catholic religion, succeeding the robbery of the soil, was goading the unhappy Irish to the rebellion of 1641.  While that rebellion, with its fierce excesses and pitiless reprisals, was convulsing Ireland, the united Colonies of New England banded themselves together for mutual defence.

A few years later Cromwell, aiming, through massacre and rapine, at the extermination of the Irish race, with the savage watchword “To Hell or Connaught,” planted Ulster, Munster, and Leinster with men of the same stock, stamp, and ideas as the colonists of New England, and in the first years of the Restoration Charles II. confirmed these confiscations, at the same time that he granted Carolina to Lord Clarendon, New Netherlands to the Duke of York, and New Jersey to Lord Berkeley, and issued fresh Charters for Connecticut and Maryland.  Finally, Quaker Penn founded Pennsylvania in 1682, and in 1691 William III., after the hopeless Jacobite insurrections in favour of the last of the Stuarts, wrung the last million acres of good Irish land from the old Catholic proprietors, planted them with Protestant Englishmen, and completed the colonization of Ireland.  Forty years passed (1733) before Georgia, the last of the “Old Thirteen Colonies,” was planted, as Ulster had been planted, mainly by Scotch Presbyterians.

During the greater part of this period we must remember that conquered Ireland herself was contributing to the colonization of America.  Every successive act of spoliation drove Catholic Irishmen across the Atlantic as well as into Europe, and gave every Colony an infusion of Irish blood.  Until the beginning of the eighteenth century this class of emigration was for the most part involuntary.  Cromwell, for example, shipped off thousands of families indiscriminately to the West Indies and America for sale, as “servants” to the colonists.  The only organized and voluntary expedition in which Irish Catholics took part was that to Maryland under Lord Baltimore.  The distinction in course of time became immaterial.  In the free American air English, Scotch, and Irish became one people, with a common political and social tradition.

It is interesting, and for a proper understanding of the Irish question, indispensable, briefly to contrast the characteristics and progress of the American and Irish settlements, and in doing so to observe the profound effects of geographical position and political institutions on human character.  I shall afterwards ask the reader to include in the comparison the later British Colonies formed in Canada and South Africa by conquest, and in Australia by peaceful settlement.