[Illustration:  From an old print

A GLIMPSE OF OLD GERMANTOWN]

Unlike the Scotch-Irish, the Germans did not speak the language of the original colonists or mingle freely with them.  They kept to themselves, built their own schools, founded their own newspapers, and published their own books.  Their clannish habits often irritated their neighbors and led to occasional agitations against “foreigners.”  However, no serious collisions seem to have occurred; and in the days of the Revolution, German soldiers from Pennsylvania fought in the patriot armies side by side with soldiers from the English and Scotch-Irish sections.

=Other Nationalities.=—­Though the English, the Scotch-Irish, and the Germans made up the bulk of the colonial population, there were other racial strains as well, varying in numerical importance but contributing their share to colonial life.

From France came the Huguenots fleeing from the decree of the king which inflicted terrible penalties upon Protestants.

From “Old Ireland” came thousands of native Irish, Celtic in race and Catholic in religion.  Like their Scotch-Irish neighbors to the north, they revered neither the government nor the church of England imposed upon them by the sword.  How many came we do not know, but shipping records of the colonial period show that boatload after boatload left the southern and eastern shores of Ireland for the New World.  Undoubtedly thousands of their passengers were Irish of the native stock.  This surmise is well sustained by the constant appearance of Celtic names in the records of various colonies.

[Illustration:_From an old print_

OLD DUTCH FORT AND ENGLISH CHURCH NEAR ALBANY]

The Jews, then as ever engaged in their age-long battle for religious and economic toleration, found in the American colonies, not complete liberty, but certainly more freedom than they enjoyed in England, France, Spain, or Portugal.  The English law did not actually recognize their right to live in any of the dominions, but owing to the easy-going habits of the Americans they were allowed to filter into the seaboard towns.  The treatment they received there varied.  On one occasion the mayor and council of New York forbade them to sell by retail and on another prohibited the exercise of their religious worship.  Newport, Philadelphia, and Charleston were more hospitable, and there large Jewish colonies, consisting principally of merchants and their families, flourished in spite of nominal prohibitions of the law.

Though the small Swedish colony in Delaware was quickly submerged beneath the tide of English migration, the Dutch in New York continued to hold their own for more than a hundred years after the English conquest in 1664.  At the end of the colonial period over one-half of the 170,000 inhabitants of the province were descendants of the original Dutch—­still distinct enough to give a decided cast to the life and manners of New York.  Many of them clung as tenaciously to their mother tongue as they did to their capacious farmhouses or their Dutch ovens; but they were slowly losing their identity as the English pressed in beside them to farm and trade.