A thousand years later, after they had become a united people and had shown their metal in the trying times of the Reformation, they furnished the emigrants who displaced the Irish in the north of Ireland. James I, whom Scotland gave to England, determined to transform Catholic Ireland into Protestant England, and thereupon confiscated the lands of the native chiefs in Ulster and bestowed them upon Scottish and English lords on condition that they settle the territory with tenants from Scotland and England. This was the "great settlement" of 1610, and from that time to the present Ulster has been the Protestant stronghold of Ireland. In 1901 the population of Ulster was 44 per cent Catholic, 23 per cent Episcopalian, and 27 per cent Presbyterian, an ecclesiastical division corresponding almost exactly to the racial division of Irish, English, and Scotch. During the whole of the seventeenth century--the first century of this occupation--the Catholics and Episcopalians were in a much smaller proportion than these figures show for the present time, and the relative increase in Irish and Episcopalians during the eighteenth century was closely connected with the migration of the Scotch to America.
For one hundred years the Scotch multiplied in Ulster and had no dealings with the remnants of the Irish, whom they crowded into the barren hills and whom they treated like savages. They retained their purity of race, and although when they came to America they called themselves Irish and were known as Irish wherever they settled, yet they had no Irish blood except that which entered into their composition through the Irish migration to Scotia fifteen hundred years before.
Yet, though they despised the Irish, they could not escape the unhappy fate of Ireland. The first blow came in 1698, nearly one hundred years after their settlement. English manufacturers complained of Irish competition, and the Irish Parliament, a tool of the British crown, passed an act totally forbidding the exportation of Irish woollens, and another act forbidding the exportation of Irish wool to any country save England. Their slowly growing linen industry was likewise discriminated against in later years. Presbyterian Ulster had been the industrial centre of Ireland, and these acts nearly destroyed her industry. Next Queen Anne's Parliament adopted penal laws directed against Roman Catholics and Presbyterians, and the Test Act, which compelled public officials to take the communion of the Established Church, deprived the entire Scotch population of self-government. Nevertheless they were compelled to pay tithes to support the Established Church to which they were opposed. Lastly, the hundred-year leases of the tenants began to run out, and the landlords offered renewals to the highest bidders on short leases. Here the poverty-stricken Irish gained an unhappy revenge on the Scotch who had displaced them of their ancestral lands, for their low standard of living enabled them to offer rack-rents far above what the Scotch could afford. No longer did religion, race pride, or gratitude have a part in holding Ulster to Protestant supremacy. The greed of absentee landlords began to have full sway, and in the resulting struggle for livelihood, hopeless poverty was fitter to survive than ambitious thrift.