The immediate effects produced upon Ireland by the commercial policy of Great Britain were such as might reasonably be anticipated from the brief and necessarily imperfect account I have given of that system. The best and most energetic members of the industrial community sought refuge in exile from a land where honest labour was robbed by law of its reward. The weaker ones, who were compelled to remain, this terrible system defrauded, impoverished, and degraded. It afflicted every Irishman, whether at home or abroad, with a sense of intolerable wrong, and created that passionate resentment towards England, which has been transmitted to succeeding generations. "One of the most obvious consequences," says Mr. Lecky, "was that for the space of about a century Ireland underwent a steady process of depletion, most men of energy, ambition, talent, or character being driven from her shores."[85] "If the ambition of an Irishman lay in the paths of manufacture and commerce he was almost compelled to emigrate, for industrial and commercial enterprise had been deliberately crushed."[86] This legislation, it must be remembered, fell most severely on the Protestant population of Ireland, although, of course, it grievously affected every class, and, indeed, every member of the community. Twenty thousand Puritans left Ulster on the destruction of the woollen trade.[87] "Until the spell of tyranny was broken, in 1782, annual ship-loads of families poured themselves out from Belfast and Londonderry. The resentment they carried with them continued to burn in their new homes; and, in the War of Independence, England had no fiercer enemies than the great-grandsons of the Presbyterians who had held Ulster against Tyrconnel."[88]