With the beginning of the eighteenth century two currents of immigration rapidly outdistanced all others in numbers, importance, and the amount of attention which they attracted. These were the Palatines and the Scotch-Irish. Throughout the rest of the colonial period they held the center of the stage in the immigration situation. The Palatines were so called because their original home was in what was known as the Palatinate. This was a section of Germany lying on both sides of the Rhine from Cologne to Mannheim. It was divided into two parts, the upper and the lower, from the latter of which most of the immigration came. The position of this country brought it into close relations with the spirit of the Reformation, and large bodies of the population became Protestant, both Reformed and Lutheran. The rulers of the Palatinate, the Electors Palatine, swung back and forth between Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Roman Catholicism, and since each successive ruler wished his subjects to conform to his religious views, the miserable people suffered accordingly. Both of the two great wars between 1684 and 1713, the War of the Grand Alliance and the War of the Spanish Succession, had borne heavily on the Palatinate, which had long been the object of Louis XIV’s most covetous desire. The second ruthless devastation which the country experienced during the latter of these wars reduced the people to the lowest pitch of misery and desperation. Meanwhile their ruler, John William, was trying to force the whole of the people back into Catholicism. “To the people already suffering from the intolerable hardships which the cruelest of wars had thrust upon them, this persecuting spirit of their prince came as the last impulse to break off their attachment to the fatherland and send them to make new homes in distant America.” Thus began the great exodus, from a combination of political and religious causes, in entire harmony with the spirit of the age.