The racial, religious, and political antagonisms between the north and south of Ireland are well known, and can never be removed. Three-fourths of the population in this section of the island are Protestants, mostly Calvinists of the sternest kind, and the portraits of John Knox and Oliver Cromwell hang on the walls of the houses rather than those of the popes. The religious feeling, however, is not so intense as formerly. A generation ago, the 12th of July (the anniversary of the battle of the Boyne, in which the Protestant army of William of Orange overcame and dispersed the Roman Catholic forces under James II.) never used to pass without a riot and many broken heads, but of recent years there have been very few collisions. Formerly, the Roman Catholics used to lie in wait at a certain bridge to attack the procession of Orange societies as it passed over, with shillalahs and stones. The Orangemen, who are mostly mechanics from the shipyards and machine-shops, always armed themselves with iron bolts and nuts for the fray, and missiles flew freely, leaving many unconscious and sometimes dead men on the ground. And on other holidays, whenever the representatives of either religious faith came out in force, the other usually attempted to interfere with them. But those days have passed. The rival religionists glare at and taunt each other now, but do not strike. One cannot blame the Roman Catholics for their bitterness. In the middle of the sixteenth century, in consequence of the rebellion of the earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell, the heads of the great clans of O'Neill and O'Donnell, against the authority of Queen Elizabeth, the territory belonging to them and their followers was confiscated by the crown and sold to Protestants, chiefly from Scotland, just as the southern counties were distributed among the "undertakers" from England, but with a difference. The "undertakers" who were granted the estates of the rebellious earls in southern Ireland were mostly adventurers and speculators. Many of them never came to Ireland at all. Few of them settled permanently upon their grants, while nearly all of those who undertook to carry out the contract of colonization were indifferent to the class of settlers they brought in. In Ulster Province, however, which is the northern third of Ireland, after the "flight of the earls," their confiscated lands were taken up in small parcels by actual settlers from Scotland, whose descendants have occupied them until this day--a sturdy, thrifty, industrious, and prosperous race, and the children of these "Scotch-Irish" Protestants have borne as important a part in the settlement and development of the United States as the children of the Pilgrims have done.