In _Old Virginia and her Neighbors_, Vol. II, p. 391, Prof. John Fiske says: “Until recent years little has been written of the coming of the so-called Scotch-Irish to America, and yet it is an event of scarcely less importance than the exodus of English Puritans to New England and that of English Cavaliers to Virginia. It is impossible to understand the drift which American history, social and political, has taken since the time of Andrew Jackson, without studying the early life of the Scotch-Irish population of the Alleghany region, the pioneers of the American backwoods. I do not mean to be understood as saying that the whole of that population at the time of the Revolution was Scotch-Irish, for there was a considerable German element in it, besides an infusion of English moving inward from the coast. But the Scotch-Irish element was more numerous and far more important than all the rest. “Who were the people called by this rather awkward compound name Scotch-Irish? The answer carries us back to the year 1611, when James First began peopling Ulster with Colonists from Scotland and the North of England. The plan was to put into Ireland a Protestant population that might ultimately outnumber the Catholics and become the controlling element in the country. _The settlers were picked men and women of the most excellent sort._ By the middle of the seventeenth century there were 300,000 of them in Ulster. “That province had been the most neglected part of the island, a wilderness of bogs and fens; they transformed it into a garden. They also established manufactures of woolen and linens which have since been famous throughout the world. By the beginning of the eighteenth century their numbers had risen to nearly a million. Their social condition was not that of peasants; they were intelligent yeomanry and artisans. In a document, signed in 1718 by a miscellaneous group of 319 men, only thirteen made their mark, while 306 wrote their names in full. Nothing like that could have happened at that time in any other part of the British empire, hardly even in New England.