There were a few Irish on the _Mayflower_, but the first large body arrived about twenty years later. There were five or six hundred of them—a forlorn and pitiful mob, forcibly transported from their native land. Those were the black days of Cromwell, when $25 was paid for the head of a wolf and $50 for the head of a patriot Irishman. In ten years probably 100,000 were driven out, and many of them came to the American colonies. The first big Irishman in our colonial history was Gov. Thomas Dongan, who gave New York its earliest charter, and who deserves to be called one of the pioneer champions of popular rights in America. The second was the distinguished philosopher, Bishop Berkeley, who came from Derry to Rhode Island in 1728, lured by a missionary enterprise that failed. All through the eighteenth century came a steady stream of the exiled Irish—men and women who had been toughened in a terrible school, and who were fit and ready for the perils of the American wilderness. Most of them were from the north of Ireland—from little Ulster, that giant-breeding province whose sons have made history in almost every country of the earth. They were the first across the Alleghanies. They settled Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia and the coal and iron regions of Pennsylvania. Such men as Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett and Matthew Lyon were their leaders. It was they who colonized Ulster County in New York and Londonderry in New Hampshire. The colonial hero of the Catskills was Timothy Murphy—so wrote Jay Gould in his famous _History of Delaware County_, published fifty years ago. When the War of Independence began there were Irish on the firing-line everywhere. They had a personal as well as a colonial grievance against Great Britain; and here was a chance, at last, to even up old scores. A writer of those times describes them as “a hardy, brave, hot-headed race; excitable in temper; unrestrainable in passion; invincible in prejudice. They are impatient of restraint, and rebellious against anything that in their eyes bears the resemblance of injustice. They were the readiest of the ready on the battlefields of the Revolution.” These were not parlor virtues, but they were the kind that founded the American republic. “You lost America by the Irish,” declared Lord Mountjoy in the British Parliament.