Irish families are invariably large, and as the same homely virtue is usually practised by their descendants, it will not be deemed an exaggeration when we say that thousands of the present natives of the South are descended directly or indirectly from the Irish colonizers from Barbadoes of the last half of the seventeenth century. There is no system of calculation by which we could arrive at any adequate idea of the probable number of American descendants of those early settlers, but, if we adopt the simple method of taking the number of generations that have elapsed since their coming, and then apportion, say an average of five persons to each family for each succeeding generation, we can safely conclude that when American historians refer to the pioneers of the South as wholly “of Anglo-Saxon origin,” they are playing fast and loose with their imaginations. The provincial authorities were anxious to attract immigrants to open up the virgin forest and extend the bounds of their domain, so we find them in communication with the government agents in England and Ireland, offering the most flattering inducements to all who desired to settle in the new country. Farmers, artisans and agricultural laborers were particularly needed, while they objected to the importation of convicts and other undesirable persons. Irish political refugees were sometimes classed as “convicts,” and while the provincial history, supported by other testimony of an indubitable character, indicates that great numbers of Irish “convicts” settled in Virginia, it is seen that once they had landed on the soil, they were, in a manner, “tolerated” and permitted to stay, and accordingly were parcelled out among the planters and others who needed the services of able-bodied men. The privations suffered by those imported Irish “convicts” under the vassalage of their colonial masters are, in some cases, beyond description, and would shake the credulity of the most sympathetic. Many of them occupied even lower positions than the Southern slaves of a later day. Not only were they the tillers of the soil, the woodsmen of the forest, and the builders of the highways, but they occupied “the firing line” in the resistance of the planters to the attacks of the savage redskins. Here where the ravages of the Indians were so terrible, these Irishmen and boys, so rudely torn from their own country, inflicted on savagery many a mortal blow and opened the way for the civilization whose fruits we now enjoy. The continued cry for settlers attracted the avarice of many of the Cromwellian adventurers in Ireland, who thus became most efficient aids in carrying on the barbarous work of the English commissioners, who were appointed by government to exterminate the Irish.