The First Census has a peculiar interest for Americans of Irish blood or descent, for here we find irrefutable evidence of the racial origin of a large part of the people of the United States a few years after the close of the Revolutionary war. There is, of course, no standard, or fixed rule or principle, by which an absolutely correct judgment on the question of the racial composition of the early inhabitants of the United States can now be formed. The available statistics on the subject are incomplete and confusing. But, if names are to be accepted as a criterion, those who examine the Census Returns, in conjunction with the records of land grants, the parochial registers, the Colonial Records that have been collected and edited by the secretaries of state, the court and church records, the Revolutionary rosters, the old newspapers, the Registers of Historical Associations, and other similarly reliable records, must at once conclude that a goodly percentage of the people were of old Irish stock. It must be borne in mind also that the Census enumerators made no returns of unmarried persons. This fact is important, when we place beside it the statements of reliable historians that the Irish exodus of the 18th century largely comprised the youth of the country. From the records which we have already quoted, we know that thousands of the Irish youth became indentured servants after their arrival in the Colonies, and it is not likely that these people, even though married while still in servitude, were considered of sufficient importance by the census enumerators to be included in the lists of the “heads of families.” One who examines these records for traces of the Irish settlers will be surprised to find a most inviting field of retrospect and research ever widening before him. We do not need to wander into the field of romance, as some writers occasionally do, in search of proof that at the beginnings of the Nation the Celtic element figured to a larger extent than it has been credited with at the hands of our historians. There is so much of dry fact concerning them in these hitherto obscure records as to make it a perplexing thought for the investigator where to begin upon an exposition of the part played by the Irish Colonists and their descendants in shaping the destinies of the future Republic. Theirs is generally a prosaic story of trials bravely borne, of victories snatched from rude nature in the face of many difficulties. The pioneer settlers lived a simple but rude life on the frontiers of civilization, free from the artificialities of our latter-day mode of living, but they made the wilderness which they found to blossom as the rose and to become a fair habitation for the generations that have succeeded them.