homely humor, or dwell in imagination amid the haunts of old
romance, we are the better Americans for the Scottish heritage from
which heart and mind alike derive inspiration and delight.

It is as difficult to separate the current of Scottish migration to
the American Colonies, or to the United States that grew out of them,
from the larger stream which issued from England, as it is to
distinguish during the last two hundred years the contributions by
Scotsmen from those of Englishmen to the great body of English
literature. We have the first census of the new Republic, in the year
1790, and an investigator who classified this enumeration according to
what he conceived to be the nationality of the names, found that the
total free, white, population numbering 3,250,000 contained 2,345,844
people of English origin; 188,589 of Scottish origin, and 44,273 of
Irish origin. The system of classification is manifestly loose, and
the distribution of parent nationalities entirely at variance with
known facts. That part of the population described as Irish was
largely Ulster-Scottish, the true Irish never having emigrated in any
considerable numbers until they felt the pressure of the potato
famine, fifty years later. There is excellent authority for the
statement that, at the outbreak of the Revolutionary War one-third of
the entire population of Pennsylvania was of Ulster-Scottish origin. A
New England historian, quoted by Whitelaw Reid, counts that between
1730 and 1770 at least half a million souls were transferred from
Ulster to the Colonies--more than half of the Presbyterian population
of Ulster--and that at the time of the Revolution they made one-sixth
of the total population of the nascent Republic. Another authority
fixes the inhabitants of Scottish ancestry in the nine Colonies south
of New England at about 385,000. He counts that less than half of the
entire population of the Colonies was of English origin, and that
nearly, or quite one-third of it, had a direct Scottish ancestry.

These conclusions find powerful support in the number of distinguished
men whom the Scots and the Ulstermen contributed to the Revolutionary
struggle, and to the public life of the early days of the United
States. Out of Washington's twenty-two brigadier generals, nine were
of Scottish descent, and one of the greatest achievements of the
war--the rescue of Kentucky and the whole rich territory northwest of
the Ohio, from which five States