that some of these transported persons rose to places of
distinction and honor in the colonies and that many of them became
respected citizens. Maryland, indeed, recruited her schoolmasters from
among their ranks.

Indentured service was an institution of that time, as was slavery.
The lot of the indentured servant was not ordinarily a hard one. Here
and there masters were cruel and inhuman. But in a new country where
hands were so few and work so abundant, it was wisdom to be tolerant
and humane. Servants who had worked out their time usually became
tenants or freeholders, often moving to other colonies and later to
the interior beyond the "fall line," where they became pioneers in
their turn.

The most important and influential influx of non-English stock into
the colonies was the copious stream of Scotch-Irish. Frontier life was
not a new experience to these hardy and remarkable people. Ulster,
when they migrated thither from Scotland in the early part of the
seventeenth century, was a wild moorland, and the Irish were more than
unfriendly neighbors. Yet these transplanted Scotch changed the fens
and mires into fields and gardens; in three generations they had built
flourishing towns and were doing a thriving manufacture in linens and
woolens. Then England, in her mercantilist blindness, began to pass
legislation that aimed to cut off these fabrics from English
competition. Soon thousands of Ulster artisans were out of work. Nor
was their religion immune from English attack, for these Ulstermen
were Presbyterians. These civil, religious, and economic persecutions
thereupon drove to America an ethnic strain that has had an influence
upon the character of the nation far out of proportion to its
relative numbers. In the long list of leaders in American politics and
enterprise and in every branch of learning, Scotch-Irish names are
common.

There had been some trade between Ulster and the colonies, and a few
Ulstermen had settled on the eastern shore of Maryland and in Virginia
before the close of the seventeenth century. Between 1714 and 1720,
fifty-four ships arrived in Boston with immigrants from Ireland. They
were carefully scrutinized by the Puritan exclusionists. Cotton Mather
wrote in his diary on August 7, 1718: "But what shall be done for the
great number of people that are transporting themselves thither from
ye North of Ireland?" And John Winthrop, speaking of twenty ministers
and their congregations that