In Ireland we have an opportunity of contrasting the results of an
artificial or forced settlement with those of a natural or spontaneous
colonization. Elizabeth, James, and Cromwell settled their colonists on
Irish tribal lands, thus exposing them to the full force of the clannish
or tribal spirit which then animated the natives of Ireland. The
consequence was that the progeny of the British colonists, as it grew
up, absorbed the Irish tribal spirit, for this spirit, being more
primitive and more easily understood than a sense of nationality, always
makes a dominant appeal to the young mind. The blood which English
statesmen of the seventeenth century poured into Ireland to quench its
national flame only served to feed it. It was otherwise in the
north-east of Ireland--particularly in Down and Antrim. These counties
were settled in the earlier decades of the seventeenth century by a
process of spontaneous colonization. The movement commenced in a small
way in 1606 by Hugh Montgomery, a south Scotch laird, purchasing a large
tract of the O'Neill's land in county Down. He settled that land with
his relations and tenantry--a farming community. Such was the beginning
of the colonial fringe on the north-east coast of Ulster. The fringe was
fed by a spontaneous exodus of farming folk mainly from the south of
Scotland, but the stream was also kept up and maintained from the north
of England and from Scottish counties as far north as those of Aberdeen
and Inverness. The men who flocked to Ulster found it easier to raise
crops on the greensward of Antrim than on the heathery hill-sides of
Aberdeenshire. Herein we see a repetition, but on a small scale, of the
Saxon colonization of England. The settled communities established by
the Scotch pioneers sheltered and nursed the national spirit they
brought with them. As the fringe of colonists expanded it came to cover
Antrim and Down and made inroads on adjacent counties, overwhelming and
absorbing the tribal organization of the native population. In 1672 Sir
William Petty estimated that there were 100,000 Scots in Ulster. Thus
in the north-east of Ireland there has been established a people which
manifests all the qualities of a new nationality. History can explain to
us how it has come about that the inhabitants of Ireland, all of them
derivatives of the same breed of Europeans, should be divided into two
peoples, each possessed by its own peculiar sense of nationality. The
north is predominantly industrial and Protestant; the south is
predominantly pastoral and Catholic. But these circumstances are not
sufficient to account for a national--almost a racial--antagonism
between the inhabitants of a single small island who have so much to
gain by a sense of unity. To understand national antagonisms we have to
look at the inheritance which modern man has carried with him from his
distant past.