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The period of Covenanter persecution in Scotland was one of comparative quiet in Ireland, but persecution came again under James II. And later in the reign of Anne (1702-1714), under the Test Act, they were made exceedingly uncomfortable. Unless they conformed in worship they could hold no public office, nor be married by their own ministers, nor bury their dead by their own simple rites, nor build churches, nor buy land, nor employ teachers except those of the Established Faith. Thus deprived by oppressive laws of every position of trust or honor, denied the liberty of speech, the free exercise of conscience, together with burdensome restraints on their commerce and extortionate rents from their landlords, they began to look toward America as another and a better home.

Says Froude: "In two years which followed the Antrim Evictions, 30,000 Protestants left Ulster for a land where there was no legal robbery, and where those who sowed the seed could reap the harvest." The government, alarmed at this depletion, gave relief and checked the emigration for a while. But in 1728 it began anew, and from then to 1750, it is estimated that 12,000 came annually from Ulster to America.

Physically and morally, of all the people in the world, these Scotch Irish were the best suited by nature and by Providential training for building up a new country. Some of them were scholars, as Robert Alexander, a Master of Arts of Dublin University, who, in 1749, built on land now owned by Samuel Finley McClure, near Old Providence Church, Augusta County, Va., the log school-house, sowing the seeds of learning, of which Washington and Lee University is the ripening fruit.

Landing in Pennsylvania, some of them crossed the Alleghanies and settled the western part of the State. Another stream flowed southward, entering the beautiful Shenandoah Valley, spreading over Augusta and Botetourt and