Lord Macaulay, commenting upon these things and deploring the policies that brought them about, says with great significance: 

“There were Irish Catholics of great ability, but they were to be found everywhere except in Ireland—­at Versailles, at St. Ildefonso, in the armies of Frederic, in the armies of Maria Theresa.  One exile (Lord Clare) became a marshal of France, another (General Wall) became Prime Minister of Spain....  Scattered all over Europe were to be found brave Irish generals, dexterous Irish diplomatists, Irish counts, Irish barons, Irish knights of St. Louis and St. Leopold, of the White Eagle, and of the Golden Fleece, who if they remained in the house of bondage, could not have been ensigns of marching regiments or freemen of petty corporations.”

The old Irish brigades ended with the French monarchy.  Battalions of the regiments of Dillon and Walsh were with the French fleet in the West Indies at Grenada and St. Eustache, also at Savannah, and under Rochambeau at Yorktown, but, except as to the officers, the surviving regiments of Berwick, Dillon, and Walsh were largely French.  With the better times under Grattan’s Parliament in Ireland, the soldier emigration to France had all but ceased.  The Irish Volunteers of 1782 numbered 100,000 men, of whom an appreciable proportion were Catholics.  Many Irish went into the English army and navy, but there was another stream of fighting emigrants, that which flocked to the standard of revolt against England in America, of which much was to be heard thereafter.

In the American colonies before the Revolution there were thousands of descendants of the Catholic Irish who had settled in Maryland and Pennsylvania during the seventeenth century, as well as hardy Irish Presbyterians from Ulster, who came in great multitudes during the first half of the eighteenth century.  They had suffered persecution in Ireland for conscience sake from their fellow-Protestants.  In Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and the Carolinas they constituted entire communities.  The emigration of the Catholic or purely Celtic Irish to America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was often compulsory.  At any rate, after the middle of the eighteenth century it was large and became continuous—­a true drift.  Catholics and Presbyterians alike brought hostility to the English government with them, and their voices fed the storm of discontent.  The Irish schoolmasters, of whom there were hundreds, were especially efficient in this.  They came in every ship to the colonies.  They had no love for England, for they had experienced in Ireland the tyranny of English law, and they would be more than human if they did not imbue the minds of the American children under their care with their own hatred of oppression and wrong and English domination.  The log schoolhouse of the Irish teacher became the nursery of revolution.  They were a very important factor, therefore, in the making of the Revolution, and many of them took an active part as soldiers in the field.