the character or the success of McCormick without knowing the Scotch-Irish influences that shaped him.

The one man who did more to launch the Scotch-Irish on their conquering way, so it appears, was John Knox. This preacher-statesman, "who never feared the face of man," forced Queen Mary from her throne, and established self-government and a pure religion in Scotland, about seventy-five years after the discovery of America. This brought English armies down upon the Scotch, and for very nearly two centuries the struggle was bitter and desperate, the Scotch refusing to compromise or to bate one jot or tittle of a covenant which many of them had signed with their blood.

THE OLD McCORMICK HOMESTEAD, WALNUT GROVE FARM, ROCKBRIDGE COUNTY, VIRGINIA

At the height of this conflict, about 300,000 of these Scotch Covenanters left their ravaged country and set out in a fleet of little vessels for the north of Ireland. Here they settled in the barren and boggy province of Ulster, and presto! in the course of two generations Ulster became the most prosperous, moral, and intelligent section of the British empire. Its people were, beyond a doubt, the best educated masses of that period, either in Great Britain or anywhere else. They were the most skilful of farmers. They wove woollen cloth and the finest of linen. They built schools and churches and factories. But in 1698, the English Parliament, jealous of such progressiveness, passed laws against their manufacturing, and Ulster was overrun, as Scotland had been, with the police and the soldiery of England.

The Scotch-Irish fought, of course, even against such odds. They had never learned how to submit. But as the devastation of Ulster continued, they resolved to do as their great-grandfathers had done,—emigrate to a new country. They had heard good reports of America, through several of their leaders who had been banished there by the British government. So they packed up their movable property, and set out across the wide uncharted Atlantic Ocean in an exodus for liberty of industry and liberty of conscience.

By the year 1776 there were more than 500,000 of the Scotch-Irish in this country. They went first across the Alleghanies, into the new lands of western Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Texas. Beyond all question, they were the hardiest and ablest founders of the republic. They dissolved the rule of the Cavaliers in Virginia; and in the little hamlet of Mecklenburg they planned the first defiance of Great Britain and struck the key-note of the Revolution. They gave Washington thirty-nine of his generals, three out of four members of his cabinet, and three out of five judges of the first Supreme Court.

Of all classes of settlers in the thirteen colonies, they were the best prepared and most willing for the struggle with England, for the reason that they had begun to fight for liberty two hundred and fifty years before the battle of Bunker Hill. They were not amateurs in the work of revolution. They were veterans. And so, because they were pioneers and patriots by nature and inheritance, the Scotch-Irish became, in the words of John Fiske, "the main strength of our American democracy."

Naturally, they were pathfinders in industry as well as in the matter of self-government, as many of them had been manufacturers in Ireland. "Thousands of the best manufacturers and weavers in Ulster went to seek their bread in America," writes Froude, "and they carried their art and their tools with them." In one instance, by the failure of the woollen trade, 20,000 of them were driven to the United States. As might have been expected, these Scotch-Irish Americans have produced not only five of our Presidents, but also such merchants as A. T. Stewart; such publishers as Harper, Bonner, Scribner, and McClurg; and such inventors as Joseph Henry, Morse, Fulton, and McCormick. They were possibly the first large body of people who had ever been driven from manufacturing into farming; and it was not at all surprising, therefore, that the new profession of making farm machinery should have been born upon a Scotch-Irish farm.

As for Cyrus H. McCormick, he represented the fourth generation of American McCormicks. His great-grandfather, Thomas McCormick, quit Ulster in the troublous days of 1735. He was a soldier at Londonderry; and later became noted as an Indian fighter in Pennsylvania. His son Robert, who moved south to Virginia, carried a rifle for American independence at the battle of Guilford Court-house, North Carolina, in 1781. He was a farmer and weaver by occupation, a typical Ulsterman, whose farm was a busy workshop of invention and manufacturing.

ROBERT McCORMICK

On his mother's side, too, Cyrus McCormick had behind him a line of battling Scotch-Irish. She was the daughter of a Virginian farmer named Patrick Hall, one of whose forefathers had been driven out of Armagh by the massacre of 1641. Patrick Hall was the leader of the old-school Presbyterians in his region of Virginia. So rigid was he in his loyalty to the faith of the Covenanters, that once when a new minister came to preach in the little kirk, and lined out a Watts hymn instead of a psalm of David, Patrick Hall picked up his hat and strode out, followed by a goodly part of the congregation. He at once built upon his own farm a new church of limestone, in which no such levity as hymn-singing was permitted.

Cyrus McCormick's mother inherited her father's strength of character, without his severity. She was a thorough Celt, impulsive, free-spoken, and highly imaginative. Judging from the stories about her that are remembered in the neighborhood, it is evident that she was a woman of exceptional quality of mind. She was not as studious as her husband, but quicker and more ambitious. As a girl, she had been strikingly handsome, with a tall and commanding figure. She was saving and shrewd, with the Scotch-Irish passion for "getting ahead." She allowed no idle moments in the home. If the children were dressed before breakfast was ready, out they went to cut wood or weed the garden. She knew the profession of housekeeping in all its old-fashioned complexity; and she worked at it from dawn to starlight, with no rest except the relief of flitting from one task to another.

"Mrs. McCormick came riding by our farm one day," said an aged neighbor, "at a time when my father and mother were hurrying to save some hay from a coming rain-storm. 'If you don't hurry up you'll be too late,' she said; and then tying her horse to the fence she picked up a rake and helped with the hay until it was all in the barn. That's the kind of woman she was,—always full of energy and ready to help."