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52 2 E. P. Chcyney person giving the estimate and his dwelling-place and opportunities for making a judgment, such a large movement as the increase or decrease of national population is quite beyond the capacities of an ordinary observer. No general statistics exist, so we are driven to indirect means of judgment. It is evident that great difficulty was found in obtaining settlers for the new colonies in both Ireland and Virginia. The plantation in Munster just referred to, instead of the anticipated 4,200 in the first year, had reached in five years only the number of 536. In 1592, at the end of seven years, instead of the 1,500 families required as a minimum by the conditions of settlement, there were but 245.^ Of all the southern and central plantations of Ireland we hear the same story ; the speculators who took the large tracts were forbidden to dispose of them to native Irish owners or tenants, but they were not successful, or at least were only partially and tardily successful in finding English or, Scotch settlers, and thus largely failed to conform to the conditions of their grants. In Ulster, except in the shires nearest Scotland, the same was largely true. Every effort was made by the officials in formulating the terms of the contracts with the " undertakers " to secure British settlers and to exclude the Irish, but reports of 1619, 1622, 1624, and 1632 show great numbers of Irish tenants and a cor- respondingly small number of English and Scotch immigrants — not one-third of the number called for by the requirements.^ The king was deeply disappointed, and from December, 1612, wrote a series of letters to the authorities in Ireland complaining bitterly of the failure to introduce any large body of English settlers in Derry and the other Ulster counties. Finally in 1635 the Irish Company of London was prosecuted in Star Chamber for having failed to fulfil the terms of its charter, and was proved not to have sent over as many settlers as required, and to have allowed the natives to out- number the new-comers in many districts. It was thereupon con- demned to pay a fine of £70,000 and to lose its lands.^ It was only into those counties which lay nearest to Scotland and which were in a specially favorable position in other respects that population flowed from the larger island in anything like an abundant stream ; into all others it was a slender and slow-flowing current, till it practically ceased about 1630. The settlers sent to Virginia were for a long time but few. A careful computation gives the following figures of those who left England for Virginia : 1606-1609, 300; 1609-1618, 1,500; 1618- ' Bonn, Kolonisation, I. 303-304. ^Ibid., 334-342- 'Gardiner, History of England, VIII. 59, 60.