The Irish wage must choose a tuberculosis incubator for a home.  Ireland is a one-room-home country.  In the great “rural slum” districts, the one-room cabin prevails.  Country slums exist where homes cannot be supported by the land they are built on—­they occur, for instance, in the rocky fields of Galway and Donegal and in the stripped bog lands of Sligo.  Galway and Donegal cabins are made of stones wrested from the ground; in Mayo, the walls are piled sod—­mud cabins.  Roofing these western homes is the “skin o’ th’ soil” or sod with the grass roots in it.  Through the homemade roofs or barrel chimneys the wet Atlantic winds often pour streams of water that puddle on the earthen floors.  At one end of the cabin is a smoky dent that indicates the fireplace; and at the other there may be a stall or two.  The small, deep-set windows are, as a rule, “fixed.”  Rural slums are rivaled by city slums.  Even in the capital of Ireland the poor are housed as badly as in the west of Ireland.  Looking down on the city of Dublin from the tower of St. Patrick’s cathedral, one can see roofs so smashed in that they look as if some giant had walked over them; great areas so packed with buildings that there are only darts of passageways for light and air.  In ancient plaster cabins, in high old edifices with pointed Huguenot roofs, in Georgian mansion tenements, there are 25,000 families whose homes are one-room homes.  Dublin’s proportion of those who live more than two to a room is higher than that of any other city in the British Isles—­London has 16.8; Edinburgh, 31.1; Dublin, 37.9.[5] In one-room homes tuberculosis breeds fast.  A table from the dispensary for tuberculosis patients, an institution built in Dublin as a memorial to the American, P.F.  Collier, shows that out of 1,176 cases 676 came from one-room homes.[6] As a type case, the report instances this:  “Nine members of the W——­ family were found living in one room together in a condition bordering on starvation.  Both parents were very tubercular.  The father had left the Sanatorium of the South Dublin Union on hearing of the mother’s delicacy.  He hoped to earn a little to support the family that had been driven to such a state through illness that, houseless, it had had to sleep on stairs.  The only regular income was $1.12 a week earned by the eldest girl, aged 16, in a factory.  Owing to want of food and unhealthy surroundings, she was in so run down a condition that it seemed certain she would become tubercular if not at once removed.”

The Irish wage can’t buy the “good old diet.”  Milk and stirabout and potatoes once grew rosy-cheeked children.  But bread and tea is the general diet now.  War rations?  Ireland was not put on war rations.  To regulate the amount of butter and bacon per family would have been superfluous labor.  Few families got even war rations.[7] Charitable organizations doubt if they should give relief to families who are able to have an occasional meal of potatoes in addition to