their bread and tea.  In a recent pamphlet[8] the St. Vincent de Paul Society said:  “A widow ... who after paying the rent of her room, has a shilling a day to feed herself and two, three, four or even more children, is considered a doubtful case by the society.  Yet a shilling a day will only give the family bread and tea for every meal, with an occasional dish of potatoes.  By strict economy a little margarine may be purchased, but by no process of reasoning may it be said that the family has enough to eat, or suitable food.”  The Irish wage would have to be a high wage to buy the old diet.  For that is not supplied by Ireland for Ireland any more.  When Ireland became a cow lot, cereal and vegetable crops became few.  But milk should be plentiful?  The recent vice-regal milk commission noted the lack of milk for the poor in Ireland.  Why?  The town of Naas tells one reason.  Naas is in the midst of a grazing country, but Naas babies have died for want of milk, because Naas cattle are raised for beef exportation.  The town of Ennis tells another reason.  Ennis is also in the center of a grazing country.  Until the Woman’s National Health Association established a depot, Ennis poor could not get retailed pitchersful of milk, for Ennis cows are raised to supply wholesale cansful to creameries which make the supply into dairy products for exportation.[9]

Bread-and-tea, and bread-and-tealess families get on the calling list of tuberculosis nurses.  “The nurses often found,” writes the Woman’s National Health Association, “that a large number of cases committed to their care were in an advanced stage of the disease ... in a number of cases families have been found entirely without food.  This chronic state of lack of nourishment ... accounts in part for the fact that there are two and sometimes three persons affected in the same family."[10]

Has mental as well as physical health been affected?  Lunacy is extraordinarily prevalent in Ireland.  In the lunacy inspectors’ office in Dublin castle, I was given the last comparison they had published of the insanity rates in England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland.  English and Welsh insanity per 10,000 people was 40.8; Scottish, 45.4; Irish, 56.2.  The Irish rate for 1916 showed an increase to 57.1.[11]

Emigration, remark lunacy experts, fostered lunacy.  Whole families withdrew from certain districts.  Consanguineous marriages became more frequent.  Weak-minded cousins wedded to bring forth weaker-minded children.

And Irish living conditions are a nemesis.  They affect those who go as well as those who stay.  Commenting on the fact that the Irish contribute the highest proportion of the white foreign-born population to the American hospitals for the insane, as well as filling their own asylums, the lunacy inspectors write:  “As to why this should be, we can offer no reasoned explanation:  but just as the Irish famine was, apart from its direct effects, responsible for so much physical and mental distress in the country, so it would seem not improbable that the innutritious dietary and other deprivations of the majority of the population of Ireland must, when acting over many generations, have led to impaired nutrition of the nervous system, and in this way have developed in the race those neuropathic and psychopathic tendencies which are precursors of insanity."[12]