Babies don’t like mentally and physically worn-out parents.  Babies used to be thought to have special predilection for Ireland.  But as a matter of fact, they come to the island less and less.  Ireland has for some time produced fewer babies to the thousand people than Scotland.  During the decade 1907-1916 Scotland’s annual average to every thousand people was 25.9;[13] Ireland’s was 22.8.  From 1907 to 1917 Ireland’s total number of babies fell from 101,742 to 86,370.[14]

But as was said in the beginning, it is not to individual excess that most of the ill health in Ireland is due.  It was not until recently that venereal disease as a factor in Irish ill health has been a factor worth mentioning.  In 1906 a lunacy report read:  “The statistics show that general paralysis of the insane—­a disease now almost unknown in Ireland—­is increasing in the more populous urban districts.  At the same time the disease is still much less prevalent than in other countries, and in the rural districts it is practically non-existent.  This is to a large extent due to the high standard of sexual morality that prevails all over Ireland."[15]

Nor do the Irish suffer from the violence that accompanies common crime—­for there is little crime under the most crime-provoking conditions.  As the Countess of Aberdeen said:  “In the past annual report by Sir Charles Cameron, the medical officer of health for Dublin, there are again some figures that tell a strange tale of poverty so widespread, of destitution so complete, of housing so unsanitary, of unemployment so little heeded, that one is amazed by the fact that no combined effort on the part of more fortunate citizens has been made toward bringing about a wholesome change, and this amazement is only lessened by the extraordinary freedom we in Dublin enjoy from robberies, peculations, from crimes of violence and other misdeeds that would sharpen our perception of miseries now borne with a fortitude and a self-restraint that cannot but appeal strongly to any who, either from personal experience or philanthropic reading, know how crime and vice are associated elsewhere with conditions not more distressing and often less long-lived than ours."[16]

SCHOOL CLOSED

There’s small chance for the Irish to better their condition through education.  Many Irish children don’t go to school.  It is estimated that out of 500,000 school children, 150,000 do not attend school.  Why not?  Here are two reasons advanced by the Vice-Regal Committee on Primary Education, Ireland, in its report published by His Majesty’s Stationers, Dublin, 1919: 

Many families are too poor.

England does not encourage Irish education.

Irish poverty is recognized in the school laws; the Irish Education act passed by Parliament in 1892 is full of excuses for children who must go to work instead of to school.  Thousands of Irish youngsters must avail themselves of these excuses.  Ireland has 64,000 children under the age of 14 at work.  But Scotland with virtually the same population has only 37,500.[17]