Would that this was all, but worse remains to be said.  Who stay with us?  The aged, the delicate, the infirm.  The kernel of the race is going, the husks are remaining with us.  Intermarriage among these, intermingling of enfeebled and tainted blood is one of the main contributory causes why the walls of our asylums are enlarging.

[Side note:  Remedies]

Let us see what the priest can do to fight the national curse, and stay the national haemorrhage.

[Side note:  The Points to Fix on]

In dealing with the drink question his main purpose should be to purify public opinion.  Till that is done, every other effort must fail.  What use in our inveighing against a vice if the people insist on labelling it a virtue?  Our first effort must be to get the people to view it in an honest light—­to see it as we see it.  Public opinion up to this could scarcely be more depraved.

[Side note:  The Village Scandal]

It was not an unusual thing to see young boys feigning drunkenness and staggering through the village.  Why?  They were at an age when pride began to crave for notoriety and applause.  They knew the public to which they appealed, and they took the shortest cut to win its approbation, and that was by pretending to be drunk.

An action like that is a terrible verdict against the national conscience.  If public opinion were healthy, if it held for such mock heroes, not the incense of applause, but a lash of scorn, if boys were persuaded that so far from exhibiting in their conduct a manly trait, they were only proving themselves degraded puppies, the cure would be immediate.

[Side note:  Perverted Judgments]

Listen to people talking of a man who has sent his children out on the world, and his wife to an untimely grave, and you would think it was some visitation of Providence overtook him, and that he deserved all our sympathy.

The agent that dares to threaten an eviction has to carry revolvers and walk the country under the shadow of police protection; but the father and husband who evicts his own children and flings them into the slums of foreign cities, and sends his broken-hearted wife to the grave, not only has his crime condoned but, by the same people, he is daily smothered in the rose-leaves of apology.  “Poor fellow!  Ah, it is a good man’s fault!” Not one hard word.  Yet the world outside the shores of this country are pouring scorn on the degraded name of drunken Ireland.

[Side note:  The Young Men’s Pride]

Why not appeal to the patriotic pride of the young men by showing the contempt and distrust that follow our race because of this vice?  It would touch them to the quick.

[Side note:  The Hereditary Taint]

Another point to be insisted on is:—­The crime of the drunkard does not die with himself.  Like lunacy or consumption it transmits a sad heritage to his offspring.  Ninety out of every hundred are drunkards because they inherited tainted blood.