lth Association. The more fit, he said, emigrate, and
the less fit stay home and propagate weak children. Besides, emigrants who
contract the disease elsewhere come home to die. Many so return from the
United States. Numbers of the 50,000 annual migrants from the west coast of
Ireland to the English harvests return to nurse the tuberculosis they
contracted across the channel. Dr. Birmingham, of the Westport Union, is
quoted as saying that in September a disease known locally as the "English
cold" is prevalent among the young men who have been harvesting in England.
Sometimes it is simple bronchitis. Mostly it is incipent phthisis. It is
easily traced to the wretched sleeping places called "Paddy houses" in
which Irish laborers are permitted to be housed in England. These "Paddy
houses" are often death traps--crowded, dark, unventilated barns in which
the men have to sleep on coarse bags on the floor.[3]

The Irish wage causes tuberculosis to mount higher. Dr. Andrew Trimble,
chief tuberculosis officer for Belfast, comments on the fact that the sex
affected proves that economic conditions are to blame. Under conditions of
poverty, women become ill more quickly than men. Dr. Trimble writes: "In
Belfast and in Ireland generally more females suffer from tuberculosis than
males. In Great Britain, however, the reverse is the case.... In former
years, however, they had much the same experience as we have in Ireland ...
and it would be necessary to go back over twenty-five years to come to a
point where the mortality from tuberculosis among women equalled that now
obtaining with us. It would seem that the hardships associated with poor
economic conditions--insufficient wages, bad housing and want of fresh air,
good food and sufficient clothing--tell more heavily on the female than on
the male, and with the march of progress and better conditions of living
... tuberculosis amongst women is automatically reduced."[4]

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' s