on]

_The third, most powerful source of lunacy, is Emigration_. It
may seem a paradox to say that the lessening of our people must
naturally mean the increase of insanity. When we say the country
loses forty thousand of its inhabitants yearly, we make but a
partial statement of the case. Whom do we lose? Not the average
class--the youth, and the youth only go. Two consequences follow.
A boy, when he has arrived at his eighteenth year, has cost the
country two hundred pounds, and a girl one hundred and fifty. Up
to that time they were consumers, they produced little. This
enables us to arrive at the appalling fact that Ireland every
year pours seven millions worth of human cargo into the emigrant
ship.

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, a