"Alleluia! Alleluia!"



ILL.

What do emigration and low wages do to Irish health? Social conditions
result in an extraordinary percentage of tuberculosis and lunacy, and in a
baby shortage in Ireland. Individual propensities to sexual excess or
common crime are, incidentally, responsible for little of the ill health in
Ireland.

Ireland's tuberculosis rate is higher than that of most of the countries in
the "civilized" world. Through Sir William Thompson, registrar-general of
Ireland, I was given much material about tuberculosis in Ireland. An
international pre-war chart showed Ireland fourth on the tuberculosis
list--it was exceeded only by Austria, Hungary, and Servia.[1] During the
war, Ireland's tuberculosis mortality rate showed a tendency to increase;
in 1913, her death list from tuberculosis was 9,387 and in 1917 it was
9,680.[2]

Emigration is heat to the tuberculosis thermometer. Why? Sir Robert
Matheson, ex-registrar-general of Ireland, explained at a meeting of the
Woman's National Health 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