o' th' soil" or sod with the grass roots in it. Through the homemade roofs
or barrel chimneys the wet Atlantic winds often pour streams of water that
puddle on the earthen floors. At one end of the cabin is a smoky dent that
indicates the fireplace; and at the other there may be a stall or two. The
small, deep-set windows are, as a rule, "fixed." Rural slums are rivaled by
city slums. Even in the capital of Ireland the poor are housed as badly as
in the west of Ireland. Looking down on the city of Dublin from the tower
of St. Patrick's cathedral, one can see roofs so smashed in that they look
as if some giant had walked over them; great areas so packed with buildings
that there are only darts of passageways for light and air. In ancient
plaster cabins, in high old edifices with pointed Huguenot roofs, in
Georgian mansion tenements, there are 25,000 families whose homes are
one-room homes. Dublin's proportion of those who live more than two to a
room is higher than that of any other city in the British Isles--London has
16.8; Edinburgh, 31.1; Dublin, 37.9.[5] In one-room homes tuberculosis
breeds fast. A table from the dispensary for tuberculosis patients, an
institution built in Dublin as a memorial to the American, P.F. Collier,
shows that out of 1,176 cases 676 came from one-room homes.[6] As a type
case, the report instances this: "Nine members of the W---- family were
found living in one room together in a condition bordering on starvation.
Both parents were very tubercular. The father had left the Sanatorium of
the South Dublin Union on hearing of the mother's delicacy. He hoped to
earn a little to support the family that had been driven to such a state
through illness that, houseless, it had had to sleep on stairs. The only
regular income was $1.12 a week earned by the eldest girl, aged 16, in a
factory. Owing to want of food and unhealthy surroundings, she was in so
run down a condition that it seemed certain she would become tubercular if
not at once removed."

The Irish wage can't buy the "good old diet." Milk and stirabout and