produced fewer babies to the thousand people than Scotland. During the
decade 1907-1916 Scotland's annual average to every thousand people was
25.9;[13] Ireland's was 22.8. From 1907 to 1917 Ireland's total number of
babies fell from 101,742 to 86,370.[14]

But as was said in the beginning, it is not to individual excess that most
of the ill health in Ireland is due. It was not until recently that
venereal disease as a factor in Irish ill health has been a factor worth
mentioning. In 1906 a lunacy report read: "The statistics show that general
paralysis of the insane--a disease now almost unknown in Ireland--is
increasing in the more populous urban districts. At the same time the
disease is still much less prevalent than in other countries, and in the
rural districts it is practically non-existent. This is to a large extent
due to the high standard of sexual morality that prevails all over
Ireland."[15]

Nor do the Irish suffer from the violence that accompanies common
crime--for there is little crime under the most crime-provoking conditions.
As the Countess of Aberdeen said: "In the past annual report by Sir Charles
Cameron, the medical officer of health for Dublin, there are again some
figures that tell a strange tale of poverty so widespread, of destitution
so complete, of housing so unsanitary, of unemployment so little heeded,
that one is amazed by the fact that no combined effort on the part of more
fortunate citizens has been made toward bringing about a wholesome change,
and this amazement is only lessened by the extraordinary freedom we in
Dublin enjoy from robberies, peculations, from crimes of violence and other
misdeeds that would sharpen our perception of miseries now borne with a
fortitude and a self-restraint that cannot but appeal strongly to any who,
either from personal experience or philanthropic reading, know how crime
and vice are associated elsewhere with conditions not more distressing and