"Wait. There's another thing. I've heard more than one priest boast
that there was less sin in the villages of Ireland than in any other
country. And why? What is yer great cure for vice? MARRIAGE--isn't
it?"

"What are ye sayin'?"

"I'm sayin' this, Father Cahill. If a boy looks at a girl twice,
what do ye do? Engage them to be married. To you marriage is the
safeguard against sin. And what ARE such marriages? Hunger marryin'
thirst! Poverty united to misery! Men and women ignorant and stunted
in mind and body, bound together by a sacrament, givin' them the
right to bring others, equally distorted, into the wurrld. And when
they're born you baptise them, and you have more souls entered on
the great register for the Holy Church. Bodies livin' in perpetual
torment, with a heaven wavin' at them all through their lives as a
reward for their suffering here. I tell ye ye're wrong! Ye're wrong!
Ye're wrong! The misery of such marriages will reach through all the
generations to come. I'd rather see vice--vice that burns out and
leaves scar-white the lives it scorches. There is more sin in the
HEARTS and MINDS of these poor, wretched, ill-mated people than in
the sinks of Europe. There is some hope for the vicious.
Intelligence and common-sense will wean them from it. But there is
no hope for the people whose lives from the cradle to the grave are
drab and empty and sordid and wretched."

As O'Connell uttered this terrible arraignment of the old order of
protecting society by early and indiscriminate marriages, it seemed
as if the mantle of some modern prophet had fallen on him. He had