nded children.

And Irish living conditions are a nemesis. They affect those who go as well
as those who stay. Commenting on the fact that the Irish contribute the
highest proportion of the white foreign-born population to the American
hospitals for the insane, as well as filling their own asylums, the lunacy
inspectors write: "As to why this should be, we can offer no reasoned
explanation: but just as the Irish famine was, apart from its direct
effects, responsible for so much physical and mental distress in the
country, so it would seem not improbable that the innutritious dietary and
other deprivations of the majority of the population of Ireland must, when
acting over many generations, have led to impaired nutrition of the nervous
system, and in this way have developed in the race those neuropathic and
psychopathic tendencies which are precursors of insanity."[12]

Babies don't like mentally and physically worn-out parents. Babies used to
be thought to have special predilection for Ireland. But as a matter of
fact, they come to the island less and less. Ireland has for some time
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