ted emigration as a fact, let us turn to a
few of the means by which it might be lessened.

[Side note: The Summer Swallow]

A constant source of temptation is the sight of the returned
emigrant with flash jewellery, superior airs and stories of
boasted wealth.

[Side note: Activity IV]

When summer brings these returned swallows, a spirit of
discontent with their social surroundings seizes the youth. The
priest's duty is to impress upon them that the bright side of the
picture alone is presented to them: there is another side of
awful darkness.

The successful one they see, but the fate of the submerged
ninety-nine is hidden from their eyes.

Our people emigrate without a knowledge of skilled labour; they
have to take the lowest occupations and bring up their children
in vile surroundings: they are lost in shoals.

Had the youth of this country the writer's experience: did they
see hundreds of their countrymen sleeping in the parks of Sydney,
without the shelter of a roof and without knowing where to turn
in the morning for a bit: could they hear the thirty-two accents
of Ireland in the low streets of dens where souls and bodies rot,
they would try their hands at a dozen means of winning honest
bread before turning their faces towards the emigrant ship.

Could we but take the twenty-two thousand Irish-born convicts out
of the jails of one city--New York--with their clanking fetters
and arrow-branded jackets, and march them through the length and
breadth of Ireland, and show the youth, that, if some wear
bangles, others wear handcuffs, it would go far to cure the
microbe of unrest.

Every tale of distress, failure and hardship abroad should be
repeated in the Irish provincial journals. No effort should be
spared to show the people, not one but both sides of the picture.

[Side note: Activity V Amusements]

One of the most important problems facing the young priest of
to-day is:--How to organise healthy and sinless amusements for
the people. Our skies are gloomy, our climate depressing, and the
very dreariness of country life causes thousands to fly. Look at
the groups of young men at the village corners, where is the hope
or contentment in their looks?

[Side note: Goldsmith's Days]

I think you may challenge the world's literature for more
wholesome pictures of rural pleasures than those mirrored in the
"Deserted Village." They are not creations of the poet's fancy,
but chronicles of facts that live