wages and food, and a less monotonous existence.

It should be remembered that the proportion of imbeciles in Great
Britain has risen in the period of fifty years as it has in
Ireland--partly, no doubt, owing to a better system of registration of
lunacy--but, at the same time, the fact remains that the average in
Ireland is very much greater than in England and Wales, rising in some
Irish counties to a proportion twice, and in another to a ratio thrice,
as high as that of the average of the whole of England and Wales.

If urban industrial conditions militate against an increase of lunacy,
on the other hand it must be remembered that in most Irish towns there
is an appalling amount of overcrowding. The death-rate of Dublin--the
highest of any city in Europe--is, in consequence, no less than 25 per
1,000, as against 16 per 1,000 in Paris and New York, and 17 per 1,000
in London. The percentage of families, consisting on an average of four
persons, living in one room is in London 14.6, in Edinburgh 16.9, in
Glasgow 26.1, in Cork 10.6, in Limerick, 15.8, while in Dublin it
reaches the appalling percentage of 36. In Belfast, which, unlike any
other of the cities which I have mentioned, is for the most part modern,
the percentage is not higher than 1, and this fact has a very great
bearing on the industrial conditions in that city. Side by side with
these figures may be placed those of the death-rate from tuberculosis,
which from 1864 to 1906 in England decreased from 3.3 per 1,000 to 1.6,
in Scotland decreased from 3.6 per 1,000 to 2.1, and in Ireland
_increased_ from 2.4 to 2.7 per 1,000.

The rate war of the steamship companies, which reduced the cost of
passage across the Atlantic in 1904, caused the emigration returns to
rise from 45,000 to 58,000 in a single year, and at the same time there
were employed in Ireland two hundred emigration agents of one company
alone--the Cunard--each of whom received six shillings a head for each
banished Irishman and Irishwoman whom he got safely out of the country.
It is easy for the Irishman to wax eloquent about the exiles who, from
the time when O'Neil and O'Donnell weighed anchor in Lough Swilly at the
very beginning of the seventeenth century, sailed from their country to
seek their fortunes abroad in Church or State or camp, since
proscription deprived them of the _carriere ouverte aux talents_ at
home. The history of the "wild geese" in the service of France, Spain,
Italy, Au