From Our Own Correspondent Duni-ars-.
" It is said, I believe, on good authority, that there are plenty of men in the country, with ample means to found a home and a family, but they are deterred from doing so by fears for the future.
" This is unpatriotic cowardice. If this gloomy outlook on Irish life is not effectively and quickly cured, we may be faced with the greatest crisis in our history."
So said his Grace the Archbishop of Tuam at St. Jarlath's College. " The distinction of man," Dr. Gilmartin said, " is the faculty of thought and the Godlike gift of free will. While those two wonderful gifts may be used to great good, they may be abused to do great ea it"
There was what. might be called " a flight from serious thought." There was so much printed matter paraded before the eyes of the public that it was almost impossible not to waste time in finding out how "stale, flat and unprofitable" most of it was in substance. There were magazines with attractive covers and deceptive titles which were " the fetid exhalations of degenerate minds."
FOLLOWS FLIGHT FROM THOUGHT This flight from thought was the Cause of another flight, which was causing alarm to all who took any serious interest in the country. He referred to the " flight from the land."
" I remember as a boy," his Grace said, "the great fight that your fathers and grandfathers made for the land. It was a fight for life—for the Land is the basic source of natural life now that we have got the land, it seems to have lost Its charm by being possessed.
"No doubt there must be migration, more or less, but it ought to be within economic limits. There are many boys and girls running across to England today, not so much through economic necessity, but from a spirit of discontent with rural life.
" We get authentic accounts from the other side showing that many of them have acted with imprudent haste."
At home in Ireland there seemed to be an inordinate craze for pleasure, which was bound to have a baneful effect on the Irish ideal of home life.
OWN LAND AND BE FREE!
"I should ask you, then, to become missionaries for a return to the Ireland of our fathers and grandfathers, who were proud to own and to work their own holdings.
"A man who has his own house and his own piece of land cannot be a
beggar except through his own fault. He Is a freeman and en asset to the country."
As a consequence of this flight from the land there was a low marriage rate, with a falling off in the child population.
o at a These words of the great and venerable Archbishop of the West appeared subsequently to the notes and letters in which the Cieraorsic HERALD argued that pleasure-seeking and discontent, not monetary need, are the cause of the headlong exodus from the land and the cessation of rural marriage.
It will be seen, therefore, that I arrived at my opinion independently, but am confirmed by the highest authority that could be found in Ireland, one of her four Archbishops.