Now that we have treated emigration as a fact, let us turn to a few of the means by which it might be lessened.
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.
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.