Unhappy Ireland!

Feilding Star, Volume VII, Issue 87, 2 January 1886, Page 3

Unhappy Ireland !

"United Ireland" has the following pathetic paragraph on the continued decrease of the population of Ireland : — " Those terrible EegistrarGeneral's returns are woeful reading. In the cold official figures they present, the tragic history Of Ireland continues te be set down as by the unemotional stylus of a Fate. For years the burden of the story has been one monotonous tale of decay and depopulation, and there is yet no trace of a turning of the ebb-tide. The returns for the last quarter show a decrease of 24,658 in the population, by a comparison of the number of births and deaths and the numbers of tho3e who have fled from our shores. Calculating on this ratio, the population of Ireland at the middle of the present year will stand, it is estimated, at 4,924,342! Tbis •continued flight and decline of the people opens up a frightful possibility. When a country lias been scourged by war, and its male inhabitants decimated, tho falling off in its numbers and the decline of its prosperity awaken only a melancholy curiosity. But to behold a similar process going on, in a period of profound peace, and uuder the sanction of what claims to lie civilised constitutional government, I is a spectacle as awful as that as a deadly but imperceptible pestilence devastating a beautiful and wholesome country. Every recurring quarter's return seems now as fateful as i the pendulum 1/oat which measure? out the san-ls of the victim in the condemned cell. It is possible there is to be no surceaso of this horrible anccmic process ? All that htis been <lone to show the people the madness of fleeing away seems to have been in vain : and it is a certainty, sure as ■death, that unless some healing styptic ho applied, the date, when the island will be as destitute of Irishmen as Tasmania is of Aborigines, must be a matter of only a few generations,