This should not be. As a rule, an Irishman is social, humorous, and kind, affectionate in his family relations and disinterested in his friendships. In this country he has all the advantages that religion can afford, the churches are open to him every day, he is not restricted in his attendance at divine service on Sundays, he has always, particularly in cities and large towns, an opportunity of hearing good, practical, and instructive sermons and discourses on the duties of life, at least once a week; and the strength to resist temptation, which the sacraments alone can give, is always within his power to obtain. Whence, then, originates this ungovernable passion, this desperate recklessness that resists all control, and, disregarding consequences, rushes madly into sin, makes man an outlaw among his fellows, and drags him to the dungeon and the scaffold? We must not attribute it to his defective education, the result of a jealous and tyrannical system of government in his native country, though it may have something to do with it; neither will the fact that many who had golden dreams before they reached our shores failed to realize them, and so became heedless. Poverty and destitution have been pleaded in extenuation, but they are more a result than a cause; for no able-bodied man, if well-conducted, need be in that sense either poor or destitute in this country, where labor is ever in demand. No; the secret, if it be a secret, lies in one word--intoxication, and, as a consequence, in the neglect of the religious duties taught and performed in their younger days. Intoxication is the demon that creeps into their souls, fires their heated blood, plunges his victims into an abyss of crime and transforms man, the noblest work of the Creator, into a ferocious brute. We are aware that instances of forgery, arson, swindling, and premeditated homicide--in fact, all offences requiring skill and deliberation--are exceedingly rare among our Irish-born population, but that is no reason why a few men born and baptized in the church, as little children taught the great truths of religion in the simple words of the catechism, and as adults weekly and almost daily within reach of moral instruction and a participation in the benefits of the sacraments, should by their neglect of religion, and their insane desire for deleterious stimulants, disgrace the race from which they have sprung and bring obloquy on the religion they profess to respect, but never practise. Who ever heard of an Irish adopted citizen, a teetotaler or even a uniformly temperate man, committing an atrocious crime or a deliberate breach of the laws of his adopted country? No better illustration can be given of the beneficial effects of temperance on the Irish character than the following official statistics taken from the _Life of Father Mathew_. The author says: