Against Home Rule | Page 9

to convert the occupiers of Irish farms into
the owners of the soil. The policy of the Ashbourne Acts was briefly
that any landlord could agree with any tenant on the purchase price of
his holding. The State then advanced the credit sum to the landlord in
cash, while the tenant paid an instalment of 4 per cent. for forty-nine
years. It is important to notice that the landlord received cash and that
the tenants paid interest at the then existing rate of interest on Consols,
namely, 3 per cent. The great defect in these Acts was that they applied
only to separate holdings and not to estates as a whole; but their
success can be estimated by the fact that under them twenty-seven
thousand tenants became owners by virtue of advances which
amounted to over ten million pounds. Under Mr. Balfour's Acts of 1891

and 1896, the landlord was paid in stock instead of cash, and the
tenants still paid 4 per cent., the interest being reduced to the then rate
on Consols--2-3/4 per cent.--and the Sinking Fund being
proportionately increased. It will be noticed that these Acts began the
practise of paying the landlord in stock, though at that time Irish Land
Stock with a face value of £100 became worth as much as £114. The
exchequer was, moreover, permitted to retain grants due for various
purposes in Ireland and to recoup itself out of them in case of any
combined refusal to repay on the part of tenants.
The Irish Land Act of 1903 was the product of the experience gained
during eighteen years of the operation of the preceding Purchase Acts.
It was founded upon an agreement made in 1902 between
representatives of Irish landlords and tenants. Cash payments were
resumed to the landlords, the tenants' instalments were reduced to 3-1/4
per cent., and a bonus, as it was called, of twelve millions of money
was made available to bridge the gap between the landlords and the
tenants at the rate of 12 per cent, on the amount advanced. That Act
possessed the additional advantage of dealing with the estates as a
whole instead of with individual holdings, and it substituted the
principle of speedy purchase for that of dilatory litigation. This
remarkable and generous measure initiated a great and beneficent
revolution, but every popular and useful feature of the Act of 1903 was
distorted or destroyed in the Land Act which the present Government
passed at the instigation of the Irish Nationalist Party in 1909. In Mr.
Wyndham's words "a solemn treaty framed in the interest of Ireland
was torn up to deck with its tatters the triumph of Mr. Dillon's unholy
alliance with the British Treasury." Under the Act of 1909, landlords,
instead of cash payments, are to receive stock at 3 per cent. issued on a
falling market. This stock cannot possibly appreciate because owing to
the embarrassment of Irish estates a large proportion of each issue is
thrown back upon the market at the redemption of mortgages. The
tenant's annuity is raised from 3-1/4 per cent, to 3-1/2 per cent., a
precedent not to be found in any previous experiment under Irish Land
Purchase finance. The bonus is destroyed and litigation is substituted
for security and speed. The results of the two Acts are instructive.
Under the 1903 Act the potential purchasers amounted to nearly a

quarter of a million; under the 1909 Act the applications in respect of
direct sales being less than nine thousand. It is hardly necessary to go
into the reasons advanced for this disastrous change. It has been
brought about not in order to relieve the British Treasury, but in order
to rescue from final destruction the waning influence of Irish
Nationalism. Mr. Wyndham has the authority of the leader of the
Unionist Party for his statement that the first constructive work of the
Unionist Party in Ireland must be to resume the Land policy of 1903
and to pursue the same objects by the best methods until they have all
been fully and expeditiously achieved. Unionist policy cannot, however,
be confined to the restoration of Land Purchase. The ruin which Free
Trade finance has inflicted upon Irish agriculture can only be remedied,
as Mr. Childers saw at the time of the Financial Relations Commission
in 1895, by a readjustment of the fiscal system of the United Kingdom.
Mr. Gerald Balfour shows us in one of the most able papers in the book
the extraordinary development which has been seen in recent years in
Irish agricultural methods. The revival of Irish rural industries dates
from Mr. Balfour's chief-secretaryship. The Parliament which set up in
Ireland the Congested Districts Board and sanctioned the building of
light railways at the public expense, also witnessed the formation in
Ireland of a Society