One of the most important measures passed by the British Parliament during this period of Irish revival has been the Irish Labourers' Act. It was one of the first measures passed by the new Liberal Parliament of 1906, and it has been since often amended and supplemented. But its main provisions still stand. In this Act the Imperial Government grants to the local authorities in Ireland loans at cheap rates for the purpose of re-housing the Irish agricultural labourers. It places the whole administration of these loans in the hands of the Irish District Councils--a very delicate and difficult task. So efficiently have the District Councils done their work that more than half the Irish labourers have already been re-housed. It is fully expected that within a few years the whole Irish agricultural labouring population will have received under this Act good houses, accompanied always with a plot of land at a small rent. Compare with this the administration of the Small Holdings Act by the English local authorities. That Act, passed in 1908, placed the actual allocation of small holdings in the hands of the English County Councils. It is not necessary to dwell here upon the notorious failure of most of the high hopes with which that measure was passed through the British Parliament. The cause of that failure is obvious. The promise of the Small Holdings Act has been practically destroyed by the refusal of the County Councils to throw either goodwill or efficiency into its administration. LAND PURCHASE But the second of the two great renovating measures--the Irish Land Purchase Act of 1903--has contributed even more powerfully than the first to the recovery of Ireland during the last ten years. There again we have a great instance of the supremacy of the spirit of Parliament over the prejudices of Party. The whole tendency of democratic government is so rootedly opposed to coercion that it is difficult for any party to continue on purely coercive lines for any long period. And yet, as Mr. Gladstone always pointed out with such prescience, the only alternatives in Ireland were either coercion or government according to Irish ideas.