Under the Act of 1881 "fair rents" were fixed for periods of fifteen years, when they were again ripe for revision. Roughly speaking, the old non-judicial rents were reduced by twenty per cent on an average to convert them into first term rents. These again were further reduced by twenty per cent on an average for the second term. This, of course, played havoc with the landlord's income, and did not materially benefit the tenant, the prices of the produce of whose farm was falling with even greater rapidity. The experiment of dual ownership had been tried and was found wanting; a return to single ownership was sought for by the series of acts known as the Land Purchase Acts. It was not till 1885 that the experiment of land purchase was seriously tried in Ireland, but it is right to say that the question first came before the public in a practical form so far back as 1869 in the discussions on the disestablishment of the Irish Episcopal Church. At that time Mr. Bright proposed to increase the number of owners of land in Ireland by allowing the glebe tenants to purchase the property attached to the glebes. The idea was embodied in the Irish Church Act, and over six thousand occupying owners were thus created. Under this act three-fourths of the purchase money was advanced by the State, and the balance paid in cash by the purchasers. The money was advanced by the State for thirty-two years, the shortest period allowed by any of the acts. From the tenant's point of view this act cannot be said to have been an unqualified success. The price of land was high at the time, and the purchasers having bought high sustained the whole burden of the sudden fall in the prices of produce which almost immediately succeeded the conclusion of their bargains. In 1870 and in 1881 there were embodied in the acts of these years provisions to enable tenants to purchase their holdings; but the procedure to be followed was made so complicated that the tenants did not avail themselves of the purchase clauses to any great extent. The insignificant number of sixteen hundred sales were completed under the two acts. In 1885 a Conservative government came into power, and though their term of office was of short duration, they introduced and passed a measure which, by its marvellous and, I might add, its unexpected success, pointed the direction and paved the way for all future legislation for the settlement of the land problem in Ireland. Back to single ownership was the keynote of the measure. Hitherto the credit or discredit of all legislation on the land problem belonged to the Liberals. They strove to make dual ownership a possibility. Conservative statesmen sought for a settlement in the opposite direction.