In sales under all the purchase acts from 1885 to the Act of 1903 all the purchase money is advanced by the State to the selling landlord, and is charged by the State to the tenant who purchases. The tenant repays the amount borrowed or "advanced," to use the language of the acts, in annual instalments, which instalments clear off not only the original "advance," but the accumulated interest. Roughly speaking, the procedure is this. The landlord and tenant, having agreed on a price, sign an agreement for sale, and file it with the Land Commission, which body has the carriage, so to speak, of all purchase transactions, as well as all other transactions under the land acts. The holding is inspected by the Land Commission which, having been satisfied that the land in question is security for the "advance," pay the purchase money to the landlord and collect from the tenant the annual instalments necessary to repay it to the State. The plan of the Act of 1885, better known as the Ashbourne Act from the fact that it was Lord Ashbourne who introduced the measure to the lords, was simple in the extreme, and to this is due, in no small measure, its rapid success. It was easily understood by the people, and so popular did it become that in three years the money provided by it was completely exhausted. In 1888 a second bill was passed under which an additional sum of five millions--this was the amount provided by the Ashbourne Act--was set aside for purchase. Under the two measures 25,368 owners were created. "Almost from the start," writes Mr. George Fottrell (a gentleman well qualified to discuss the question of land purchase in Ireland) in the _Morning Post_, "the Ashbourne Act was a success. During the first five years of its working, the 'advances' actually paid over by the Land Commission to landlords amounted annually on an average to L1,250,000 sterling. The 'applications' represented a considerably larger sum. By 1887 they had more than exhausted the L5,000,000 which had been voted by Parliament for the Ashbourne Act, in 1885, and thereon a further sum of L5,000,000 was voted. The scheme continued to work well; the 'applications' came in steadily but with no feverish haste, the largest total sum applied for under the Ashbourne Act in any one year being in 1887 when it reached L3,700,000. In each of the next two years it reached just two millions. In 1890 it had dropped to less than a million and a half; in 1891 it was slightly in excess of that amount. By 1891 it was plain that the second vote of five millions had been virtually absorbed, and that Parliament must be applied to for further money. To cool-headed people in Ireland it seemed that the obvious course was to ask for a small grant, say of ten millions, so as to continue to test cautiously the usefulness of an act which had so far worked well, while by the very smallness of the grant keeping in reserve a check on the expansion of the act if it should prove to work mischievously.