One of the first stumbling-blocks to a tenant proposing to purchase under the Act of 1891 was that he was unable to know, or even approximately gauge, what was the actual sum he would have to pay, by way of annuity, each year. This was a serious flaw, and helped more than anything else perhaps to clog the wheels of purchase. This state of things, however, was remedied by the Purchase Act of 1896, by which the maximum sum payable in any year was an instalment at the rate of L4 per cent on the purchase money, no matter at what number of years' purchase of his rent the tenant might buy. Most of the cumbrous restrictions of the Act of 1891 were removed, and once more the applications began to tumble in. In 1895-1896 the applications received numbered less than half a million. In 1897-1898 and in 1898-1899 they reached nearly two millions. A steady decrease then set in, but on the whole purchase proceeded at a satisfactory pace. A strange condition of things now existed in Ireland, and a condition of things that could not last. Here and there over the country there existed a contented peasantry, the virtual owners of their holdings, paying a reasonable annuity for a definite period to the State. If they had not the sense of complete ownership, they had the very next best thing to it. They knew that if they themselves were not the absolute owners of their holdings during their lives, their children and their children's children would be, and they set to work with a heart and a will to work and improve their farms, knowing full well that the results of their labour would, at last, be theirs, and could not be wrung from them by the whims or exigencies of the landlord. On the other side of the fence, or river, the tenant who had not purchased and, perhaps, could not purchase, for his landlord would not sell, continued to pay a rent sometimes exorbitant, but always higher than his friend the purchaser close by. Such was the position of the tenant's side of the question. Now let us examine the landlord's.