'future' tenants so as to discharge their estates from a burden; it revealed marked ignorance of the affairs of Ireland. The Bill dealt, also, with the land on the side of ownership; it gave additional facilities to tenants to purchase their holdings; the State was empowered to advance three-fourths of the moneys; but the tenants were to find the remaining fourth; the transaction was to be still a purchase, and not in the nature of a gift.[76] The Bill became law, with very little change; the House of Lords, though fully alive to its evils, did not amend it in any important respect; the Peers had in mind, perhaps too much, what had followed the rejection of the Bill of the year before. Mr. Gladstone and his followers maintained at the time, and the statement has been ever since repeated, that the Land Act of 1881, its popular title, was but a natural development of the original Act of 1870; but this assertion is not only untrue, but absolutely contrary to the truth. The Act of 1870, no doubt, considered as a whole, annexed a large tenant right to the estate of the landlord, and to that extent placed a burden on it; but it preserved for the landlord the ownership of the land; it did not interfere with his rent, his first proprietary right; above all, it was, in the main, in accord with fact, and just. The Act of 1881 was almost the exact opposite; it deprived the landlord of the ownership of his land, and nearly converted him into a mere rent-charger; it created against him a perpetuity at a State-settled rent; it really all but made the tenant the owner of the land; it was, in short, inconsistent with fact, and essentially unjust. The Act of 1881, too, established a principle, never heard of before in civilised countries, that tribunals of the State were to fix the rate of rent; this not only annihilated the most important of landed contracts, entirely to the landlord's detriment, it inevitably tended to cut down rents wholesale, as Judge Longfield had predicted would be the case. 'It is probable,' wrote that great authority, 'that the value of land, as fixed by any tenant-right measure, would be less than half the rent, which a solvent tenant would be willing to pay;'[77] the prediction has been too well verified. The Act of 1870, in a word, was a remedial law, fairly adjusting the rights of landlord and tenant; the Act of 1881 was a socialistic law, despoiling the landlord of his property wholesale, and handing it over to a dependent who had no claim to it; it was sheer confiscation hardly disguised; and it should be added that the exemption of tenants' improvements from rent, as affairs stood in Ireland, was a grave wrong to the landlord. The Act of 1881, to speak plainly, transformed the Irish land system iniquitously for the benefit of a single class; and it directly promoted litigation of the very worst kind, on an enormous scale, embittering, and still further dividing, the classes connected with the land.