Ireland, unhappily often displayed by British statesmen. Only a sum, it will be observed, of about L40,000,000, that is, two of L5,000,000, and some L30,000,000 more, has thus been made available for 'Land Purchase;' this obviously could not transfer even a fourth part of the Irish land, valued, we have seen, by Mr. Gladstone at L300,000,000--in a remarkable speech in reply to Lord George Hamilton--and almost certainly worth from L150,000,000 to L200,000,000. The process of doing away with 'dual ownership' and making tenants in Ireland owners of their farms, having been pronounced by its authors slow, the Act of 1896, referred to before, enabled the landlord's guarantee to be dispensed with, and provided that, in the case of hopelessly embarrassed landlords, whose estates were being offered for sale in the Courts, the tenants should virtually have a right of pre-emption, thus asserting a principle, on which I shall dwell afterwards, and known as the 'Compulsory Purchase' of the Irish land. I shall point out, in another chapter, the present and the inevitable future results of this policy of so-styled 'Land Purchase;' suffice it to say here, that, in my judgment, it betrays utter ignorance of the Irish land system, and of the customs and inclinations of the Irish peasant; that it proceeds on an essentially immoral principle, the bribery of a class to promote its welfare; that, from the very nature of the case, it cannot abolish 'dual ownership;' that, human creatures being what they are, it cannot, as is being already proved, establish a thriving body of occupying owners on the Irish soil; that it must create sharp and unjust distinctions in Irish land tenure, iniquitous to the landlord and to every tenant, who may be excluded from its benefits; that it must directly tend, as it is even now tending, to arouse a cry for a wholesale confiscation of Irish estates, the most shameful and wrongful Ireland has yet witnessed; and that so far from settling the Irish Land Question, it must necessarily unsettle it from top to bottom. As respects the legislation I have briefly described, on the side of the occupation of the Irish land--by many degrees the most important--I shall also comment upon its results in a subsequent chapter, after examining its administration by the tribunal it has set up. But a word may be said, in this place, on its essential character: from 1881 to the present time, it is absolutely without a precedent in civilised lands; it has trampled on economic science and the truths it teaches, as, indeed, its chief author made his boast; it has created a mode of land tenure in Ireland not in accord with fact, which has virtually deprived the Irish landlord of real ownership in his estate, has turned him into a kind of annuitant, and has virtually changed the Irish tenant into a kind of owner, but under conditions absolutely bad; its inevitable tendency was to cut down rents wholesale, without regard to