Ultimately an opportunity presented itself to sell the San José Estate of some fifty-eight thousand acres in its entirety to an individual, and it was thus sold after consultation with the attorney-general of the Philippines and the attorney-general of the United States as to the rights of the government in the premises, and with the approval of the secretary of war and of President Taft first had. The buyer acted as an agent for Messrs. Welch, Havemeyer and Senf, who were all heavily interested in sugar growing and desired to establish a modern sugar estate in the Philippines. This fact, when it became known, was the beginning of trouble. Two very distinct classes of men were interested in imposing the existing legislative restrictions relative to the sale of Philippine lands. The first were influenced by the most honourable of altruistic motives. They feared the monopolization of agricultural lands and the evils of absentee ownership. The other class were the representatives of certain important sugar interests in the United States who wished to keep out Philippine sugar at all hazards and had shrewdly figured out that the simplest way to do this would be to prevent its production on a commercial scale. They therefore sought to restrict the sale of public land so as to make it impossible for an individual or an association to buy enough to establish a modern sugar estate. This they succeeded in doing. They even went further, and by limiting the land which a corporation might own and control made it impossible for a corporation to purchase enough land of any sort for such an estate. But that is another story with which we are not here concerned. They built a fence around Philippine lands which they deemed to be "pig-tight, horse-high, and bull-strong," but we unwittingly cut a small hole through it. The limitations on the sales of land did not apply to land belonging to the insular government which had first imposed certain restrictions on the size of the areas of vacant friar land which might be sold and had then removed them, having the same right to do the one thing that it exercised in doing the other.