On one of these visits, in the winter of 1905-1906, I called upon President Roosevelt to pay him my respects, and to express to him my obligations to some members of his Administration. I wished especially to acknowledge my indebtedness to that veteran statesman, Secretary Wilson, the value of whose long service to the American farmer it would be hard to exaggerate. Mr. Roosevelt questioned me as to the exact object of my inquiries, and asked me to come again and discuss with him more fully than was possible at the moment certain economic and social questions which had engaged much of his own thoughts. He was greatly interested to learn that in Ireland we have been approaching many of these questions from his own point of view. He made me tell him the story of Irish land legislation, and of recent Irish movements for the improvement of agricultural conditions. Ever since, his interest in these Irish questions--to _the_ Irish Question we gave a wide berth--has been maintained on account of their bearing upon his Rural Life policy, for I had shown him how the economic strengthening and social elevation of the Irish farmer had become a matter of urgent Irish concern. I recall many things he said on that occasion, which show that his two great policies of Conservation and Country Life reform were maturing in his mind. I need hardly say how deeply interesting these policies are to me, embracing as they do economic and social problems, the working out of which in my own country happens to be the task to which I have devoted the best years of my life. I must now offer to the reader so much of the story of the Country Life movement in my own country as will enable him to understand its interest to Mr. Roosevelt and to many another worker upon the analogous problems of the United States. Ireland is passing through an agrarian revolution. There, as in many other European countries, the title to most of the agricultural land rested upon conquest. The English attempt to colonise Ireland never completely succeeded nor completely failed; consequently the Irish never ceased to repudiate the title of the alien landlord. In 1881 Mr. Gladstone introduced one of the greatest agrarian reforms in history--rent-fixing by judicial authority--which was certainly a bold attempt to put an end to a desolating conflict, centuries old.