The scheme failed,--whether, as some hold, from its inherent defects, or from the circumstances of the time, is an open question. It is but fair to its author to point out that a rapidly increasing foreign competition, chiefly from the newly opened tracts of virgin soil in the New World, led to a fall in agricultural prices, which made the first rents fixed appear too high. Quicker and cheaper transit, together with processes for keeping produce fresh over the longest routes, soon showed that the new market conditions had come to stay. A bad land system on a rising market might succeed better than a good one on a falling. The land tenure reforms begun in 1881, having broken down under stress of foreign competition, and Purchase Acts on a smaller scale having been tentatively tried in the interval, in 1903 Parliament finally decreed that sufficient money should be provided to buy out all the remaining agricultural land. In a not remote future, some two hundred million pounds sterling--a billion dollars--will have been advanced by the British Government to enable the tenants to purchase their holdings, the money to be repaid in easy instalments during periods averaging over sixty years. Twenty years ago this general course of events was foreseen, and a few Irishmen conceived and set to work upon what has come to be Ireland's Rural Life policy. The position taken up was simple. What Parliament was about to do would pull down the whole structure of Ireland's agricultural economy, and would clear away the chief hindrance to economic and social progress. But upon the ground thus cleared the edifice of a new rural social economy would have to be built. This work, although it needs the fostering care of government, and liberal facilities for a system of education intimately related to the people's working lives, belongs mainly to the sphere of voluntary effort.