a choice between sale direct to their tenants and to the Land Commission, have refused to give their consent to the declaration of their estate as a congested estate, which is necessary for the application of this section, unless they receive a guarantee that the holdings shall not be sold to the tenants at a lower price than they themselves could have obtained.  The result is that if the Commissioners were to pay these maximum prices there would be nothing left for them out of which to make the necessary improvements, and, in consequence, this provision of the Act has been a failure.

As regards the evicted tenants, the first condition in the settlement arrived at by the Land Conference, and embodied in the Wyndham Act, was that they—­the wounded soldiers in the land war, as they have been called—­to whose sacrifices in the common cause is due the ameliorative legislation enacted by Parliament, should be restored to their holdings.  In actual practice, by means of restrictive instructions issued by the late Government to the Commissioners, two of whom protested against this action in their report for 1906, the provisions of the Act which promised this reinstatement were made a dead letter—­the Executive once again, in a historic phrase, driving a coach and four through the statute.

With the advent to power of the Liberal Government these instructions were withdrawn, but a further serious obstacle was to be found in the refusal of some landlords—­and those, too, the worst—­to allow their estates to be inspected with a view to find holdings for evicted tenants.  This was the condition of affairs to which Mr. Bryce—­at that time Chief Secretary—­referred, when he said—­“If the remedy for this state of things is compulsion, then to compulsion for that remedy we must go.”

It is to be observed that the three Estates Commissioners were unanimous in thinking compulsion necessary, and that which was demanded was that the occupants, or planters, who in some cases have been bona fide farmers, but whom the Land Commission inspectors reported had in many cases allowed the land to get into a bad and dirty state, should, on dispossession, be generously compensated or given their choice of other lands.  It was originally thought that one thousand would be the limit of the number of applications which would be made for reinstatement, but, in the event, out of ten thousand tenants evicted in the last quarter of a century, such applications were made in 6,700 cases, and some notion of the poverty of these peasants who were turned out upon the roadside may be inferred from the fact that nearly one-half paid a rental of less than L10 a year.