I shall say no more here about the legislation beginning forty years ago, which revolutionized the agrarian tenure derived directly from the Penal Code, and converted the Irish tenant into a “judicial” tenant with a rent fixed by the Land Commission, with security of tenure, and free sale of the tenant-right.[154] There are now in Ireland two distinct classes of occupying tenants, “judicial” tenants, and purchasing tenants, and it is upon the question of the State-aided transference of the land from the landlord to the tenant that I wish to concentrate the reader’s attention.

The principle of Land Purchase is this:  The State advances money, raised by a public loan, to the tenant, who pays off the landlord with it, and becomes for a fixed period the tenant of the State.  During this period he pays, in lieu of rent, an annuity, which represents both interest and sinking-fund on the capital sum advanced to him.  At the end of the period, which, of course, will vary with the fixed annual amount of the sinking-fund, he becomes owner in fee-simple of his farm.

There is no charity to the tenant.  He borrows the money and pays it back in a perfectly regular way, and the State has made a temporary investment of a profitable character.

And now, for the last time, I must trouble the reader with a little indispensable history.  There are four phases in the history of Irish Land Purchase.

1.  John Bright was the first British statesman to maintain that no healthy and lasting readjustment of the relations between landlord and tenant in Ireland could ever be made by law.  He advocated State-aided purchase; and in the Church Disestablishment Act of 1869 and the Land Acts of 1870 and 1881, clauses were inserted allowing the State to advance money for Land Purchase.  The conditions, however, were so onerous, both to landlord and tenant, that only 7,665 tenants out of more than half a million were able to avail themselves of these purchase clauses.

2.  The Ashbourne Act of 1885 was the first successful measure of the kind.  Five millions were advanced under it, and five millions more under an extending Act of 1887.  Next came the Act of 1891, empowering the loan of thirty-three millions, followed by the amending and simplifying Act of 1896.  These Acts form a body of legislation by themselves, of which I need refer only to a few salient characteristics.  They were all alike in settling the tenant’s annuity (in lieu of rent) at 4 per cent, on the purchase money, though the proportions allocated to interest and sinking-fund varied.  Under the first two Acts the period for final redemption of his loan by the tenant was forty-nine years, under the third forty-two years, though this period was extended to seventy years if the tenant availed himself of decadal reductions in the annuity, proportionate to the capital paid off by the sinking-fund.

The average price of the holdings sold under these Acts represented seventeen and a half years’ purchase, and the tenant’s great inducement to buy was that, by the aid of cheap State credit, the annuity he paid, even over so short a period as forty-nine years, represented a reduction of more than 20 per cent, on his existing judicial rent.