amount advanced.  That Act possessed the additional advantage of dealing with the estates as a whole instead of with individual holdings, and it substituted the principle of speedy purchase for that of dilatory litigation.  This remarkable and generous measure initiated a great and beneficent revolution, but every popular and useful feature of the Act of 1903 was distorted or destroyed in the Land Act which the present Government passed at the instigation of the Irish Nationalist Party in 1909.  In Mr. Wyndham’s words “a solemn treaty framed in the interest of Ireland was torn up to deck with its tatters the triumph of Mr. Dillon’s unholy alliance with the British Treasury.”  Under the Act of 1909, landlords, instead of cash payments, are to receive stock at 3 per cent. issued on a falling market.  This stock cannot possibly appreciate because owing to the embarrassment of Irish estates a large proportion of each issue is thrown back upon the market at the redemption of mortgages.  The tenant’s annuity is raised from 3-1/4 per cent, to 3-1/2 per cent., a precedent not to be found in any previous experiment under Irish Land Purchase finance.  The bonus is destroyed and litigation is substituted for security and speed.  The results of the two Acts are instructive.  Under the 1903 Act the potential purchasers amounted to nearly a quarter of a million; under the 1909 Act the applications in respect of direct sales being less than nine thousand.  It is hardly necessary to go into the reasons advanced for this disastrous change.  It has been brought about not in order to relieve the British Treasury, but in order to rescue from final destruction the waning influence of Irish Nationalism.  Mr. Wyndham has the authority of the leader of the Unionist Party for his statement that the first constructive work of the Unionist Party in Ireland must be to resume the Land policy of 1903 and to pursue the same objects by the best methods until they have all been fully and expeditiously achieved.  Unionist policy cannot, however, be confined to the restoration of Land Purchase.  The ruin which Free Trade finance has inflicted upon Irish agriculture can only be remedied, as Mr. Childers saw at the time of the Financial Relations Commission in 1895, by a readjustment of the fiscal system of the United Kingdom.

Mr. Gerald Balfour shows us in one of the most able papers in the book the extraordinary development which has been seen in recent years in Irish agricultural methods.  The revival of Irish rural industries dates from Mr. Balfour’s chief-secretaryship.  The Parliament which set up in Ireland the Congested Districts Board and sanctioned the building of light railways at the public expense, also witnessed the formation in Ireland of a Society which was destined to work great changes in the social conditions of the country.  The Irish Agricultural Organisation Society represents the fruit of a work begun in the face of incredible difficulties and remorseless opposition