of his interest in that tenant’s holding.  The State facilitated the transaction by advancing that amount to the landlord in cash whenever the holding offered sufficient security, and accepting from the tenant an undertaking to pay an instalment of L4 a year for every L100 advanced over a period of forty-nine years.  The instalment comprised L3 for interest, 2_s._ 6_d._ for expenses, and 17_s._ 6_d._ for sinking fund.  The loan from the exchequer was secured against individual failures to pay by the realisable value of the holdings.

The salient features in this procedure were that the landlord received cash and that the tenant paid interest at the then existing rate on Consols, viz. 3 per cent.  Both these features are important.  A payment in cash, or its equivalent, is preferable for such transactions to a payment in stock, with a fluctuating value, because, if the stock appreciates the landlord gets more than he bargained for, and this, by arousing the suspicions of other would-be tenant-purchasers, produces a disinclination on their part to buy.  Again, if the stock depreciates, the landlord cannot carry out contemplated redemptions of mortgages on his property, and this produces a disinclination on the part of other landlords to sell.  In the second place it is difficult to persuade Irish tenants that the State is assisting them if they, the poor, are asked to pay higher interest for the State’s credit than the State pays for the credit of the rich.  The chief defect in this procedure lay in its restriction to separate bargains in respect of single holdings.  It made a patchwork, whereas the untoward results of the historic and economic causes on which I have touched demanded the wholesale treatment of convenient areas.

Under these Acts, in the course of six years, more than 27,000 tenants became owners by virtue of advances which amounted to over L10,000,000.  The largest number of applications for purchase in any one year was 6,195 for L2,271,569 in 1887, and the average price for all the holdings bought under these Acts was L396.

When the sums provided by the Ashbourne Acts were exhausted, Mr. Arthur Balfour carried the Act of 1891, subsequently amended by the Act of 1896.  Under these Acts the landlord was paid in stock instead of cash.  The tenant still paid an instalment of L4, which was, ultimately, divided into L1 5_s._ for sinking fund and L2 15_s._ for interest.  This large sinking fund, L1 5_s._ instead of 17_s._ 6_d._, was retained after interest had been reduced to the rate on Consols, 2-3/4 per cent., chiefly to avoid a discrepancy in the total of annual instalments as between purchasers under the Act of 1891 and purchasers under the Ashbourne Acts.  Difficulties were feared if the earlier purchasers were to pay L4 and the later purchasers only L3 15_s._ for each L100 advanced, so the spare five shillings was put in the sinking fund.  This speculative difficulty was afterwards discounted in order to deal with one of a more practical