B. The substitution of speedy purchase for dilatory litigation. To all members of the Conference of 1902 and of the House of Commons in 1903, with, I believe, the exception of Mr. Dillon, who was away in America while the Conference sat, it was evident that, if dual ownership was to be abolished, our choice was confined to two courses.  We could, on the one hand, pursue, under the guise of purchase, the metaphysical and costly distinctions between landlord-right and tenant-right, which Mr. Gladstone had established under the guise of rent-fixing; or else, as the only alternative, we had “to cut the cackle” and get to business.  Under this head the House of Commons—­Mr. Dillon ingeminating dissent—­decided in so far as landlords and tenants were concerned, two things:  (1) It was agreed that where the tenant-purchaser’s instalment, after purchase, was substantially less than his statutory rent revised at great cost—­L140,000 a year for Land Courts—­then, in those cases the State needed not to inquire at further cost and delay into either its own security in the holding, or the metaphysical distinction between value due to the landlord’s ownership of the soil and value due to the tenant’s improvement of the soil.  This close approximation to unanimity will not surprise those who grasp that every landlord and tenant was to make a voluntary bargain on precisely those terms which the representatives of their classes had combined to obtain from the State.  The alternative method of delay and litigation had been further discounted, for everybody except Mr. Dillon, by the fact that in the classic case—­Adams v. Dunseath—­tried out in accordance with Mr. Gladstone’s panacea, Adams, after repeated lawsuits, improved his financial position by an infinitesimal sum per annum without becoming an owner of his farm.  It was also agreed that the Estates Commissioners appointed to administer the Act, should be administrative officials under the Government, and not amateur judges.  This was essential, not only to substitute cheap speed for costly delay, but also to ensure that the benefits offered by the State should not be absorbed, say, in the rich province of Leinster to the detriment of the poorer province of Connaught, or—­for who knows what may happen in Ireland?—­absorbed in the Home Rule province of Connaught to the detriment of the Unionist province of Ulster.

C. Dealing with Estates as a whole instead of with single holdings. This process, till then applied tentatively in the congested districts of the West, became the general method throughout Ireland, and was assisted by the provision of working capital for carrying out necessary amalgamations and improvements before resale.

D. Increase in the ’borrowing power and funds of the Congested Districts Board, for the purpose of dealing systematically with “agricultural slums.”