deferred with sick hearts.  Whilst to owners and occupiers who have not completed their bargains “no hope comes at all.”  The newly won prosperity of Ireland is doomed because the Nationalist party and British Government have not kept faith; and with prosperity peace is departing.  The environment that breeds agrarian disorder and crime has been restored, and agitators, in expectation of Home Rule, are already at “their dirty work again.”  A new plan of campaign menaces the peace of Ireland in those districts whose past records are most darkly stained.

Examination of the reasons alleged for tearing up the Treaty of 1903.—­The Government defended their reversal of the policy of 1903, and departure from their pledges to carry out that policy, by making two assertions.  They asserted (1) that the size of the problem, which all parties undertook to solve, would exceed by far the speculative estimate put forward in 1903; (2) that the credit of the British Exchequer, which they have depressed, would prove unequal to the burden foreshadowed by the new dimensions, which they have assigned. (1) Size of the problem.  The first assertion, that much nearer L200,000,000 than L100,000,000 must be borrowed in order to complete purchase, is based on two assumptions explicitly stated in the Return presented to Parliament (Cd. 4412 of 1908) as follows:  “It will be observed that the purchase money of the agricultural land not yet brought before the Commissioners for sale under the Land Purchase Acts has been estimated on the assumption that it will be all sold and that it will be sold on an average at the price for which lands had been sold up to 30th April last, under the Irish Land Act (1903).”  The assumptions on which the Government proceeded are not, therefore, in doubt, but the validity of those assumptions, on which the whole case of the Government depends, is refuted by the ascertained facts of Irish agriculture.  The census shows that the number of agricultural holdings in Ireland is about 490,000, including nearly 19 million acres.  The whole area of Ireland includes some 21 million acres, apportioned to 3-1/2 million acres under crops, 6 million acres of waste, and 11-1/2 million acres under grass.  The Return to which I have referred (Cd. 4412 of 1908) cavils at the figures given in the census on the ground that the 490,000 “holdings” are more accurately 490,000 “land-holders,” since a tenant holding “half a dozen farms in the same county is returned as having a single holding.”  But it is right to take “holders” when, as under the Act of 1903, the limit on advances applies to the person who receives them.  Again, the Return throws over the census for figures supplied by the Department of Agriculture.  But it is wrong to use these figures, for they include holdings not exceeding one acre, of which there are 80,000 in Ireland, and many more that cannot be described as “in the main agricultural or pastoral.”  No special