on sterling a
year in buying out Polish landowners, great and small, and planting
Germans in their stead. The measure proved futile; the "rabbits" still
multiplied, for the Poles bought land from German owners faster than the
Government did from them. In 1904, in order to check the development of
Polish agriculture and land-settlement, the Government took the extreme
step of forbidding Poles to build new farmhouses without a licence. A
still more oppressive measure came in 1908, when, in clear defiance of
the German Constitution, the Prussian Government actually took powers
and were voted funds--from taxation paid by Poles and Germans alike--for
the compulsory expropriation of Polish owners against whom nothing
whatever could be alleged except their non-German nationality. These
powers have been put into operation, and every Pole in Prussia now holds
his patrimony on his own soil on the sufferance of a Government which
regards his very existence as a nuisance, because he occupies a place
which a German might otherwise fill.

During precisely the same period the British Government in Ireland has
been bending the wealth and credit of the United Kingdom to objects
precisely the reverse. Ireland, owing to the wars and confiscations of
the seventeenth century, had come to have a land-owning aristocracy
mainly of English descent with a Celtic peasantry holding their farms as
yearly tenants. The object of British land-legislation has been to
expropriate the landlords, so far as their tenanted land is concerned,
and to establish the Irish peasant, as absolute owner of the land he
tills. The Irish tenant is now subject only to rents fixed by law; he
can at any time sell the interest in his farm, which he has, therefore,
a direct interest in improving; he is also assisted by a great scheme of
land-purchase to become owner of his land on paying the price by
terminable instalments, which are usually some 20 per cent. less than
the amount he formerly paid as rent. Under this scheme about two-thirds
of the Irish tenantry have already become owners of their farms, while
the remainder enjoy a tenure which is almost as easy and secure as
ownership itself. It is not surprising, then, that a German economist
who has made a special study of this subject should declare that "the
Irish tenants have had conditions assured to them more favourable than
any other tenantry in the world enjoy"; adding the dry comment that in
Ireland the "magic of