eform were maturing in
his mind. I need hardly say how deeply interesting these policies are to
me, embracing as they do economic and social problems, the working out
of which in my own country happens to be the task to which I have
devoted the best years of my life.

I must now offer to the reader so much of the story of the Country Life
movement in my own country as will enable him to understand its
interest to Mr. Roosevelt and to many another worker upon the analogous
problems of the United States. Ireland is passing through an agrarian
revolution. There, as in many other European countries, the title to
most of the agricultural land rested upon conquest. The English attempt
to colonise Ireland never completely succeeded nor completely failed;
consequently the Irish never ceased to repudiate the title of the alien
landlord. In 1881 Mr. Gladstone introduced one of the greatest agrarian
reforms in history--rent-fixing by judicial authority--which was
certainly a bold attempt to put an end to a desolating conflict,
centuries old.

The scheme failed,--whether, as some hold, from its inherent defects, or
from the circumstances of the time, is an open question. It is but fair
to its author to point out that a rapidly increasing foreign
competition, chiefly from the newly opened tracts of virgin soil in the
New World, led to a fall in agricultural prices, which made the first
rents fixed appear too high. Quicker and cheaper transit, together with
processes for keeping produce fresh over the longest routes, soon showed
that the new market conditions had come to stay. A bad land system on a
rising market might succeed better than a good one on a falling. The
land tenure reforms begun in 1881, having broken down under stress of
foreign competition, and Purchase Acts on a smaller scale having been
tentatively tried in the interval, in 1903 Parliament finally decreed
that sufficient money should be provided to buy out all the remaining
agricultural land. In a not remote future, some two hundred million
pounds sterling--a billion dollars--will have been advanced by the
British Government to enable the tenants to purchase their holdings, the
money to be repaid in easy instalments during periods averaging over
sixty years.

Twenty years ago this general course of events was foreseen, and a few
Irishmen conceived and set to work upon what has come to be Ireland's
Rural Life policy. The position taken up was simple. What Parliame