The agricultural area, calculated by the exclusion of the last item in
the above column, works out at 17,425,155 acres, but since bog forms
part of a large number of farms, we may, for the purposes of Land
Purchase, place the agricultural area of Ireland at 18,739,644 acres,
the figure given in the Census of 1901, and its annual value for rating
purposes, as given in the same census, at L10,061,667.

This area is divided into 603,827 agricultural holdings, which are in
the hands of 554,060 occupiers, and vary in size from vast pasture
ranches to the tiny plots of miserable rock-sown soil, which abound in
the congested districts of the west.

But small holdings largely predominate. More than two-thirds do not
exceed 30 acres; 153,565 are between 5 and 15 acres, and 147,580 are
below 5 acres.

Size, however, is by itself an imperfect index to value. The effects of
the ancient confiscations and of the extraordinarily unequal
distribution of land which they and the bad Irish agrarian system
produced may be gauged by the valuation figures of the Census of 1901,
which showed that 335,491, or 68.5 per cent, of the total number of
holdings had an annual value (for rating purposes) not exceeding L15,
while they covered only a little more than a third of the total
agricultural area; 134,182 of these holdings were rated below L4, and
covered only 1,360,000 acres.

All farms rated below L4, and a large number of those below L15, may be
regarded as "uneconomic"--that is, incapable by themselves of supplying
a decent living to the farmer and his family.

I shall say no more here about the legislation beginning forty years
ago, which revolutionized the agrarian tenure derived directly from the
Penal Code, and converted the Irish tenant into a "judicial" tenant with
a rent fixed by the Land Commission, with security of tenure, and free
sale of the tenant-right.[154] There are now in Ireland two distinct
classes of occupying tenants, "judicial" tenants, and purchasing
tenants, and it is upon the question of the State-aided transference of
the land from the landlord to the tenant that I wish to concentrate the
reader's attention.

The principle of Land Purchase is this: The State advances money, raised
by a public loan, to the tenant, who pays off the landlord with it, and
becomes for a fixed period the tenant of the State. During this period
he pays, in lieu of rent, an annuity, which represents both interest and
sinking-fund