on the capital sum advanced to him. At the end of the
period, which, of course, will vary with the fixed annual amount of the
sinking-fund, he becomes owner in fee-simple of his farm.

There is no charity to the tenant. He borrows the money and pays it back
in a perfectly regular way, and the State has made a temporary
investment of a profitable character.

And now, for the last time, I must trouble the reader with a little
indispensable history. There are four phases in the history of Irish
Land Purchase.

1. John Bright was the first British statesman to maintain that no
healthy and lasting readjustment of the relations between landlord and
tenant in Ireland could ever be made by law. He advocated State-aided
purchase; and in the Church Disestablishment Act of 1869 and the Land
Acts of 1870 and 1881, clauses were inserted allowing the State to
advance money for Land Purchase. The conditions, however, were so
onerous, both to landlord and tenant, that only 7,665 tenants out of
more than half a million were able to avail themselves of these purchase
clauses.

2. The Ashbourne Act of 1885 was the first successful measure of the
kind. Five millions were advanced under it, and five millions more under
an extending Act of 1887. Next came the Act of 1891, empowering the loan
of thirty-three millions, followed by the amending and simplifying Act
of 1896. These Acts form a body of legislation by themselves, of which I
need refer only to a few salient characteristics. They were all alike in
settling the tenant's annuity (in lieu of rent) at 4 per cent, on the
purchase money, though the proportions allocated to interest and
sinking-fund varied. Under the first two Acts the period for final
redemption of his loan by the tenant was forty-nine years, under the
third forty-two years, though this period was extended to seventy years
if the tenant availed himself of decadal reductions in the annuity,
proportionate to the capital paid off by the sinking-fund.

The average price of the holdings sold under these Acts represented
seventeen and a half years' purchase, and the tenant's great inducement
to buy was that, by the aid of cheap State credit, the annuity he paid,
even over so short a period as forty-nine years, represented a reduction
of more than 20 per cent, on his existing judicial rent.

Under the first Act, that of 1885, the landlord received the purchase
money in cash, under the other two, in guaranteed 3 per cent, or