BASIS.—­ABOLITION OF DUAL OWNERSHIP

1.  For landlords, net second-term income, less all outgoings.

2.  For occupiers, reduction of not less than 20 per cent. in
   second-term rents or first-term correspondingly reduced.  Decennial
   reductions to be retained.

3.  Difference between landlords’ terms and occupiers’ terms to be made
   up by State bonus and reduced interest with, in addition, purchase
   money in cash and increased value for resale of mansion and demesne.

4.  Complete settlement of evicted tenants’ question an indispensable
   condition.

5.  Special and drastic treatment for all congested districts in the
   country (as defined by the Bill of 1902).

6.  Sales to be between parties or through official commissioners as
   parties would prefer.

7.  Non-judicial and future tenants to be admitted.

8. (Query.) Sporting rights to be a matter of agreement.

I do not propose to go into any detailed account of what transpired at the sittings (six in number) of the Land Conference.  All this information is available in Mr O’Brien’s An Olive Branch in Ireland.  Suffice it to say that seven out of eight of the tenants’ requirements were conceded outright and the eighth was covered by a compromise which would have enabled any tenant in the country, whether non-judicial or future tenants, to become the proprietor of his own holding on reasonable terms.  On 4th January 1903 a unanimous report was published.  The country scarcely expected this, and its joy at this ever-memorable achievement was correspondingly greater.  It was inconceivable that the landlords should have, in solemn treaty, signed their own death warrant as territorialists, yet this was the amazing deed to which they affixed their sign manual when their four representatives signed the Land Conference Report.

Ever since the first Anglo-Norman set foot in Ireland and began to despoil the ancient clans of their land there has been trouble in connection with the Irish Land Question.  The new race of landlords regarded their Irish land purely as a speculation, not as a home; they were in great part absentees, having no aim in Ireland beyond drawing their rents.  They had no duties to their tenants in the sense that English landlords have.  They had no natural ties with the country and they regarded themselves as free from all the duties or obligations of ownership.  They never advanced capital for the improvement of the land or the erection of buildings, and never put a farthing into the cultivation of the soil.  The tenant had to do everything out of his own sweat and blood—­build his home and out-offices, clean and drain the land, make the fences, lay down the roads and, when he had done all this and made the property more valuable, his rent was raised on him, even beyond the value of the improvements he had effected.  Woe to the