character.  Under Mr. Gladstone’s Land Law Act of 1881, which dealt with rent-fixing, statutory rents were revised every fifteen years, and the second term rents, beginning in 1896, seemed certain to reveal considerable reductions on the rents payable during the first period.  It was felt that the security for the earlier advances would be endangered if rents throughout Ireland fell below the level of the purchase-instalments, and that purchase would be retarded if the purchaser did not obtain immediate relief by agreeing to buy.  To meet this practical difficulty Mr. Gerald Balfour, in 1896, permitted the purchaser to write off the amount repaid by sinking fund during the first and two successive periods of ten years.  These “decadal reductions” were optional.  If the purchaser forewent them he paid L4 per L100, and extinguished his debt in 42-1/2 years.  If he availed himself of them he paid L3 8_s. 7d._ per L100 after the first ten years, and continued to pay, with two further reductions in prospect, till the debt was extinguished in a period undefined, but estimated at about 72-1/2 years.  But this privilege was made retrospective, so that purchasers under the Ashbourne Acts could also reduce their instalments of L4 to L3 11_s. 10d._

The salient features in the procedure of the Acts of 1891 and 1896 were that, (1) the landlord was paid in stock instead of cash.  But owing to the rise in the value of gilt-edged securities, Irish Land Stock, with a face value of L100, became at one moment worth as much as L114; (2) the purchaser’s interest was at 2-3/4 per cent. i.e. the existing rate on Consols; but (3) his instalment, prospectively fined down by decadal reductions, enabled him to offer an acceptable price and yet pay far less to the State, by way of instalment, after purchase than was due to his landlord, by way of rent, before purchase.  The operation of purchase was still confined, almost wholly, to single bargains.  But in Mr. Arthur Balfour’s Act of 1891 a new departure was authorised which, after development in Mr. Gerald Balfour’s Act of 1896, has led to important and far-reaching consequences.  The Congested Districts Board was established to deal with scheduled areas in the West of Ireland that comprised a large number of holdings at once too limited in area, and too poor in soil, for any one of them to support a family by farming or to afford security to the State, under existing facilities for purchase, in the event of the occupier wishing to become the owner.  A select committee of the House of Commons, so long ago as in 1878 (No. 249, pp. 4 and 5), when Disraeli was Prime Minister, had recommended that a properly constituted body should be empowered to purchase, not single farms, but whole estates, and to re-sell them after amalgamating, enlarging, and re-distributing what are now called “uneconomic” holdings.  Provisions to this end had been inserted in earlier Acts, but, in the absence of administrative machinery and financial resources, they remained abortive.