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 £10,061,667.
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 £15, while they covered only a little more than a third of the total agricultural area; 134,182 of these holdings were rated below £4, and covered only 1,360,000 acres.
All farms rated below £4, and a large number of those below £15, 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 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.