“This course was not taken. In 1891 Parliament was asked to make a much larger grant. Over thirty millions were voted, but coupled with conditions which made the money useless.”
Mr. Balfour’s act, the Purchase Act of 1891, was extremely complicated. Under it Ireland was entitled to draw upon Imperial credit to the extent of £33,000,000. The rate of interest payable by the purchasers was substantially the same as under the acts of 1885 and 1888, the period of repayment in the three cases being forty-nine years.
But a change was made in the method of payment to the landlord. Previous to 1891, he had been always paid in cash. Under the Balfour Act he was paid in guaranteed land stock. There were many complicated provisions in regard to the creation of a guarantee fund, an insurance fund, and other safeguards. The complexity of the measure and the procedure under it, and the consequent delays in completing any transactions in a reasonable time, acted as a deterrent to intending purchasers and the act was virtually a failure. At this point it is well, perhaps, to summarize the results of the working of land purchase under the acts already dealt with. We have seen that a total sum of (say) £44,000,000 was made available by the various acts for land purchase. Out of this a total sum of £21,182,268 has been expended, leaving about twenty-three millions still available. Under all the acts up to and including that of 1891, 62,241 tenants purchased their holdings, 6057 under the Church Act, 877 under the Land Act of 1870, 731 under the Act of 1881, 25,368 under the Purchase Acts of 1885 and 1888, and the balance of about 30,000 became purchasers by means of the Act of 1891.
Numerous and extensive as these operations were, it is satisfactory to note, and it redounds to the credit of the Irish people, that Mr. Wyndham, when introducing his Land Bill of 1902, was able to assure the House of Commons that Irish Land Purchase had this one merit that the State had incurred no loss under it and was exposed to no risk. In no case did an Irish tenant break his bargain. There was no case of bad debt to mention.
One of the first stumbling-blocks to a tenant proposing to purchase under the Act of 1891 was that he was unable to know, or even approximately gauge, what was the actual sum he would have to pay, by way of annuity, each year. This was a serious flaw, and helped more than anything else perhaps to clog the wheels of purchase. This state of things, however, was remedied by the Purchase Act of 1896, by which the maximum sum payable in any year was an instalment at the rate of £4 per cent on the purchase money, no matter at what number of years’ purchase of his rent the tenant might buy. Most of the cumbrous restrictions of the Act of 1891 were removed, and once more the applications began to tumble in. In 1895-1896 the applications received numbered less than half a million. In 1897-1898 and in 1898-1899 they reached nearly two millions. A steady decrease then set in, but on the whole purchase proceeded at a satisfactory pace.
A strange condition of things now existed in Ireland, and a condition of things that could not last. Here and there over the country there existed a contented peasantry, the virtual owners of their holdings, paying a reasonable annuity for a definite period to the State. If they had not the sense of complete ownership, they had the very next best thing to it. They knew that if they themselves were not the absolute owners of their holdings during their lives, their children and their children’s children would be, and they set to work with a heart and a will to work and improve their farms, knowing full well that the results of their labour would, at last, be theirs, and could not be wrung from them by the whims or exigencies of the landlord. On the other side of the fence, or river, the tenant who had not purchased and, perhaps, could not purchase, for his landlord would not sell, continued to pay a rent sometimes exorbitant, but always higher than his friend the purchaser close by. Such was the position of the tenant’s side of the question. Now let us examine the landlord’s.
Under the Act of 1896 the landlord was paid in government stock. Between the years 1891 and 1896 government stock rose from 96 to 110. A premium of ten per cent was a strong incentive to the landlord to sell. If he had an estate worth £5000, he received in reality for it £5500, for he was credited with £5000 stock which, sold on change, realized £5500 in cash. In some cases, where the estate was mortgaged, the gain was even more. This was gold finding for the landlord until the price of stock fell, which it did and with a vengeance. Stock which in 1897 stood at 113 fell in 1901 to 91. The fall again clogged the wheels, and the question once again became the burning question of the hour. It is right to say here that there were other forces at work which made the landlord anxious to get out, if he could at all, on reasonable terms. The fall in the price of produce continued, and the Land Commission, which had under the Act of 1881 twice revised the rentals, and reduced them each time by twenty per cent on an average, were preparing for the third revision. The landlords looked forward to 1911 with fear and trembling. With their estates mostly heavily mortgaged, and the third revision at hand, they were as anxious as the tenants, if not more so, that Parliament should step in to their mutual aid. It did so in the Land Act of 1903. The introduction of this measure was preceded by a conference of landlords and tenants, representatives in Ireland which met in the Mansion House, Dublin, and after five sittings reported as follows:—
“Whereas it is expedient that the land question in Ireland be settled so far as it is practicable and without delay,
“And whereas the existing position of the land question is adverse to the improvement of the soil of Ireland, leads to unending controversies and law-suits between owners and occupiers, retards progress in the country, and constitutes a grave danger to the state,
“And whereas an opportunity of settling once for all the differences between owners and occupiers in Ireland is very desirable,