n outrage for fifty years.

It would certainly be both remiss of me, and altogether below the
character which I trust I have acquired for honest plain speaking, if I
omitted to give my views upon Mr. Wyndham's Act, for those readers who
regard my book as something more than a storehouse of anecdotes--and
since it is written at all, I maintain it claims to be more than
that--having noticed the freedom with which I have spoken of previous
English legislation for Ireland, may very naturally think I should be
begging the question of the hour, if I did not offer a few observations
on the latest development of the Irish question.

I must emphatically repeat what I have already asserted:--that the Acts
of Mr. Gladstone rendered a Purchase Bill inevitable, and it fell to Mr.
Wyndham's lot to formulate the scheme which has now become law.

Mr. Wyndham's Act is a great one for Ireland, because where a tenant
previously paid L100 a year rent, all he will have to pay--even at
twenty-four years' purchase--is L80 a year, and at that rate with the
bonus the landlord obtains twenty-seven years' purchase. But this scale
is a little halcyon in most instances.

It should prove a boon to the country, and it is the necessary outcome
of the Land Act of 1881, by which rents were cut down by commissioners,
whose means of living depended on the reductions they made.

And to make this state of things yet more remarkable, there were two
courts established for fixing rates. The one consisted of
sub-commissioners, who were paid by the year, and the other was that of
the County Court judge, who was wholly dependent on a valuer paid by the
day.

So, whoever cut down the most earned the most.

A valuer in Limerick was remonstrated with for cutting down local rents
so low, and he replied:--

'It is all for the good of trade, for it will bring every tenant into
the Court.'

And so it actually did, for that Court very shortly afterwards was chock
full of cases.

My own opinion is that the Wyndham Act would have been far more
beneficial, if the Government had given the tenant a free grant of some
of the purchase money, and insisted on his finding some more of it
himself, whereby would have been created a deeper interest in his land
than is now inspired in his breast by the mere transference of his lease
from his old landlord to the Government.

I made this remark to an Englishman at the Carlton Club, and he said to
me that, according to his