ttention during the latter half of the
nineteenth century upon obtaining a legislative cure for the ills
produced by legislation, to the comparative neglect of those equally
difficult, if less obvious economic questions, which have been brought
into special prominence by the agricultural depression of the last
quarter of a century. Now, however, that the Land Act of 1903 has been
passed and the solution of the tenure question is in sight, we in
Ireland are more free to direct our attention to what is at present the
most important aspect of the agrarian situation--the necessity for
determining the social and economic conditions essential to the
well-being of the peasant proprietary, which, though it is to be started
with as bright an outlook as the law can give, must stand or fall by its
own inherent merits or defects. Not only are we now free to give
adequate consideration to this question, but it is also imperative that
we should do so, for whilst I am hopeful that the Land Act will settle
the question of tenure, it will obviously not merely leave the other
problems of agricultural existence--problems some of which are not
unknown in other parts of the United Kingdom--still unsolved, but will
also increase the necessity for their solution, and will, moreover,
bring in its train complex difficulties of its own.

The main features of the depressing outlook of rural life in the United
Kingdom are well known. The land steadily passes from under the plough
and is given over to stock raising. As the kine increase the men decay.
In Ireland the rural exodus takes, as I have already said, the shape,
mainly, not of migration to Irish urban centres, but rather the uglier
form of an emigration which not only depletes our population but drains
it of the very elements which can least be spared.

The reason generally given for the widespread resort to the lotus-eating
occupation of opening and shutting gates, in preference to tilling the
soil, is that in the existing state of agricultural organisation, and
while urban life is ever drawing away labour from the fields, the
substitution of pasturage for tillage is the readiest way to meet the
ruinous competition of Eastern Europe, the Western Hemisphere, and
Australasia. Yet upon the economic merits of this process I have heard
the most diverse opinions stated with equal conviction by men thoroughly
well informed as to the conditions. One of the largest graziers in
Ireland recently gav