any
previous experiment under Irish Land Purchase finance. The bonus is
destroyed and litigation is substituted for security and speed. The
results of the two Acts are instructive. Under the 1903 Act the
potential purchasers amounted to nearly a quarter of a million; under
the 1909 Act the applications in respect of direct sales being less than
nine thousand. It is hardly necessary to go into the reasons advanced
for this disastrous change. It has been brought about not in order to
relieve the British Treasury, but in order to rescue from final
destruction the waning influence of Irish Nationalism. Mr. Wyndham has
the authority of the leader of the Unionist Party for his statement that
the first constructive work of the Unionist Party in Ireland must be to
resume the Land policy of 1903 and to pursue the same objects by the
best methods until they have all been fully and expeditiously achieved.
Unionist policy cannot, however, be confined to the restoration of Land
Purchase. The ruin which Free Trade finance has inflicted upon Irish
agriculture can only be remedied, as Mr. Childers saw at the time of the
Financial Relations Commission in 1895, by a readjustment of the fiscal
system of the United Kingdom.
Mr. Gerald Balfour shows us in one of the most able papers in the book
the extraordinary development which has been seen in recent years in
Irish agricultural methods. The revival of Irish rural industries dates
from Mr. Balfour's chief-secretaryship. The Parliament which set up in
Ireland the Congested Districts Board and sanctioned the building of
light railways at the public expense, also witnessed the formation in
Ireland of a Society which was destined to work great changes in the
social conditions of the country. The Irish Agricultural Organisation
Society represents the fruit of a work begun in the face of incredible
difficulties and remorseless opposition by Sir Horace Plunkett in 1889.
"Better farming, better business, better living"--these were the
principles which he and Mr. Anderson set out to establish in Ireland.
Their representatives were described as monsters in human shape, and
they were adjured to cease their "hellish work." Now the branches of the
Society number nearly 1000, with an annual turnover of upwards of 2-1/2
millions, and they include creameries, village banks, and societies for
the purchase of seeds and manure and for the marketing of eggs. It is
not necessary to tell again the story of th
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