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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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