eve, the exception of Mr. Dillon, who was away in America
while the Conference sat, it was evident that, if dual ownership was to
be abolished, our choice was confined to two courses. We could, on the
one hand, pursue, under the guise of purchase, the metaphysical and
costly distinctions between landlord-right and tenant-right, which Mr.
Gladstone had established under the guise of rent-fixing; or else, as
the only alternative, we had "to cut the cackle" and get to business.
Under this head the House of Commons--Mr. Dillon ingeminating
dissent--decided in so far as landlords and tenants were concerned, two
things: (1) It was agreed that where the tenant-purchaser's instalment,
after purchase, was substantially less than his statutory rent revised
at great cost--L140,000 a year for Land Courts--then, in those cases the
State needed not to inquire at further cost and delay into either its
own security in the holding, or the metaphysical distinction between
value due to the landlord's ownership of the soil and value due to the
tenant's improvement of the soil. This close approximation to unanimity
will not surprise those who grasp that every landlord and tenant was to
make a voluntary bargain on precisely those terms which the
representatives of their classes had combined to obtain from the State.
The alternative method of delay and litigation had been further
discounted, for everybody except Mr. Dillon, by the fact that in the
classic case--_Adams_ v. _Dunseath_--tried out in accordance with Mr.
Gladstone's panacea, Adams, after repeated lawsuits, improved his
financial position by an infinitesimal sum per annum without becoming an
owner of his farm. It was also agreed that the Estates Commissioners
appointed to administer the Act, should be administrative officials
under the Government, and not amateur judges. This was essential, not
only to substitute cheap speed for costly delay, but also to ensure that
the benefits offered by the State should not be absorbed, say, in the
rich province of Leinster to the detriment of the poorer province of
Connaught, or--for who knows what may happen in Ireland?--absorbed in
the Home Rule province of Connaught to the detriment of the Unionist
province of Ulster.

C. _Dealing with Estates as a whole instead of with single holdings._
This process, till then applied tentatively in the congested districts
of the West, became the general method throughout Ireland, and was
assisted by the pr