to indifferent farming, since
the commissioners who had the fixing of rents, and the inspectors who
examined the farms, made their valuations upon the farms as they saw
them. True, the tenant could claim for his improvements, but in
practice this was no real safeguard. The more industrious the tenant
the higher the rent--the less industrious and the less capable the
lower the figure to be paid.

Hence, after the failure of countless Acts of Parliament, it was borne
in upon all earnest land-reformers that there could be only one final
and satisfactory solution: that was the abolition of dual
ownership--in other words, the buying out of the landlord and the
establishment of the tenant in the single and undisputed ownership of
the soil on fair and equitable terms. A tentative start had been made
in land purchase by the Land Purchase Act of 1885--called, after its
author, the Ashbourne Act. This experiment had proved an immense
success, for in six years the ten millions sterling assigned for its
operations were exhausted and 25,867 tenants had been turned into
owners of their farms.

It became clear that a scheme of purchase which would, within a
definite period, root out the last vestige of landlordism was the one
only real and true solution for the land problem. And now, blessed
day, and glory to the eyes that had lived to see it, and undying
honour to the men whose genius and sacrifices had made it possible,
the decree had gone forth that end there must be to landlordism. And,
wonder of wonders, the landlords themselves had agreed to the fiat
decreeing their own extinction as a ruling caste. It was with
heartfelt hope and relief, and with the sense of a great victory
achieved, that the country received the wondrous news of the success
of the Land Conference. The dawn of a glorious promise had broken
through the long night of Ireland's suffering, but the mischief-makers
were already at work to see that the noonday sun of happiness did not
shine too strongly or too steadily.

CHAPTER X

LAND PURCHASE AND A DETERMINED CAMPAIGN
TO KILL IT

I can only rapidly sketch the events that followed the publication of
the Land Conference Report. Mr Sexton made it his business in _The
Freeman's Journal_ to decry its findings on the sinister ground
that they offered too much to the landlords and were not sufficiently
favourable to the tenants,