st be further noticed that the minimum price fixed
by the zones is higher than the mean price of sales effected under
Purchase Acts from 1885 to 1903, and by this method in the case of every
sale brought about without the delay of inspection, the provisions of
the Act have secured an artificial inflation of price for the benefit of
the landlord, amounting to a minimum of one year's rent. The reduction
of the annuity payable by the tenants from 4 per cent. to 3-1/4 per
cent, of the capital has served to obscure the amount of purchase price
paid by tenants who are apt to fail to appreciate the fact that the
annuity is payable over a more extended period of years, and the
provisions as to the sale and re-purchase of demesnes have at the same
time secured for the landlords themselves facilities for obtaining
advances of ready money on reasonable terms. These are the factors in
the Wyndham Act which have made M. Paul-Dubois declare of it
that--"Emanee d'un gouvernment, ami des landlords, elle cache mal, sous
un apparence d'impartialite d'adroits efforts pour faire aux landlords
de la part belle pour hausser en leur faveur le prix de la terre."

The average price per acre for the five years before 1903 was L8 9s.;
since the Act it has been L13 4s., or taking into account the bonus L15.
The prices before the Wyndham Act rarely exceeded eighteen years'
purchase, and were, moreover, paid in Land Stock and without a bonus.
Under this Act the reasons which I have tried to outline have brought it
to pass that twenty-five years of second term rents are being paid in
cash, which, with the bonus, makes the total purchase price amount to
twenty-eight years. Hence it is that there is widespread anxiety in
Ireland lest land is being sold under the zones at prices which the Land
Commission, had it been entitled to inspect, would have been unable to
sanction as offering a safe security, seeing that the purchaser must pay
his annuity for sixty-eight years without hope of reduction--a danger,
in the event of bad seasons, which might have been diminished if the
sinking fund had been fixed at a higher rate and the decadal reductions
of earlier Acts retained, so as to reduce the incidence of the burden in
its later stages. This, be it noted, is one of the points in which the
provisions of the Act differ from the recommendations of the Land
Conference.

I have referred already to the block in sales under the Act owing to the
scarcity of money w