ests by
establishing a court which should fix a fair rent, by giving him a right
to compensation for disturbance and for his improvements, and by
allowing him to sell his interests for the best price he can get for
them. It also enabled him to borrow from the government, at a low rate
of interest, three-fourths of the money necessary to purchase his
landlord's interest in the holding. This legal recognition and guarantee
of the Irish tenant's interests have led the crofter to hope that his
claims, based on better grounds, may also be conceded.

The changes recently made in the land laws of England and Scotland, and
the activity of the advocates of further and more radical changes, have
increased this hope. Progressive English statesmen have long looked with
disfavor upon entails and settlements, and there have been a number of
enactments providing for cutting off entails and increasing the power of
limited owners. The last and most important of these, the Settled
Estates Act, passed in 1882, gives the tenant for life power to sell any
portion of the estate except the family mansion, and thus thoroughly
undermines the principle upon which primogeniture and entails are
founded. Much land which has hitherto been so tied up that the limited
owners were either unable or unwilling to develop it can now be sold and
improved. New measures have been proposed to increase still further the
power of limited owners and to make the sale and transfer of land easier
and less expensive. Many able statesmen are advocates of these measures.
Mr. Goschen in a recent speech at Edinburgh urged the need of a
land-register by which transfers of land might be made almost as cheaply
and easily as transfers of consols. By such an arrangement, it is held,
many farmers of small capital will be enabled to buy their farms, and
the land of the country will thus be dispersed among a much larger
number of owners. There has also been a very marked tendency to enlarge
the rights and the authority of the tenant farmer. The Agricultural
Holdings Act of 1883 gives the tenant a right to compensation for
temporary and, on certain conditions, for permanent improvements, and
permits him in most cases, where he cannot have compensation, to remove
fixtures or buildings which he has erected, contrary to the old doctrine
that whatever is fixed to the soil becomes the property of the landlord.
The landlord's power to distrain for rent is greatly reduced: formerly
he c