THE FAI>{ RENT PKOVISIONS OF THE IRISH T-AND ACTS I27 



We may therefore say that two-thirds of the agricultural land in Ireland has 

 been or is being purchased by the occupying tenants, and thereby removed 

 from the operation of the Fair Rent Acts. But the tenants of the holdings 

 comprised in the remaining third will certainly make application to have 

 their rents revised for a second or third term as the case may be, and the 

 result of these applications will be of considerable importance in Land 

 Purchase. 



Under the Act of 1903 where a judicial tenant, i. e., a tenant on whose 

 holding a fair rent has been fixed, enters into an agreement with his landlord 

 to purchase his holding at a price coming within certain limits, generally 

 known as the Zones, the holding is deemed to be security for the price 

 agreed on, and the Estates Commissioners, unless they reject the whole 

 estate, are practically bound to advance such price. The result is that sales 

 between landlords and tenants are nearly always arranged on the basis of 

 so many years purchase of the fair rents. The revised fair rents which may 

 be fixed on the one-third of Ireland which has not yet been purchased by 

 the tenants, wiU therefore be of the greatest importance in determining 

 whether these lands wiU be sold under the voluntary provisions of the Land 

 Purchase Acts, or whether compulsion will be necessary. It is to be hoped 

 that compulsion, with the bitterness which it leaves behind, will only 

 be required in exceptional cases and that the transfer by the landlords of 

 their property to the tenants will in the future, as in the past, be effected 

 with but little friction or loss of mutual good- will. 



Conclusion. 



Many severe criticisms have, as pointed out, been passed on the admini- 

 stration of the Fair Rent Acts, but in view of the stupendous dif- 

 ficulty of the Land Commissioners' task, they may be given the greatest 

 credit for the success with v/hich they administered those Acts. Ireland 

 was not a new country where one could frame a policy unhampered by 

 ancient traditions. She was an old country, inhabited by the most conserva- 

 tive people on the globe, who clung to old customs, and who had still the 

 feudal instincts of their ancestors ; a people imbued with the memories of 

 " old, unhappy, far-oS things," and intensely suspicious of any innovations. 

 There had been no revolution in Ireland, as in France, to sweep away at 

 one blow the privileges and the property of the landed classes, but there 

 had been a revolution at the time of the Famine and in the years which 

 succeeded it, which had impoverished both landlords and tenants, and had 

 destroyed to some extent the old feudal attachment between them. 



It was in this atmosphere of discontent and suspicion that the lyand 

 Commission commenced their labours, and if neither landlords nor tenants 

 were satisfied until the Fair Rent Acts were supplemented by the La^d 

 Purchase Acts we may safely say that it was the former which made the 

 latter possible. Land Purchase has been based on fair rents, and the pol- 



