398 



GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND, UNITED KINGDOM OF. 



years' penal servitude. They had associated 

 in London with a suspected Irish revolution- 

 ist named Melville, and received money from 

 him, and with a certain Cohen, who, when 

 taken seriously ill in September, 1887, before 

 he died gave two boxes of dynamite into the 

 charge of Harkins, one of which the latter left 

 with Callan. Harkins was apprehended and 

 searched by the police, without anything suspi- 

 cious being found, but Callan became alarmed, 

 and clumsily attempted to do away with the 

 dynamite in his possession. His lodgings were 

 searched, and both in his baggage and in that 

 of Harkins experts discovered traces of dyna- 

 mite. They asserted that they had taken the 

 explosive from Cohen as an act of friendship 

 in order to shield him by concealing it, but the 

 jury were convinced from their relations with 

 Melville, who escaped to Paris, as well as with 

 Cohen, that all four were concerned in a dy- 

 namite plot. One of the Irish members of 

 Parliament had introduced the two Americans 

 to the gallery of the House of Commons, a 

 circumstance which afforded a fresh opportu- 

 nity to the Unionists to accuse the Nationalists 

 of being in league with Fenian assassins and 

 possibly cognizant of a plot to blow up the 

 Houses of Parliament. 



The Land Purchase Act. Lord Ashbourne's act, 

 which became law on Aug. 14, 1885, author- 

 ized advances of the aggregate amount of 5,- 

 000,000 to Irish tenants to enable them to be- 

 come owners of their farms. At the end of 

 three years this sum was exhausted. Under 

 this act the state advanced the whole purchase 

 money, but was secured by a deposit of cash 

 equal to at least one fifth of it, which the pur- 

 chasing tenant had to place in the hands of 

 the Land Commission, and when the security 

 seemed insufficient the commissioners called 

 for a fourth, and in some cases even for a third 

 of the amount of the loan. The security was 

 usually retained from the purchase money, the 

 selling landlord receiving 3 per cent, interest 

 for it or causing it to be invested under the 

 laws governing the investment of trust moneys. 

 Under the Ashbourne act about 12,000 tenants 

 have acquired the freehold of their farms, more 

 than half of them being Ulster farmers, where- 

 as in Conuaught the sum applied for was only 

 412,687. The purchasing tenants have paid 

 their installments with promptness and regu- 

 larity, except in very few cases. Before ad- 

 vancing the money for the purchase of a hold- 

 ing, the Land Commission sends an inspector, 

 who examines the property and reports wheth- 

 er the land is sufficient security for the price 

 stated in the contract of sale between the land- 

 lord and the tenant, and whether the install- 

 ments can be paid out of the profits of the farm, 

 leaving a fair margin for the cultivator and for 

 bad seasons. The average rate of purchase has 

 been seventeen or eighteen times the net an- 

 nual rent. The tenant pays back the entire 

 purchase money advanced by the Government 

 in annual installments of 4 per cent, of the loan, 



3^ per cent, constituting the interest, and seven 

 eighths of 1 per cent, a sinking-fund which will 

 extinguish the debt in forty-nine years. The 

 landlords have benefited by the voluntary sales 

 through the eagerness of the tenants to acquire 

 land, and the leaders of the Land League have 

 advised against purchasing under the act, save 

 in exceptional cases. Those who have pur- 

 chased in the north have usually secured fair 

 terms, and in general the new proprietors have 

 till now shown little dissatisfaction, evincing a 

 disposition to work harder in order to meet 

 their installments, and many have applied for 

 loans under the land improvement act. The 

 installments are less than the old rent, the pur- 

 chaser having in addition to assume the whole 

 of the poor rate, and in cases where the pur- 

 chase was based on rents fixed since 1870 the 

 county taxes also, but they exceed the rents 

 adjusted under the last land act. The peasants 

 who have become proprietors under the act are 

 for the most part large farmers who were well 

 off before, while in the congested and impov- 

 erished districts there have been few sales. 

 The most important business of the adjourned 

 session of Parliament was the continuance of 

 Lord Ashbourne's act, which passed the third 

 reading on November 29. The Irish party en- 

 deavored to introduce instructions to the Land 

 Commission to consider the question of arrears 

 in applying the act. The sum of 5,000,000 

 was placed at the disposal of the commission- 

 ers for advances to purchasing tenants on the 

 same conditions as under the original act. 



Sugar Bounties. In an international confer- 

 ence held in London in November, 1887, all 

 the chief sugar-producing nations of Europe, 

 through their representatives, agreed in prin- 

 ciple to the total abolition of bounties on the 

 export of sugar. In France, Germany, Austria, 

 Belgium, and Holland the excise duty on sugar 

 is levied on the beet-roots as they are taken in 

 at the factory, while the manufacturer receives 

 a drawback or bounty on all the sugar that he 

 exports, which was intended to be exactly 

 equal to the duty that he has already paid. 

 After the saccharine yield had been fixed by 

 law, the refiners had an extraordinary incentive 

 to perfect their processes and machinery and 

 the growers to improve the culture, in order to 

 obtain a higher, yield than the legal standard. 

 There was a rapid development of the methods 

 of cultivation and extraction, and the govern- 

 ments soon found themselves paying out more 

 in drawbacks than they received in taxes. Un- 

 der this stimulus the cultivation of the sugar- 

 beet and the manufacture of sugar outstripped 

 the demand. A glut in the market, a great 

 fall in prices, and a universal crisis in the sugar 

 industry resulted. The governments had hesi- 

 tated to lower the bounties while the industry 

 was prosperous, because none could move in 

 the matter without placing its own producers 

 at a disadvantage. To take away the bounties 

 now, when the producers were embarrassed, 

 would create a more widespread financial crisis 



