VIII. AGRICULTURAL POLICY 



THE IRISH LAND PURCHASE ACT OF 1903 

 BY C. F. BASTABLE 



(From the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. XVIII, p. i, 

 November, 1903) 



[Footnotes are omitted from this reprint. The reader is referred to the 

 original article. ED.] 



THE Irish Land Act, which has been the principal work of 

 the legislative session of 1903, is remarkable in several 

 respects. But its chief significance lies in the fact that it defi- 

 nitely binds all parties in Great Britain and Ireland to that par- 

 ticular method of solving the land question often described as 

 the " abolition of dual ownership." It thus marks an important 

 and probably decisive stage in the tedious process of recasting 

 the agrarian system of the country and removing the obstacles 

 that have hampered the operation of earlier measures of reform. 

 So many have been the discussions on the political and eco- 

 nomic aspects of this great branch of the Irish problem that all 

 persons even moderately interested in such inquiries are well 

 aware of the way in which the existing land system has been 

 formed. Beginning with the application of the English common 

 law to Irish tenures in the opening years of the seventeenth cen- 

 tury, it was further affected by the series of confiscations which 

 only ceased at its end, as well as by the extensive Plantation of 

 Ulster. The position in the eighteenth century was that of a 

 body of landowners, many of them not residing in the country, 

 and distinct both in race and religion from the actual cultivators 

 who made up the great body of the people. In this way the 

 "cottier" system which Ireland may claim to have originated 



