386 THE FUTURE OF OUR AGRICULTURE. 



perty under the old tenant right custom, which later became 

 legalised all over Ireland. We believe there is only one estate 

 in Ulster, belonging to a City Company, where the English custom 

 prevails of the landlord doing the improvements. The rent on 

 the farm we were considering used to stand at about 20s. an 

 acre. Then came the judicial rent system, perhaps the most 

 demoralising piece of legislation which even Ireland has experi- 

 enced, and successive revisions lowered the rent by perhaps 

 20 per cent. Finally, under the Land Act, the farmer bought 

 at twenty years' purchase of his judicial rent spread in annual 

 instalments over sixty- eight years, with the result that he is now 

 paying 12s. to 14s. an acre instead of 205., and gradually acquir- 

 ing the land. Without doubt he has thereby been encouraged 

 to better his farming ; for, though the old tenant right gave him 

 the improvements, yet he had always one eye on the Com- 

 missioners, who might raise— at any rate not reduce — his rent 

 every five years, if the farm looked prosperous. But nowadays 

 as prospective owner he has reformed the drainage, the hedges 

 are taken in hand, and the farming is tuned up as rapidly as the 

 profits permit." And once more : "In this district, which, 

 if not so rich as the Ards, still bore every sign of steady pros- 

 perity, the farms had all been bought — our host indeed had 

 acquired his nearly twenty years ago under the old Act — so 

 that the flourishing condition of the farming industry might be 

 associated with the fact that ownership had been operating for 

 some time." 



Those passages recall Arthur Young's oft-quoted pane- 

 gyrics of the gilding Midas touch of " property." Outside 

 England it is hard to argue at all in favour of tenancy, so 

 firmly rooted in Continental and Colonial minds is the 

 belief in the superiority of ownership, which gives the tiller 

 an absolutely free hand, such as Mr. Prothero insists that 

 the farmer must have, once farming becomes a " business," 

 and permits him to deal with his property in matters both 

 of sale as of husbandry, without hindrance, in the way that 

 he thinks best, growing whatever pays best, laying out his 

 fields in his own way, setting up buildings or cutting down 

 hedges, wherever such course recommends itself to his 

 judgment and giving his creative mind a free rein. 



It deserves to be pointed out that the conditions under 

 which Irish tenants under their Land Act acquire their 

 land, is in substance precisely the same as that under which 

 encumbered owners, wherever there is a Credit Institution 



