104 APPENDIX 



courts and the reconstituted Land Commission. The tenant 

 was also granted power of sale of his lease. 



" Yet despite the liberality of the law of 1881 and the 

 enthusiasm of the Irish people for the reform, its success 

 was far from realizing the hopes which were based on it. 

 Agitation, punctuated by agrarian crimes of every des- 

 cription, continued. In L88G, the publication of the Plan 

 of Campaign intimated that the tenants were bent on having 

 things even more completely their own way. In case rents 

 were considered unfair, there was to be a general no-rent 

 strike on the estate in question, and the amounts withheld 

 were to furnish the means for obtaining further concessions. 

 Nor did attempted improvements of the law in 1887, 189 L 

 and 1896 have appreciable results. Nevertheless, up to 

 March 31, 1914, determinations had been made by civil 

 courts and the Land Commission in respect of 410,150 

 cases. Of these, 295,673 were for the first period of 

 fifteen years, 111,794 for the second, and 2,683 for the third. 

 These represent a very considerable proportion of the total 

 land holdings in Ireland. And the fact that already a very 

 considerable number of third-term determinations have been 

 made indicate that this Jegisation is still of importance."... 

 44 Laissez-faire had produced in rack-rents an intolerable 



situation ; governmental control under a system of judicial 





 rents had a hardly more satisfactory outcome. 



"The reasons for this failure are not difficult to discover. 

 In the first place, the landlords had a grievance. The 

 judicial rents represented decreases over the previous 

 payments averaging 20, 19, and 9 per cent for the three 

 determinations It seemed a legal confiscation of property, 

 for in many cases the income of the owner was all but 

 completely absorbed. Nevertheless, no measure of Irish 

 reform could be withheld on that account. Irish condi- 

 tions were so serious as to merit unusual treatment. 



