N.—: Irish Agrarian Development (p. 342)

The Irish Land Act of 1870 marked the beginning of an attempt to solve the agrarian problem in accordance with the principle popularly described as “dual ownership,” by giving the tenants a right to “compensation for disturbance.” The great Land Act of 1881 carried the process much further by accepting the proposals known as “the three F's” (fair rents, free sale of tenants' interests, and fixed tenure), and establishing a Land Court to fix “judicial rents” for a term of years. By the Land Act of 1903, however, a new departure was made; and machinery was provided for the voluntary transference to the tenants of the land still in the hands of the landlords, on terms attractive to both parties. This measure and the subsequent amending and supplementary Acts will probably, in no long time, bring about the establishment of a system of peasant proprietorship over a great part of Ireland. It should be added that there has of recent years been a rapid growth among Irish farmers of various forms of co-operation. For a brief account of the Act of 1881 and of its relation to contemporary Nationalism, see Low and Sanders, Political History of England during the reign of Victoria (1907). The least biassed accounts of Irish agrarian history during the last forty years are perhaps to be found in a brief work by a German economist, Dr. Bonn, Modern Ireland and her Agrarian Problem (Eng. trans. 1906), and in Bastable's articles in the (Harvard) Quarterly Journal of Economics, xviii. (Nov. 1903), and in the Economic Journal, xix. (March 1909). On the movement towards co-operation among farmers, see Plunkett, Ireland in the New Century (1903), part ii. The details of the history are best looked for in the reports of Royal Commissions and similar documents, such as the Report of the Royal Commission of 1880–1, and of the Royal Commission of 1886–7, the Report of the Select Committee of the House of Commons of 1894 (“Morley's Committee”), and the Report of the Royal Commission of 1897–8 (“Fry's Commission”), together with a Report by Mr. W. F. Bailey, Legal Assistant-Commissioner, of an Inquiry into the Present Condition of Tenant Purchasers (1903). the Reports of the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society (from 1895), and of the Irish Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction (from 1901). See also Coyne, Ireland, Industrial and Commercial (pub. by Irish Dep. of Agriculture, 1902), and for the text of the Acts, Cherry and Barton, Irish Land Law.