To ask the Secretary to the Treasury whether the Chairman of the Board of Customs is prohibited by statute from giving the names and addresses of persons importing milk from abroad; and whether, if it is desired that the names of such persons should be made public, legislation would be required; and, if so, if the Government will introduce a Bill for such purpose. (Answered by Mr. Elliot.) The Board of Customs are not prohibited by statute from giving the names and addresses of the importers of milk. The names of such importers are in fact published in the periodical Customs Bill of Entry for certain ports, which are available to subscribers. It is, however, the duty of the Board of Customs to exercise discretion as to the supply of information to persons making inquiry about the business of others.

To ask the President of the Board of Trade if, with a view to the saving of life among passengers in the event of ships colliding at sea or meeting with other accidents, he will consider the advisability of requiring passenger lines to place a notice over every berth, showing to which boat station the occupant should repair in the event of collision, fire, or mishap requiring taking to the boats. (Answered by Mr. Bonar Law.) I appreciate the motives of my hon. and gallant friend, but I fear the adoption of his suggestion is impracticable. In the opinion of the Board of Trade, any attempt to allot boat stations to passengers by previous notice would, in the event of disaster, be not only useless but dangerous. The first duty of the captain in case of serious accident is to save the women and children; and the responsibility of doing the best for all is one that can only be safely left to him.

To ask the Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs whether the provisions of the International Conference, held in London in May, 1899, for the preservation of big game in Africa have now been ratified by all the Powers represented thereat; and, if not, what Powers have not done so and for what reasons; whether the provisions of the conference are now being carried out in all parts of Africa under the control of the Foreign Office, and particularly if the prohibition of the export of elephant tusks under 11 lbs. in weight is being strictly enforced, and by what means; also whether, having regard to the regulation that licensees must make a return of game killed, these returns from the date the regulation come into force can be collected from all territories in Africa under the control of the Foreign Office and presented to Parliament; and whether he can state in what game reserves in Africa officials and natives are allowed to kill game, and to what extent and under what conditions; also to what extent and at what cost the sanctity of the game reserves in Africa is enforced by game wardens, police, or otherwise. (Answered by Lord Cranborne.) The ratifications of the Powers have not been deposited owing to the fact that in signing the Convention the French Government reserved its obligation to ratify until Abyssinia and Liberia had acceded. These Powers had been repeatedly urged to accede, but have hitherto hesitated to do so owing to their fear that they may not be able to carry out all the provisions of the Convention. Negotiations with them are still proceeding. The provisions of the Convention are now being carried out in all the Protectorates under the control of the Foreign Office by means of the game regulations. These regulations forbid, amongst other things, the export of elephant tusks under 11 lbs. in weight, and it is the duty of all administrative officers of the Protectorates and of the Customs officials to see that they are strictly enforced. It was at first found impossible to collect accurate returns of the game killed under licences, but the returns for 1901–2 for the British Central Africa Protectorate were laid before Parliament in August last (No. 2872 of the Annual Series of the Diplomatic and Consular Reports); for Somaliland in April last (see Appendices in No. 2948 of the Annual Series of the Diplomatic and Consular Reports). Those for East Africa and Uganda will be laid shortly. Officials are not allowed to shoot game for the purposes of sport in any of the reserves in the Protectorates administered by the Foreign Office. It has not yet been found possible to deal with the natives in those reserves in such a way as to prevent their hunting game within them, but the importation of firearms is carefully checked and natives are not allowed to own weapons of precision as defined in the Brussels Act. As already stated, it is the duty of all administrative officials to see that the game regulations are enforced; and in the East Africa Protectorate a special officer with the title of game ranger has been appointed for the purpose at a salary of £250, with £100 for expenses. There is no other sum specially appropriated to game preservation. Observations on the preservation of game in the Soudan will be found at page 80 of Egypt, No. 1 (1903), laid before the House in April of this year.

To ask the Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs whether recent correspondence relating to the treatment of the Jews in Roumania can now be laid upon the Table. (Answered by Lord Cranborne.) I fear that I have nothing to add to the answer which I gave to my hon. friend on the 18th of November last.† There has been no further correspondence since that date of any material importance.

† See (4) Debates, cxiv., 1231.

To ask Mr. Chancellor of the Exchequer whether the £425,000 of small coins held by the Bank of England ready for issue to the public are coinage of the late or present reign; and whether supplies of coin can be obtained by others as well as bankers. (Answered by Mr. Ritchie.) Of the £425,000 silver coin held by the Bank of England, £417,000 is Victorian and fit for circulation; the balance of £8,000 consists of new coin of the present reign. Silver coins of any denomination, and in any quantity desired, are issued to the general public on personal application at the head office of the Bank in exchange for gold or Bank of England notes, and at country branches of the Bank of England in exchange for gold or notes of the particular branch of the Bank at which application is made. A further sum of £10,000 in sixpences of this year's date was issued to the Bank on the 9th instant and is available for issue.

To ask the Secretary of State for India whether he is aware that an order has recently been issued to open and to examine all export packages passing from India across the Tibetan frontier; and whether the Government of India will take steps to prevent this interference with trade along this route. (Answered by Secretary Lord George Hamilton.) The Government of India have found it necessary to establish posts on our side of the frontier to prevent the export of military stores to Tibet. I see no reason to disapprove these precautionary measures.

To ask the hon. Member for Huntingdonshire, as representing the President of the Board of Agriculture, whether the attention of the Department has been directed to the circumstances of the alleged outbreak of contagious pleuro-pneumonia among a cargo of Canadian cattle in 1892, on account of which an embargo was imposed and is maintained on the importation of these cattle; and, if so, whether the Department can now remove it in the interests of British feeders and Canadian ranchers. (Answered by Mr. Ailwyn Fellowes.) The circumstances to which the hon. Member refers are of course well known to the Board of Agriculture. They are fully detailed in Parliamentary Papers which were issued at the time. There is no special embargo applicable to cattle imported from Canada, but in pursuance of The Diseases of Animals Act, 1896, all animals imported to this country from abroad must be slaughtered at the port of landing. This requirement cannot be set aside by any order of the Board. I may add that the question of the admission of store cattle into the United Kingdom has been carefully examined, and that my noble friend sees no reason to depart from the policy adopted by his predecessor and endorsed in this House by a very large majority so recently as February last.

To ask the hon. Member for West Derbyshire, as representing the First Commissioner of Works, whether he will have placed in the Tea Room plans and drawings showing how it is proposed to carry out the opening of the Mall into Charing Cross. (Answered by Mr. Victor Cavendish.) The plan that it is hoped will be carried out is substantially the same as that shown in a plan attached to the Report of the Select Committee upon the Public Offices (Appropriation of Sites) of 1896 (House of Commons Paper, No. 310).

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department whether, as reported at a recent meeting of the Committee of the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society, Professor Schafer has obtained permission to conduct experiments on dogs without anæsthetics for the purpose of investigating the phenomena of death from drowning; is he aware that these experiments have hitherto been conducted under chloroform; and will he take steps to prevent the infliction of cruelty which the experiments authorised involve. (Answered by Mr. Secretary Akers Douglas.) Professor Schäfer has obtained the certificates required by the Act to enable him to perform certain experiments on dogs for the purpose of investigating, not the phenomena of death from drowning, but the best means of effecting resuscitation in cases of apparent drowning The experiments will be performed on behalf of the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society of London, who have appointed a committee to consider this question. I am aware that Professor Schäfer has performed experiments on the effect of immersion on anæsthetised dogs, but I am informed that the use of anæsthetics frustrated the object of the experiments. In view of the great importance of the subject in connection with the saving of human life, and of the strong recommendations received in support of the experiments, I have not felt justified in disallowing the certificates.

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department whether his attention has been called to the case of the death at Southwark of a young man, through injuries received on 29th May in the Walworth Road, owing to assault by three roughs, and to the remarks of the coroner upon the amount of hooliganism in the district, and of the danger of walking about the Borough, even in broad daylight; and, if so, whether steps will be taken to increase the police protection in that district, especially owing to the small increase in the police force in the Metropolitan area during the last ten years. (Answered by Mr. Secretary Akers Douglas.) So far as I can ascertain by inquiry into the case to which the hon. Member refers, the young man was struck by two men with whom he was walking; he was at work next day, and it was not till a day or two afterwards that he complained of being ill. The death may have been attributable to injuries received on the 29th May; but the coroner's jury found that the evidence was not sufficient to show the cause of it, and they returned an open verdict. No complaint was made to the police by the deceased, nor does the case appear to be one of hooliganism at all. No complaints have been received by the police from the coroner, and I have no reason to suppose that the number of police in the Borough is not adequate for the reasonable requirements of the district.

To ask the President of the Local Government Board what progress has been made in the investigations by the Royal Commission on Tuberculosis during the past twelve months on the two farms at Stansted, lent by Sir James Blyth; and whether a Report will shortly be issued. (Answered by Mr. Walter Long.) I am informed that considerable progress has been made in the investigations instituted by the Royal Commission. It is stated, however, that the ground to be covered by the experiments is very extensive, and that some time must necessarily elapse before any Report by the Commission can be issued.

To ask the Secretary to the Board of Education whether the Nottinghamshire County Council have any power under the Education Act of 1902 to prevent the chairman of the Sutton-in-Ashfield Urban District Council, who is the head teacher of the central Board schools, from serving on the local education committee; and whether the fact of this gentleman being the head teacher of the Board schools disqualifies him from being a member of the Urban District Council. (Answered by Sir William Anson.) If the local education committee referred to is the committee of the Nottinghamshire County Council, that Council can certainly determine the personnel of its education committee. As Sutton-in-Ashfield is not an autonomous area, there is nothing to disqualify the head teacher of the Board school in that area from being a member of the Urban District Council, unless, in the view of the Board of Education or the County Council, his duties on the Urban District Council should interfere with the proper discharge of his duties as a teacher.

To ask the Secretary to the Board of Education whether his attention has been called to a circular issued by the Nottinghamshire County Council to the Urban District Councils of this county with reference to the appointment of school managers under the Education Act of 1902 in which the Nottinghamshire County Council have decided that no one shall be eligible to be appointed by the County Council as a manager of any school if a member of his family is employed in that school; and will he state if the Nottinghamshire County Council have any power under the Education Act to enforce this rule, and if not, will he call upon them to at once withdraw this circular. (Answered by Sir William Anson.) My attention has not been called to the circular in question. There is nothing to prevent a County Council from determining the qualifications or disqualifications for managers chosen by itself, but not for managers chosen by the minor local authority. Under the circumstances stated in the Question I see no reason for the intervention of the Board of Education.

To ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland whether he can state the gross rental of lands in the Court of the Irish Land Judge in the hands of receivers before the application of the Act of 1896, and the gross rental of lands at present in the hands of such receivers. (Answered by Mr. Wyndham.) The rental of lands in this Court in the hands of receivers in the year 1895 was £793,821. In the year 1902, the latest period for which the figures are at present available, the rental was £449,106. It is right to state that these amounts include the rental of non-agricultural hereditaments as well as agricultural, and of estates managed for other Judges of the Chancery Division where no order for sale has been made.

To ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland whether the Commission appointed by the Lord Lieutenant to inquire into the Poor Law system will embrace an inquiry into the condition of the Irish blind; and, if not, can he see his way to widen the scope of the inquiry with a view to securing this object. (Answered by Mr. Wyndham.) It will be competent to the Commission to inquire into the condition of the blind who are relieved from the poor rates.

To ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland whether, in view of the fact that manual instructresses in national schools give instruction in needlework, kindergarten, hand and eye training, and object lessons, and give service during the entire school day, and that £24 per annum is the maximum salary for such service, he will recommend that a portion of the Equivalent Grant or some other fund be allocated for increasing their salaries. (Answered by Mr. Wyndham.) I am not yet in a position to make an announcement in reference to the allocation of this Grant.

To ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland if he will grant a Return of the names, valuations, and causes of evictions of tenants in the county of Tipperary during the fifties, sixties, and seventies, where such lands remain on owners' hands, together with names of local representatives of each evicted tenant. (Answered by Mr. Wyndham.) There are no official records in existence that would enable such a Return to be prepared.

To ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieuten ant of Ireland whether his attention has been called to a difficulty now experienced by the County Borough Council of Cork, due to the impossibility of levying the rates in time to provide funds for Poor Law and municipal purposes, owing to the fact that the revised valuation lists do not come to hand from the General Valuation Office, Dublin, before 1st March, the time fixed by statute; that the financial year begins on 1st April, leaving only one month for fixing the rates and the preparation of the rate book, which requires at least seven weeks; and whether, seeing that the Board of Guardians are how instructing their law agents to proceed against the corporation, while the Local Government Board will not permit the Council to pay interest to the bank on an overdraft, he will say what steps he proposes to take to deal with this difficulty. (Answered by Mr. Wyndham.) My attention has been directed to this matter by a communication received from the hon. Member. In the case of counties no difficulty should be experienced in paying these demands in advance, as the Councils receive an instalment of the Agricultural Grant at the end of March, as well as other advances from the Local Taxation Account. But in some of the county boroughs difficulty has been experienced in making the payments referred to in the early part of the financial year. I am inquiring whether it is practicable by administrative action to provide a remedy to meet the latter difficulty.

To ask the Secretary of State for War why an officer of Militia who has served in South Africa for two years with embodied battalion is not eligible for the £100 allowance. (Answered by Mr. Secretary Brodrick.) It is not clear to what grant reference is made, but the terms on which the outfit allowance was granted have been explained in previous replies † to Questions put by my hon. and gallant friend, to which I fear I can add nothing.

To ask the Secretary of State for the Colonies, in view of the fact that the Colonial Office is unable to state the number and amount of claims for compensation which have been lodged by the Transvaal and Orange River Colonies, will he state how the Department arrives at the sum required for the satisfaction of these claims. (Answered by Mr. Secretary Chamberlain.) The Government has never undertaken to satisfy claims for compensation for war losses in the Transvaal and Orange River Colony. As far as ex-burghers of the late Republics are concerned, the £3,000,000 which has been set apart for them was fixed by Article 10 of the Terms of Surrender. It will be distributed pro rata among those who have suffered war losses and are in actual want of relief. The £2,000,000 set apart for British subjects, neutral foreigners, and natives will be distributed pro rata among all who are held to be entitled to some compensation for war losses. It is a sum estimated by Lord Milner to be sufficient to provide each recipient with a larger measure of compensation than the ex-burghers will receive from the £3,000,000 above referred to.

I beg to ask the Secretary of State for War if he can say when the recommendations of the Committee appointed to consider the condition of the Army Veterinary Department will be brought into force, as the last meeting of this Committee took place in February; and, whether, seeing that there are now 35 vacancies in the Army Veterinary Department, and it is 20 per cent. below its authorised peace establishment, he will state how many candidates there are for these vacancies.

† See (4) Debates, cxvi., 911.

The Report of the Committee is now under consideration. There are at present five candidates and thirty-six vacancies.

I beg to ask the Secretary of State for War whether he has any information to give with reference to the statement in the Press to the effect that the Mullah has cut the British lines of communication between Galadi and Bohotle; whether Colonel Cobbe, now at Galadi, can return to General Manning; and whether General Manning can render any assistance to Colonel Cobbe.

The Government are not in possession of more information with regard to the position of Colonel Cobbe and the movements of the Mullah than has been published in the Press this morning. On the other hand, some five or six weeks ago instructions were sent to General Manning to concentrate at Bohotle; and, according to the estimate given us, a considerable portion of General Manning's force would be already concentrated at Bohotle. But I have telegraphed for particulars from the officer commanding at Bohotle.

But the force is cut off from its base?

I have said nothing to indicate that in any way. I have no information corroborative of some private telegrams which have appeared in one of the newspapers to that effect.

I beg to ask the Secretary of State for War who is responsible for the design of the new German cap for the British Army; whether it was adopted with a view to increasing the popularity of the service; and whether he is aware that there has been a marked falling off in the number of applicants for enlistment since the new cap has come into wear.

Before the right hon. Gentleman answers may I ask if the right hon. Gentleman will consider the desirability of referring the whole question of the new military outfit to a Committee of Milliners?

The new cap was designed to give better protection to the head, with the addition of a cap cover, than the late field cap which was not found to give sufficient protection in the manœuvres of 1898. It was designed by the Army Clothing Committee in 1901, and the year following its introduction the largest number of recruits joined the Army who have enlisted since the short service system was instituted.

Was it at the instance of the War Office that this cap was sent over to the Irish police?

I beg to ask the Secretary to the Admiralty whether it is intended to establish a naval base at Sydney (Cape Breton), at an early date in view of the maintenance of a strong French squadron at St. Pierre, Miquelon.

The reply is in the negative.

I beg to ask the Secretary of State for the Colonies whether, in view of the fact that Canada has differentiated against Germany as compared with certain European nations other than the mother country, he proposes to protect Canada from being on this ground removed by Germany from the category of a most favoured nation by imposing retaliatory duties in Great Britain against Germany.

Canada has only differentiated against Germany after it had been for five years excluded from the most-favoured-nation treatment in that country in consequence of the preference voluntarily given by Canada to the mother country. The situation thus created is one of the subjects to which I have recently called the attention of the country, and in regard to which I have invited discussion.

May I take it that Canada did not differentiate in favour of France at the same time that she differentiated in favour of the mother country.

The hon. Member is aware that the differentiation was in favour of the mother country, accompanied by the statement that certain preferences would be given to any British possession, or, in fact, to any other country which gave reciprocal treatment.

I beg to ask the Secretary of State for the Colonies whether General Louis Botha has summoned a public meeting at Heidelberg, Transvaal, for the 20th June, to discuss various political grievances; and, if so, will he state what is the nature of the matters to be brought before the meeting; and whether any communications on the subject have passed between Lord Milner and the Colonial Office, and in that case will he lay copies thereof upon the Table.

I have no information on the subject beyond what I have read in the Press.

Will the right hon. Gentleman inquire into this serious matter?

No, Sir.

I beg to ask the Secretary of State for the Colonies whether, during the autumn of last year, he received petitions from British dynamite manufacturers protesting against the attempt of the De Beers Company and others to establish a new dynamite monopoly in South Africa; and whether, seeing that a coast duty of 7s. 6d. a case has recently been sanctioned by Lord Milner, and that the mining companies of the Transvaal other than those controlled by the Directors of the De Beers Company and their friends are opposed to this monopoly, will he instruct Lord Milner to remove this duty in the interest of British manufacturers and the general mining community.

I have received petitions of the nature stated in the Question. Under the new Customs Unions Convention, which has been laid on the Table, the duty on explosives at the coast ports is fixed at 1½d. per pound or 6s. 3d. a case. The question of an Excise duty of equal amount to the import duty is under consideration.

I beg to ask the Secretary of State for the Colonies whether, seeing that in the letter addressed to him by Mr. Abdool Gani, chairman of the British Indian Association, last month, specific charges were made in relation to the ill-treatment of respectable Indian storekeepers at Heidelberg, Johannesburg, and Potchefstroom, he will say whether a definite statement was made by Mr. Abdool Gani on behalf of the association that under Mr. Kruger's administration British Indian subjects were never subjected to the physical ill-treatment they are at present suffering; and what steps he has taken to put an end to this condition of affairs.

I have not received any letter making these charges.

Did not the right hon. Gentleman say last week he had received a letter?

The hon. Member asks if I have received a letter making specific charges. I say I have not, but I have received a letter from Mr. Gani.

I beg to ask the Secretary of State for India whether the allocation of capital expenditure in the current year (as per Return 137) of 59,000,000 rupees for railways and 4,500,000 rupees for irrigation projects is open to revision; and, if so, whether it is the intention of the Government of India to increase the grant under the latter head with a view to promoting the extension of water storage in India as a precaution against future drought.

The figures of 4,500,000 rupees given in Return No. 137 refer only to expenditure on Major Irrigation Works actually in course of construction at the date of the Return. The financial statement for this year shows that in 1903–04 it is proposed to expend £666,700 on the construction of Major Irrigation Works, £166,700 on the construction of Protective Irrigation Works, and £810,500 (net) on the construction and maintenance of Minor Irrigation Works, the last two amounts being charged against the revenue of the year. This gives a total expenditure of £1,643,900 on Irrigation Works. The Government of India, after full consideration, deliberately put forward this Estimate of expenditure, and I know of no reason why it should be now altered.

I beg to ask the Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs whether the secret Commission now sitting at Brussels is the Permanent Commission provided for under Article 7 of the Sugar Convention; if so, who is the English delegate; whether it is authorised to name the sugar exporting countries, outside those which have approved of the Convention, against which the ports in this country are to be closed under the Sugar Convention Bill; if so, whether, before any decision is reached in their case, due notice will be given to these countries and whether they will have an opportunity of appearing by counsel, or otherwise, before the Commission; and, if not, whether Great Britain will be obliged to put in force the decisions at which this secret Commission may arrive.

The Commission now sitting at Brussels is the permanent Commission provided for under Article 7 of the Brussels Sugar Convention. The British delegate is Sir Henry Bergne, K.C.M.G., and he is accompanied by four assistant delegates. The answer to the third Question is in the affirmative. The decisions of the Commission will no doubt be announced without unnecessary delay, but, subject to the terms of the Convention, their procedure is a matter for the determination of the Commission itself. With regard to the last Question, Great Britain is of course bound by the terms of the Convention.

Will any opportunity be given to any country against which proceedings are to be taken to be heard?

That is a matter of procedure to be determined by the Commission itself.

I beg to ask the Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs whether the Government have received official information as to the issue of the Imperial Decree sanctioning the construction of the Shanghai-Nanking Railway, and as to when the final contract will be signed; and whether he is in a position to state the main provisions of the contract.

On the 11th instant His Majesty's Chargéd' Affaires at Peking telegraphed that an Imperial Decree had been issued and officially communicated to him sanctioning the Agreement for the construction of this railway. He had previously reported that as soon as the Imperial assent had been given the agreement would be signed at Shanghai. The railway, which is to be built and financed by the British and Chinese Corporation, must be begun within twelve months and finished within five years of the conclusion of the agreement. It is to be the property of the Chinese Government and to be administered by a Board of Control consisting of two Chinese nominees and three members appointed by the British and Chinese Corporation. The railway is to be mortgaged as security for the loan to be made by the Corporation to the Chinese Government.

In accordance with private notice I beg to ask the Prime Minister whether His Majesty's Government propose to continue diplomatic relations with those persons who, having been concerned in the assassination of the late King and Queen of Servia, now assume to act as the Government of Servia; what attitude the Government proposes to assume, and what steps it proposes to take in consequence of these recent events; and whether negotiations with other Powers are going on with a view to common and concerted action.

I can only say that at present the matter is under consideration; but as far as diplomatic relations are concerned, they came ipso facto to an end with the death of the King of Servia, because our representative in Servia was accredited only to the late King. Those relations have therefore terminated of themselves. If my hon. friend thinks this an inadequate answer—as perhaps he may—he can put a Question on the Paper.

I beg to ask Mr. Chancellor of the Exchequer if he can state the system adopted for the collection of Income Tax on foreign bonds to bearer held in England, the interest on which is payable abroad.

The Income Tax on foreign bonds to bearer, the interest of which is paid abroad, is for the most part collected under the provisions of the Act 48 and 49 Vict., Chap. 51, Section 26, which prescribes that a banker or other person who obtains payment of the coupons shall deduct Income Tax from the proceeds, and account therefore to the Special Commissioners of Income Tax. In cases where the owner of the bonds obtains payment of his coupons direct from abroad, he would be liable to include the proceeds in his return for direct assessment under Schedule D.

I beg to ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department if his attention has been called to the death of Charles Joseph Smart in the Middlesex County Asylum; and, if so, will he state whether this man was just before his death placed in a strait-jacket without the doctor's orders, and whether inquiries will be made into the whole matter.

This man died on the day after he was received in the asylum, to which he had been removed in a strait waistcoat from the Isleworth Workhouse. I understand that the latter part of the Question is being made the subject of inquiry by my right hon. friend the President of the Local Government Board.

Is it not only unusual but improper to put a patient into a strait-jacket without the doctor's orders?

That Question should be addressed to the Local Government Board. This case only came under my notice when the patient was brought into the asylum from the workhouse.

I beg to ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department if he will state the number of firms manufacturing china and earthenware in the Potteries district, and the number of these firms insured under the compensation scheme; also the number of persons employed in the manufacture of china and earthenware in the district, and the number insured under the scheme.

According to the latest Returns in my possession there are in the North Staffordshire Potteries district 364 works at which earthenware and china are made, employing 4,857 persons. In ninety of these works, where 2,750 persons are employed, an insurance scheme has been adopted.

I beg to ask the President of the Board of Trade whether he can say when the Report of the Royal Commission upon Alien Immigration will be presented; and, if so, can he state when he will be prepared to introduce legislation in conformity therewith, having regard to the disturbances between the native population and Aliens; has the right hon. Gentleman's attention been called to further murders by aliens recently?

I understand that the Royal Commission on Alien Immigration has concluded the taking of evidence and is now considering its Report. Until the Report is received I am not able to make any statement with regard to legislation.

May I ask what time is likely to elapse before the Report is presented, and whether it will be in time for legislation this session.

I see no prospect of its being in time for legislation this session.

I beg to ask the President of the Board of Trade if he will name the countries which deny to British imports treatment accorded to imports from other foreign countries.

Generally speaking, the only countries, so far as I am aware, in which imports from the United Kingdom do not receive complete most-favoured-nation treatment are the United States of America, where we do not enjoy the benefit of the reductions on certain articles conceded to France and other countries under reciprocal agreements, and Portugal, which withholds from certain British goods the reductions conceded by treaty to Russia, Norway, and Holland, also certain of the South and Central American Republics grant special favour to the citizens and products of the neighbouring States, which are not enjoyed by British subjects and products.

Is there not a most-favoured-nation arrangement between this country and the United States?

Yes.

Can you name any country in which British goods get the same treatment as foreign goods do in this country?

Have we not a most-favoured-nation arrangement with Portugal?

Yes, but there are exceptions which I have read out.

I fail to understand what is meant by "exceptions."

I beg to ask the Lord Advocate whether his attention has been directed to the fact that there are sixty-six lads sentenced by Edinburgh magistrates at present inmates of the Wellington Reformatory, and that application has been made to the Home Secretary for authority to discharge these lads, in respect that the Town Council of Edinburgh refuses to contribute towards their maintenance; and whether, in view of the statement of one of the sheriff substitutes that the Reformatory Act is a dead letter in Edinburgh, and that the Judges of the city are prevented from inflicting the only sentence which promises any permanent good to the criminal, he is prepared to take such steps as may be necessary to remedy these matters. In putting the Question the hon. Member asked further if it was the fact that a boy had already been discharged from the Reformatory, because of the refusal of the magistrates to pay the cost of his maintenance, although his sentence of five years had not expired. Would the right hon. Gentleman take steps—

Order, order! That should be the subject of a separate Question.

Perhaps I may be allowed to answer the Question on the Paper. I am aware of the position of matters in Edinburgh referred to by the hon. Member. The Secretary for Scotland has made repeated representations during the last twelve months to the Town Council drawing their attention to the responsibility they are incurring in regard to the maintenance of Edinburgh children in reformatories. I understand from my right hon. friend the Home Secretary that as responsible for the administration of the Reformatory Acts he has also been in communication both with the Town Council and with the Wellington Reformatory managers, and that there is some prospect of an arrangement being reached which will obviate any necessity for taking any steps as proposed by the hon. Member.

I beg to ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland what steps have been taken to carry out the portion of the scheme under The Marine Act, 1902, for the dredging of waterways; and if he would make inquiries in reference to the entrance into the Galway Docks which, from silting in the channel, large vessels are now prevented from entering, necessitating the discharge of cargoes in the roadstead, causing loss and expense to the shipowners and merchants in Galway.

The scheme under the Marine Works Act does not deal with the dredging of waterways except so far as may be necessary in connection with works proposed to be undertaken under the Act. That Act does not embrace such a case as that of Galway Harbour. It is the duty of the harbour authority to make provision for clearing the channel.

I beg to ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland why the Local Government Board in Ireland have refused to sanction the election of Mr. Flanagan as chairman of the Corofin District Council.

The election of chairman of a District Council does not require the sanction of the Local Government Board. But Mr. Flanagan, having been convicted and sentenced to a term of imprisonment with hard labour, is disqualified by law from being a member of the Corofin District Council.

May I ask the right hon. Gentleman whether, in view of the peaceful state of affairs in Ireland, the Government cannot do something to remove this disqualification, which causes very widespread dissatisfaction and may cause a great deal of trouble?

It is a disability which could only be removed by legislation.

I beg to ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland if he has received from various bodies, municipal and otherwise, of Galway city and county, representations of the dangers to which the fishermen are exposed in violent weather owing to their inability to reach the harbour and the loss to their business through delay in reaching the markets, and of the advantages which would accrue from the construction of a pier at Salthill; and, if so, will he state what grant has been proposed in the matter.

Representations to this effect have been received. The County Council has been informed that it will not be practicable to expend any money on the proposed undertaking under the Marine Works Act.

I beg to ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland whether he can state the number of agricultural holdings in Ireland valued at over £200.

The number is 4,745, according to the last Census.

I beg to ask the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland whether the Government can arrange to provide complete monthly and annual statistics of all commodities exported from and brought into Ireland, with a view to providing that country with information respecting its progress, such as is furnished in other civilised States.

As the hon. Member is doubtless aware, statistics of the trade done directly by Ireland with foreign countries and British possessions are contained in the volumes of the "Annual Statement of the Trade of the United Kingdom." No official records exist of the trade passing between Great Britain and Ireland, and I fear that any system that could be devised for collecting such information would prove a hindrance to trade.

In view of the fact that practically the whole body of Irish trade is with Great Britain, will not the hon. Gentleman promise to consider whether these vital statistics cannot be provided.

Is the hon. Gentleman aware that the Irish Agricultural Department in Ireland is most anxious to get these statistics?

I am sure if the Irish Office approaches the Board of Trade in that matter we shall be glad to consider their suggestions.

Has the hon. Gentleman no settled convictions on the matter?

I beg to ask Mr. Attorney-General for Ireland whether it is his intention to have the Charitable Loan Fund (Ireland) Act, 1900, amended at an early date by granting an extension of the time for collection, so as to enable the receivers of the societies to collect the outstanding debts which have been blocked through the recent decision of the Court of Appeal in the case of Reiley v. Magistrates of Tyrone and Fermanagh.

An amending Bill with the object stated in the Question has been drafted, and I should be prepared to introduce it upon receiving an assurance from hon. Members that it will be treated as a non-contentious measure.

I beg to ask the President of the Board of Trade whether his attention has been called to the fact that Irish butter, which arrives in London thirty-six hours after consignment from the south-west of Ireland, takes forty-eight hours longer to be delivered at any place within a radius of twenty-five to forty miles of London, while foreign butters are delivered punctually in the same districts; and, if so, will he, in the interest of the Irish saltless butter trade, take steps to have this state of things remedied by the railway companies over whose lines this produce is carried.

The Board of Trade have received no representations alleging such delay in the delivery of Irish butter by railway as compared with foreign butter, but if any specific cases of delay are submitted to the Board, inquiry will at once be made into the circumstances.

I beg to ask the First Lord of the Treasury whether, in view of the loss of life occasioned by the recent explosion on H.M.S. "Good Hope," he is now able to announce the decision of the Government with regard to granting State pensions to the widows and orphans of those seamen and marines who lose their lives on duty similar to those awarded to the widows and orphans of men killed on war service.

Yes, Sir. Arrangements have now been made by the Admiralty that the pensions granted from the Greenwich Hospital Fund to the widows and children of the seamen and Marines who lose their lives by accident shall be supplemented from the Navy Votes so as to bring them up to the war scale laid down in 1901. This arrangement will cover the cases of existing widows and orphans.

Will the concession be retro-active?

Yes, Sir, I said so.

I beg to ask the First Lord of the Treasury how the inquiry into the relative advantages and disadvantages of a fundamental change in our fiscal system, involving the taxation of all food stuffs from foreign sources and their free entry from our self-governing colonies is to be pursued; whether it is to be an official inquiry; if so, to whom it is to be entrusted, and to whom inquiry is to be addressed, and how long is it expected to last; and whether an opportunity will speedily be given for the constituencies to express their opinions in regard to the contemplated change, in order to limit as far as possible the injury to trade and commerce which a lengthy uncertainty might produce.

The inquiry will, of course, be conducted by His Majesty's Government and on the responsibility of that Government.

By the Board of Trade?

It will be conducted by the Government on its own responsibility.

By what Department? By the Board of Trade? And what will be the form of the inquiry? Will it be by Royal Commission?

I am sorry that I have been so obscure. It will not be by Royal Commission, or by Committee of this House, or by a Departmental Committee. It will not be concerned with any one Department.

Will the Proceedings and the Report be published?

The hon. Member below the Gangway has never served in the Cabinet, but the right hon. Gentleman has; and he must know that inquiries of this sort conducted by a Cabinet do not necessarily lead to a Report.

Is it wholly to enable the Cabinet to make up its mind?

The inquiry is in order that the Cabinet and the House and the country may be informed. These are really most extraordinary Questions. I do not object to them. I rather like them. Hon. Members show extraordinary ignorance as to the ordinary methods by which the proceedings, legislative and administrative, of the Government are carried on. Most of them are preceded by Government inquiry, and the House of Commons and the country are at the proper time taken into the confidence of the Government.

Is it intended that the inquiry shall be completed before the General Election?

As I do not know the length of the inquiry nor the time when the General Election will take place, I am not in a position to answer the Question.

ruled out of order an instruction standing in the name of the hon. Member for Merthyr Tydvil giving the Committee power to extend the provisions of the Bill to Wales and Monmouthshire. It was quite out of the question, he said, to apply the Land Purchase laws of Ireland, which formed a separate Code, to England or Wales by instruction.

moved to insert in line 1 of Clause 1, after "sale of," the words "one or more holdings, or." He said this raised the question of the principle on which the Bill was founded. Both sides were agreed in the desire that land purchase in Ireland should work as smoothly as possible, and that there should be no difficulties thrown in the way either of landlord or of tenant. Now the Bill said that what the landlord was to be enabled to sell, and what the tenant was to be enabled to buy, was an "estate," and an estate was defined in Section 85 of the Bill as "any lands which the Estate Commissioners may see fit to be regarded as a separate estate for the purposes of the Act." Thus, before any sale could take place, before any agreement could be made between landlord and tenant, they would have to find out whether the particular property to be dealt with was or was not an estate. That would throw a great difficulty in the way of sales, for a landlord would be loth to deal with any of his tenants, and the tenants would be loth to deal with the landlord without some assurance that the property in question would be considered to be an estate under the Act. The landlord would be forced, in the first instance, to go to the Estates Commissioners and ask the question—"If I agree to make an arrangement with such and such a tenant will you deem the property an estate?' He would have to ask even more, and would have to inquire—"If I fail to agree with a tenant as to a certain part, will you accept the remainder as an estate?" Surely it was not necessary that the word "estate" should require any definition, and surely if the property constituted a holding subject to the Irish Land Law, that ought to be sufficient to enable landlord and tenant to come to an agreement in the knowledge that the necessary money would be advanced. The only possible objection was that there might be some holdings which it would not be advantageous to advance money upon. True, there might be certain uneconomic holdings, but if that were so, they ought to be dealt with by way of exception, and there should be in the Act some means by which rules could be laid down to provide for such cases. If the plan he suggested were adopted it would much simplify the working of the Act.

said he was unable to accept the Amendment. It was admitted that great advantage would accrue from dealing with large areas, and it would strike at the very foundation of the Bill if those advantages were to be given separately in the case of what he might call small isolated purchases. This Bill took away no existing rights, and as the law now stood these small purchases could be carried out, but it was not to be expected that in cases where only two or three farms were the subject of the agreement, the parties should enjoy all the advantages of the costly machinery erected under the Bill.

said it was quite true that under the present Land Purchase Act a tenant could buy an individual holding from his landlord, and that that right was not taken away by this Bill. He should be inclined to limit the clause in the direction to be proposed by the hon. Member for Louth, and did not, therefore, propose to either support this Amendment or to propose the one he had himself placed on the Paper, to insert after "estate" the words "or any part thereof."

regretted that the Chief Secretary had not been able to give a more satisfactory reply. As he now understood it, any sale carried out must be of an entire estate. ["No, no."] Then what was the intention? The marginal description of the clause was to regulate "advances for purchase of holdings where a whole estate is sold." He understood the right hon. Gentleman objected to putting in anything that would enable part of an estate to be sold under Clause 1. It was desirable to have some definite idea, then, as to what the word "estate" really meant. If it did not mean the whole estate, or if it would apply to a single holding, what objection could there be to the Amendment?

said that his hon. friend had fallen into an error which nearly everybody fell into at first blush. The word "estate" meant in common parlance the whole property of an owner; but "estate" in the Bill meant that which the Estate Commission believed was an area of land which could be conveniently dealt with in globo.

asked if it would be possible for a landowner to know before he entered into negotiations with the tenant how the matter was going to end—whether the Land Commission would regard it as an estate or not.

said that they could not anticipate by statutory enactment all the difficulties that might arise in administering an Act of Parliament; but if his hon. and gallant friend would consider the composition of the Estate Commission, and all the provisions in the Bill, he himself would find no difficulty in discovering what the result of the clause would be. If they went the extreme length of appointing a public officer, a public trustee who might be consulted by private individuals, he thought that that was as far as they could go.

said that the point raised was of the greatest importance. It was essential before the landowner opened negotiations with his tenants that he should know whether what he proposed to sell was considered an estate or not. He might take all the trouble of negotiating with his tenant and then bring the agreement to the Land Commission who might say "That is not an estate at all, and therefore we will not sanction the sale." His object was to render it an easy, cheap, and satisfactory process for the landlord to sell and the tenant to buy, and he appealed to the right hon. Gentleman to consider whether he could not at some subsequent stage introduce some provision which would render it possible for the landlord to consult with the Estate Commission and say "I propose to sell this portion of my land, will you consider it an estate? And, if so, will you sanction the sale?"

said that his hon. and learned friend had overlooked the fact that in the Bill he had reserved as an alternative the procedure introduced last year. In an ordinary case no one could be in any doubt as to the result; but if there were exceptional circumstances, the number and character of which could not be anticipated, the best plan would be to sell the estate to the Land Commission instead of by private bargain.

asked if it was not the case that under Clause 1 the bonus entirely depended on the land being an estate or not.

said that that question could be more conveniently discussed on another Amendment.

said he had an Amendment on the Paper to leave out of line 8, Clause 1, the word "whether" and insert "except," in order to understand what the position was in regard to this particular clause. He understood that the provisions in the clause were necessary in order, in certain cases, to protect the rights of the remainder man. But surely no such provisions were necessary in the case of a sale to the Land Commission. Was it to be supposed that the Land Commission would allow sales to take place by which the remainder man would be in the least degree prejudiced? What he wanted was free transactions, free sales between landlord and tenant. He begged to move.

said that this was a very important Amendment. It raised perhaps the most important question in the whole Bill, but in a partial manner and in a manner on which the point could not be fully and satisfactorily discussed. The question raised by the Amendment was whether these restrictions and limitations should apply to holdings that were sold through the Land Commission; but it left the Bill to apply to cases f direct sale between landlord and tenant. He understood that the object of the Government was that the ordinary case of the sale of land should be the result of direct bargaining between landlord and tenant, and that the sale through the Land Commission should be the exception. In laying down that basis to their Bill the Government had followed the recommendation of the Land Conference, which most people in Ireland approved of. If this Amendment were carried one result would be that sales through the Land Commission would be carried out under more favourable conditions than sales direct; in fact, the tendency would be to abolish direct sales altogether. That was a purpose which he and his friends around him could not sympathise with at all. This question of limitations could not be satisfactorily dealt with piece-meal or in compartments, and it should be reserved till another Amendment further down on the Paper was reached.

said that he was unable to accept the Amendment for many reasons, but also for one not yet adduced. The Amendment, coming at this stage of the Bill, would decide the questions raised in Sub-sections 2 and 3 of Clause 5, in which directions were laid down to guide the Estate Commission in their estimate of the price which it would be proper for them to offer to a landlord. It was not confined to the cases referred to by the hon. Member for Waterford, but applied to many other cases. He could not consent to the omission of these most important sub-sections.

said he had put down the Amendment as showing his aversion to the principle of the clause. He thought the whole clause was bad; that the entire system of zones was bad, and that the true system was a free market between landlord and tenant. At all events, now that they had it confessed, as the result of discussion, that one of the objects of the zone system was not to protect the remainder man, or the person under disability, but some other object, he had thought it would be a reasonable thing to attack the principle of sale through the Land Commission. But as the Government would not accept his Amendment, he had no desire to kill time, and he would withdraw it.

moved as an Amendment—"In Clause 1, page 1, line 11, after 'holding,' insert 'whether subject to a judicial rent or not.'"

pointed out that the Amendment of the hon. Member would not carry out the object he had in view, and, if accepted, would only make the Bill more cumbersome. He could not accept the Amendment.

said the Amendment he now proposed was to take out the words which limited the advance to £3,000 to any single purchaser. It was true the exceptions might be made under special circumstances, with the special sanction of the Treasury, but with those exceptions the advances were limited. Such limitation excluded all occupiers of agricultural land who paid £150 a year rent. He attached extraordinary importance to this Amendment. There was only a limited number of tenants in Ireland whose annual rent amounted to over £150, but all those second term tenants who paid £150 a year were to be excluded. The acceptance of his Amendment would not therefore involve any considerably large transaction, and it was desirable for several reasons. The big farmers of Ireland were the advanced pioneers of agricultural progress, and on that ground, in considering a measure of this kind, the State should favour them. They were a highly respectable body of men and the guardians of social order; and they were also the employers of labour and the purchasers of young stock from small occupiers. It was most important to the small occupiers that they should have a market for their young stock, because, although they were able to breed them, the carrying capacity of their land would not enable them to carry older stock than yearlings, which were not fit for the British market, and, therefore, it was most desirable that the large farmers should not be excluded from the benefits of the Bill. It was the more important that no one could say whether, under this Bill, the landlords would remain in Ireland or not; and, if they did not, it was extremely important that someone should be left to take their place. The exclusion of the large farmers from the operation of the Act would only lead to subdivision. In order to come within the limits of the Act a large farmer would subdivide with his son, and he, therefore, entreated his right hon. friend to agree to the omission of these words. He begged to move.

, who was very indistinctly heard, was understood to say that the exact proportions of this question had entirely escaped the attention of the hon. Member. The full advance of £5,000 would, on the ordinary calculation, enable the tenant to pay a rent of £146, and, in the case of a nominal reduction—even so moderate a reduction—a full advance of £5,000 would enable him to pay a rent of £200 a year. He did not think there were in Ireland more than 20,000 men who held more than £200 so that this Amendment represented only the interest of 20,000 out of 94,000 agricultural holders in Ireland, and those who were best able to take care of themselves; men whom the banks were only too happy to accommodate But there was a much stronger argument against this Amendment, and that was that if these big graziers, who were not, as a rule, employers, were to purchase their holdings through the State, the last chance of carrying out what was the main object of this Bill would be lost. An Amendment appeared lower down dealing with the large tillage farmers, who were extensive employers and a blessing to the community, and in whose case some exception might be made, but as to the central portion of Ireland—Meath, West Meath, and part of Tipperary—the people there had not sufficient land, and the rich lands were in the hands of the big graziers, and if this Amendment were accepted a new system of landlords would be set up which would keep the people out of the land for ever. These graziers were not farmers in any sense of the word, and were not entitled to benefit by the Bill. He hoped, therefore, the right hon. Gentleman would have no hesitation in rejecting the Amendment.

said the hon. Gentleman was obviously in favour of his Amendment, so far as the tillage farmers were concerned. He pointed out that these large grazing tracts were largely held under grazing agreements of eleven months. This Amendment largely concerned not only Ireland but England and Scotland as well. The agriculturists of England and Ireland relied entirely on Irish stock to work their farms. The stock they required was two or three years old stock, and they could not get it if this Amendment was not accepted, and the result would be the ruin of the Irish stock-breeding industry and of small holdings unable to keep young stock beyond yearlings. The grazing farms and big farms therefore had a large economic interest, and it was not so much for the personal interest of the farmers that he urged his Amendment.

said he did not know the view of the Government on this question, but he would suggest they should insert the words, "As amended by this Act," and leave the question of limits to be settled by a new clause. It might be of interest to the Committee to know how the limits got into the Bill at all. There were no limits put into the Act of 1885, their first appearance was in 1888, when the limit was placed at £3,000 to be extended to £5,000 if deemed desirable. That limit was inserted because there was only £5,000,000 to expend under the Act, and it was felt unfair to the small holders that large holders should be allowed to come in and swamp them. But they now had £100,000,000, or as much more as they wanted.

, who was indistinctly heard, said: I do not propose to enter into a discussion of graziers or large farmers, but I take exception to one part of the arguments of the hon. Member for South Tyrone—that in which he said we had £100,000,000, or as much more as we wished. That is a contention which governs, and which must be held to be governed by, what I said in introducing this Bill. There are many Members absent from the House now who were present on that occasion, but on that occasion I urged the House to accept this Bill largely by using financial arguments at very great length, and I laid great stress on certain features of the Bill which would put no rigid, but still certain, limits to the tax we might have to place on the credit capacity of this country. Among these I mentioned that the total amount advanced to any one person would not exceed under this Bill what was permitted under previous Acts—namely, £3,000 with a permissive extension to £5,000. I think it would be wrong on my part, at the very outset of our proceedings in Committee, to depart from the attitude I took up in consultation with my colleagues, and to which I intend to adhere—namely, that I would not accept Amendments which increased the pecuniary obligations of the general taxpayers. That would be the case with this Amendment, but under this Bill you will always be able to get the £5,000 limit in the case of a whole estate when it is desirable. If any difficulty arises over a large farm, rather than not sanction the sale of that farm, of course it will be the usual practice for the sale commissioners to sanction an advance up to the higher limit of £5,000. But then the hon. and gallant Member said more than that ought to be sanctioned because you will force the landlord to retain part of his property which he wishes to dispose of. That is not so. In the case of such a farm outside the concession, but not outside the estate, other arrangements would have to be made to get the additional £1,000 or £2,000. Even if I accept the Amendment it would not meet the difficulty as put by my hon. friend; therefore I must adhere to the limit provided in the Bill.

said that the decision of the Government not only dealt in advance with the case of the graziers, but killed the hope of all tenants of tillage holdings. As he read the Bill, no tenant with any hope of getting a reduction of 25 per cent. would be able to purchase under the Act, if his valuation was more than £95 or £96, so that the real effect of the Government's decision was to exclude from the purview of the Bill practically all tenants of over £100 valuation who expected to get any reasonable reduction of rent. In the case of Lord Lansdowne's estate it was the big men who led the agitation and induced the smaller men to act with them; and they were usually the most intelligent men on the estate. As the Bill was very complicated, it would need a good deal of explanation to make the twenty-five years purchase palatable to the small men; consequently the more the Government excluded the more intelligent of the larger tenants the more unworkable would they make the measure, and the less likely it would be to work smoothly. He was anxious to see the land question settled, even on the high terms of this Bill; it would pay the country to settle it on those terms, and that was why he should support the Amendment. As to the apprehensions which had been expressed about the graziers, by Sub-section 4, holdings on congested estates were excluded from the clause, and that might be construed to mean that the very men against whom the hon. Member for Cork protested, were to benefit by the Bill. The Government had announced a most serious decision, which would cut out Amendments dealing with the dairying and tillage men, and, while not affecting the graziers, would seriously hit the honest tillage farmers. He pressed the Government to retain an open mind on the matter.

thought the hon. Member for North Louth was mistaken in supposing that under the clause the limitation would not apply to the congested districts in the West. Vast tracts of grass land in Tipperary, King's County, Clare, and Roscommon would not be at all congested estates, although they might be within the limits of a congested county. But his purpose in rising was to urge the Government not to adopt any irreconcilable attitude on this question. The limitations required to be considerably increased in some directions and relaxed in others. They were not sufficient to secure that the grass lands, which were essential for the resettlement of the people and the rescue of the population of the West from a condition described by the Chief Secretary as worse than that of Hottentots or Kaffirs, should not pass into the hands of graziers. On the other hand, he entirely sympathised with the view of the hon. Member for North Louth, that tillage and mixed farms, which gave a great deal of employment, should not be excluded from the operation of the Act, and he appealed to the right hon. Gentleman not to insist on a decision which would shut out any future discussion of this interesting and most important point.

regretted the Chief Secretary had taken so firm a stand with regard to a point on which all parties in Ireland were agreed. As the present landlords were disappearing as a class, it was very desirable that they should be replaced by men having amongst them people of substance with a considerable stake in the country. But they would be excluded by this decision. Never had a Bill started under such favourable auspices as the present; the Irish lions and lambs were smilingly waiting to be fed with the same food by the same hand; it would be very unfortunate if, at the very commencement of the proceedings, the Government adopted a non possumus attitude, declaring that under no circumstances would they allow any of these large farmers to become the owners of their land.

expressed his surprise that the right hon. Gentleman should have taken up his present attitude at the commencement of the consideration of the Bill, seeing that, for the first time for a quarter of a century, landlords and tenants had come together with a most earnest desire to bring the fight to a conclusion. It was necessary to abolish the landlords, but nothing would be gained by abolishing landlords who afforded a great deal of employment, if large grazing tracts were to be left untouched. In the case of large farms, on which for years employment had been given, it was undoubtedly desirable that the farmers should be given facilities to come under the Act. He wished to know whether they would have an opportunity of discussing this point later on. He thought it was very unfair that at the outset they should be debarred from considering this question. If the Chief Secretary had made up his mind he might get up and tell them on which points he intended to stand firm. One of the Amendments put forward by the Convention was to bring in large mixed farms, and that was now to be swept aside by the decision of the Chief Secretary without any argument at all.

said he wished to make a suggestion to avoid coming into sharp conflict at this point in the discussion. The Amendment of the hon. and gallant Gentleman was of such a wide and far reaching character that it was impossible for Nationalist Members to vote for it. The Amendment standing in the name of the hon. Member for North Kildare expressed their view, and he suggested to the hon. and gallant Member that he should withdraw his Amendment, upon which there could not be that Irish unity which had been spoken of. It would not be possible to carry out the arrangement he had suggested unless the Chief Secretary accepted the Amendment standing in the name of the hon. Member for South Tyrone. It was a pity that the Chief Secretary on this most vital point had declared himself somewhat prematurely before he had heard the full arguments, and before they had had an opportunity of moving the well considered Amendments which stood on the Paper. By taking this course the Chief Secretary would not be doing anything undignified, and it would enable them, when they arrived at the proper time, to have a full discussion upon the real merits of this question. The right hon. Gentleman had not heard the whole of this case, and therefore it was most unfortunate that he had come to a decision. He did not think this proposal would very largely increase the pecuniary liabilities under the Bill. If the hon. and gallant Gentleman opposite would for the present withdraw his Amendment, and if the right hon. Gentleman would accept the words of the hon. Member for South Tyrone, then this discussion could take place at the proper time. He presented this suggestion as a possible solution of the difficulty, in the earnest hope that it would be accepted, because it would be most unfortunate, if within the first hour of the debate, the Government came to an absolute decision without hearing the whole of the facts.

said that by accepting this suggestion they would be landing themselves into another difficulty. The policy proposed gave great liberty to one class of farmers, but he thought that many hon. Members would be violently opposed to drawing such a distinction, and the limit would have to be increased in respect of all farms under the Bill. He did not think he would be acting at all wisely if he set up another bone of contention between the parties who were now in substantial agreement. The hon. Member for Cork City had stated very definitely his opinion upon the subject of not giving greater facilities in the future than in the past, to those who farmed large grazing ranches. If he adopted the advice of the hon. and learned Member for Waterford he did not think he would be proposing a peaceable and almost unanimous solution, but he rather thought he would be precipitating a very keen debate from those who would not extend the limits in respect of grazing farms. As the hon. Member for Louth pointed out, grazing farms would already be excluded because, assuming that Sub-section A must stand, it dealt with the Land Law Acts which applied, but they would not apply to farms of more than £100 valuation It seemed to him that, underlying all the appeals which had been made, there was an impression that these farms were excluded by the refusal to advance more than £5,000, but that was not the case at all. If a farmer was ready to give £8,000 it was true he would borrow £5,000 on very easy terms from the State, and there ought to be no difficulty in arranging by way of mortgage for raising the extra £3,000. Hon. Members knew that at the present time very large sums of money had been given for these valuable farms in excess of £5,000. None of the arguments he had previously used could cover the ground of having to come to the taxpayer to lend money to people who were wealthier than the landlords. He knew a case in which one man was tenant of seventeen of those large farms and was conducting great monetary transactions. Therefore he could not ask hon. Members representing English constituencies to say that more than £5,000 should be advanced. When it was said that he was adopting an obstinate attitude, he asked hon. Members to consider how far the present provisions of the Bill went. The hon. Member for Louth said that if a tenant agreed to buy upon such terms as would give him a reduction of 25 per cent., he would be excluded from the benefits of this Bill supposing his rent was £200 a year. In such a case he would pay £75 a year, and £2,360 would be advanced. Under the existing law £5,000 could be advanced to facilitate the sale. With regard to the sale of estates, they might take it that the £5,000 limit would be available. In the sale of an estate the limit was £5,000, and not £3,000. In the case put forward by the hon. Member for Louth, £2,360 would be advanced, so that on that scale a £200 rental could be disposed of inside the limit of £5,000. He contemplated many cases in which farmers would be prepared to accept a much less reduction. Take the extreme case, the smallest reduction of 10 per cent., and even upon that a man with a farm worth £100 a year would get the whole of the money advanced by the State. If the tenant agreed to purchase, then it would be £90 instead of £100, and the general taxpayer would advance £2,832, and even that was inside the £3,000 limit. He hoped hon. Members would agree that he had not prematurely rejected this Amendment; on the contrary, he had considered it very carefully, and it would be inconsistent with what he had said if he were to hold out any hopes that he was prepared to extend this money limit, which he thought was large enough to embrace all the transactions which were likely to arise.

said he hoped the Chief Secretary would accede to the suggestion of the hon. Member for South Tyrone. He did not think there was any question upon this Bill more important than the one they were now discussing. By this proposal a great number of tenants would be excluded from the benefits of this measure. He was not speaking of grazing tenants, because if they held the land for only eleven months they did not come within the Act at all. A great number of large farmers had grass farms, and while the great inducement held out to Parliament to pass a comprehensive Act was to abolish dual ownership, by excluding that particular class of tenants they were leaving dual ownership in full force. That appeared to him to be an evil system. He could assure the Committee that great injustice would be wrought if there was not some relaxation of this limit of £3,000 or £5,000, as the case might be. He asked the Chief Secretary not to decide the question now. It had not been fully discussed, and materials had not been laid before the Committee to enable them to solve the problem. By adopting the suggestion of the hon. Member for South Tyrone, and adding the words, "as amended by this Bill," they would afterwards have full opportunity of considering where the line should be drawn. He would be very sorry indeed to have to vote against the Government at the first stage of the Bill, but he would have to do so unless some concession of this sort was made.

said there was a large estate in Kildare, with which he was sure the Chief Secretary was acquainted, which would be more affected by his decision than almost any other property in Ireland. It was the Leinster estate, which was not composed of grass farms. The district consisted entirely of agricultural property, and if the right hon. Gentleman adhered to what he had said, that no amount greater than £5,000 should be advanced in any case, the largest employers of labour in Kildare would be absolutely shut out from the benefits of the Bill. He had no objection that the right hon. Gentleman should limit the amount in the case of grass farms, and even in the case of residential grass farms, but he did object to have large agricultural tenants paying more than £200 shut out from the benefits of the Bill—the men who in South Kildare were of the greatest good to the community. He supposed the Chief Secretary was aware that the agriculturists of South Kildare compared favourably not only with those in any other part of Ireland, but also with those of England and Scotland. In many cases their forefathers came from Scotland and introduced improved methods of agriculture. He hoped the right hon. Gentleman would accept the suggestion of his friend the Member for North Kildare, and leave the question open.

expressed the hope that the Chief Secretary would take time to consider whether the limit stated in the Bill might not be increased to some extent. He was afraid that the right hon. Gentleman had not obtained full information as to all the districts of the country. In the eastern counties, Dublin, Louth, Wicklow, and portions of Meath and Kildare, the proposed limit would have the effect of restricting the operation of the Act to 100 acre farms. The men who occupied farms at a higher figure were those who were most useful, so far as the labouring class was concerned. The smaller farmer tilled the land with the assistance of his own children, and gave little employment except to his own family. The larger farmer employed a large number of people, and he was the very man whose presence in the community was most desirable. Of course the Chief Secretary said that man could buy his farm. He understood that one of the objects of the Bill was to prevent Irish tenant farmers from buying under conditions which would compel him to mortgage the land, but under the proposal in the Bill the purchasing tenant must mortgage the land to the landlord or some one who was prepared to lend him the money. How would that work? Suppose the case of a landlord who was desirous of selling the whole of his estate, and he found that he had to deal with men holding 100 acres or more who could not borrow the whole of the money under this Act. What would the landlord do if he wanted to sell the whole of his estate? He had only to arrange with the tenant as to the conditions on which he would sell. The tenant would still have the landlord as mortgagee. He appreciated the difficulty of dealing with this question, but still he thought if the right hon. Gentleman considered the question in all its bearings he would see that the limit in the Bill was considerably too low. It was most desirable that the holders of these farms of over 100 acres should not be excluded from the operation of the Act. He hoped the Chief Secretary would still see his way to make some modification of the proposed limit. He was sure that he spoke the feeling of the great body of the Irish people when he said that they considered the limit too small.

said it was unfortunate that the Chief Secretary should refuse to listen to the voice of united Ireland in this matter. The Committee were engaged at present in the operation of terminating the most pernicious system of dual ownership of land in Ireland. That was the professed object of the Bill, and yet they were going to make these large and important exceptions. Who were the men to whom they were going to deny the opportunity of taking advantage of the benefits of the Bill? Why, they were the men, as had been pointed out by the hon. Member for South Kildare, whom they ought to desire to benefit—men who in many cases were large employers, and who conducted operations on the land in an entirely satisfactory way. Was it wise or necessary to force the continuance of the existing system upon this large and important class of men? He ventured to think that if the Government insisted on the limitation they would in many cases stop the sale of the whole estate. Take the case of a man who had fifty tenants; four or five of whom were outside the limit. Was the landlord going to sell his estate to those tenants and have five separate occupiers in the middle of the estate who would still be tenants subject to the objections of dual ownership and of the rent-fixing system. In such a case the landlord would probably say: "If I cannot sell the whole of my estate, I will not sell any of it." In that way there would be a material diminution in the benefits to be derived from this Bill. He appreciated the position of the Chief Secretary, who said that he was bound to protect the interest of the British taxpayer, but there was really no risk in allowing these men to borrow. Were they not the very men who would be most certain to pay their instalments? By bringing these men within the benefits of the Bill they would satisfy the desires of practically the whole of the Irish representatives, while they would impose no real extra liability upon the British taxpayer at all. He hoped the Government would remove what otherwise would be a most serious objection to the measure.

said that as the representative of one of the constituencies which would be chiefly affected if the Chief Secretary adhered to the position he had taken up, he desired to join in the protest which had been made against the limit proposed in the Bill. The Chief Secretary had warned the Committee by saying that he would not give way, no matter what might be said. He must say, for one, that that remark did not indicate the spirit in which he had hoped the Government would come to the discussion of the Amendments on the Paper. He was afraid if that spirit was maintained the result would be a different sort of discussion of the clauses of this Bill from what he himself personally would desire. The right hon. Gentleman had also said that he did not wish to plunge into a discussion as to the claims of large graziers and large tillage men, but he must be perfectly aware that there was an Amendment on the Paper, in the name of the hon. Member for North Kildare, which raised that question, and he was greatly mistaken if, notwithstanding what the right hon. Gentleman had said, that Amendment would not be proposed. The Amendment would be proposed and it would be supported by almost every Irish Member in the House. The reason the right hon. Gentleman had given for not acceding to the Amendment now before the Committee was really absurd and ridiculous. The right hon. Gentleman had represented that the change which would be made in the financial proposals of the Bill by the Amendment was one of vast magnitude and one calculated to justify Members in saying that the Government had broken faith with the British people. It would not be any financial change at all to let in the large farmers who used their land on a mixed system and who employed a lot of labour. That could easily be tested from the figures which the right hon. Gentleman himself had given to the House. This was not the time to discuss this question in detail, but it could be shown that if the Amendment were adopted it would add 10,000 to the number of purchasing tenants in Ireland. It was preposterous for the right hon. Gentleman to reject all Amendments of this character, because, forsooth such an enormous additional risk would be placed on the shoulders of the British taxpayer! That excuse was ridiculous. On the other hand, if the right hon. Gentleman did not accede to the demand of the Irish Members on this question, some of his recent speeches in Ireland, and also in England, in regard to Ireland and the land question, would bear a very different construction in the future. The right hon. Gentleman had spoken in deprecatory language of the stream of emigration from Ireland, and had expressed the hope that that stream would soon be stopped; but by opposing the concession demanded by the Amendment he would increase that stream; because these large mixed farms would not continue to employ such large numbers of labourers as in the past if the advantages given to the small farmers were not also extended to them.

thought it was very desirable that the Government should enlarge their scheme. He knew graziers who were as real bonâ fide farmers as the men who cultivated thirty or forty acres. The right hon. Gentleman spoke of his duty to the people of England, but as an English Member, and one interested in Ireland, he was certain that there was no one in England who had laid any stress on this question of £3,000 or £5,000. Nobody had thought about it at all. As the hon. and learned Member for York had pointed out, these 3,000 and 5,000 pounders were the best men to whom the English Government could lend their money. He presumed that what the right hon. Gentleman was thinking of was the bonus which would go to the landlord, but in the case of very large farms some kind of arrangement could be made for adjusting the difficulty. The hon. Member for Waterford had proposed that this question should be postponed. He agreed that a great deal had to be thought of yet, and the certainty of litigation was going to be a very serious hindrance to the working of the Bill. The right hon. Gentleman should leave a loop-hole for the reconsideration of the matter.

said the right hon. Gentleman appeared to be afraid of breaking faith in any way with the British taxpayer in regard to this matter. The British taxpayer did not seem to be very much concerned about it. What the British taxpayer was interested in was to see this question settled; and anything more or less added to the loan and the bonus was not of enormous importance. What was of enormous importance, however, was that this Bill should be the means of settling the Irish land question, and that no portion of the loan should be repudiated. From the standpoint of the British taxpayer he had been very much struck by a remark made by the hon. and learned Member for Louth, viz., that some of the farmers who would be excluded by the £5,000 limit under the Bill as it at present stood, were most intelligent men, who would be leaders of opinion on the estates where they were tenants That was a matter of great importance. When such farmers found that the £5,000 limit would not be sufficient to allow of their farms being purchased, or that outside the £5,000 they would have to make arrangement, by no means so favourable as in the case of the farmer just below the £5,000 limit, that might possibly turn the balance and lead to the sale of that estate falling through. He suggested that the Amendment should be withdrawn in the meantime, and that this most essential point should be raised at a later stage, on an Amendment of which notice had been given by the hon. Member for South Tyrone.

said that this was a matter on which the Irish Members were united. They did not wish the large farmers in Ireland to be excluded from the benefits of the Act. They knew the dire effect it would have on Ireland, and the heartburning it would produce. He had received many letters, some from gentlemen who were not of his own political Party, urging him to try and bring these large farmers within the purview of the Act. Why should the gentlemen farmers of Ireland, whose land was worth more than £5,000, be debarred from the purchase of their farms and from the joys of ownership? The right hon. the Chief Secretary would forgive him for saying that he had not been quite fair in, so early in the debate, bringing in the matter of the British taxpayer. The gentlemen farmers of Ireland were as honourable men as the gentlemen farmers of England or Scotland, and would fulfil their obligations to the very letter. The right hon. Gentleman knew how the ordinary tenant farmers had behaved. Out of 76,000 purchase transactions there had been only two bad debts; and it was not likely that the gentlemen farmers would be remiss in paying their debts. If this concession was not given to them there would be discontent. As to the British taxpayer, he did not stand to lose one farthing by the transaction, and when £250,000,000 had been given for the War in South Africa, why should they not have a few millions for Ireland? England overtaxed Ireland every year £2,500,000 beyond her proper due. The arguments which applied to other Land Acts did not apply to the present Bill. They were to relieve the poorest of the poor; but this Bill was to effect a pacification throughout Ireland, and to bring about a social revolution. Therefore any person who belonged to the tenant class should not be excluded. The Chief Secretary had not commenced the discussion in the conciliatory manner in which the Irish Members were determined to carry it on. He asked the right hon. Gentleman to have an open mind on the question, because he knew the discontent, the heartburning, and the disappointment which his declaration would produce.

said he did not think the attitude taken up by the Chief Secretary was at all in keeping with the attitude which he displayed on the Second Reading of the Bill. Knowing the evils of dual ownership, he would ask the right hon. Gentleman to consider the arguments put forward with such great force by the hon. Member for York. So far as Ulster was concerned, unless the Amendment was accepted the Act would not be operative over at least half of that province. In an estate of say 200 tenants, thirty would be over the limit. Was the landlord to sell to 170 tenants, and keep up his estate office, retain his agent and bailiffs to collect rent from the remaining thirty? In his opinion the clause would be fatal to the working of the Act in many districts. Clause 49 showed how important the Government regarded the mortgaging of farms in Ireland. It provided that a farmer should not be in a position to mortgage his holding after having purchased it without the consent of the Land Commission. But now the right hon. Gentleman stated in the debate that the only remedy for the large farmer was, in addition to mortgaging his farm to the Government, to borrow the balance required for purchase, from a bank or a money-lender. In his opinion, that would be fatal to the working of the Act so far as the large farmers were concerned, and it would prevent landlords selling to the smaller tenants. Further, the hon. and gallant Gentleman who moved the Amendment pointed out that the Bill as it stood would have the effect of sub-dividing holdings between father and son in order to enable the farmer to take advantage of the Act. He would ask the Chief Secretary if he could not accept the Amendment of the hon. and gallant Gentleman, to accept the Amendment suggested by the hon. Member for South Tyrone. If neither of the Amendments was accepted, he would be prepared to support the hon. and gallant Gentleman in the division Lobby.

said he understood that the object of the Government was to get rid of dual ownership of land in Ireland, and as far as possible to bring peace and prosperity to that country. It was now, however, proposed to leave a certain quantity of land in the position it was at present. The point of view of the British taxpayer had been referred to, and he would ask the right hon. Gentleman to pause and consider what that was. If the Government were willing—and he for one was perfectly satisfied that they were right in taking that course—to advance money for the purchase of small holdings, and were satisfied that the money would be secured and would be repaid, then they ought to be doubly satisfied with reference to the money to be advanced for the purchase of larger holdings. He was most anxious that this Bill should put an end to the differences between landlord and tenant in Ireland; and if his hon. and gallant friend went to a division he would be prepared to support him.

said that the Government could not have considered this matter with reference to Clause 17, which provided that where an estate was purchased by the Land Commission and tenants on the estate, to the extent of three-fourths in number and rateable value, had agreed to purchase their holdings, no proceedings to fix the fair rent of any holding on the estate should be taken. The one-fourth, therefore, would not be allowed to purchase, nor would they be allowed to have fair rents fixed. That was a position which the Government never intended to take up, and it was clear that some Amendment would have to be made. Unless the Irish Secretary was fettered by some invisible bond, and was obliged to take his sailing directions from a right hon. Gentleman who was not now present, he would suggest that the question be postponed. Did the right hon. Gentleman imagine that when all the Irish Members, the representatives of both landlords and tenants, were agreed, that the clause would be allowed to stand as it was in another place? Did the right hon. Gentleman wish that those large tenants would, for the first time in their lives, exclaim "Thank God we have a House of Lords"?

said he was glad to hear the Chief Secretary talk about the British taxpayer, and he hoped the right hon. Gentleman would resist the Amendment which was being very strongly pressed upon him. He did not complain of hon. Gentlemen opposite; but it seemed to him that some hon. Gentlemen representing English constituencies had a very curious idea of how such constituencies should be treated. It was very hard to bring home to the British taxpayer the liability he was incurring; and he trusted that as the Bill proceeded in Committee, the British taxpayer would wake up to the burdens which he was taking upon his shoulders. He hoped that the Bill would emerge from Committee very considerably altered in the direction of limitations; and he trusted that on the present occasion the Chief Secretary would show himself firm and keep to the determination he had announced.

said he did not at all agree with the hon. Gentleman who had just spoken. He thought the Chief Secretary might rest assured that as far as the British taxpayer was concerned, the only failure with which he would reproach the right hon. Gentleman would be the failure to make a settlement of this matter. They had gone a great deal too far already in reliance on the benefits which they hoped to purchase, even at the cost of some possible sacrifices, to shrink now from making an addition to the Bill which was agreed to by both parties, and which was necessary to make it symmetrical and satisfactory. The first essential of the Bill was that it should satisfy both parties in Ireland, and give a fair start to the regeneration of the agricultural population. That would satisfy the British taxpayer; but a great many hon. Members on that side of the House, if they found, on the Third Reading, that the measure was not likely to receive the assent of both the great parties in Ireland, would not hesitate to vote against it.

said he had had an opportunity of addressing his constituents on the Bill; and he found it was a matter on which they were prepared to act generously. Although it was true that the British taxpayer would become responsible for the whole of the purchase money, yet it was only the landlords' interest that was being purchased; and in a great many cases, especially in the case of a small holding, a great part of the property was the creation of the tenant. Therefore the amount for which the British taxpayer would be liable would in many cases be less than half the total value of the holding. That was an aspect of the case which he had put before his constituents, and they were quite satisfied that the security was good, and that the responsibility would not be by any means serious. The Amendment, if accepted, might enlarge the scope of the transaction by something like 20 per cent. But even if it did, he hoped the Chief Secretary, having regard to the great public object to be achieved, would not shrink from it.

said there was no greater argument in favour of the right hon. Gentleman, the Chief Secretary trying to meet both sides of the House than that used by the hon. Member for Stoke, who had pointed out to the Committee that there could be no risk. That was absolutely clear, and for the sake of the general harmony of the Committee he appealed to the right hon. Gentleman to give way on this point, which was not one that affected the principle of the Bill.

said the Committee certainly ought to arrive at some decision. He had given his ground for arriving at the decision he had, and if the hon. and gallant Gentleman pressed that matter to a division he would be obliged to vote against him. Personally he thought that was the proper course, but in the absence of the British taxpayer he would not perhaps be justified in taking a course which might preclude the question being considered on a future occasion. It was possible that it might be held that having passed the words in the Bill as they at present existed, any change would be of a monetary character, and that the question could not be reopened. Although he thought there was a good deal to be said for not drawing largely on the funds of those best circumstanced in Ireland, still he should allow that consideration to germinate in the minds of hon. Members opposite, and discuss the matter at a later stage of the Bill. That, however, could not be done except by the hon. and gallant Member withdrawing the Amendment, when they could put in the words of the hon. Member for South Tyrone "as amended by this Act."

congratulated the right hon. Gentleman on the suggestion he had just made, and pointed out that the hon. and gallant Member in withdrawing his Amendment would not be in any way prejudiced.

said he should withdraw his Amendment with great pleasure. He would just like to say he was extremely glad the right hon. Gentleman had taken the course he had, and he hoped the debate which had taken place would have a good effect.

said the Amendment he now proposed to move raised the most important question, in the opinion of the Irish Members, in Clause 1, and, in fact, the most important question in the whole Bill. It raised the question of zones of limitation. He was extremely glad he had been called upon to move this Amendment in the face of similar Amendments on the Paper, as it was necessary that there should be a clear-cut issue on which to take the decision of the House. The universal opinion on the tenant side in Ireland an opinion which was largely shared by a certain class of landlords, was that the zone limits of this Bill were absurd and iniquitous. There were two limits. There was the limit on the minimum price and the limit on the maximum price which the tenant was called upon to pay before he could take advantage of the Bill. Take the minimum price first. Some Gentlemen were in favour of the abolition of both these limits, and one of the Amendments on the Paper before him proposed to abolish both, but the opinion of the tenants of Ireland was that so far as the limitation of the minimum reduction and the maximum price was concerned it ought to be retained. In the Bill it was fixed at 10 per cent., but the tenants thought that was too low, and that it ought to be raised from 10 to 25 per cent. It might be asked why not abolish these limits altogether and leave the law as it was at present? In the law as it stood there was no limitation, but, on the other hand, the duty was thrown on the Land Commission to hold an inquiry into the value of the land in order that they might be able to say that the price at which it was bought was not too high, and that the holding was a good security for the loan. In such a case there was no need of a limit. But this Bill was based on a different principle. This Bill was based on the theory that the value of the holding should be abolished, and that the Land Commission should be compelled to sanction the loan. In those circumstances it was almost necessary that there should be some limitation of the maximum price the tenant should pay, otherwise if he paid too large a price the security of the State would be impaired or destroyed. Therefore the convention of the tenants of Ireland advocated this limit. He therefore did not ask for its abolition, but a small enlargement of the limitation. But he saw no reason whatever for the other limitation. As the Bill stood, no tenant could purchase his holding unless he paid at least the minimum price mentioned in the Bill. Although landlord and tenant might agree to a price as fair and reasonable, it would not be possible to carry out the purchase unless the price complied with this limitation. Could it be seriously argued that under a so-called voluntary Bill the State should step in and upset bargains on the ground that the landlord was selling his land too cheaply? Irish landlords, by their ability, keen business instincts, and power of organisation and resistance, were well able to take care of themselves in this matter, and it was ludicrous to say in a voluntary Bill that the State must have power to step in and prevent a landlord selling his land at a price which he considered was fair and just. The restriction was not wanted for the protection of the State, because the lower the price the tenant paid the better the security of the State. Furthermore, not only was the restriction absurd, but it might work manifest and gross injustice. Everybody knew that all over Ireland there were holdings which were not worth anything like twenty-two years' purchase of the second-term rents. That was admitted by the framers of the Bill, because they had provided that the limitation should not apply to congested districts or congested estates, which were defined as being estates on which one half of the tenants were under a certain valuation. Scarcely an estate could be found on which there were not holdings so poor and small that a price of twenty-two years purchase would be an absurdity. Under the operation of the Bill either those holdings would be excluded from any proposed purchase, or the unfortunate tenants would be tempted into offering an extravagant price, with the result that the security of the State would be imperilled, if not destroyed, and the whole future of this question endangered. He had not heard a single sound argument in favour of the proposal from any point of view whatever. He had anticipated that the Chief Secretary's reply would have been that the Commissioners would put these holdings together and call them congested estates, but it was clear from his declaration that the right hon. Gentleman had no idea of the Commissioners holding one or two such holdings to be an estate within the meaning of the Bill. On the Chief Secretary's own admission, therefore, something would have to be inserted to protect these poor holdings. He had shown that this limitation was not in the interest of the State and the taxpayers, and that it was manifestly against the interest of the tenant and against common justice. Was it in the interest of the landlord? He could not conceive why the Irish landlords as a body had not joined heartily in the demand for the abolition of the limitation. The only defence of it that he had heard was a reference in passing by the Attorney-General for Ireland to the effect that it was necessary to protect the landlords from undue pressure to sell at a low price. Such an argument would not stand examination for a moment. If a landlord pleaded the provision of the Bill as a reason for not selling at, say, eighteen years purchase, the tenants would at once reply that under the Act of 1896 he could declare a reduction of his existing rents for the purpose of the sale, and thus come within the limitation. From that point of view, therefore, the limitation was absolutely worthless. But it had been argued that the abolition of the limitation would lead to renewed agitation and conflict between classes in Ireland. If he really believed that, it would have a serious influence on his mind, but he believed exactly the opposite. If the Government abolished the limit, and left the landlord and tenant free to bargain, there would be no undue interference, and the bargaining would go on amicably all over the country. But, if they retained the limit, the maximum reduction would inevitably be taken by the people as the minimum they ought to ask, and all over the country there would be an organised attempt to obtain that as the minimum reduction. He was convinced, therefore, that, in the interests of the landlords themselves, as well as of the peace of the country, and in order to destroy the chance of a renewal of class conflict, this limitation ought to be abolished. Possibly it would be said that the tenants' representatives agreed to this at the Land Conference. The Report of that Conference was the result of a compromise. Each side gave up something for the sake of peace. The tenants' representatives originally proposed there should be a minimum but no maximum reduction, but in order to prevent the absolute breakdown of the meeting, and in return for concessions on other points, they gave way on this. For his own part, if the Chief Secretary had embodied the Conference Report in full in the Bill, he would have upheld it, and he believed the Irish tenantry would have accepted it; but it was childish and not honest to pick out one portion, and, rejecting others, declare that the tenants had agreed to it and were bound by it. He certainly did not feel himself bound by one portion of the Report, when other portions which had been conceded by the other side in return were struck out. It was impossible to exaggerate the importance of this Amendment. If the Chief Secretary could see his way to make a concession on this point, there was no earthly doubt that on almost every other part of the Bill they would be able after argument to arrive at a satisfactory arrangement. But if the right hon. Gentleman adopted a non possumus attitude, he feared it would be beyond the power of the best friends of the Bill, and the policy it represented, to make the measure appear attractive or satisfactory to the people of Ireland. He felt most keenly upon this subject, and he asked the right hon. Gentleman to weigh carefully what he and others had said on various sides of the House. The fate of this Bill depended upon these discussions. He did not mean so much the passage of the Bill, because the right hon. Gentleman had the power to pass it in spite of anything they might say; but he was speaking more of what would happen in the future in regard to whether this Bill was going to provide a practical settlement of the Irish land question, and whether it was going to carry out the hopes cherished by them during the last few months, or whether it was going to be one more of the many failures of British statesmen to deal satisfactorily with this question. He earnestly commended the Amendment he had now the honour to move to the favourable consideration of the Committee.

said he agreed with the hon. and learned Member for Waterford that upon the question of Amendments to Clause 1 depended, he would not say the whole future of the Bill, but undoubtedly to a very large extent its successful working in Ireland. They ought not to forget that this was a Bill to facilitate voluntary purchase in Ireland. The real force behind the Bill was that notable Conference in Dublin, which achieved the remarkable result of uniting the owners and the occupiers of the soil in Ireland. He joined with the hon. and learned Member for Waterford in regretting that the Government did not accept the terms drawn up in the Report of that Conference. In March last the Chief Secretary said that in view of the recommendations of the Conference Report and other recommendations from authoritative sources he was willing to provide that the landlord might make his own arrangement if they fell within the policy of the Bill. Hon. Gentlemen opposite had not complained that the provision in the Bill, which provided for a 10 per cent. reduction, had been raised to 15 per cent. The hon. Member wanted to know why they objected to sweeping away altogether the lower limit. He wished to know why landlord and tenant should not be allowed to agree for a lower price than the minimum in the Bill. A good many answers might be given to this point. The hon. and learned Member ought to consider something about the remainder man. He had been told that the great insurance companies in England had several million pounds invested in Irish securities. They knew how necessary it was to provide reasonable security against the undue depreciation of a huge amount of capital invested like that. They ought to prevent the limit for sacrificing his estate, and they should remember that under this Bill no notice whatever was given to the remainder man. One had to bear in mind the necessity of looking after the interests of the remainder man upon this question. He thought they did get roughly a Court of uniformity under this Bill, and they prevented the sum being made very much lower than others. If they had a great fluctuation between those annuities they might have fresh sources of discontent in Ireland. Those were some of the reasons which made these limitations necessary. As to whether the limitations proposed were the best he had some doubt. He believed the Conference terms were far more favourable to the landlords and the tenants than the terms under this Bill. He thought if the Government had risen to the full height of a great occasion this measure would have been far more satisfactory to the great bulk of the Irish people, and would certainly have worked without the slightest injury or danger to the English Exchequer, and would have been far more satisfactory than the measure they had before them. People were apt to forget the difference between second-term and first-term rents. He would give the Committee the particulars of a farm in Ireland. The old rent was £150 a year. The first rent was fixed in 1881, and showed a 20 per cent. reduction, which reduced it virtually to £120. The second-term rent in 1896 gave a reduction of 18 per cent., which reduced the rental to about £100. Under this clause, if it is passed, the highest price the landowner could get was obtained by allowing the tenant a minimum reduction of 10 per cent. on the second-term rent, and charging him at £90 for his annuity. That was in accordance with the terms of the Bill. The purchase money worked out at £2,832, and if they added to that sum 12 per cent. all round it made a total of £3,172, which, if invested at 3¼ per cent. would yield about the present income of the farm. This was about the most favourable case which could occur under Clause 1. The hon. and learned Member for Waterford would see that if this Bill was to be accepted in Ireland by the land-owning classes it must be framed in such a way as to induce those owners to sell who had not hitherto been willing to bring their estates into the market. The present Land Purchase Acts had come to a standstill, not from the unwillingness of the tenants to buy, but from the reluctance of the owners to part with their estates upon what they considered to be unfair terms. If this Bill was to be the great measure which they all hoped it would be, it must bring in those landlords who had hitherto stood aloof. He hoped the Chief Secretary would not lightly abandon the position he had taken up. He had not brought forward an argument which weighed with a large number of people, namely, that these limitations would prevent agitation or undue pressure being placed on tenants by organisations, or the landlords themselves. He was not inclined to think that was a contingency which, under present circumstances, was not likely to occur. He preferred to base his argument in favour of the retention of these limitations on the ground that they were essential to the satisfactory working of a voluntary Bill, and that without them they would not get co-operation between the occupying class and the landlords in Ireland, whose help in the working of the measure was essential to success.

hoped the Committee would not complain if the debate upon this measure should occupy a little more time than they expected. He could assure the Committee that the debate on Clause 1 would go a long way towards settling the whole Bill. Everything else would be much simpler and much easier. He would have been glad of a Motion to leave out the clause and leave a free and open market as that market existed now under the Land Purchase Acts. But if the Bill was to be amended it must be amended on its own frame, and therefore they were shut up to a consideration of the Bill as it stood. The Chief Secretary had very properly referred to the difficulty of dealing with the subject, at least as regarded finance in the absence of the British taxpayer. The greater part of that afternoon they had had an Irish Parliament, and so far they had got on very well indeed. If the Chief Secretary was anxious about the British taxpayer a few moments ago in regard to the limit he would desire a much larger audience of the representatives of the British taxpayer on the present Amendment. These limits affected the State seriously, and they affected the tenant and the landlord. He had beside him a volume, not a very popular one, of the Dublin Gazette. People did not often look at it, but it contained a mass of information on this question well worth study. He took from the Dublin Gazette of April 3rd—so that it was not ancient history—a decision given by the Irish Land Commission on the application of the Protestant Bishop of Limerick, the right Rev. Dr. Bunbury, in regard to the sale of his estate. That estate consisted of nine holdings and the rent was £632, something like an average of £70 for each holding. This was not a piece of bog in any part of Ireland, but rich substantial land and rather large farms, as they would say in Ireland. The Bishop arranged for the sale of these nine holdings on his estate at eighteen years purchase and the result came to £11,444. The Land Commission sitting in Dublin refused to sanction the advance of £11,444 on the ground that the farms did not give adequate security for that advance. The minimum which the Bishop could receive under the Bill was twenty-two years purchase of these second-term rents—that was the worst that could happen to him—which would bring him £13,904. He could get, if the tenants agreed, twenty-eight years purchase, £17,696. The Land Commission refused to sanction £11,000 on the ground that these holdings were not security for that sum, but the minimum he could get under the Bill would be £13,000 and the maximum £17,000, and he would get his bonus in addition. Where was the British taxpayer now? He wanted hon. Members now to bristle up a bit. If the Chief Secretary was going to appeal to the British taxpayer, he wanted to know what earthly defence there was for a proposal of that kind. Now he came to North Down. Lord Clanwilliam had an estate there. He had exercised the right which the Land Purchase Acts gave him to sell a single holding. The rent was £16 and the money to be advanced was £320. The Land Commission refused to sanction an advance on the ground that the security was not adequate. What would Lord Clanwilliam get under the Bill? The least would be £352. If the Land Commission felt itself unable to advance £320 on a single farm, how were they to meet the British taxpayer when, without any investigation whatever, they were compelled to pay at least £352 for that farm? He would take the Plummer estate in county Limerick, and he referred to the Dublin Gazette of June 5th. This estate was not a congested estate at all. He did not think there were many congested estates in that county. The landlord and the tenant agreed to sell and buy at a little over seventeen years purchase, and the purchase money was £15,961. The sanction of the Land Commission was refused on the ground that the security was inadequate. Would it be believed that under this Bill, without any inspection at all, the least this man would receive would be £17,908, and the highest would be £22,792, with the bonus in addition? He wanted the British taxpayer to take an interest in this matter. They were now coming to close quarters. Now was the time for his hon. friend the Member for Stoke to get his war paint on. He said that there could not be any possibility of defence for proposals of this kind. They could go over the Dublin Gazette and find case after case such as he had put now. These were not solitary cases. He asked the Chief Secretary a Question the other day. He asked how many applications had been refused since the Land Purchase Acts came into operation because he security was inadequate. Under the Acts of 1885 and 1888, 1,286 applications had been refused, involving £467,872, on the express ground that the security was inadequate, and under the Act of 1891, there were 789 refusals for £175,154, or in all, during the seventeen years the Acts had been in operation, 2,075 cases had been refused for the gross sum of £643,026. The real truth of the matter was this, and the Committee had better realise it, that there had always been a danger of tenants in arrear with rent being pressed to give more than they ought to give for the land. Up to the present the British taxpayer had had a judicial inspection of the holding; he had got the report of the Land Commission as to the security being adequate; but that now vanished under Clause 1. The taxpayer had no defence whatever against the weakness of the tenant and the pressure of the landlord. He maintained that these limits opened up the gravest question which they would have to discuss. During the Second Reading of the debate the right hon. the Chief Secretary, when speaking of the question of the limits, said that the Land Conference was responsible for the suggestion. Now, that was not so. He entirely agreed with his hon. friend the Member for Waterford on that point. He would, however, give a little more in detail what the Land Conference actually proposed. He would not enter into the question of what the tenants' representatives desired. His hon. friend said that when the Conference met the tenants were in favour of a minimum reduction of 20 per cent. on the second-term rents; but that was not the finding of the Conference. A proposal was made by Lord Dunraven that the reduction on the second-term rents, or the fair equivalent, should be not less than 15 or more than 25 per cent., taking the reductions as in the Act of 1896. It was a curious thing that when that decision was quoted the last part of the sentence was invariably left out. The Government Bill was based on the idea of the Land Conference; that was on the idea of a limit, but it altered every figure, and wholly ignored the proposals for a decadal reduction. In altering 15 to 10 per cent. it lessened the security of the British taxpayer for the advance. That was the first difference made, and he repeated that if they had not the security of inspection they had nothing between the landlord's pressure and the tenant's weakness.

What is landlord pressure?

said that where the tenant was in arrears and likely to be evicted pressure could be put upon him to purchase his holding at a price that he ought not to give; and the fact that more than 2,000 cases of proposed purchase were rejected by the Land Commission showed what the pressure was. The maximum reduction of the Conference was 25 per cent., but that was altered in the Bill to 30 per cent. Clearly it was imagined that that was to the advantage of the tenant; but how would it operate? The Government were extending the tenant's privileges and advantages, where in ninety cases out of 100 they would be of no use, because the majority of the tenants would not get more than a 20 or 25 per cent. reduction of second term rents. Very few landlords, unless on uneconomic holdings, would sell at more than a 20 or 25 per cent. reduction, therefore the tenants had no advantage in increasing the Conference 25 per cent. to 30 per cent. They struck at the State assuredly in altering 15 to 10, and they struck at the tenant in altering 25 to 30. He maintained, therefore, that it was not fair to quote only one part of the Conference Report and leave the other out. He came now to the question of ignoring the decadal reductions. Let them see how these operated. There were 80,000 second-term rents fixed. If one of these holdings were taken with a rent of £100, that rent was reduced in 1882 by 20 per cent. In 1897 the tenant again went into Court and had another 20 per cent. taken off the £80 rent, and that brought the rent down to £62 instead of £100. They commenced the purchase operation on a £62 rent, and suppose a tenant got a mean reduction of between 20 and 30 per cent. he would be in the position of paying an annuity for sixty years of £50 instead of £100. That man would be placed in a tolerably good position; but the Conference Report put him in a still better position, and with no loss either to the State, the landlord, or anybody else. The Conference Report proposed that a tenant at the end of ten years should get a 10 per cent. reduction, and at the expiration of a second term of ten years another reduction, and, at the expiration of a third term of ten years, a further reduction. All that was done by the Act of 1896. It had this enormous advantage; it was a great help to the tenants if bad times came, to have a lessening annuity to pay; and it was an enormous security to the State. Who had asked for the limits in the Bill? He had heard from the hon. Member for Bradford that day, for the first time, what he considered to be something like a real reason for these limits. The suggestion was that a limited owner, an owner who had very little interest in his estate might sell at a low rate, and so set the price for the whole district, his object being to get hold of the bonus. He was not saying that that was not a good object; he thought it was very likely to happen. There were a whole lot of "scallywag" landlords in Ireland who would sell their holdings for half nothing, accept the bonus, and bolt with the proceeds. That was a thing which ought to be guarded against. But was not that a small object, indeed, compared with the price which the British taxpayer was going to pay? Beyond and above everything else, the Committee ought to devote its attention to these limits. Who asked for them? He challenged the Chief Secretary to show a single document from the Landowners' Convention—he had carefully read all their literature for years; he was impregnated with it—asking for a minimum price. He could perfectly understand that if this were a Bill for the compulsory sale of land, it would be absolutely necessary to put in a minimum price; but a minimum price in a voluntary Bill was a contradiction in terms. The whole thing meant a system of preferential tariffs for the Irish landlords, and he objected to all preferential tariffs. He objected on another ground. The first limit of 10 per cent. or 15 per cent. Has not only defensible, but, when they had abolished the inspection of estates, it was absolutely necessary. Judicial rents were all very good, but they were not infallible; and it was little enough that the British taxpayer should have a 15 per cent. reduction before the advance was sanctioned. But there was no logical defence for the maximum reduction of 30 per cent. It was so absurd and outrageous that, if the British taxpayers were properly represented in this House, it would be impossible to carry such a proposal. They were told that the maximum reduction was to prevent pressure being put on the landlord. That was the suggestion of his right hon. friend the Attorney-General for Ireland. What pressure had been put upon the Irish landlords to sell during the seventeen years that the Land Purchase Acts had been in operation? He would prove that the pressure had been all the other way. The cases which had been refused showed that pressure had been put by the landlords on the tenants to agree to terms that could not be sanctioned. If no pressure were put on the landlords in time of war, when the landlord and the tenant never met except in a Land Court, or some other Court, and when his right hon. friend the Attorney-General never met the tenants except in a Crimes Court, how could pressure arise in the milleninum that had now arrived. The truth of the matter was that the tenants could not put pressure on the Irish landlords. The landlords were in possession of the soil, and the Bill was not compulsory. His right hon. friend the Attorney-General represented, as he himself did, an almost purely agricultural constituency. Did his right hon. friend anticipate that in any part of the North of Ireland any undue pressure would be put upon a landlord to sell his estate at a price at which he ought not to sell it. With a voluntary Bill the tenants could exercise no pressure whatever that he was aware of. Why should the Committee assume that the old war was going to break out again? Why should a limit be put in the Bill which meant, "Thus far you shall go and no farther." Above all, why should the same terms be exacted for an agricultural slum as would be exacted for good land. He held that the Irish landlord was doing uncommonly well, and did not need protection. He was getting an enormous price for his land, and a large bonus in addition. He would be materially aided in the cost of transfer, and he would get payment in cash instead of in depreciated stock. There was no logical defence for the maximum reduction; and he hoped the Government would be induced to withdraw it.

said he sincerely hoped that his right hon. friend the Chief Secretary would not accept the Amendment, or anything like it. The hon. Gentleman who had just spoken had only a very cursory knowledge of a great part of Ireland. He had no doubt scurried through other parts of the country.

said he represented an Irish constituency, which the hon. Gentleman did not.

said he did not see the point of that observation. The hon. Gentleman, and also the hon. Member for Waterford, said it was not fair to take the Conference Report, the reason being that the Conference was composed of men representing a variety of conflicting interests, and that it was very difficult to arrive at any conclusion at all. But the Conference did arrive at a conclusion; and he maintained that the Government was, for the very same reasons entitled to adopt the principle in the Bill, because the same difficulty of arriving at a conclusion was equally great in this House. In expressing that hope, he echoed the universal demand of the Irish landlords that the Government should adhere to the zone principle. The hon. Member for South Tyrone spoke as if every landlord was a devil, and every tenant an angel. As a matter of fact, landlords and tenants were very much of a muchness in looking after their own interests. With reference to pressure being put on the landlords, did the hon. Member or the Committee never hear of groups of tenants, oftentimes under outside leadership, coming to the agent or the landlord, and saying, "We want to purchase, and we will only give you so much, and pay 4 per cent. on the purchase money." The pressure would be now still worse when the percentage was reduced. He entreated the Committee, when landlords were spoken of, to picture the great proportion of the landlords of Ireland as men who had by their own industry, or by the industry of their fathers or grandfathers, invested money earned in business in what they conceived to be the best security—the land of their own country. Those were the men who had to be considered; and it was mainly for their protection that the minimum and maximum reductions were required. The hon. Member for South Tyrone punctuated almost every sentence of his speech by a reference to the interests of the British taxpayer. It was a new thing to hear the hon. Member talk of the interests of anyone except a tenant. It was new zeal on his part to talk about the British taxpayer. The hon. Member referred to instances where landlord and tenants had agreed to sale and purchase, and in which the terms had been refused. He himself had in his mind a particular property, the landlord of which was driven to sell to the tenants, the tenants agreeing to pay seventeen and a half years purchase. Four years afterwards, the Land Commission honeycombed the agreement by allowing no tenant to pay more than sixteen years purchase, and some only paid twelve years purchase. One tenant who had agreed to pay seventeen and a half years purchase, after four years, had his price fixed at thirteen years purchase. His original rent was £17, and his annual instalment after purchase was only £9. He recently sold that holding for £250. In a case of that kind the interest of the State would have been sufficiently safeguarded, had he purchased at twenty-one years on the original rent. The hon. Member for South Tyrone had left out of the question the position of middlemen, the leaseholder, the encumbrancers, the mortgagee, and the remainder man, all of whom had to be considered. Were they going to make it mandatory on the Land Commissioners to agree to any price which the landlord and tenant chose to agree to, no matter how it extinguished the rights and interest of all others concerned. The hon. Member for South Tyrone had said he did not remember a single passage in the Report of the Convention which dealt with the maximum and minimum prices. That might be true in the letter but not in the spirit. Both the Landlords' Convention and the Tenants' Conference arrived at practically the same conclusion that the landlord should receive so much cash as would yield him at 3 per cent. his former income, and that fixed the minimum price of the land at once. The universal opinion of the landlords of Ireland was that if the Government gave way on this question of zones the Bill would be wholly inoperative, and trouble would arise in the south and west of Ireland which would defeat the object they all had, which was to come to a compromise and settle the difficult and complicated question of the land in Ireland.

said that up to the present not one of the 101 representatives of Ireland had said one word against the Amendment. The objections to it had been confined to two Irish gentleman who represented English constituencies. The hon. and gallant Member assumed to speak for the universal opinion of Ireland, and laid stress on the fact that unless these limitations were preserved the result would be conflict with the tenant. Would there be no possibility of that conflict if these limitations were fixed? It was almost impossible to imagine why the landlords should object to the Amendment. The fact was that the retention of these limitations would be an incentive to, and would absolutely force, combination, and keep up the whole evil conflict and agitation in Ireland. If the Irish tenants were to be restrained within the limitations which would unquestionably worsen their position by two or three years purchase, the inevitable result would be that they would be driven to go for the highest maximum price the law laid down as a reduction, whereas if the Amendment were agreed to, and if the law only laid down the one standard of maximum price, anyone who knew the people and their present position knew that the tendency would be that they would be content with exceedingly little more than the maximum price laid down in the Act. In the great majority of cases there would be the strongest disinclination for anything like strife and conflict and the whole thing would be arranged on moderate terms. If the British taxpayers were anxious to keep out bad blood and agitation in Ireland, they would not hesitate a moment about giving up these limitations. The hon. and gallant Gentleman's attitude was part of the old vice of not trusting the people. No people in the world understood their own interests better than the Irish, and the moment fair terms were offered to them they would at once endeavour to get out of their horrible position and to improve their holdings, but if they were confined within these limitations their worst traits would be brought out, and they would be forced to fight for the greatest limitation. Everybody was agreed that the State could not be the gainer by the tenants paying excessive rents; on the contrary men who were seduced by this Bill to make an improvident bargain would be a burden and a danger by-and-bye to the State The landlords who had got their money, and had got out of the partnership, might not care whether the Bill succeeded or not, but the State would have to deal with these men in future years, possibly years of severe distress or some terrible national calamity. There was no danger of general repudiation, but if the tenants were forced into improvident and impossible bargains the State might easily find honest poverty much more difficult to deal with than any conspiracy of repudiation. For the sake of the future peace of Ireland it was of the utmost importance these limitations should be removed. Under the Bill even the poorest tenants might be seduced into paying twenty-eight years purchase, and before ten years had elapsed they would be in a state of bankruptcy. Possibly not many would make so foolish a bargain, but why should the temptation be placed in their way? Hon. Members could not realise what a powerful attraction the prospect of any reduction of rent was. Large bodies of tenants would risk anything to get some immediate relief, and the danger of these improvident bargains would apply principally to the poorest and most defenceless class of the community. The definition of the new congested estates would leave at least 100,000 of the poorest tenants in the country isolated and unprotected, to become victims of this minimum price. It was an extremely narrow definition, entirely depending on what the Estates Commissioners chose to consider as mountain or bog land, and in any case applying to a very small number of estates. In the richest parts of the country, side by side with the better-off tenants, would be a mass of these poor people; the weakest would go to the wall; they would have to do as their richer neighbours did, with the result that they would soon be in arrears, they would be sold up, and their farms would be grabbed. By excluding tenants on congested estates the Government themselves confessed that this minimum price was dangerous and indefensible. It would place a legal premium upon the creation of a new, and possibly more troublesome, Irish difficulty. As to the second portion of the Amendment they admitted that for the protection of the State, as well as of the tenant, it was as necessary to retain the minimum reduction as it was to abolish the minimum price. Unless that were done a minute inspection and valuation of over 300,000 holdings would have to be made, with the result that generations would probably pass before any general transfer of land was effected. While, with a view to the more expeditious working of the Bill, he recognised the necessity for this minimum reduction, he strongly urged that the existing minimum reduction of 15 or 20 per cent. would be totally inadequate for the protection either of the State or of the tenant. Experience had shown that the better off a man was the better the bargain he would make. The poorest men were almost certain to make the worst bargain the Bill would allow. In the matter of rent fixing, out of 330,000 judicial rents 140,000 were not fixed in Court at all, but were dictated in the rent office by the landlord or his agent, and submitted to by the tenant under the pressure of arrears or some other element of compulsion. The consequence was that Mr. Gladstone's Act, while it had done wonders for the better-off tenants, had done next to nothing in the way of a radical remedy for most of the poor tenants. The same thing had happened in the case of second-term rents. Of the 79,000 which had been fixed, about 34,000 were fixed, not in Court, but in the rent office. The result was that where tenants fought the thing out in Court they got reductions averaging 23 or 24 per cent., while the poor people who were wiled into so-called voluntary agreements got only 19 per cent., and in Connaught the reduction went as low as 16 per cent. Much the same thing would happen under this limitation. The poor people in arrears, desperately anxious for any relief, would be induced to make the worst bargain possible. The Bill would be the salvation of the landlords. As many of them as pleased would be enabled to remain, while to the remainder the Bill would give at least five more years purchase than they could obtain under the Ashbourne or Balfour Acts. He did not grudge them those generous terms so long as they did not insist on the tenants being two or three years purchase worse off than under the Ashbourne Acts. That was the crux of the whole situation. As the hon. Member for Bradford had stated, if the recommendations of the Land Conference had been adopted in their entirety, and the additional £8,000,000 bonus given, the Bill would have gone through without a single night's friction. The trouble was that a section of the landlords were attempting to use the advantage given them by this minimum price to extort from the tenants the £8,000,000 which the British Treasury refused to bear, and that, from the Irish point of view, was simply intolerable. If the landlords were willing to accept the tremendous advantages they had been offered owing to the magnanimity of the tenants, which gave them at least five years additional purchase above what they could have got under the Ashbourne Acts, and if they were willing to accept from the tenants the prices which had ruled in the open market for the last twenty years, he thought the landlords would make a superb bargain. Beyond that he did not think the intelligent tenants in Ireland would go. Irish tenants had no interest whatsoever in bidding one pound more for their land than had been given in the open market for the last thirty years. The prospects of agriculture in Ireland had become gradually worse, and so had the prospects of the landlords until the Land Conference showed them the daylight. If once the magnificent terms now open to the landlords owing to the tenants' hearty desire for peace, were rejected, and if the Land Conference bargain should unhappily break down completely, the tenants would have no alternative but to return to their old methods, and then the landlords' interests would not again be a very saleable commodity. Those who honestly desired to be the friends of the landlords ought to bear that fact in mind. As to any attempt to inflate the price of the landlords' interest he agreed that the landlords had not tried to do that at the Conference, but if they did try to do it the tenants would have no alternative but to make efforts to restore the land market to its natural state. In justice to the landlords of Ireland he was bound to say that up to the present there had not been any considerable attempt in that direction, and he hoped there would not be. The whole question came to this—let the Irish people have the land substantially on the Ashbourne Acts terms, and then the whole trouble in Ireland would be over. He said that to-night with more confidence than ever, but he was bound to add that if the landlords were ill-advised and were not content with the splendid advantages that had been given, and with being at least five years purchase better off than under the Ashbourne Acts, if they insisted upon attempting to make the Irish tenants two or three years worse off than they would be under the Ashbourne Acts, or than they would be if this Act was not passed at all, then the thing would be certain to end badly both for the landlords and the tenants. This Amendment represented the unanimous opinion of the people of Ireland, and of 100 out of 103 Irish representatives. Therefore in proposing this Amendment his hon. friend spoke in the interests, not only of the people of Ireland, but also of the vast mass of the British taxpayers. If the right hon. Gentleman would only put down his foot upon this question and say that he recognised that they ought not to fetter the tenants any more than they fettered the landlords, and if he would recognise that this wretched minimum price was only really demanded by one very small section of the Irish landlords, who did not love this Bill any more than they loved the Irish people, and who did not represent more than one-tenth of the Irish landlords; if the right hon. Gentleman in this matter would only yield to what was the unanimous opinion of Ireland and to what was in the interests of the British taxpayers who understood this question; if he would yield upon this question he agreed with the hon. Member for South Tyrone that the rest of the progress of this Bill would be a very smooth and easy matter, and he would lay the best foundation for the complete success of this Bill in Ireland by trusting the people and not putting upon them the almost intolerable disability which this clause would inflict.

said he did not think there could be any division of opinion upon the Opposition side of the House when they saw how this provision squared with the rights of the British taxpayers on the one hand, and the rights of the Irish tenantry on the other. It appeared to him to be a very strange proposition that His Majesty's Government should propose a hard and fast line in regard to the price for every variety of Irish land. That seemed to him to go to the very root of the entire situation. There were tracts of land in Ireland which any landlord or tenant in Ireland would say that to pay twenty-two years purchase of the present rental to acquire it would be a perfect outrage, and yet that was what was proposed as the minimum under this Bill. The hon. Member for Tyrone gave various illustrations, and two of them he would venture to repeat. He mentioned two cases, one from Limerick and one from County Down. In the Limerick case there was an agreement for a sale at eighteen years purchase, and the entire figure was £11,444. Under the scheme of this Bill if they insisted upon the minimum the sum total would be not £11,444, but £13,904. In this case four years purchase would be added by this Bill to what the landlord and tenant were willing to agree upon. In the County Down case £320 was agreed upon, or twenty years purchase, and under this Bill the sum would be £400, or, in other words, the figure would be raised from twenty to twenty-two years purchase. What he wanted to know was why should Parliament commit itself to a situation antagonistic to what landlords and tenants were willing to arrange between themselves? They had to consider the finances not merely from the point of view of the Irish tenant, but in this way, that unless the Irish tenant was put squarely upon the land and made to live under conditions of peace and contentment and comparative prosperity, to that extent the security of the British Exchequer was impaired. How did the British Exchequer stand? The two cases referred to showed eighteen years and sixteen years purchase, but the Land Commission declined to sanction that transaction, and why? Because they said there was not adequate security for the State. If there was not adequate security under the existing law to deal with these transactions; if there was not good security in eighteen and twenty years transactions to justify the Land Commission, what was there to justify the Government in imposing a minimum of twenty-two years purchase, thus impairing the security of the British Exchequer. The right hon. Gentleman had said that the Irish tenants must be placed in a position to work out their own salvation. The people asked to have the Ashbourne terms, because these were the terms which had been arrived at after investigation by competent tribunals throughout Ireland. Was it exorbitant for the people to say, "Start us with the privileges we have been accustomed to in times past?" That was denied apparently on account of some superior force at the back of the proposal. The superior force was to operate so cruelly that this beneficent measure would be withdrawn from every class of tenantry unless they would pay more in order to take advantage of the Act than they would have to pay under private arrangement without the Act. He knew perfectly well what the land hunger was—how these men were driven to accept hard terms. He was glad to hear the expression of opinion that there would be a long continued attempt to make the best of these terms, however harsh, but the British Exchequer had got to be considered. They were to put these men in a financial situation in which they would be placed on a proper economic position, and in which they would be able to make a living and to work out their own destiny for a long period of years. If we started on a false and usurious basis we would find strained relations between the British Exchequer on the one hand and the tenant on the other, which he for one did not contemplate with much satisfaction. He put this to the Chief Secretary, it was not merely a settlement of terms here. Under this Bill there was no compulsion, but, if these terms were refused, and if the landlords of Ireland forced the tenants of Ireland to make a bargain so tight, then the tenantry would ask the assistance of this House to make the Bill a good deal tighter for the landlords than was expected. If terms were forced on them the tenants, too, might have the right in all the disturbed districts to use the weapon of the Land Commission which was now granted under Section 5 only to the owner, and to start by that operation a system of compulsion wherever a majority of the tenants on the estate demanded a settlement and that the peace in a particular quarter should be secured thereby. He saw, however, difficulty in the cardinal proposal of the Government. This proposal to make a hard and fast line seemed to him inconsistent with every interest involved. It was inconsistent with the land itself, which varied so much—which yielded only eight to ten years purchase in some districts and thirty years purchase in others. It was inconsistent with the tenants' claim that they should have their historical position under the Ashbourne Acts. It was inconsistent with the British Exchequer, because it was landing us in the position of financing a transaction which on voluntary lines, apart from this Bill, would never have been attempted by landlord or tenant. It was a matter for the taxpayers of the United Kingdom, and he for one, here and now, entered his definite protest against a financial scheme which would set a class of tenantry on their feet in Ireland in a tottering instead of a firm and settled position. He thought that the scheme of the Government, by drawing this line, was faulty and harsh, and that in the end it might prove injurious.

said he wished to join in the appeal to remove the limits stated in the Bill. The working of the Land Purchase Act in County Kerry showed that a great danger would be obviated if these limits were removed and the tenants allowed to come to a fair and free bargain. As a young politician, he could not understand why the landlord section in the country should be allowed freedom to do as this Bill proposed, in regard to the sale of land, and to get a bonus for doing it, while the tenants, who had as much interest in the land, and whose future would be connected with it, should be limited between certain points. As had been pointed out by several speakers, the poorer class of tenants in certain districts were to a large extent dependent on the intelligence of the larger and better class. It would be easy for the larger class of tenants to give a larger price for their holdings, and it might be supposed that they, acting on the usual dictates of human nature, would be inclined to argue the poorer classes into bargains which, before many years were passed, they would have reason to regret. He knew some cases where purchases had taken place under the Ashbourne Acts, and where the tenants were now regretting their desire to become owners, because they had been induced to give prices for their holdings which rendered it hard for them to maintain themselves. He instanced the case of land on the estate of the Earl of Kenmare, all round the town of Killarney, where owing to different conditions they found different classes. Terms which would be quite reasonable and proper in one parish, where there was good land, would be quite unjust and unbearable in another where the land was mostly bog and moorland. The highest reduction obtainable under this Bill might be reasonable where there was good land, but it might be totally inadequate for the poorer holdings. The tenants were only too anxious to become owners of their holdings, and the Irish representatives would be slow to do anything to kill that honest and laudable desire. That desire, however, was so strong that they might be induced to enter into bargains which were unsuitable from every point of view. The Government ought to stand evenly between the landlords and tenants. There were landlords who might be inclined to enter into fair and reasonable bargains with their tenants, but there were others who would utilise the limits within the Bill to excuse themselves from entering into reasonable bargains, in the hope that the tenants would agree to small reductions in order that they might become owners of their holdings. He knew cases in Kerry where small farmers, side by side and similarly circumstanced, had to pay rents as widely different as it was possible to imagine.

, continuing his speech, contended that whether this question was looked at from the larger or the smaller point of view these limitations ought not to be retained. On large estates the difference in the condition of the various tenants was enormous, and nobody but the tenants themselves could say what were fair terms. The landlords in Ireland had vast power, which could be exercised most successfully under the Bill as it at present stood, when dealing with the tenants who were not financial experts and who desired to become the owners of their holdings, to induce them to give a price without considering whether it was such a price as they could pay. Every argument which had been adduced showed the price fixed in this Bill was greater than the average rate that had been paid by the tenants under any previous Act. In the county of Kerry several purchases had taken place of estates equal to any in the country, and the highest price had never exceeded eighteen years purchase and the price had dropped as low as 12·9 years. Under the present Bill tenants would have to pay twenty-two years purchase, a most extravagant price compared with that paid by their neighbours, and that would result in a feeling of unrest which would culminate in another land agitation. It was desirable, therefore, that the maximum limit of reductions should be swept away. The minimum limit should be retained because the State must have some protection. If the maximum limit was removed the landlord would not be compelled to sell, whereas on the other hand the tenant would be able to say what price he was able to purchase at. This Bill dealt with the first-term, second-term, and ordinary tenants as if they were all the same class, but as a matter of fact they were very differently situated. He could not see the use of this limitation. Why not give the tenants the opportunity of deciding for themselves in the matter of these reductions? In the best interests of the government of the country it was desirable that the Government should commence to display to the Irish people some sign that they were willing to conciliate Irish feeling. This Bill was looked forward to with hope and impatience, and the Government should show that they desired to conciliate the Irish people. He was an extreme advocate of the tenants in this matter, and under the Bill the and lords were getting a good deal more than he would have given had he had the power, but the Irish Party had come to the conclusion that there ought to be some give and take in this matter, and they were willing to give up everything to secure peace for the Irish people, and if those were the signs of conciliation displayed by the extreme advocates of the tenants surely there should be similar signs of conciliation on the other side.

said every person in Ireland who wished to live in peace in Ireland would echo the sentiments of the hon. Member. The hon. Member was very much mistaken if he supposed that the landlords objected to the zones. He had not come across a single landlord who was not distinctly friendly to the Bill, but at the same time, he had not come across one who desired to get rid of the zones. It was desirable that they should be retained. With regard to each class of tenants receiving separate treatment he would point out that in all the recent legislation passed for Ireland, Ireland had been treated as a whole, and all these estates had been attempted to be placed on the same footing. It did not matter that one estate was particularly bad land, and another was good land—that had been taken into account in the fixing of the rent. If the 1881 Act had had any success at all it was because the land had been assessed at its real value, therefore the separate treatment of each individual estate seemed to be absolutely unnecessary. The Bill did not treat all estates equally. In the treatment of estates there was a very wide margin in this Bill between the 10 per cent. and the 30 per cent. reduction. Many landlords thought the limitation was too wide, but to say that the treatment of all estates in Ireland was the same was an entire mistake. The Amendment itself was divided into two separate parts; one portion increased the minimum reduction, and the other abolished the maximum reduction. In both cases the tenant was to be favoured. The tenant, in every case, was to be in the position of being able to say to the landlord, "You must give me this or that reduction." But the Committee must bear in mind, in considering this question, that the whole success of the Bill depended on the landlords working in friendly accord with the tenants. If the Bill was made so that it would not work, nothing would be got out of it. In considering this Bill he had never lost sight of the British taxpayer, who was, in settling this question, making an excellent bargain. The hon. Member for Plymouth had said that all that the people of England required was to see that this question was really settled. It appeared to him that the taxpayer was perfectly safe. If he got the minimum reduction he got his consideration for the advance he was making. He got the security of the landlords' interest in the land, and he got the tenants' interests. Nobody suggested that the rents now fixed were the full rents of the holdings. It had never been suggested that the tenant could not let his holding for more than he was paying, and the difference between the amount paid and the rent at which the holding could be let, plus the landlords' interest, would be the State's security. In the working of this Bill he did not think this Amendment would affect an enormous number of holdings in Ireland. Bargains would not take place either at the maximum or the minimum, but at some intermediate point, and, therefore, in the bulk of the cases, it would be no use to the tenant to increase the maximum reduction. But what was clear on the part of the landlords was that a certain number of people who did not care about their property, and who would like to be relieved of it, might sell at a low rate and establish a kind of precedent, and that would be a dangerous thing. In his opinion, the maximum reduction was no benefit to the landlord. He did not argue this matter from the point of view of the landlord alone, but from other points of view as well. From his own point of view he should prefer that the only sum mentioned in the Bill would be 10 per cent.; that the bargain should commence on that basis and be decreased downwards. The landlords of Ireland, as a whole, distinctly thought that the mention of 30 per cent. was an advantage to them. There was a much more important reason for retaining the zones. If they were once abandoned, the position between the landlords and the tenants would be so vague that he himself did not anticipate that they would come to any agreement at all. The great advantage of the zones was that they pointed to both landlords and tenants what the effective limit of their power was; it did not leave it perfectly indeterminate as to what was to be sold and bought. Again, under the Bill, as framed, the landlord and the tenant might settle the matter between them. The landlord might say, "I will give you 15 or 20 per cent.," and the tenant would say, "I agree." Now they knew that the Irish landlord was very seldom absolutely unencumbered; there were either mortgages or family charges, and in addition to that there were, in a large number of cases, reversionaries. In other words, the landlord was only a tenant for life. One of the great advantages of the Bill would be that these persons need not be consulted in negotiating the price. If the zones were destroyed altogether, and the maximum reduction taken away, it could not for one moment be said that the price to the tenant could be fixed in the absence of the mortgagee, or the chargee, or the remainder man. They would have to bring in all these persons to say whether or not they approved. It might be said, would not these persons have to come in at any rate? The answer was, No; because the reduction being a certain agreed sum, the mortgagee, chargee, and remainder man got all the benefit out of the property which could be got, and so the transaction could be completed without their presence. Another argument hinted at was what might be called the De Freyne Estate argument. That was, there might be a certain number of people who had no particular interest in the property not being sold at a very low rate; and while people on the estate would be benefited, the whole turmoil raised on the Dillon Estate would be repeated. It was not desirable to bring about that state of things. What was wanted was to make Ireland a comfortable place to live in, and he held that the Bill would not work well unless they brought it into conformity with the wishes of the landlord, as well as the wishes of the tenant.

said he wished to make his protest once for all against the doctrine of a minimum price. His hon. friend who had just sat down had made the best defence of the minimum price during the discussion, but it was a very bad one at the best. The hon. Gentleman had a great interest in Ireland, and though his relations with the Irish people were of the best, he did not speak in the House with the power and force of an Irishman. He sat for an English constituency, and however great his experience of Irish questions might be, his sentiments on Irish questions were simply his own. He pointed out that no Irish Member had spoken a word in favour of the minimum price. There was a spectre at every feast, and the two learned Gentlemen who alone, at the moment, represented the Government on the Treasury Bench, were silent. He had seen it stated that the Irish law officers were in favour of a minimum price, and that if that doctrine were destroyed they would resign office. He would be really as much amazed if either of these learned Gentlemen resigned their situations as if an earthquake shook Primrose Hill. The Attorney-General and the Solicitor-General for Ireland made contradictory speeches and used contradictory arguments in favour of the minimum price. The Attorney-General had criminal combination on the brain, and he said that if there was not a minimum price there would be a criminal combination to reduce the price. The members of the Estate Commission could not join with the tenants in a criminal conspiracy to reduce the purchase money, or force an unfair bargain on the landlords. The right hon. and learned Gentleman had made a speech to the Commercial Unionists — what a delightful expression — and defended the minimum price exactly on the ground on which he assailed it. The hon. and learned Gentleman said that unless the minimum price was retained, there might be a spendthrift landlord anxious to get the bonus who would get rid of his estate at any price; and that the price he received would rule the market in the district. Why on earth should it not rule the market? Under the old system of the Ashbourne Acts the land itself was security for the repayment of the advances, whereas, by fixing a minimum price, the British taxpayer became the security. The landlords were to get independently of the minimum price £12,000,000, while they only got £3,000,000 sterling for carrying the Union, with a few peerages thrown in by way of consolation stakes. He wondered if the Chief Secretary had considered the case of the British public. They wished this Irish Land Question to be settled finally, once and for all; but the British public would not consider it settled if there was any sense of wrong on the part of the Irish tenant. He was no particular protector of the British Exchequer, but he believed that the British public who had given £250,000,000 for the South African War would give a few millions for the settlement of the Irish Question. The leading objection to a minimum price was that it was utterly contrary to the principle of a voluntary Bill. The bonus to the landlords exceeded by 60 per cent. the compensation given wherel and was taken for railways, or other public improvements. Another objection to a minimum price was that while it inflated the price it diminished the security for the repayment of the advances. It would also prevent the landlord from settling the transaction in a way satisfactory to himself. Everyone knew what an enormous bait an immediate reduction of 20 per cent. would be to the tenant; but there might come changes—competition with America, a fall in markets, possibly preferential tariffs—and the tenant would find he was bound to his price for ever. That might lead not to independence and solvency, but to bankruptcy, and bankruptcy meant that the price must be paid by the British Government. He was not anxious for the British taxpayer, but for the Irish tenant; and he thought they should not bribe the tenant into making a bargain which he might bitterly repent of. He could not help thinking that fixing a minimum price was intended and designed, and whether intended and designed or not, it would have the effect of minimising the disparity between the tenant purchaser and the ordinary purchaser. He could prove that this Bill without the minimum price at all, embodied the landlords' proposal of last October as far as they could be embodied in a voluntary Bill. The Chief Secretary for Ireland had been constantly drawing comparisons between this measure and the Bill of last year. Could the Chief Secretary give them any voluntary Bill in which there was a restriction in favour of one party as regarded bargain and sale? The minimum price was suggested in the Act of 1891, but in that case the legitimate conditions of sale and purchase were invaded, and provision was made that a purchasing tenant could not obtain for the first five years an annuity less than twenty per cent. of his original rental. Of course the surplus would go to the Sinking Fund. From the year 1891 to 1896 purchase decreased, and the moment these irritating conditions ceased the purchase of land increased in Ireland until the South African War commenced. That showed that anything like a restriction in reference to the annuity to be paid restricted land purchase. He did not think it was fair between man and man to give to the 2,000 Irish landlords not merely £12,000,000 of money, but also by a legislative contrivance mulct the Irish tenants to the extent of a sum of £28,000,000 more. This was not fair either to the tenants or to the Irish landlords, because it made them the creatures of privilege, and was calculated to give a fallacious peace to Ireland, and would not settle the Irish question. The Ashbourne Acts should be left as they were, and the Irish landlords ought to be content with £12,000,000, cash down, which would enable them to pay off their mortgages with public funds and renew them at about half the rate of interest. Besides this, the landlords were getting five years purchase beyond the ordinary market price of the moment.

said if anyone who had never read a line of this Bill had heard the speeches of hon. Members opposite, he would have come to the conclusion that this was a Bill to confer enormous benefit upon the landlords and no corresponding benefit upon the tenants. Nothing could be further from the truth. If a sale were carried out upon the most favourable possible terms the landlord would receive less than he would now; and if the sale was carried out on the terms most unfavourable to the tenant, he would have to pay less than at the present time. The second-term tenant was already paying 40 per cent. less than his original rent, but under this Bill he would get from 10 per cent. to 30 per cent. reduction upon his rent, and at the end of twenty-two years he would become the owner of the land. Was there any tenant in this country who would not gladly accept such terms? Even the hon. Member for South Tyrone was obliged to admit that the second-term tenant, who paid in purchase instalments 20 per cent. less than the second-term rent, was in an exceptionally favourable position. He asked the Committee to affirm that these limits were really necessary for the successful working of this Bill. The existence of a limit ensured the fixing of a price without delay and expense, and without the tedious and troublesome investigations which had to take place under former Acts. Under the former Acts it was open to the landlord to make any bargain he liked with the tenant, but it did not follow that that bargain was necessarily carried out, because it had to come before the Land Commission for sanction. He thought that was a very great disadvantage, because it meant delay and often a refusal to sanction sales which would otherwise have taken place. Again although the landlord and tenant might have come to terms they had still to give notice to the other parties interested in the estates, with the result that the sale could not be sanctioned without enormous delay. It was one of the leading features of this Bill to avoid all that delay, and to ensure that when a price was fixed within the limits the sales should be carried through and sanctioned at once, and carried through automatically. In the majority of cases in Ireland, the man who was called the owner and who made the bargain was not the absolute owner at all but a strictly limited owner. Often there were mortgages on the estates, and unless they had the limits fixed in the Bill, it would be necessary to resort to the old procedure and give notice to the mortgagees and everyone else interested. One of the great advantages of this Act was that by ensuring a reasonable price within the limits laid down they ensured the sale being carried out without delay. The question had been asked why they did not adopt the procedure under the Ashbourne Acts? The answer was that there was no reason whatever why a landlord and tenant who desired to utilise the existing machinery should not do so. He had listened to the speech of the hon. Member for South Tyrone with the most profound dissatisfaction. The hon. Member had spoken about the number of years purchase, but that had nothing whatsoever to do with the question so far as the tenant was concerned. The question which affected the tenant was how much reduction he would get upon his present rent? It was most unfortunate that hon. Members professing to lead public opinion in Ireland should divert the tenant from the real question to a wholly erroneous and false issue as regarded the number of years purchase. The hon. Member for South Tyrone said that eighteen years purchase was enough.

said he did not say whether it was enough or not.

said he was afraid he did not understand the views of the hon. Member, but in another part of his speech the hon. Member admitted that a tenant who obtained a reduction of 20 per cent. on his second-term rent was in a favourable position. If a tenant purchased on these terms it would mean twenty-five years purchase for the landlord. He thought, therefore, he was justified in calling the hon. Member as a witness that twenty-five years purchase was a reasonable amount. He wished to point out that eighteen years purchase would mean a loss to the landlord of something like 42 per cent. of his income. The hon. Member for South Tyrone signed his name to a certain proposal in the Conference Report the very basis of which was that the landlord should get such a sum of money as if invested would bring him in 90 per cent. of his former income. He should like to know if the hon. Member still adhered to that view. The hon. Member appeared to suggest that the price might in some cases be too large, because there would be landlords' pressure on the one hand and tenants' weakness on the other; but he seemed to remember speeches of the hon. Member in former days the staple of which was not landlords' pressure, but tenants' tyranny. He was very sorry to have entered upon controversial channels, because he was extremely desirous that they should come to an amicable arrangement. [An HON. MEMBER: You are not doing much to promote it.] But for his part he did not see where landlords' pressure was likely to come in; he thought pressure was rather likely to be exercised upon them than by them.

regretted the line of argument adopted by the last speaker, and said the House had something more to deal with on the present occasion than the opinions or changes of opinion of individual Members. The clause with which this Amendment dealt was the keystone of the present Bill. The Bill purported to be a voluntary measure for transferring the land from the landlords to the tenants by voluntary agreement. For his part he believed that without the element of compulsion the effort would never be a complete success. But still it would go some way towards achieving that which they were all anxious on both sides of the House to see—viz., that the land question should once and for all be settled in Ireland. Hon. Members, of course, wished to deal fairly with both landlords and tenants, and they would naturally ask why, in a voluntary Bill, there should be what were called zones. Why should there be any restriction on the volition of the landlord and the tenant. He thought the hon. Member for the City of Waterford—the leader of the Irish Party—was to be congratulated on the moderation of his Amendment retaining the minimum reduction and the maximum price. Why did he retain these? In the interests of the tenants and in the interests of the Exchequer, it was necessary that there should be a maximum price fixed by Act of Parliament, because in the absence of any inquiry or investigation such as was made under the Ashbourne Acts, there would be no security that the tenant in his anxiety to become the purchaser might not undertake a burden which he was unable to discharge. That was the reason for pressing for the minimum reduction or maximum price at 15 per cent. in the case of second-term rents, and 25 per cent. in the case of other rents. Though it might operate harshly on the tenant it was only fair to the House of Commons and to the public because they must recollect that one of the peculiarities of the Irish tenant always had been his anxiety to get possession of the land. That led to the exorbitant rents which had originally necessitated Land Reform in Ireland, and unless there was some restriction that land hunger would lead to the tenant in his anxiety to become the owner, offering a price which, is cooler moments, and when he came to farm the land, he would find was so high that he could not possibly pay it. Therefore, it was only right, although it might be inconsistent with the idea of voluntary purchase that the maximum price should be retained. He did not gather that any hon. Member who had spoken had objected much to that part of the argument, indeed the hon. and learned Member for York hardly touched upon it, although it was the very gist of the Amendment. This was a subject which it was not easy for any but Irish Members fully to understand. He would like very much to impress upon the House how much the hearts of the Irish people were set on having this question put into a proper train for settlement. He well knew that if the Bill should pass in its present shape it would wholly fail in what he believed was the intention of the Government; it would, in fact, prove to be still-born. In his own constituency—North Tyrone—the tenant farmers were by no means enamoured of the Bill as it stood, and he had received many representations strongly urging him to object to the first clause. Indeed, he was not sure that he had authority to support the very moderate Amendment of the hon. Member for Waterford. It so happened that in that part of Ireland there had been, under the Ashbourne Acts, several estates sold at rates varying from sixteen to seventeen years purchase. These purchasers had all the benefits of the decadal reduction, and they were in a far better position than purchasers would be under this Bill, and the result would naturally be that would-be purchasers would realise the difference, and the object of passing this Bill would be altogether defeated. Care must be taken that the burden accepted by the tenant was not too heavy for him. As this Bill now stood without any provision for decadal reduction the tenant purchaser undertook for sixty-eight and a half years to paya fixed immutable rent, immutable no matter how prices fell or how bad the times might be. He would have no means of escape from his obligation except by surrendering his holding. He should not, therefore, be allowed to agree to pay an extravagant price. He had the utmost respect for the landlords, but they could not expect, when their income was to come from gilt-edged securities, to get as much as they nominally did from their rents under the old system of landlord and tenant. They were to get a bonus as an inducement to sell, a bonus which would go into their own pockets, irrespective of the remainder man and encumbrances, and with which the tenants had no concern whatever. The great point was the capacity of the tenant to bear the burden for sixty-eight and a half years, and, seeing that the Irish Party had shown much moderation in this proposal, he should give it his hearty support. There was no similar limit imposed under the Ashbourne Acts and he failed to see any reason for introducing one here. If this clause were retained in its present form the Bill instead of being received with pleasure and satisfaction by the tenants of Ireland would only lay a new foundation for increased discontent and dissatisfaction with the policy of the British Parliament in dealing with the Irish land question.

regretted to hear the concluding words of the last speaker, for if the result of passing this measure was to be a recrudescence of the agitation which had existed for so many years in Ireland the British people would feel inclined to withdraw the consent they had given to it as a measure of conciliation. A very considerable cost was to be incurred under the Bill, and the electors of this country had only consented to bear it because they believed it would be a good thing for this country as well as for Ireland that a settlement of the land question should be brought about. But if at every stage in the discussion they were to be told that the Bill would not be accepted by one party to the bargain, they were not likely to go very far in the way of amicable discussion. Now he had no interest, direct or indirect, in Irish land, and he, like most English people, supported the measure on the ground that there had been a concordat between the landlords and tenants of Ireland. But it was complained that the Government were not carrying out that concordat in its entirety. He would like to point out that even if that were so the Government, on the other hand, had not released the landowners of Ireland from the most onerous clause of all and had not permitted them to make the best terms they could with their tenants irrespective of the interests of the State. The first governing condition of the operation of the Bill was that there should be compulsory loans of public money. The second governing condition of the Bill was that its operation should be automatic. If public money was to be compulsorily loaned to persons who made a certain class of agreements, that class of agreements must be defined. It was conceded on the other side that the agreement must be so defined that the landlord should not be able to impose upon the tenant such a rate of purchase as would extinguish the economic security of the State. What was the landlord to get in exchange? In order to placate the British taxpayer, the one party to the bargain agreed to the minimum of reduction, and, in return the other party conceded the maximum of reduction. If the mean of those limits of reduction was preserved in the Bill, it was impossible to say there had been a departure in spirit from the agreement arrived at in the Conference. If the alteration of the minimum from fifteen to ten was a possible advantage to the landlord, the shifting of the maximum from twenty-five to thirty was in favour of the tenant. The Amendment, however, proposed to retain the limit against the landlord, while abolishing that against the tenant. Freedom of contract in the matter of Irish land had long passed away, and one of the objects of this Bill was to restore it. But this was not a question of freedom of contract: it was a question of fair dealing with the landlords, the great body of whom were not in favour of this maximum of reduction being withdrawn. That was a practical objection to the Amendment. It was said that if this provision were retained the tenant would be unable to negotiate freely with his landlord. But the very men who advanced that argument declared that the landlords had such control over their tenants that they would be able to compel the purchase of their land at the maximum price. If the landlords had that overwhelming influence over the tenants the absence of the upper limit would not matter, because the tenant, being at the mercy of his landlord, would be compelled to buy at the minimum reduction. On the other hand, it was said that the maximum of reduction would operate as the minimum on which the tenants would insist. Would not the striking out of the maximum reduction be taken as a tacit assertion on the part of the Government that the minimum of price was too high, and that the limits of the bargain ought to be outside those now proposed? Again, would it be a fair thing in the case of settled lands to omit the maximum of reduction? The fact could not be lost sight of that, for the sake of public peace, an astounding bonus was being offered to a large class of persons in Ireland to induce them, in many cases against their will, to sell property which was only partly theirs. If in any other country than Ireland such a proposition were made, capped with the promise that the transaction should be carried through compulsorily, and no questions be asked, it would be characterised as a monstrous inducement to acts of commercial immorality. It was now said by the other side that the landlords were proof against such a temptation. They were not so credited in all quarters. The hon. Member for South Tyrone had said there were among the Irish landlords a lot of "scallywags" who, for the sake of such a bonus, would sell the land of which they were the tenants for life at any price that could be got. Was it possible for the State to leave the matter in that condition?

said he expressly stated that that ought to be provided for. His contention was that the price by which it was to be provided for was excessive.

was afraid that if the question was discussed purely from the pounds, shillings, and pence point of view, as a hard commercial transaction, this Bill would not go much farther. It was notorious, however, that they were not considering this matter on the doctrines of Adam Smith, or seeking to drive the hardest bargain that could be arranged; but the same measure must be applied all round The Chief Secretary in his Second Reading speech instanced the case of a large estate in the West of Ireland, the life owner of which for eleven months in the year was an inmate of the workhouse. Would Parliament offer a bonus of 10 per cent. upon the purchase price of a considerable property and give it to that gentleman without inquiry as to the incumbrances on that estate? It would be impossible. Then there was the case of a man of sixty or seventy years of age, with an encumbered estate worth £50,000 or £100,000, of which the greater part of the beneficial interest was obviously in the remainderman. Was it fair to offer that man £5,000 or £10,000 to induce him to come to terms with his tenants, and leave the remainder-man to shift for himself? The policy of the Bill was to avoid the necessity for elaborate investigation, in order that the operation of the Bill should be automatic. It was therefore essential in order to guard against such dangers as he had suggested to have such limits as those proposed in the Bill. He was told though, and he fully believed, that in the case of estates where there were no judicial rents, and where there were isolated holdings not held on economic terms, the Bill would have an unintended operation. Those were the exceptional cases no doubt, but there could be little doubt that they existed in large numbers, and ought to be dealt with. The Land Conference agreed that there were certain limits within which the operation of the Bill might be treated as normal, and the State might safely make the advances proposed, and under which the remainder men would be fairly dealt with. While it was essential that those limits should be retained, he hoped the Bill would not be marred by the exceptional cases to which he had referred being left unprovided for. The view of the Government was that these limits were of the essence of the Bill. He suggested as a compromise that while those limits were retained where the operation of the Bill would be compulsory, some means should be provided for dealing with the exceptional cases. But it had to be borne in mind that the Bill had been so drawn that its operation wholly depended upon the mutual effect of its several parts, and unless the limits which were here in question were retained he did not see how the Chief Secretary's scheme could be carried into effect.

said he had taken a great interest in the land question for many years, and had discussed this question with many people, but he had never met a tenant who gave much consideration to the number of years purchase. What the tenant considered of importance was the amount he would get back on purchase and the number of years he would have to pay his rent, though this was a minor consideration. The tenant would not mind how many years purchase the landlord was given provided he himself got 6s. or 7s. in the £ reduction on his first-term rent. As to the matter before the Committee, surely some compromise would be possible if exceptional cases were referred to the Land Commission for settlement.

contended that the limits suggested in the Bill were not likely to work out satisfactorily. While he deprecated comparisons of the benefit landlords and tenants respectively were likely to secure under the Bill, he asked whether it was not the fact that the tenants who had bought during the last five years had in most cases done better than they could possibly do under the present proposals, and that the landlords would have enormously improved their position by waiting? On the point of the necessity of these zone limits, the Commissioners would be unable to refuse the ratification of a bargain provided it came within the limits of the Bill, and possibly tenants who were in arrears with their rent would be compelled to accept a 10 per cent. reduction for fear of being turned out of their holdings. In the interesting report of Mr. Bailey, attention, was called to the one class of cases in which purchase had been unsatisfactory—the cases in which tenants had had insufficient capital. Such tenants, being in arrears, might be forced to make a 10 per cent. bargain, and they would be in the position of impoverished occupying owners, likely to fail. If many tenants were to be placed in that position there would be a danger of a serious breakdown. The interest of the general taxpayer was that there should be safety, that the price should be reasonable, that the two parties should bargain on equal terms. He preferred that the minimum reduction put down at 10 per cent. should be made 15 per cent. With regard to the side of the landlord he asked, did it seem to be an unfair bargain for the landlord? Upon that point he was short of information. What instances were there of recent years where such a bargain would have been passed by the Land Commission? On the other hand they had been told of many cases where such a bargain, or even more favourable bargains, had been refused by the Land Commission. In reference to the maximum reduction he thought there ought to be no barrier to a free bargain. Many recent bargains allowed a reduction of more than thirty per cent. In face of this fact why should a greater reduction than thirty per cent. on second-term rents be debarred. Looking at it from the standpoint of the general taxpayer, he thought there should be no limit to the reduction made on a fair bargain between landlord and tenant. Take the position of the landlord, for it was no use passing a voluntary Bill unless the terms were fair. What would the landlord get? The landlord would get in hard cash under this Bill, by the intervention of State credit, five years' more purchase at least than anything he had ever got before; and by the lower rate of interest and the increased number of years for repayment the landlord got an extra five years' purchase above what he would have got at the present time. Take a case where the rental was £100. Under the old conditions the advance would have been £2,500.

Yes, if it had been agreed.

said the landlord would get in this case between £3,000 and £3,100. That was the difference between 4 per cent. under the old Act and the 3¼ per cent. interest he would have to pay under this Act.

When my hon. friend takes £100 as the amount it is difficult to follow. I would suggest that he should take £80.

said he would call the old rent £100 and the new rent £80, and that would represent an advance of £2,000. Under the new Act upon a 3¼ per cent. basis that would allow of an advance of something like £2,500. Therefore the landlord got five or six years' extra rent in cash over what he would get under the old Act. Under these circumstances he thought the landlord as well as the tenant was getting a fair inducement even if the maximum reduction were struck out of the Bill. Looking at the matter from the standpoint of the general taxpayer, and having regard also to the position of the landlord, he supported the Amendment.

said the hon. and learned Member for Plymouth generally spoke from behind the Front Bench, and judging from the promptings he received he imagined that the Front Bench supplied him with his facts and figures.

denied that he had received any promptings from the Front Bench. The Chief Secretary had been good enough to communicate with him through an hon. friend sitting near him to ask what precisely an Amendment which he had set down meant, and he had endeavoured to explain what he thought the Amendment meant. Beyond that he had had no communication with the right hon. Gentleman.

said that according to the hon. and learned Gentleman's argument it would appear that a great boon was being conferred upon the tenant. If they judged this measure from past experience in Ireland it could be shown that this Bill was a great boon to the landlords, and one which they ought to be very ready to accept. The hon. and gallant Member below the gangway had spoken on behalf of the landlords in a manner which showed that his great affection for the tenant farmers of Ireland was to get as much as he could out of their pockets for the benefit of the landlords. The arguments of the hon. and gallant Member for Yarmouth had been met in a friendly and conciliatory manner, but the hon. and learned Member for York had imparted a bit of that spirit of hostility which was behind the remarks of a great many gentlemen like him, who spoke on behalf of the landlords. He did not wish to introduce anything bitter into this discussion, but when the hon. and learned Member opposite spoke of the tyranny of the past, and ridiculed the idea that landlords could put pressure upon the tenants, all he could say was that he remembered the first occasion when the hon. and learned Member came over to Ireland—when they were having a big fight with the landlords—as the political emergency man, and he went on behalf of the Crown to give evidence against his fellow Nationalists. That was the hon. Gentleman who now imputed petty tyranny to Irish Nationalists. The hon. Member for York spoke of the facilities given for the sale of estates, and said this would be a great saving to the tenant. On the contrary, those facilities, instead of being a benefit to the tenant, were altogether a benefit to the landlord. The hon. Member said that they ought not to deal with the number of years purchase, but this was distinctly a question of purchase, because it was on the basis of the number of years purchase that all the sales had proceeded up to the present time. Hon. Members who thought that this was not so were making a very serious mistake. In his own constituency a great number of sales had taken place, and from the first year after the passing of the Purchase Acts up till last year the highest number of years purchase obtained had been nineteen, and some of them had been as low as fifteen years. In 1902 a number of sales took place, and the average was 17·4 years purchase. He thought those tenants who had not purchased in his own constituency would find it very hard that under this Bill they would be expected to pay twenty-two years purchase when their neighbours had bought at from fifteen to nineteen years purchase. This Bill with Clause 1 was not at all the great boon which hon. Members tried to dangle before the eyes of the tenant. With regard to the argument that landlords could not put on pressure he would point out that for years past Irish land lords had been working to deprive the tenants of a great many of their privileges. He had known of landlords who had gradually been depriving their tenants of certain privileges which they had hitherto enjoyed in order to gain by purchase. In his own locality a landlord offered to sell at twenty-two and a half years purchase to his tenants who were paying exorbitant rents, and in order to get out of their arrears the landlord induced them to buy at twenty-two and a half years purchase. When the Land Commission sent down a representative they distinctly refused to advance the money at such an exorbitant rate. If the Land Commission refused to sanction twenty-two and a half years purchase how was it that the Government were now fixing twenty-two years purchase as the lowest price? He thought it was most unfair and unreasonable that this reservation should be in the Bill at all.

said this Amendment asked the Committee to give the tenants of Ireland a free market, and not bind them to a minimum or a maximum price, but leave them in a position to make their purchase agreement in a free market. What good was it to a tenant farmer to be able to purchase his holding with the prospect of having only a 10 per cent. reduction of his rent for a series of sixty-eight and-a-half years. It would be madness for an Irish tenant farmer to make such a bargain, and they would get very few Irish farmers to avail themselves of this provision if they were tied down to a 10 per cent. reduction.

They are not tied down.

said he was afraid that his hon. and gallant friend did not quite understand the provisions of the Bill. The 10 per cent. limit would not be put there if it was not intended to affect the position of the tenants. He should like to know if the Chief Secretary had studied the interesting tabular statement which had appeared in the Freeman's Journal, giving the whole figures for voluntary purchase in Ireland for the last seventeen years. The statement showed that in the county of Longford the purchase agreements for the last seventeen years averaged between 12·5 and 17·5 years purchase. How had the second-term rents been fixed? A storm of indignation was arising amongst Irish tenant farmers at the way in which a regular conspiracy amongst the Land Commissioners had arisen, for they appeared to have resolved not to give reductions on the first-term rents, and in certain cases they had increased the second-term rents. He was expressing his own honest conviction upon this subject as the representative of a body of tenant farmers, very many of whom had purchased upon the terms he had mentioned, namely, between twelve years and seventeen years purchase. If they kept this restriction in the Bill, of a 10 per cent. minimum and a 30 per cent. maximum reduction, they would be taking the surest way of rendering this Bill practically inoperative. The Chief Secretary said in the debate on the Second Reading of the Bill that it was hoped that this would finally settle the Irish land question. The British House of Commons had been tinkering at the question during the past fifty years. Nobody would be more glad than himself to see the right hon. Gentleman having the credit of finally and satisfactorily settling the land question, but if he listened to the bad advice he received from Irish landlords representing English constituencies, who sat behind him, he would never settle the question. The Bill as it stood contained clauses which were retrogressive as to their effect even on the existing land legislation, but no clause was more absolutely repugnant to the ordinary tenant of the country than Clause 1, which as it stood practically gave compulsory powers to bind the tenant with respect to the price he was to pay for the land. Let them look beyond the present. It might be that agriculture was paying better this year than it did some years ago, or than it would do in the future. Foreign competition was daily increasing, and he did not think there was any prospect of the Imperial Zollverein materialising as some gentlemen fondly hoped. Perhaps it would do Ireland no harm if it did. It had been suggested that by a system of motor-cars farm produce would be brought quickly to the markets in future. He did not know how far that would materialise, but he hoped it would do some good. He had no great faith in it personally. He thought the Chief Secretary could not complain that any member of the Irish Party, whether leader or humble ranker, had done anything to thwart his design or to meet his policy in a spirit of nagging, but there were certain conditions which they could not accept the responsibility of seeing passed into law without protest. He warned the right hon. Gentleman that if he persisted in giving effect to them a great deal of his labour would be in vain.

said it had been shown in many speeches that under the operation of the existing Land Purchase Laws, tenants had been able to buy at a much lower figure than they would have been able to do under this Bill. The hon. Member for North Longford had shown that in his own constituency twelve to seventeen years purchase was given by a number of tenants for their land. Of course, all were agreed that if these terms could be generally applied to Ireland they would be better than the terms offered by this Bill, but unfortunately they knew too well that the process of sale and purchase in Ireland under the existing Purchase Acts had pretty well come to a standstill. The position they were in was that if they were to induce the landlords to sell they must offer terms considerably in advance of those which had hitherto prevailed, and it was altogether a question for the tenants themselves to consider whether in order to obtain the sanction of their landlords for purchase they were prepared to give something in excess of the prices which had hitherto prevailed. The question how much more should be given was one which the tenants would be perfectly free to decide for themselves under the provisions of this Bill, but the Amendment which was at present before the Committee dealt with a particular point which was very justly regarded as one of the most important in the Bill, namely, the proposal that under no circumstances whatever could the tenants obtain more than a certain reduction of the instalments in the purchase transaction. The hon. Member for Oldham had pointed out with perfect truth that under the existing Purchase Acts many of the tenants had obtained for themselves terms equal to a great deal more than a 30 per cent. reduction upon the rents they had hitherto paid, and there could be no doubt whatever that there were a certain number of tenants who would, because of the nature of their holdings, be justly entitled to receive a settlement which would be more to them than 30 per cent. on the rents they were paying at the present time. He was perfectly satisfied that, taking into consideration the bonus which was to be provided by the Government under this Bill, many of the landlords—he did not say the whole or anything like the whole of them—would be quite prepared to make settlements with their tenants upon terms which would mean more to the tenants than the 30 per cent. maximum reduction provided by the Bill. Could it possibly be argued that in a case where landlord and tenant were perfectly willing to come to terms which would mean more than 30 per cent. reduction of rent, it was not perfectly reasonable that they should be allowed to do so? It might be said that in a great many cases in Ireland a reduction of 30 per cent. would not be reached, but the Chief Secretary knew that in some parts of the country where the land was not so rich there were cases where it would not be unreasonable for tenants to expect, on a final settlement such as everybody hoped this would be, to receive more than the 30 per cent. which was allowed by the Bill. Why in the name of common sense should a hard and fast line be drawn in this Bill which would have the effect of preventing a settlement in cases where the landlord would very likely be glad to come to an arrangement which would mean more than 30 per cent. reduction to the tenants? It was the desire of all parties in Ireland that the settlement under this Bill should be of a satisfactory and permanent character. As far as he was personally concerned, he could tell the Chief Secretary without the slightest hesitation that he would be extremely sorry to see a single estate sold or purchased in Ireland upon terms which were not in themselves likely to stand well the test of time, and to be, as far as one could humanly judge, permanent and satisfactory to the tenants who bought. What was there sacred or magical about the figure 30 in regard to the reduction which the tenant might hope to obtain? Why 30, instead of 31, or 29, or some other figure? There was no argument by which this hard and fast rule could be justified. He asked the Chief Secretary to look at it from a reasonable point of view, and to realise that there must be numbers of the most deserving people excluded from the operation of the Bill if this hard and fast rule was made. It had been said that this particular zone had been agreed to by the landlords and tenants in conference, but it was only one item in a general agreement. He thought it was unreasonable and unfair to expect the representatives of the tenants to accept one particular portion of the Report to which they agreed, when it was admitted that other portions of the Report had been repudiated by the representatives of the landlords and by the Government. He had been asked over and over again why this particular figure of 30 per cent. had been adhered to by the Government, and he had never been able to answer the question. He would look forward with the greatest interest to the explanation of the Chief Secretary why this particular figure had been chosen. He was perfectly convinced that if the right hon. Gentleman maintained this figure the Bill would not provide a satisfactory or permanent settlement for very many tenant farmers, and that the result in some cases to men who might be induced to purchase would be disastrous. They would find themselves in difficulties in the future, and then this Bill would have to be amended. He appealed to the Chief Secretary to consider this important point seriously, and to see whether a change in the proposal could not be made whereby landlords and tenants would be left perfectly free. He could understand the proposal to fix the limit if this were a compulsory Bill, but under a perfectly voluntary Bill landlords who were willing to give more than 30 per cent. reductions to tenants should be free to make that arrangement.