It was no doubt conceivable, and it was often argued, that a ...

It was no doubt conceivable, and it was often argued, that a secure administration would attract capital to Ireland, that capital alone was required to create that balance of land and industry which in England provided a market for the farmer's produce, a demand for the labourer's work, and a steady revenue It is a curious fact that the land system of the Free State rests on the Bright clauses (land purchase) of the Act of 1870, developed by three Conservative and one Liberal Act, of 1885, 1898, 1900, and 1909. The only man who thoroughly grasped this historic dissidence was John Mill.

for the landlord, the merchant, and the investor: in short, that the missionary efforts of the Anglican Church having failed to make the Irish good Protestants, Ricardian economics might be applied to making them good tenants.

But the precedent was not encouraging.

The Devon Commission, on the eve of the great famine, had diagnosed the malady; and the Land Act of 1870 was an attempt to apply the remedy they had indicated. The object of all agrarian legislation must be to keep the land and the people on it in a good heart, and, in the last analysis, the prosperity of Ireland depended on the contentment and energy, and therefore on the security, of the tenant cultivator.