The Economical and Statistical Section of the Association has been
presided over this year by Lord O'Hagan, who delivered an opening address on Thursday. The late Irish Chancellor is him- self a Belfast man, and he described with complacency the extra- ordinary progress that his native town has made during the last half-century. The population of Belfast in this period has nearly multiplied five-fold. Where there had been a single manufactory hundreds have sprung up, and new industries of vast magnitude, including shipbuilding-yards and iron-foundries, have risen into fame. Lord O'Hagan seems to attribute this remarkable growth to the cultivation of political economy in Belfast, and we wish we could believe that the backwardness of Irish enterprise could be so easily counteracted. But Lord O'Hagan himself is obliged to admit that agricultufe is almost as much as ever the mainstay of Ireland. The Land Act, he was forced to confess, had not, on one im- portant point at least, answered the expectations of its authors. The purchase clauses have been but little used, and the applications of tenant-farmers for loans to enable them to buy their holdings have not only been few, but are diminishing. Lord O'Hagan did not attempt to assign the cause of this failure, or to suggest a remedy. It can hardly be alleged that an insufficient degree of Government aid is the reason, for out of a total KUM paid for land so purchased of /219,522, £192,000 was advanced by the Commissioners of Public Works, the balance only being provided in ready money by the tenants.
