Mr. A. J. Balfour on Monday introduced his Bill for
facilitating the purchase of land in Ireland by cultivating tenants. In a speech of nearly two hours, as full of arith- metic as a Budget, he explained a plan of extraordinary ingenuity, which would, he believed, enable the State to advance £33,000,000 without the taxpayer incurring the smallest real liability. We have dwelt upon the plan at length elsewhere, but it is briefly this. Landlords and tenants are to agree, without compulsion, upon a price which must not exceed twenty years' purchase of the net rent,"—that is, the judicial rent minus landlords' rates. The total will be usually seventeen years' rental, and the process is then in this wise. A Land Department, formed *by the amalgamation of the existing five Land Commissions, will pay to the owner of, say, a holding of £100 a year, £1,700 in special Consols of 2* per cent., irredeemable for thirty years. The tenant will pay for five years 80 per cent. of his present rent, and for forty-four years more 70 per cent., and after that nothing, the mortgage and its interest at 4 per cent. being extinguished. On the first instalment being received, the Department issues "a vesting order," and the tenant becomes a freeholder, subject only to the decreasing mortgage. His holding can only be sold by the State in default of payment ; and if that default is involuntary, it will be made up out of the Assurance Fund created by accumulating the extra 10 per cent. payable for the first five years. The tenant, in brief, sits at a reduced rent, which buys the freehold.
