Mr. Lloyd George's speech to the Gladstone League, summarised in
our last issue, has produced the usual crop of corrections. His condemnation of the Land Purchase Act of 1903 is answered by Mr. William O'Brien in the Times of yesterday week. Mr. Lloyd George asserted that the first result of that Act had been to put up the price of land in Ireland by seven years' purchase. Mr. O'Brien retorts by quoting the official statistics of sales under that Act for the county of Cork, where 17,944 tenants have become proprietors at a price of £8,346,257, at an average rate of 211 years' purchase for the county at large, and 20.7 years' purchase in the congested dis- tricts. In Galway, it is true, the ratepayers have been saddled with £28,000 a year for extra police, and about as much again for malicious injuries, and the "first result" of the sums thus imposed on the ratepayers of Galway has been to add an equivalent of at least "seven years' purchase" to the price of their holdings. "But that," remarks Mr. O'Brien, "is not the fault of the Act of 1903, but of those who, by the aid of Mr. Birrell's Act of 1909, have succeeded in wrecking it."
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