For half a century _laissez-faire_ was pedantically applied to Irish agriculture, then suddenly the other extreme was adopted; nothing was left alone, and political economy was sent on its famous planetary excursion.
When Mr.Gladstone was attempting to settle the land question on the basis of dual ownership, the seed of a new kind of single ownership--peasant proprietorship--was sown through the influence of John Bright.

The operations of the land purchase clauses in the Church Disestablishment Act of 1869, and the Land Acts of 1870 and 1881, were enormously extended by the Land Purchase Acts introduced by the Conservative Party in 1885 and in 1891, and the success which attended these Acts accentuated the defects and sealed the fate of dual ownership, which all parties recently united to destroy.

In other words, Parliament has been undoing a generation's legislative work upon the Irish land question.
This is all I need say about that stage of the Irish agrarian situation at which we have now arrived.

What I wish my readers to bear in mind is that the effect of a bad system of land tenure upon the other aspects of the Irish Question reaches much further back than the struggles, agitations, and reforms in connection with Irish land which this generation has witnessed.

The same may be said with regard to the other economic grievances.