the protection and interests of property; and, second, out of that continually advancing value of the country's real estate, of which the people, as a whole, should thus enjoy some share or small percentage, seeing it is mainly due to their increasing numbers and industrial wealth-creating attainments.
The great and varied Land Question opened early upon us, and our union was able to bear with decided and beneficial effect upon its settlement. The concurrent Irish Land Question had a certain confusing effect, which we were useful in dissipating. In the exceptional Irish measure, the principle was "Justice to the people;" in the other and more ordinary case it was "Justice to the land." The land must yield its greatest and best return by passing freely to the hands that could best use it. The court to settle "fair rent" must therefore, as the rule, continue to be, as in every other industrial direction, the court of open competition. If John Smith can't get £500 a year out of the land, and John Jones can, Jones must, of the two, have the farm, if we mean justice to the land; otherwise we are back to "protection," in its most injurious form of artificially restricted production. There are exceptions, however, to every general rule, and we had repeatedly to back the "crofters'" case, when it reached the character and magnitude of a public question, and when, as being thus akin to the Irish case, it claimed some like dealing. When the question is the forcible expulsion of multitudes of our people from cherished ancestral homes, the possibility of some other arrangement should not be beneath public concernment, and accordingly the Trust System found on occasion its genial
