Excerpt from Irish Land and Irish Liberty: A Study of the New Lords of the SoilGreat changes have taken, and are taking, place in the ownership of Irish land. Great political changes are promised and foreshadowed in the near future, as to which the air is full of rumours and counter rumours.The operations of Land Purchase involving hundreds of millions of British capital, subscribed and to be subscribed on the British Treasury's guarantee that the interest will be regularly paid are effecting a revolution, without parallel in English history, by transferring the freehold of the most fertile area in the United Kingdom from a body of landlords, who have long been called The Protestant Garrison, to a body of owner-occupiers, nearly nine-tenths of whom are Catholics.And yet there is, perhaps, no class in the British Isles about whom such general ignorance prevails as about the new Catholic lords of the soil, who dominate Irish public opinion as represented in Parliament by the Nationalist Party, and on whose good faith the British public have staked a sum of money amount ing to over one-third of the funded National Debt.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.