landlords. This was the basis of the "Wyndham Act" – the Land Purchase (Ireland) Act (1903) – which O'Brien orchestrated through parliament. It differed from earlier legislation which initially advanced to tenants the sum necessary to purchase their holdings, repayable over a period of years on terms determined by an independent commission, while the Wyndham Act finished off absentee landlords' control over tenants and made it easier for tenants to purchase land, facilitating the transfer of about up to 1914. By then 75% of occupiers were buying out their landlords under the 1903 Act and the later Birrell Land Purchase (Ireland) Act (1909) which extended the 1903 Act by allowing for the compulsory purchase of tenanted farmland by the Land Commission, but fell far short in its financial provisions. In all, under these pre-1921 Land Acts over 316,000 tenants purchased their holdings amounting to out of a total of in the country. The Acts provided Irish tenant farmers with more rights than tenant farmers in the rest of the United Kingdom. Munster tenants availed of land purchase in exceptionally high numbers, encouraged by their Irish Land and Labour Association's leader D. D. Sheehan after he and O'Brien established an Advisory Committee to mediate between landlords and tenants on purchase terms which produced a higher take-up of land purchase than in any other province. Historian R. K. Webb gives most of the credit for the Wyndham Act to Conservative leader Arthur Balfour. He says the Act was: A complete success. By the time the Irish Free State was created in 1922, the system of peasant proprietorship had become universal... A land problem more than a century old had been solved, though it had taken more than 30 years of educating Parliament and landlords to do it. The scheme was intended as well to "kill Home Rule by kindness". Labourers (Ireland) Act 1906 Having largely settled the Irish land question, William O'Brien, convinced by the success of combining the "doctrine of conciliation" with "conference plus business", turned his attention in a Second Phase to the Irish Land and Labour Association's demands for the need to settle Irish labourers in the soil. His parliamentary engagement achieved the successful enactment of the unprecedented James Bryce Labourers (Ireland) Act (1906), followed by the Birrell Labourers (Ireland) Act (1911), and finally the Labourers (Ireland) Act 1919, which all together made provisions for a programme of large