ground, to make any new experiment which
might improve agriculture, or to do anything more than what may answer
the immediate and momentary calls of rent to the landlord, and leave
subsistence to the tenant and his family. The desire of acquisition is
always a passion of long views. Confine a man to momentary possession,
and you at once cut off that laudable avarice which every wise state has
cherished as one of the first principles of its greatness. Allow a man
but a temporary possession, lay it down as a maxim that he never can
have any other, and you immediately and infallibly turn him to temporary
enjoyments: and these enjoyments are never the pleasures of labor and
free industry, whose quality it is to famish the present hours and
squander all upon prospect and futurity; they are, on the contrary,
those of a thoughtless, loitering, and dissipated life. The people must
be inevitably disposed to such pernicious habits, merely from the short
duration of their tenure which the law has allowed. But it is not enough
that industry is checked by the confinement of its views; it is further
discouraged by the limitation of its own direct object, profit. This is
a regulation extremely worthy of our attention, as it is not a
consequential, but a direct discouragement to melioration,--as directly
as if the law had said in express terms, "Thou shalt not improve."

But we have an additional argument to demonstrate the ill policy of
denying the occupiers of land any solid property in it. Ireland is a
country wholly unplanted. The farms have neither dwelling-houses nor
good offices; nor are the lands, almost anywhere, provided with fences
and communications: in a word, in a very unimproved state. The
land-owner there never takes upon him, as it is usual in this kingdom,
to supply all these conveniences, and to set down his tenant in what may
be called a completely furnished farm. If the tenant will not do it, it
is never done. This circumstance shows how miserably and peculiarly
impolitic it has been in Ireland to tie down the body of the tenantry to
short and unprofitable tenures. A finished and furnished house will be
taken for any term, however short: if the repair lies on the owner, the
shorter the better. But no one will take one not only unfurnished, but
half built, but upon a term which, on calculation, will answer with
profit all his charges. It is on this principle that the Romans
established their _emphyteusis_, or fee-fa