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-farm.  For though they extended the ordinary term of their location only to nine years, yet they encouraged a more permanent letting to farm with the condition of improvement, as well as of annual payment, on the part of the tenant, where the land had lain rough and neglected,—­and therefore invented this species of engrafted holding, in the later times, when property came to be worse distributed by falling into a few hands.