This denial of landed property to the gross of the people has this further evil effect in preventing the improvement of land, that it prevents any of the property acquired in trade to be regorged, as it were, upon the land.  They must have observed very little, who have not remarked the bold and liberal spirit of improvement which persons bred to trade have often exerted on their land-purchases:  that they usually come to them with a more abundant command of ready money than most landed men possess; and that they have in general a much better idea, by long habits of calculative dealings, of the propriety of expending in order to acquire.  Besides, such men often bring their spirit of commerce into their estates with them, and make manufactures take a root, where the mere landed gentry had perhaps no capital, perhaps no inclination, and, most frequently, not sufficient knowledge, to effect anything of the kind.  By these means, what beautiful and useful spots have there not been made about trading and manufacturing towns, and how has agriculture had reason to bless that happy alliance with commerce! and how miserable must that nation be, whose frame of polity has disjoined the landing and the trading interests!

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The great prop of this whole system is not pretended to be its justice or its utility, but the supposed danger to the state, which gave rise to it originally, and which, they apprehend, would return, if this system were overturned.  Whilst, say they, the Papists of this kingdom were possessed of landed property, and of the influence consequent to such property, their allegiance to the crown of Great Britain was ever insecure, the public peace was ever liable to be broken, and Protestants never could be a moment secure either of their properties or of their lives.  Indulgence only made them arrogant, and power daring; confidence only excited and enabled them to exert their inherent treachery; and the times which they generally selected for their most wicked and desperate rebellions were those in which they enjoyed the greatest ease and the most perfect tranquillity.

Such are the arguments that are used, both publicly and privately, in every discussion upon this point.  They are generally full of passion and of error, and built upon facts which in themselves are most false.  It cannot, I confess, be denied, that those miserable performances which go about under the names of Histories of Ireland do, indeed, represent those events after this manner; and they would persuade us, contrary to the known order of Nature, that indulgence and moderation in governors is the natural incitement in subjects to rebel.  But there is an interior history of Ireland, the genuine voice of its records and monuments, which speaks a very different language from these histories, from Temple and from Clarendon:  these restore Nature to its just rights, and policy to its proper order.  For they even now show to those who have