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and to continue their trade till suck time as you shall have reimburseed yourself,by your mm successful management. Such, however,is the short-sightedness of avarice, that Scots leases are some-times, even at this day, constructed with the absurd condition in-serted in them, in reinforcement of the jus delectus, that thebankruptcy of the tenant shall infer an irritancy of the lease,and shall cause the land instantly to revert to the possession ofthe landlord j thus precluding any sort of interference of credi-tors for their interest, and entirely defeating their claims.
But, secondly, Supposing the tenant to have abundance of ca-pital of his own, the retention of the jus delectus may, in manyvery supposable situations, deprive him of every rational induce-ment to fix his own capital in improvements of the farm, even al-though the period of duration of the lease should allow him o-therwise the fairest prospect of reaping abundantly the fruits ofhis outlay, even in the most expensive and most‘permanent im-provements.
Though the jus delectus prevents voluntary alienation and dis-posal, and compulsory alienation at the instance of the tenant’screditors, it hath not been carried to that extreme of absurdityas to prevent the lease from descending to the tenant’s heirs: Itdescends, however, to his natural heirs by succession, not to suchas he might be inclined to nominate : In other words, it is entail-ed upon those whom the law has designed the heirs, and he isdeprived of all power of choice. But supposing the tenant hasno children, and that his legal heirs are such as he regards not,or hates, either with or without reason, is it in human nature tosuppose that, with the probable prospect of dying during thecurrency of a lease, of such length of endurance as to give pro-spect of repayment for improvements of expense and permanen-cy, he should fix his capital in the soil, to be carried off alongwith the lease by heirs of this description ? Will he not ratherretain it as much as possible from outlay on such improvements,that he may keep it under his own command, to be disposed ofas he pleases i Or, supposing he has sons, he can make nochoice among them ; the eldest son is legal heir to the tack. Butin a lease of sufficient endurance for any material improvement,the supposition having most probabilities on its side, is, that theoldest leaves the family, not choosing to keep himself disengag-ed from employment in view of succeeding to his father’s lease.He may have become merchant, or manufacturer, or may havesettled in a distant farm in England or Ireland . If the fatherdies, he cannot destine it to any other son, who may have re-mained with him, to assist him in his labours: The heir, and theheir alone, can take up the lease : He must either occupy per-sonally, or in the unprofitable mode of a manager, acting en-tirely at another’s risk, and having no further personal interest inthe management, than merely to avoid forfeiture of his wages,