bsentees never return, our
endless foreign payments never be lessened, or our landlords ever be
less exacting.

All other schemes for preserving this Kingdom from utter ruin are idle
and visionary, consequently drawn from wrong reasoning, and from general
topics which for the same causes that they may be true in all Nations
are certainly false in ours; as I have told the Public often enough, but
with as little effect as what I shall say at present is likely to
produce.

I am weary of so many abortive projects for the advancement of trade, of
so many crude proposals in letters sent me from unknown hands, of so
many contradictory speculations about raising or sinking the value of
gold and silver: I am not in the least sorry to hear of the great
numbers going to America, though very much so for the causes that drive
them from us, since the uncontrolled maxim, "That people are the riches
of a Nation," is no maxim here under our circumstances. We have neither
[manufactures] to employ them about, nor food to support them.

If a private gentleman's income be sunk irretrievably for ever from a
hundred pounds to fifty, and that he hath no other method to supply the
deficiency, I desire to know, my Lord, whether such a person hath any
other course to take than to sink half his expenses in every article of
economy, to save himself from ruin and the gaol. Is not this more than
doubly the case of Ireland, where the want of money, the irrecoverable
ruin of trade, with the other evils above mentioned, and many more too
well known and felt, and too numerous or invidious to relate, have been
gradually sinking us for above a dozen years past, to a degree that we
are at least by two thirds in a worse condition than was ever known
since the Revolution? Therefore instead of dreams and projects for the
advancing of trade, we have nothing left but to find out some expedient
whereby we may reduce our expenses to our incomes.

Yet this procedure, allowed so necessary in all private families, and in
its own nature so easy to be put in practice, may meet with strong
opposition by the cowardly slavish indulgence of the men to the
intolerable pride arrogance vanity and luxury of the women, who strictly
adhering to the rules of modern education seem to employ their whole
stock of invention in contriving new arts of profusion, faster than the
most parsimonious husband can afford; and to compass this work the more
effectually, their universal maxi