will think they have enough: and it
now appears that he will not be content with all our gold and silver,
but intends to buy up our goods and manufactures with the same coin.

I shall not enter into examination of the prices for which he now
proposes to sell his half-pence or what he calls his copper, by the
pound; I have said enough of it in my former letter, and it hath
likewise been considered by others. It is certain that, by his own
first computation, we were to pay three shillings for what was
intrinsically worth but one, although it had been of the true weight
and standard for which he pretended to have contracted; but there is
so great a difference both in weight and badness in several of his
coins that some of them have been nine in ten below the intrinsic
value, and most of them six or seven.

His last proposal being of a peculiar strain and nature, deserves to
be very particularly consider'd, both on account of the matter and the
style. It is as follows.

Lastly, in consideration of the direful apprehensions which prevail in
Ireland, that Mr. Wood will by such coinage drain them of their gold
and silver, he proposes to take their manufactures in exchange, and
that no person be obliged to receive more than five-pence half-penny
at one payment.

First, observe this little impudent hard-ware-man turning into
ridicule the direful apprehensions of a whole kingdom, priding himself
as the cause of them, and daring to prescribe what no king of England
ever attempted, how far a whole nation shall be obliged to take his
brass coin. And he has reason to insult; for sure there was never an
example in history of a great kingdom kept in awe for above a year in
daily dread of utter destruction, not by a powerful invader at the
head of twenty thousand men, not by a plague or a famine, not by a
tyrannical prince (for we never had one more gracious) or a corrupt
administration, but by one single, diminutive, insignificant,
mechanic.

But to go on. To remove our direful apprehensions that he will drain
us of our gold and silver by his coinage, this little arbitrary
mock-monarch most graciously offers to take our manufactures in
exchange. Are our Irish understandings indeed so low in his opinion?
Is not this the very misery we complain of? That his cursed project
will put us under the necessity of selling our goods for what is equal
to nothing. How would such a proposal sound from France or Spain, or
any other country we