be a little more minute in explaining your Views, and let me know if
you had many large additional Subscriptions, how would you have applied
them?

PRIOR. Why, I cannot enter into a long Detail of every Particular, but
I would in General, have doubled the Praemiums of most of the Articles,
which the Society has yet promoted, and in some of the most important
Improvements and Manufactures, I would have trebled them. By this
Means, it is hardly credible, what a Progress we should make, in all
those Subjects of Husbandry and manual Arts in a few Years; and how we
should work up the Industry and Skill of our People, by every Incentive
that Profit or Glory could give them. I formerly reckoned up many
Articles which I may probably seem tedious in repeating now, but you
will make Allowances for my Fondness and Folly, as you know Mr. _Dean_;
a Lover would as soon be tired with dwelling on the Praises of his
Mistress, as I can be with naming the Things, or the Methods by which I
flattered myself I could have served poor _Ireland_. The reflecting on
them made my Life pleasant to me when upon Earth, and the Remembrance
of them, sweetens my Grave to me; and therefore, though you may think
them but Dreams, allow me the Pleasure of repeating them. I say, then,
with the highest Joy of Heart, that the enlarging and improving our
neglected Tillage, the encouraging and heightening our old decaying
Manufactures, and the setting up new ones should have been the great
Care of my Life, and the extending the Force and Use of the Society,
when thus advanced to its Manhood, beyond what the Weakness and
Inexperience of its infantine State could perform. I would have nursed
up Crowds of Orphan Arts, and as they grew up, and could shift for
themselves, I would have wean'd them, and brought a new Succession of
others in their Place, as far as the Narrowness of the Fund would allow
me. I would have brought over foreign Workmen of all Trades and
Professions; I would have set up Glass Manufactures of all Kinds near
our Collieries; I would have established our Earthen-Ware in the most
effectual Manner, and if possible (by bringing over Hands from
_Birmingham_) I would have improved our Hard-ware to such a Degree of
Perfection as to stop that terrible Drain of our Cash. I had also
designed to allow large Encouragements to bring over Foreigners for
improving our Silk and Thread Bone-lace for enlarging our Paper and
Sugar Business, which would be a Savi