as the silk and the wool.

Nothing could, in my opinion, be more surprising of its kind, than to hear
with what warmth this very argument was urged to the parliament, and to
the public, by not the Scots and Irish only, but even by some of our own
people, possessed and persuaded by the other, at the time the act against
the printed calicoes was depending before the parliament; as if an
upstart, and in itself trifling manufacture, however increased by the
corruption of our people's humour and fancy, could be an equivalent to the
grand manufacture of wool in England, which is the fund of our whole
commerce, and has been the spring and fountain of our wealth and
prosperity for above three hundred years; a manufacture which employs
millions of our people, which has raised the wealth of the whole nation
from what it then was to what it now is; a manufacture that has made us
the greatest trading nation in the world, and upon which all our wealth
and commerce still depends.

I insist upon it that no novelty is to be encouraged among us to the
prejudice of this chief and main support of our country, let it be of what
kind it will; nor is it at all to the purpose to say such or such a
novelty is made at home, and is the work of our own people; it is to say
nothing at all, for we ought no more to set up particular manufactures to
the prejudice of the woollen trade in general, which is the grand product
of the whole nation, and on which our whole prosperity depends, than we
would spread an universal infection among us, on pretence that the
vegetable or plant from whence the destructive effluvia proceeded, was the
growth of our own land; or than we should publish the Alcoran and the most
heretical, blasphemous, or immodest books, to taint the morals and
principles of the people, on pretence that the paper and print were our
own manufactures.

I am for encouraging all manufactures that can be invented and set up
among us, and that may tend to the employment of the poor and improvement
of our produce; such things having a national tendency to raising the rent
of our lands, assisting the consumption of our growth, and, in a word,
increasing trade in general; I say I am for encouraging new manufactures
of all sorts, with this one exception only, namely, that they do not
interfere with, and tend to the prejudice of the woollen manufacture,
which is the main and essential manufacture of England.

But the woollen manufacture is the lif