so far you are pardonable.

If you will propose a general contribution in supporting the poor in
potatoes and butter-milk, till the new corn comes in, perhaps you may
succeed better, because the thing at least is possible; and I think if
our brethren in England would contribute upon this emergency, out of the
million they gain from us every year, they would do a piece of justice
as well as charity. In the mean time, go and preach to your own tenants,
to fall to the plough as fast as they can; and prevail with your
neighbouring squires to do the same with theirs; or else die with the
guilt of having driven away half the inhabitants, and starving the rest.
For as to your scheme of raising one hundred and ten thousand pounds, it
is as vain as that of Rabelais; which was, to squeeze out wind from the
posteriors of a dead ass.

But why all this concern for the poor? We want them not, as the country
is now managed; they may follow thousands of their leaders, and seek
their bread abroad. Where the plough has no work, one family can do the
business of fifty, and you may send away the other forty-nine. An
admirable piece of husbandry, never known or practised by the wisest
nations, who erroneously thought people to be the riches of a country!

If so wretched a state of things would allow it, methinks I could have a
malicious pleasure, after all the warning I have in vain given the
public, at my own peril, for several years past, to see the consequences
and events answering in every particular. I pretend to no sagacity: what
I writ was little more than what I had discoursed to several persons,
who were generally of my opinion; and it was obvious to every common
understanding, that such effects must needs follow from such causes;--a
fair issue of things begun upon party rage, while some sacrificed the
public to fury, and others to ambition: while a spirit of faction and
oppression reigned in every part of the country, where gentlemen,
instead of consulting the ease of their tenants, or cultivating their
lands, were worrying one another upon points of Whig and Tory, of High
Church and Low Church; which no more concerned them than the long and
famous controversy of strops for razors: while agriculture was wholly
discouraged, and consequently half the farmers and labourers, and poorer
tradesmen, forced to beggary or banishment. "Wisdom crieth in the
streets: Because I have called on ye; I have stretched out my hand, and
no man reg