m is to despise and detest everything
of the growth and manufacture of their own country, and most to value
whatever comes from the very remotest parts of the globe. And I am
convinced, that if the virtuosi could once find out a world in the moon,
with a passage to it, our women would wear nothing but what came
directly from thence.[100]

The prime cost of wine yearly imported to Ireland is valued at thirty
thousand pounds, and the tea (including coffee and chocolate) at five
times that sum. The lace, silks, calicoes, and all other unnecessary
ornaments for women, including English cloths and stuffs, added to the
former articles, make up (to compute grossly), about four hundred
thousand pounds.

Now, if we should allow the thirty thousand pounds for wine, wherein the
women have their share, and which is all we have to comfort us, and
deduct seventy thousand pounds more for over-reckoning, there would
still remain three hundred thousand pounds, annually spent for
unwholesome drugs, and unnecessary finery. Which prodigious sum would be
wholly saved, and many thousands of our miserable shopkeepers and
manufacturers comfortably supported.

Let speculative people busy their brains as much as they please, there
is no other way to prevent this Kingdom from sinking for ever than by
utterly renouncing all foreign dress and luxury.

It is absolutely so in fact that every husband of any fortune in the
Kingdom is nourishing a poisonous, devouring serpent in his bosom with
all the mischief but with none of its wisdom.

If all the women were clad with the growth of their own Country, they
might still vie with each other in the cause of foppery, and still have
room left to vie with each other, and equally shew their wit and
judgment in deciding upon the variety of Irish stuffs; And if they could
be contented with their native wholesome slops for breakfast, we should
hear no more of their spleen, hysterics, colics, palpitations, and
asthmas. They might still be allowed to ruin each other and their
husbands at play, because the money lost would only circulate among
ourselves.

My Lord; I freely own it a wild imagination that any words will cure the
sottishness of men, or the vanity of women, but the Kingdom is in a fair
way of producing the most effectual remedy, when there will not be money
left for the common course of buying and selling the very necessaries of
life in our markets, unless we absolutely change the whole method o