ance, will soon change the present set of bishops,
and consequently encourage purchasers of their lands. For example, If a
Primate should die, and the gradation be wisely made, almost the whole
set of bishops might be changed in a month, each to his great advantage,
although no fines were to be got, and thereby save a great part of that
sum which I have appropriated towards supplying the deficiency of fines.

I have valued the bishops' lands two years' purchase above the usual
computed rate, because those lands will have a sanction from the King
and Council in England, and be confirmed by an Act of Parliament here;
besides, it is well known, that higher prices are given every day, for
worse lands, at the remotest distances, and at rack rents, which I take
to be occasioned by want of trade, when there are few borrowers, and the
little money in private hands lying dead, there is no other way to
dispose of it but in buying of land, which consequently makes the owners
hold it so high.

Besides paying the nation's debts, the sale of these lands would have
many other good effects upon the nation; it will considerably increase
the number of gentry, where the bishops' tenants are not able or willing
to purchase; for the lands will afford an hundred gentlemen a good
revenue to each; several persons from England will probably be glad to
come over hither, and be the buyers, rather than give thirty years'
purchase at home, under the loads of taxes for the public and the poor,
as well as repairs, by which means much money may be brought among us,
and probably some of the purchasers themselves may be content to live
cheap in a worse country, rather than be at the charge of exchange and
agencies, and perhaps of non-solvencies in absence, if they let their
lands too high.

This proposal will also multiply farmers, when the purchasers will have
lands in their own power, to give long and easy leases to industrious
husbandmen.

I have allowed some bishoprics of equal income to be of more or less
value to the purchaser, according as they are circumstanced. For
instance, The lands of the primacy and some other sees, are let so low,
that they hardly pay a fifth penny of the real value to the bishop, and
there the fines are the greater. On the contrary, the sees of Meath and
Clonfert, consisting, as I am told, much of tithes, those tithes are
annually let to the tenants without any fines. So the see of Dublin is
said to have many fee-farm