amilies and servants, to leave their habitations to settle there, to
the increase of the woollen manufacture in Ireland, which makes your
loyal subjects in this kingdom very apprehensive that the further growth
of it may greatly prejudice the said manufacture here." The Commons went
further, and suggested the advisability of discouraging the industry by
hindering the exportation of wool from Ireland to other countries and
limiting it to England alone. The Act of 10 and 11 Will. III. c. 10,
made the suggestion law and even prohibited entirely the exportation of
Irish wool anywhere. Thus, as Swift puts it, "the politic gentlemen of
Ireland have depopulated vast tracts of the best land, for the feeding
of sheep." See notes to later tracts in this volume on "Observations on
the Woollen Manufactures" and "Letter on the Weavers." [T. S.]

[8] That Swift did not exaggerate may be gathered from the statute
books, and, more immediately, from Hely Hutchinson's "Commercial
Restraints of Ireland" (1779), Arthur Dobbs's "Trade and Improvement of
Ireland," Lecky's "History of Ireland," vols. i. and ii., and Monck
Mason's notes in his "History of St. Patrick's Cathedral," p. 320 _et
seq._ [T. S.]

[9] Barnstaple was, at that time, the chief market in England for Irish
wool. [T. S.]

[10] In 1726, Swift presented some pieces of Irish manufactured silk to
the Princess of Wales and to Mrs. Howard. In sending the silk to Mrs.
Howard he wrote also a letter in which he remarked: "I beg you will not
tell any parliament man from whence you had that plaid; otherwise, out
of malice, they will make a law to cut off all our weavers' fingers."
[T. S.]

[11] This last sentence is as the original edition has it. In Faulkner's
first collected edition and in the fifth volume of the "Miscellanies"
(London, 1735), the following occurs in its place: "I must confess, that
as to the former, I should not be sorry if they would stay at home; and
for the latter, I hope, in a little time we shall have no occasion for
them."

Swift knew what he was advising when he suggested that the people of
Ireland should not import their goods from England. He was well aware
that English manufactures were not really necessary. Sir William Petty
had, a half century before, pointed out that a third of the manufactures
then imported into Ireland could be produced by its own factories,
another third could as easily and as cheaply be obtained from countries
other than Engl