popular mistakes with respect to our woollen
manufacture fairly stated, our national indolence in that very particular
reproved, and the consequence laid before you; if you will not make use of
the hints here given, the fault is nobody's but your own.

Never had any nation the power of improving their trade, and of advancing
their own manufactures, so entirely in their own hands as we have at this
time, and have had for many years past, without troubling the legislature
about it at all: and though it is of the last importance to the whole
nation, and, I may say, to almost every individual in it; nay, and that it
is evident you all know it to be so; yet how next to impossible is it to
persuade any one person to set a foot forward towards so great and so
good a work; and how much labour has been spent in vain to rouse us up to
it?

The following sheets are as one alarm more given to the lethargic age, if
possible, to open their eyes to their own prosperity; the author sums up
his introduction to it in this short positive assertion, which he is ready
to make good, viz., That if the trade of England is not in a flourishing
and thriving condition, the fault and only occasion of it is all our own,
and is wholly in our own power to mend, whenever we please.

SEASONABLE PROPOSAL, &c.

As by my title I profess to be addressing myself to Englishmen, I think I
need not tell them that they live by trade; that their commerce has raised
them from what they were to what they are, and may, if cultivated and
improved, raise them yet further to what they never were; and this in few
words is an index of my present work.

It is worth an Englishman's remark, that we were esteemed as a growing
thriving nation in trade as far back as in the reigns of the two last
Henries; manufactures were planted, navigation increased, the people began
to apply, and trade bringing in wealth, they were greatly encouraged; yet
in king Henry VIII.'s reign, and even towards the latter end of it, too,
we find several acts of parliament passed for regulating the price of
provisions, and particularly that beef and pork should not be sold in the
market for more than a halfpenny per pound avoirdupoise, and mutton and
veal at three farthings.

As the trading men to whom I write may make some estimate of things by
calculating one thing by another, so this leads them to other heads of
trade to calculate from; as, first, the value of money, which bore some