time prohibit it themselves?
for refusing to wear it is the worst and severest way of prohibiting it.

We do indeed put a prohibition upon our trade when we stop up the stream,
and dam up the channel of its consumption, by putting a slight upon the
wearing it, and, as it were, voting it out of fashion; for if you once
vote your goods out of wear, you vote them out of the market, and you had
as good vote them contraband.

With what an impetuous gust of the fancy did we run into the product of
the East Indies for some years ago? How did we patiently look on and see
the looms empty, the workmen fled, the wives and children starve and beg,
the parishes loaded, and the poor's rates rise to a surprising height,
while the ladies flourished in fine Massulapatam, chints, Indian damasks,
China atlasses, and an innumerable number of rich silks, the product of
the coast of Malabar, Coromandel, and the Bay of Bengal, and the poorer
sort with calicoes? And with what infinite difficulty was a remedy
obtained, and with what regret did the ladies part with that foreign
pageantry, and stoop to wear the richest silks of their own manufacture,
though these were the life of their country's prosperity, and those the
ruin of it?

When this was the case, how fared our trade? The state of it was thus, in
a few words:--

The poor, as above, wanted bread; the wool lay on hand, sunk in price, and
wanted a market; the manufacturers wanted orders, and when they made
goods, knew not where to sell them; all was melancholy and dismal on that
side; nothing but the East India trade could be said to thrive; their
ships went out full of money and came home full of poison; for it was all
poison to our trade. The immense sums of ready money that went abroad to
India impoverished our trade, and indeed bid fair to starve it, and, in a
word, to beggar the nation.

At home we were so far from working up the whole quantity or growth of our
wool, that three or four years' growth lay on hand in the poor tenants'
houses, for want of which they could not pay their rent.

The wool from Scotland, which comes all to us now, went another way, viz.,
to France, for the Union was not then made, and yet we had too much at
home. Nor was the quantity brought from Ireland half so much as it is now.

Was all this difference from our own wearing, or not wearing the produce
of our own manufacture? How unaccountably stupid then are we to run still
retrograde to the public go