od of our country, and ruin our own commerce,
by rejecting our own manufacture, setting our people to furnish other
nations with cloths, and recommending the manufacture to other countries,
and rejecting them ourselves?

If the difference was small, and the clothing of our own people was a
thing of small moment, that it made no impression on the commerce, or the
manufacture in general, it might be said to be too little to take notice
of.

If our consumption at home is thus considerable, and the clothing of our
own people does consume the wool of many millions of sheep; if the silk
trade employs many thousands of families; if there is an absolute
necessity of working up if possible all the growth of our wool, as well of
Ireland as of England, or that else it would be run over to France, to the
encouragement of rival manufactures, and the ruin of our own; in a word,
if our own people, falling into a general use of our own manufacture,
would effectually do this, and their continuing to neglect it would
effectually throw our manufacture into convulsions, and stagnate the whole
trade of the kingdom; if our wearing foreign silk manufactures did
annually carry out 1,200,000_l._ sterling per annum for silks, to France
and Italy, and above 600,000_l._ per annum for the like to India, all in
spices, to the impoverishing our trade, by emptying us of all our ready
money, as well as starving our poor for want of employment.

Again, if these grievances were very much abated, and indeed almost
remedied by the several acts of parliament, first to prohibit East India
silks, then to lay high duties, equal to prohibition, upon French silks;
and, in the last place, an act to prohibit the use and wearing of printed
calicoes; I say, if these acts have gone so far in the retrieving the
dying condition of our woollen manufacture, and encouraging the silk
manufacture; that in the first, we have wrought up all the English growth
of wool, and that of Scotland too, which was never done before; and in the
last have improved so remarkably in the silk manufacture, that all that
vast sum of 1,800,000_l._ per annum, expended before in French and Indian
silks, is now turned into the pockets of our own poor, and kept all at
home, and the silks become a mere English manufacture as was before a
foreign.

If all this is true, as it is most certainly, what witchcraft must it be
that has seized upon the fancy of this nation? What spirit of blindness
and i