The prime cost of wine yearly imported to Ireland is valued at thirty thousand pounds, and the tea (including coffee and chocolate) at five times that sum. The lace, silks, calicoes, and all other unnecessary ornaments for women, including English cloths and stuffs, added to the former articles, make up (to compute grossly), about four hundred thousand pounds.
Now, if we should allow the thirty thousand pounds for wine, wherein the women have their share, and which is all we have to comfort us, and deduct seventy thousand pounds more for over-reckoning, there would still remain three hundred thousand pounds, annually spent for unwholesome drugs, and unnecessary finery. Which prodigious sum would be wholly saved, and many thousands of our miserable shopkeepers and manufacturers comfortably supported.
Let speculative people busy their brains as much as they please, there is no other way to prevent this Kingdom from sinking for ever than by utterly renouncing all foreign dress and luxury.
It is absolutely so in fact that every husband of any fortune in the Kingdom is nourishing a poisonous, devouring serpent in his bosom with all the mischief but with none of its wisdom.
If all the women were clad with the growth of their own Country, they might still vie with each other in the cause of foppery, and still have room left to vie with each other, and equally shew their wit and judgment in deciding upon the variety of Irish stuffs; And if they could be contented with their native wholesome slops for breakfast, we should hear no more of their spleen, hysterics, colics, palpitations, and asthmas. They might still be allowed to ruin each other and their husbands at play, because the money lost would only circulate among ourselves.
My Lord; I freely own it a wild imagination that any words will cure the sottishness of men, or the vanity of women, but the Kingdom is in a fair way of producing the most effectual remedy, when there will not be money left for the common course of buying and selling the very necessaries of life in our markets, unless we absolutely change the whole method of our proceedings.
This Corporation of Weavers in Woollen and Silks, who have so frequently offered proposals both to your Grace and to me, are the hottest and coldest generation of men that I have known. About a month ago they attended your Grace, when I had the honour to be with you, and designed me then the same favour. They desired you would recommend to your clergy to wear gowns of Irish stuffs, which might probably spread the example among all their brethren in the Kingdom, and perhaps among the lawyers and gentlemen of the University and among the citizens of those Corporations who appear in gowns on solemn occasions. I then mentioned a kind of stuff, not above eightpence a yard, which I heard had been contrived by some of the trade and was very convenient. I desired they would prepare some of that or any sort of black stuff on a certain day, when your Grace would appoint as many clergymen as could readily be found to meet at your Palace, and there give their opinions; and that your Grace's visitations approaching you could then have the best opportunity of seeing what could be done in a matter of such consequence, as they seemed to think, to the woollen manufacture. But instead of attending, as was expected, they came to me a fortnight after, with a new proposal; that something should be writ by an acceptable and able hand to promote in general the wearing of home manufactures, and their civilities would seem to fix that work upon me. I asked whether they had prepared the stuffs, as they had promised, and your Grace expected; but they had not made the least step in the matter, nor as it appears thought of it more.
I did some years ago propose to the masters and principal dealers in the home manufactures of silk and wool, that they should meet together, and after mature consideration, publish advertisements to the following purpose.[101] That in order to encourage the wearing of Irish manufactures in silk and woollen, they gave notice to the nobility and gentry of the Kingdom, That they the undersigned would enter into bonds, for themselves and for each other, to sell the several sorts of stuffs, cloths and silks, made to the best perfection they were able, for certain fixed prices, and in such a manner, that if a child were sent to any of their shops, the buyer might be secure of the value and goodness, and measure of the ware, and lest this might be thought to look like a monopoly any other member of the trade might be admitted upon such conditions as should be agreed on. And if any person whatsoever should complain that he was ill used in the value or goodness of what he bought, the matter should be examined, the person injured be fully satisfied, by the whole corporation without delay, and the dishonest seller be struck out of the society, unless it appeared evidently that the failure proceeded only from mistake.
The mortal danger is, that if these dealers could prevail by the goodness and cheapness of their cloths and stuffs to give a turn to the principal people of Ireland in favour of their goods, they would relapse into the knavish practice peculiar to this Kingdom, which is apt to run through all trades even so low as a common ale-seller, who as soon as he gets a vogue for his liquor, and outsells his neighbour, thinks his credit will put off the worst he can buy; till his customers will come no more. Thus I have known at London in a general mourning, the drapers dye black all their old damaged goods, and sell them at double rates, and then complain and petition the Court, that they are ready to starve by the continuance of the mourning.
Therefore I say, those principal weavers who would enter in such a compact as I have mentioned, must give sufficient security against all such practices; for if once the women can persuade their husbands that foreign goods besides the finery will be as cheap, and do more service, our last state will be worse than the first.