Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 6.djvu/228

204, upon a new foot. To this end, they procured a royal patent; for erecting an academy of projectors in Lagado; and the humour prevailed so strongly among the people, that there is not a town of any consequence in the kingdom, without such an academy. In these colleges, the professors contrive new rules and methods of agriculture and building, and new instruments and tools, for all trades and manufactures; whereby, as they undertake, one man shall do the work of ten; a palace may be built in a week, of materials so durable, as to last for ever without repairing. All the fruits of the earth shall come to maturity, at whatever season we think fit to choose, and increase a hundred fold more than they do at present; with innumerable other happy proposals. The only inconvenience is, that none of these projects are yet brought to perfection; and in the mean time, the whole country lies miserably waste, the houses in ruins, and the people without food or clothes. By all which, instead of being discouraged, they are fifty times more violently bent upon prosecuting their schemes, driven equally on by hope and despair: that as for himself, being not of an enterprising spirit, he was content to go on in the old forms, to live in the houses his ancestors had built, and act as they did, in every part of life, without innovation. That some few other persons of quality, and gentry, had done the same, but were looked on with an eye of contempt and ill-will, as enemies to art, ignorant, and ill commonwealths men, preferring their own ease and sloth, before the general improvement of their country.

His lordship added, that he would not, by any farther