Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 9.djvu/226

216 But, why all this concern for the poor? We want them not as the country is now managed; they may follow thousands of their leaders, and seek their bread abroad. Where the plough has no work, one family can do the business of fifty, and you may send away the other forty-nine. An admirable piece of husbandry, never known or practised by the wisest nations, who erroneously thought people to be the riches of a country!

If so wretched a state of things would allow it, methinks I could have a malicious pleasure, after all the warning I have in vain given the publick, at my own peril, for several years past, to see the consequences and events answering in every particular. I pretend to no sagacity: what I writ was little more than what I had discoursed to several persons, who were generally of my opinion: and it was obvious to every common understanding, that such effects must needs follow from such causes. A fair issue of things begun upon party rage, while some sacrificed the publick to fury, and others to ambition: while a spirit of faction and oppression reigned in every part of the country, where gentlemen, instead of consulting the ease of their tenants, or cultivating their lands, were worrying one another upon points of whig and tory, of high church and low church; which no more concerned them than the long and famous controversy of strops far razors: while agriculture was wholly discouraged, and consequently half the formers and labourers, and poorer tradesmen, forced to beggary or banishment. "Wisdom crieth in the streets; because I have called on you; I have stretched out my hand, and no man regarded. But ye have set at nought all my " counsels,