Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 9.djvu/356

346 that these funds are deficient? If they depend on trade, can it possibly be otherwise, while we have neither liberty to trade, nor money to trade with; neither hands to work, nor business to employ them if we had? Our diseases are visible enough, both in their causes and effects; and the cures are well known, but impossible to be applied.

If my steward comes and tells me, "that my rents are sunk so low, that they are very little more than sufficient to pay my servants their wages;" have I any other course left, than to cashier four in six of my rascally footmen, and a number of other varlets in my family, of whose insolence the whole neighbourhood complains? And I would think it extremely severe in any law, to force me to maintain a household of fifty servants, and fix their wages, before I had offered my rent-roll upon oath to the legislators.

To return from digressing: I am told one scheme for raising a fund to pay the interest of our national debt, is, by a farther duty of forty shillings a tun upon wine. Some gentlemen would carry this matter much farther, by raising it to twelve pounds; which, in a manner, would amount to a prohibition; thus weakly arguing from the practice of England.

I have often taken notice, both in print and in discourse, that there is no topick so fallacious, either in talk or in writing, as to argue how we ought to act in Ireland, from the example of England, Holland, France, or any other country, whose inhabitants are allowed the common rights and liberties of human kind. I could undertake to name six or seven of the most uncontrolled maxims in government, which are utterly false in this kingdom. As