Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 9.djvu/364

354 our circumstances. We have neither manufactures to employ them about, nor food to support them.

If a private gentleman's income be sunk irretrievably for ever, from a hundred pounds to fifty, and he has no other method to supply the deficiency; I desire to know, my lord, whether such a person has any other course to take, than to sink half his expenses in every article of economy, to save himself from ruin and a gaol. Is not this more than doubly the case of Ireland, where the want of money, the irretrievable ruin of trade, with the other evils above-mentioned, and many more too well known and felt, and too numerous or invidious to be related, have been gradually sinking us, for above a dozen years past, to a degree, that we are at least by two thirds in a worse condition, than was ever known since the revolution? Therefore, instead of dreams and projects for the advancing of trade, we have nothing left but to find out some expedient, whereby we may reduce our expenses to our incomes.

Yet this procedure, allowed so necessary in all private families, and in its own nature so easy to be put in practice, may meet with strong opposition, by the cowardly slavish indulgence of the men, to the intolerable pride, arrogance, vanity, and luxury of the women; who, strictly adhering to the rules of modern education, seem to employ their whole stock of invention in contriving new arts of profusion, faster than the most parsimonious husband can afford: and, to compass this work the more effectually, their universal maxim is, to despise and detest every thing of the growth of their own country, and most to value whatever comes from the very remotest parts