“Mr. Walter Scott says (’Life of Swift,’ p. 278) that the Irish woollen manufacture produced an annual million, but this is not the fact; Mr. Dobbs in his ‘Essay on the Trade of Ireland,’ informs us, from the custom-house books, that in the year 1697 (which immediately preceded the year in which the address above-mentioned was transmitted to the king) the total value of Irish woollen exports, of all sorts, was only L23,614 9s. 6d., and in 1687, when they were at the highest, they did not exceed L70,521 14s. 0d. It moreover appears, that the greater part of these exports were of a sort which did not interfere with the trade of England, L56,415 16s. 0d. was in friezes, and L2,520 18s. 0d. coarse stockings, the rest consisted in serges and other stuffs of the new drapery, which affected not the trade of England generally, but only the particular interests of Exeter and its neighbourhood, and a very few other inconsiderable towns.

“But, whatever injury was intended, little prejudice was done to Ireland, except what followed immediately after the passing of this Act.  It appears from Mr. Dobbs’s pamphlet, that, a few years after, four times the quantity of woollen goods were shipped in each year, clandestinely, than had ever been exported, legally, before:  moreover, the Irish vastly increased their manufactures for home consumption, and learned to make fine cloth from Spanish wool:  it was only to England itself that any disadvantage redounded; many manufacturers who were unsettled by this measure, passed over to Germany, Spain, and to Rouen and other parts of France, ’from these beginnings they have, in many branches, so much improved the woollen manufactures of France, as to vie with the English in foreign markets.—­Upon the whole, those nations may be justly said to have deprived Britain of millions since that time, instead of the thousands Ireland might possibly have made.’—­What Mr. Dobbs has here asserted, relative to the removal of the manufacturers, has been confirmed by another tract, ’Letter from a Clothier a Member of Parliament,’ printed in 1731, which informs us that, for some years after, the English seemed to engross all the woollen trade, ’but this appearance of benefit abated, as the foreign factories, raised on the ruin of the Irish, acquired strength’:  he shows too, that the importation of unmanufactured wool from Ireland to England had been gradually decreasing since that time, which was probably on account of the increase of the illicit trade to foreign parts, towards the encouragement of which the duties, or legal transportation, served to act as a bounty of 36 per cent.  ’So true it is, that England can never fall into measures for unreasonably cramping the industry of the people of Ireland, without doing herself the greatest prejudice.’” (Note g, pp. 320-321). [T.  S.]