If a private gentleman’s income be sunk irretrievably for ever from a hundred pounds to fifty, and that he hath no other method to supply the deficiency, I desire to know, my Lord, whether such a person hath any other course to take than to sink half his expenses in every article of economy, to save himself from ruin and the gaol.  Is not this more than doubly the case of Ireland, where the want of money, the irrecoverable ruin of trade, with the other evils above mentioned, and many more too well known and felt, and too numerous or invidious to relate, 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 everything of the growth and manufacture of their own country, and most to value whatever comes from the very remotest parts of the globe.  And I am convinced, that if the virtuosi could once find out a world in the moon, with a passage to it, our women would wear nothing but what came directly from thence.[100]

The prime cost of wine yearly imported to Ireland is valued at thirty thousand pounds, and the tea (including coffee and chocolate) at five times that sum.  The lace, silks, calicoes, and all other unnecessary ornaments for women, including English cloths and stuffs, added to the former articles, make up (to compute grossly), about four hundred thousand pounds.

Now, if we should allow the thirty thousand pounds for wine, wherein the women have their share, and which is all we have to comfort us, and deduct seventy thousand pounds more for over-reckoning, there would still remain three hundred thousand pounds, annually spent for unwholesome drugs, and unnecessary finery.  Which prodigious sum would be wholly saved, and many thousands of our miserable shopkeepers and manufacturers comfortably supported.

Let speculative people busy their brains as much as they please, there is no other way to prevent this Kingdom from sinking for ever than by utterly renouncing all foreign dress and luxury.

It is absolutely so in fact that every husband of any fortune in the Kingdom is nourishing a poisonous, devouring serpent in his bosom with all the mischief but with none of its wisdom.