was in favour of total exclusion. "I should rejoice to see an English stay-lace thought scandalous," he said, "and become a topic for censure at visits and tea-tables." He applied the fable of Pallas and Arachne to England and Ireland, and thought England harsher than the goddess. He spoke in vain to a people, indifferent to prosperity, a people which would rather have kept in the fashion, by wearing foreign stuffs and silks, than have ensured the success of Irish manufactures.
But it was the patent granted to William Wood, a gentleman eminent in the hardware trade, to impose a new copper coinage upon Ireland, which stirred the savage indignation of Swift to its depths. That there was a great lack of pence and ha'pence in Ireland is certain. The want was not supplied most economically by promising comfortable bribes to many personages about the Court, and by making the egregious Wood a present of £3000 a year for eight years. In all these transactions the need and benefit of Ireland were forgotten, and Swift made it his
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