Practically it was altogether unimportant.

Prohibitions were not needed to prevent the Ireland of the seventeenth century from being a great manufacturing country; nor could the most liberal bounties have made her so.

The jealousy of commerce, however, is as fanciful and unreasonable as the jealousy of love.

The clothiers of Wilts and Yorkshire were weak enough to imagine that they should be ruined by the competition of a half barbarous island, an island where there was far less capital than in England, where there was far less security for life and property than in England, and where there was far less industry and energy among the labouring classes than in England.

Molyneux, on the other hand, had the sanguine temperament of a projector.