“174. Whether it would not be wise so to order our trade as to export manufactures rather than provisions, and of those such as employ most hands? “466. Whether our exports do not consist of such necessaries as other countries cannot well be without? “353. Whether hearty food and warm clothing would not enable and encourage the lower sort to labour? “354. Whether in such a soil as ours, if there was industry, there would be want? “418. Whether it be not a new spectacle under the sun, to behold in such a climate and such a soil, and under such a gentle government, so many roads untrodden, fields untilled, houses desolate, and hands unemployed? “514. Whether the wisdom of the State should not wrestle with this hereditary disposition of our Tartars, and with a high hand introduce agriculture? “534. Why we do not make tiles of our own, for flooring and roofing, rather than bring them from Holland? “539. Whether it be not wonderful that with such pastures, and so many black cattle, we do not find ourselves in cheese?” In several of his queries (381, 383) Bishop Berkeley is driving at the expediency of domestic slavery. It was two hundred years since the same expedient had been tried by Protector Somerset in England, during the intolerable state of vagabondage which followed the rage for pasture farming under the first Tudors. In Scotland, it was hardly more than a generation since the institution of domestic slavery had commended itself to Fletcher of Saltoun, as the only expedient that could free that country from the vagabondage of a tenth, or more, of the population. England had surmounted the difficulty long ago, Scotland got over it easily and speedily when she was admitted to the English and colonial markets for her linen manufacture by the Treaty of Union[440]. But in Ireland in the year 1740, and until long after, disabilities of all kinds, not only economic, but political and religious, were fastened upon the weaker nation by the stronger, the unfortunate cause of their long continuance having been the costly inheritance of loyalty to James II. and the Mass. The Famine and Fever of 1740-41. At the time when the bishop of Cloyne was issuing his economic queries from week to week (not much to the satisfaction of Primate Boulter), things were making up for the greatest crisis of famine and pestilence that Ireland experienced in the 18th century. There had been relapsing fever among the poor in Dublin in the autumn of 1738, and it appeared among them again in the summer and autumn of 1739. Rutty’s account of it is as follows: