"Common sense must discover to every man that when foreign trade is restrained, discouraged, or prevented in any country, and where that country has the materials for manufactures, a fruitful soil, and numerous inhabitants, the home trade is its best resource. If this is thought by men of great knowledge to be the most valuable of all trades, because it makes the speediest and surest returns, and because it increases at the same time two capitals in the same country, there is no nation on the globe whose wealth, population, strength, and happiness would be promoted by such a trade in a greater degree than ours."[125] The author of the "Commercial Restraints" was a barrister of great eminence, who had been Prime Serjeant, was a member of the Irish Privy Council, Principal Secretary of State, and Provost of Trinity College, and a distinguished member of the Irish Parliament. This book, however, obtained a reception similar to that accorded to the "Case of Ireland," and the fourth Drapier's letter. In the fly-leaf of the copy in the Library of the Honourable Society of the King's Inns, which I have utilised in arranging this treatise, there are the following observations:--"Of this remarkable book see the _Times_ of February 14, 1846. Extract of a letter of Sir Valentine Blake, M.P. for Galway, in which he says, 'that immediately after its publication it was suppressed, and burned by the common hangman, and that Mr. Flood, in his place in the House of Commons, said he would give one thousand pounds for a copy, and that the libraries of all the three branches of the Legislature could not procure one copy of this valuable work.'" The editor of a new edition tells us that there are two copies of the work in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin, both of which have been recently obtained, and from one of them the reprint is taken.[126] When Hely Hutchinson, in 1779, advocated "the necessity of using our own manufactures," he stated with accuracy that such arguments, though never so universal as at that time, were no new idea in Ireland. It had been recommended half a century before by Swift, and the celebrated Bishop Berkeley. "I heard," said Swift, writing in 1720, "the late Archbishop of Tuam (Dr. John Vesey) make a pleasant observation that Ireland would never be happy till a law was made for burning everything that came from England, except their people and their coals."[127] Again, in 1727, he says, "The directions to Ireland are very short and simple, to encourage agriculture and home consumption, and utterly discard all importations that are not absolutely necessary for health or life."[128] Bishop Berkeley, in the "Querist," published in 1731, asks these questions, which show clearly his views:--"Whether there be upon the earth any Christian or civilised people so beggarly wretched or destitute as the common Irish? Whether, nevertheless, there is any other people whose wants may be more easily supplied from