The variety of work that is performed, and the number of hands employed to gratify the fickleness and luxury of women, is prodigious, and if only the married ones should hearken to reason and just remonstrances, think themselves sufficiently answered with the first refusal, and never ask a second time what had been once denied them: If, I say, married women would do this, and then lay out no money but what their husbands knew, and freely allowed of, the consumption of a thousand things, they now make use of, would be lessened by at least a fourth part. Let us go from house to house, and observe the way of the world only among the middling people, creditable shop-keepers, that spend two or three hundred a-year, and we shall find the women when they have half a score suits of clothes, two or three of them not the worse for wearing, will think it a sufficient plea for new ones, if they can say that they have never a gown or petticoat, but what they have been often seen in, and are known by, especially at church; I do not speak now of profuse extravagant women, but such as are counted prudent and moderate in their desires. If by this pattern we should in proportion judge of the highest ranks, where the richest clothes are but a trifle to their other expences, and not forget the furniture of all sorts, equipages, jewels, and buildings of persons of quality, we should find the fourth part I speak of a vast article in trade, and that the loss of it would be a greater calamity to such a nation as ours, than it is possible to conceive any other, a raging pestilence not excepted: for the death of half a million of people could not cause a tenth part of the disturbance to the kingdom, than the same number of poor unemployed would certainly create, if at once they were to be added to those, that already, one way or other, are a burden to the society.