These, I say, and the like methods would in corrupt times have been
taken to let in this deluge of brass among us; and I am confident would
even then have not succeeded, much less under the administration of so
excellent a person as the Lord Carteret, and in a country where the
people of all ranks, parties and denominations are convinced to a man,
that the utter undoing of themselves and their posterity for ever will
be dated from the admission of that execrable coin; that if it once
enters, it can be no more confined to a small or moderate quantity, than
the plague can be confined to a few families, and that no equivalent can
be given by any earthly power, any more than a dead carcass can be
recovered to life by a cordial.
There is one comfortable circumstance in this universal opposition to
Mr. Wood, that the people sent over hither from England to fill up our
vacancies ecclesiastical, civil and military, are all on our side:
Money, the great divider of the world, hath by a strange revolution,
been the great uniter of a most divided people. Who would leave a
hundred pounds a year in England (a country of freedom) to be paid a
thousand in Ireland out of Wood's exchequer. The gentleman they have
lately made primate[17] would never quit his seat in an English House of
Lords, and his preferments at Oxford and Bristol, worth twelve hundred
pounds a year, for four times the denomination here, but not half the
value; therefore I expect to hear he will be as good an Irishman, upon
this article, as any of his brethren, or even of us who have had the
misfortune to be born in this island. For those, who, in the common
phrase, do not "come hither to learn the language," would never change a
better country for a worse, to receive brass instead of gold.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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