REMARKS OX THE EL AX SUBJECT. 



155 



addition to giving employment to the working classes, bring 

 back millions sterling. 



"Such production will operate against the interest of a 

 party, who care little what may swamp the English as well 

 as the Irish landowners and farmers in one mass of ruin, in 

 hope of gain — I mean those engaged in cotton manufactures, 

 and known as the Cotton Lords of Manchester; for 

 who would wear a cotton shirt if fine linen comes lower 

 in price (and a more extended cultivation of Flax would 

 make it so), for now we can have four linen shirts for the 

 price of six cotton ones, and the four linen shirts will out- 

 wear the six cotton ones. Therefore, as the small farmers 

 holding from twenty to forty acres of land in Ulster could 

 formerly, and up to the peace of 1815, pay their years rent 

 with the proceeds of from four to eight pieces of linen cloth, 

 I cannot see why the same should not be encouraged by 

 the landowners of Ireland in general, in opposition to the 

 wear and export of an article we cannot produce (cotton), 

 and for which our gold must be sent in millions before we are 

 at all benefitted. I find, according to the statistics of the 

 Linen Board in 1809, there were 76,749 acres sown in 

 Flax, but Wakefield made the total 100,000 acres in that 

 year, and valued it at £1,500,000. Drummond says that 

 the acres sown in 1823 were 122,242, and that at "Wake- 

 field's estimate, yielded a produce worth £1,833,000 

 sterling. There was a considerable falling off from 1823 

 up to 1829 and 1830, when the first Flax-spinning mills 

 were started in Belfast, and from that time the Belgian 

 system of managing the Flax crop has been gradually 

 extending itself, and as such proof as that we have from 

 Mr. Dobbin and others in this letter, must be enough to 

 satisfy Professor Lowe, and also the old women on whose 

 wisdom he placed so much stress, that we live now in the 

 days of progress, and must move along with the tides that 



