48 



rately. I live in a country where every farmer is also a 

 manufacturer, and if not personally employed, yet, scarcely 

 ■with any exception, has manufacture in some form carried 

 on in his house. Such has been our practice for more 

 than a century ; and the result has been, that with the 

 weakest soil, and from the most thinly inhabited part of 

 Ireland, we are become by far the most populous, our 

 cultivated field bears a greater proportion to our whole 

 area than in other provinces, and we have carried tillage 

 farther up our mountains, and reclaimed more of our bogs 

 than will be observed in any part of the kingdom. 



Hence, I confess, I am prejudiced in favour of the 

 usages to which I have been a witness in my own imme- 

 diate country ; and in my plan for domestic colonization, 

 wish to assimilate the measures to those which I see at- 

 tended with complete success. 



I know it to be the habit of many wise ones, to condemn 

 the union of agriculture and manufacture as injurious to 

 each other, and I have often listened with impatience to 

 lectures on the prudence of keeping these two arts distinct 

 from each other ; for, say they, when united, neither can 

 attain the perfection to which they would arrive sepa- 

 rately; and I have heard the inferior style of our practical 

 agriculture brought in proof of the position, that the 

 union is injurious. 



1 have often taken the other side of the question, and 

 admitting the agricultural produce of a given area, 

 divided into small farms, to be decidedly inferior to that of 

 an equal area laid out in greater farms, and more skilfully 

 cultivated, yet still I have sustained, that the whole 

 produce, including manufacture, afforded by the mass of 



