pure Greek blood, and fully qualified to send a chariot to the
Olympic race course, would have rejected the name of Gaul or
Libyan. He was, in the phrase of that time, an English gentleman
of family and fortune born in Ireland. He had studied at the
Temple, had travelled on the Continent, had become well known to
the most eminent scholars and philosophers of Oxford and
Cambridge, had been elected a member of the Royal Society of
London, and had been one of the founders of the Royal Society of
Dublin. In the days of Popish ascendancy he had taken refuge
among his friends here; he had returned to his home when the
ascendancy of his own caste had been reestablished; and he had
been chosen to represent the University of Dublin in the House of
Commons. He had made great efforts to promote the manufactures of
the kingdom in which he resided; and he had found those efforts
impeded by an Act of the English Parliament which laid severe
restrictions on the exportation of woollen goods from Ireland. In
principle this Act was altogether indefensible. Practically it
was altogether unimportant. Prohibitions were not needed to
prevent the Ireland of the seventeenth century from being a great
manufacturing country; nor could the most liberal bounties have
made her so. The jealousy of commerce, however, is as fanciful
and unreasonable as the jealousy of love. The clothiers of Wilts
and Yorkshire were weak enough to imagine that they should be
ruined by the competition of a half barbarous island, an island
where there was far less capital than in England, where there was
far less security for life and property than in England, and
where there was far less industry and energy among the labouring
classes than in England. Molyneux, on the other hand, had the
sanguine temperament of a projector. He imagined that, but for
the tyrannical interference of strangers, a Ghent would spring up