The  occasion  was  the  attempt,  on  the  part  of  the  English  ministry,  to
force  in  Ireland  the  circulation  of  a  large  sum  of  copper  money,  the
contract  for  coining  which  had  been  undertaken  by  William  Wood,  a
Birmingham  speculator.  This  money  Swift  endeavored  to  persuade
the  people  was  enormously  below  its  nominal  value,  and  he  counselled
all  true  patriots  not  only  to  refuse  to  take  it,  but  to  refrain  from  using
any  English  manufactures  whatever.  The  force  and  animation  of  his
arguments,  and  the  exquisite  skill  with  which  he  woie  his  mask  of  a
plain,  honest,  patriotic  tradesman,  excited  the  impressionable  Irish
almost  to  frenzy.  As  Swift  afterwards  boasted  to  Archbishop  Boulter,
he  would  have  had  but  to  lift  his  finger  to  cause  the  ministry  to  be  torn
in  pieces.  The  government  was  obliged  to  renounce  the  project  of
Wood's  coinage,  and  the  attorney-general's  indictment  of  Harding,  the
printer  of  the  letters,  though  maintained  by  all  the  violence  of  Whit-
shed,  was  ignored  by  the  jury.  Swift  was  known  to  be  the  real  author
of  the  letters,  and  his  defence  of  the  rights  of  the  Irish  people  made
him  from  this  moment  the  idol  of  that  warm-hearted  and  impres-
sionable race.
