"The connection between a farmer and his labourers--you will say, that I speak like a farmer, in mentioning that _first_--ought to be advantageous to both--not merely as a contract, by which the employer is to receive so much work, and the workman so much money; but as it tends to produce an interchange between them of kind offices and kind feelings. By many of the labourers this is still felt as it ought to be felt, and they take a pride and a pleasure in working year after year for the same master, and try to obtain his approbation by industry and good conduct. Some of them, however, have no notion of fixing themselves. They care little whether their employer is pleased with them or not, and upon the slightest affront as they call it, or the slightest difference about wages, they are off directly. If one wont employ them, another _must_; or, at all events, they _must_ be employed by the parish. "Again; the natural affection which subsists between parent and child, is strengthened and increased in both--as is the case indeed with brute animals--by the dependence of the children on their parents for subsistence. But now this dependence is, in many instances, removed from the parent to the overseer. On the other hand, when the parents grow old and infirm, the children often might do much to assist them, and if left to themselves would delight in doing so. But under the present system, if they do it at all, they do it by _stealth_; for _why_, say they, _should we favour the parish_? If they happen to have a little matter of money left them, they are tempted for the same reason to conceal it. Here again they ask, why should they favour the parish? and they will not feel, that the receiving of parish relief, when they have any thing of their own, is a fraud upon the parish, an act of dishonesty.