It is not reading in the abstract, but the kind of reading they are likely to meet with, and the examples about them leading them to emulate the patterns of sobriety and industry, or of vice and profligacy held out to them in books, that will do either good or harm to the morals of a people. In the country the people read moral or religious, or, at least, innocent books, and therefore, they are benefited by them; in towns, they as often meet with licentious and idle publications, which must do them harm. It is in vain to say that you will give them _good_ books, they will get _bad ones_. Will those hotbeds of vice, the factories of Manchester, &c., be less fruitful for having the _farina_ of knowledge sprinkled over them? Will not corruption quicken faster, and spread wider for having this new channel opened to it? Will a smattering in books, and the current pamphlets of the day tend to quench and smother the flame of the passions, or will it add fuel to them? I do not scruple to assert, that religion itself, when it comes in contact with certain situations, may be highly dangerous. It is the soil in which the greatest virtues and the greatest vices take root. Where it has not strength to stop the torrent of dissolute manners, it gives it additional force by checking it; as the bow that has been bent the contrary way, recoils back with tenfold violence. It is for this reason that the morals of the people in the trading towns in the north of England are, I believe, worse than they are farther south, because they are brought up more religiously. The common people there are almost all of them originally dissenters. Again, it may be asked, will the poor people in the trading towns send their children to school instead of sending them to work at a factory? Or will their employers, forgetting their own interests, compel them to do it? Or will they give up their profits and their wealth for the sake of informing the minds, and preserving the morals of the poor? Oh! no. It may be replied, that it is chiefly for the peasantry and country people, who compose the largest part of the community, that this plan of education is intended. But they are the very people who do not stand in need of it, and to whom, if it does no harm, it will do little good. If working hard, and living sparingly are the chief lessons meant to be inculcated in their minds, they are already tolerably perfect in their parts. As for the rest, it is in vain to attempt to make men any thing else but what their situation makes them. We are the creatures not of knowledge, but of circumstances.