Reading, writing, and arithmetic, are very necessary to those whose business require such qualifications; but where people's livelihood has no dependence on these arts, they are very pernicious to the poor, who are forced to get their daily bread by their daily labour. Few children make any progress at school, but, at the same time, they are capable of being employed in some business or other, so that every hour those of poor people spend at their book is so much time lost to the society. Going to school, in comparison to working, is idleness, and the longer boys continue in this easy sort of life, the more unfit they will be when grown up for downright labour, both as to strength and inclination. Men who are to remain and end their days in a laborious, tiresome, and painful station of life, the sooner they are put upon it at first, the more patiently they will submit to it for ever after. Hard labour, and the coarsest diet, are a proper punishment to several kinds of malefactors, but to impose either on those that have not been used and brought up to both, is the greatest cruelty, when there is no crime you can charge them with. Reading and writing are not attained to without some labour of the brain and assiduity, and before people are tolerably versed in either, they esteem themselves infinitely above those who are wholly ignorant of them, often with so little justice and moderation, as if they were of another species. As all mortals have naturally an aversion to trouble and pains-taking, so we are all fond of, and apt to overvalue those qualifications we have purchased at the expence of our ease and quiet for years together. Those who spent a great part of their youth in learning to read, write, and cypher, expect, and not unjustly, to be employed where those qualifications may be of use to them; the generality of them will look upon downright labour with the utmost contempt, I mean labour performed in the service of others in the lowest station of life, and for the meanest consideration. A man, who has had some education, may follow husbandry by choice, and be diligent at the dirtiest and most laborious work; but then the concern must be his own, and avarice, the care of a family, or some other pressing motive, must put him upon it; but he will not make a good hireling, and serve a farmer for a pitiful reward; at least he is not so fit for it as a day labourer that has always been employed about the plough and dung cart, and remembers not that ever he has lived otherwise.