It would encourage, likewise, the lower sort of people to give their children this part of education, if they could see them preferred to those of idle sots or sorry rake-hells, that never knew what it was to provide a rag for their brats but by begging. But now, when a boy or a girl are wanted for any small service, we reckon it a duty to employ our charity children before any other. The education of them looks like a reward for being vicious and unactive, a benefit commonly bestowed on parents, who deserve to be punished for shamefully neglecting their families. In one place you may hear a rascal half drunk, damning himself, call for the other pot, and as a good reason for it, add, that his boy is provided for in clothes, and has his schooling for nothing: In another you shall see a poor woman in great necessity, whose child is to be taken care of, because herself is a lazy slut, and never did any thing to remedy her wants in good earnest, but bewailing them at a gin-shop. If every body's children are well taught, who, by their own industry, can educate them at our universities, there will be men of learning enough to supply this nation and such another; and reading, writing, or arithmetic, would never be wanting in the business that requires them, though none were to learn them but such whose parents could be at the charge of it. It is not with letters as it is with the gifts of the Holy Ghost, that they may not be purchased with money; and bought wit, if we believe the proverb, is none of the worst. I thought it necessary to say thus much of learning, to obviate the clamours of the enemies to truth and fair dealing, who, had I not so amply explained myself on this head, would have represented me as a mortal foe to all literature and useful knowledge, and a wicked advocate for universal ignorance and stupidity. I shall now make good my promise, of answering what I know the well-wishers to charity schools would object against me, by saying that they brought up the children under their care, to warrantable and laborious trades, and not to idleness as I did insinuate. I have sufficiently showed already, why going to school was idleness if compared to working, and exploded this sort of education in the children of the poor, because it incapacitates them ever after for downright labour, which is their proper province, and, in every civil society, a portion they ought not to repine or grumble at, if exacted from them with discretion and humanity. What remains, is, that I should speak as to their putting them out to trades, which I shall endeavour to demonstrate to be destructive to the harmony of a nation, and an impertinent intermeddling with what few of these governors know any thing of.