that it might as well have been let alone: yet I always thought it would please men of any tolerable taste, and not be easily lost. My vanity I could never conquer, so well as I could wish; and I am too proud to commit crimes, and as to the main scope, the intent of the book, I mean the view it was wrote with, I protest that it has been with the utmost sincerity, what I have declared of it in the Preface, where you will find these words: "If you ask me, why I have done all this, cui bono? And what good these notions will produce? Truly, besides the reader's diversion, I believe none at all; but if I was asked, what naturally ought to be expected from them? I would answer, That, in the first place, the people who continually find fault with others, by reading them would be taught to look at home, and examining their own consciences, be made ashamed of always railing at what they are more or less guilty of themselves; and that, in the next, those who are so fond of the ease and comforts of a great and flourishing nation, would learn more patiently to submit to those inconveniences, which no government upon earth can remedy, when they should see the impossibility of enjoying any great share of the first, without partaking likewise of the latter." The first impression of the Fable of the Bees, which came out in 1714, was never carped at, or publicly taken notice of; and all the reason I can think on, why this second edition should be so unmercifully treated, though it has many precautions which the former wanted, is an Essay on Charity and Charity Schools, which is added to what was printed before. I confess, that it is my sentiment, that all hard and dirty work, ought, in a well-governed nation, to be the lot and portion of the poor, and that to divert their children from useful labour till they are fourteen or fifteen years old, is a wrong method to qualify them for it when are they grown up. I have given several reasons for my opinion in that Essay, to which I refer all impartial men of understanding, assuring them that they will not meet with such monstrous impiety in it as reported. What an advocate I have been for libertinism and immorality, and what an enemy to all instructions of youth in the Christian faith, may be collected from the pains I have taken on education for above seven pages together: and afterwards again, page 193, where speaking of the instructions the children of the poor might receive at church; from which, I say, "Or some other place of worship, I would not have the meanest of a parish that is able to walk to it, be absent on Sundays," I have these words: "It is the Sabbath, the most useful day in seven, that is set apart for divine service and religious exercise, as well as resting from bodily labour; and it is a duty incumbent on all magistrates, to take a particular care of that day. The poor more especially, and their children, should be made to go to church on it, both in the fore and