I.] INTRODUCTION. 9 



of all parents, to teach, or cause to be taught, their 

 children as much as they can of books, after, and not 

 before, all the measures are safely taken for enabling 

 them to get their living by labour, or for providing 

 them a living without labour, and that, too, out of the 

 means obtained and secured by the parents out of their 

 own income. The taste of the times is, unhappily, to 

 give to children something of book-learning', with a 

 view of placing them to live, in some way or other, 

 upon the labour of other people. Very seldom, com- 

 paratively speaking, has this succeeded, even during 

 the wasteful public expenditure of the last thirty years ; 

 and, in the times that are approaching, it cannot, I 

 thank God, succeed at all. When the project has 

 failed, what disappointment, mortification and misery, 

 to both parent and child ! The latter is spoiled as a 

 labourer : his book-learning has only made him con- 

 ceited : into some course of desperation he falls ; and 

 the end is but too often not only wretched but ignomi- 

 nious. 



12. Understand me clearly here, however ; for it is 

 the duty of parents to give, if they be able, book-learn- 

 ing to their children, having first taken care to make 

 them capable of earning their living by bodily labour. 

 When that object has once been secured, the other 

 may, if the ability remain, be attended to. But I am 

 wholly against children wasting their time in the idle- 

 ness of what is called education; and particularly in 

 schools over which the parents have no control, and 

 where nothing is taught but the rudiments of servility, 

 pauperism and slavery. 



13. The education that I have in view is, there- 

 fore, of a very different kind. You should bear con- 

 stantly in mind, that nine-tenths of us are, from the 

 very nature and necessities of the world, born to gain 

 our livelihood by the sweat of our brow. What rea- 



son have we, then, to presume, that our children are 

 not to do the same ? If they be, as now and then 

 one will be, endued with extraordinary powers of mind, 

 those powers may have an opportunity of developing 

 themselves ; and if they never have that opportunity. 



