arents will be
relieved, but ignorance will be banished from the rising generation, and
the number of poor will hereafter become less, because their abilities,
by the aid of education, will be greater. Many a youth, with good
natural genius, who is apprenticed to a mechanical trade, such as
a carpenter, joiner, millwright, shipwright, blacksmith, etc., is
prevented getting forward the whole of his life from the want of a
little common education when a boy.

I now proceed to the case of the aged.

I divide age into two classes. First, the approach of age, beginning at
fifty. Secondly, old age commencing at sixty.

At fifty, though the mental faculties of man are in full vigour, and
his judgment better than at any preceding date, the bodily powers for
laborious life are on the decline. He cannot bear the same quantity of
fatigue as at an earlier period. He begins to earn less, and is
less capable of enduring wind and weather; and in those more retired
employments where much sight is required, he fails apace, and sees
himself, like an old horse, beginning to be turned adrift.

At sixty his labour ought to be over, at least from direct necessity.
It is painful to see old age working itself to death, in what are called
civilised countries, for daily bread.

To form some judgment of the number of those above fifty years of age,
I have several times counted the persons I met in the streets of London,
men, women, and children, and have generally found that the average is
about one in sixteen or seventeen. If it be said that aged persons
do not come much into the streets, so neither do infants; and a great
proportion of grown children are in schools and in work-shops as
apprentices. Taking, then, sixteen for a divisor, the whole number of
persons in England of fifty years and upwards, of both sexes, rich and
poor, will be four hundred and twenty thousand.

The persons to be provided for out of this gross number will be
husbandmen, common labourers, journeymen of every trade and their wives,
sailors, and disbanded soldiers, worn out servants of both sexes, and
poor widows.

There will be also a considerable number of middling tradesmen,
who having lived decently in the former part of life, begin, as age
approaches, to lose their business, and at last fall to decay.

Besides these there will be constantly thrown off from the revolutions
of that wheel which no man can stop nor regulate, a number from every
class of life c