paid for all the toils and all the cares that
children have occasioned in their infancy. To be without sure and safe
friends in the world makes life not worth having; and whom can we be so
sure of as of our children? Brothers and sisters are a mutual support. We
see them, in almost every case, grow up into prosperity, when they act the
part that the impulses of nature prescribe. When cordially united, a
father and sons, or a family of brothers and sisters, may, in almost any
state of life, set what is called misfortune at defiance.

10. These considerations are much more than enough to sweeten the toils
and cares of parents, and to make them regard every additional child as an
additional blessing. But, that children may be a blessing and not a curse,
care must be taken of their _education_. This word has, of late years,
been so perverted, so corrupted; so abused, in its application, that I am
almost afraid to use it here. Yet I must not suffer it to be usurped by
cant and tyranny. I must use it: but not without clearly saying what I
mean.

11. _Education_ means _breeding up_, _bringing up_, or _rearing up_; and
nothing more. This includes every thing with regard to the _mind_ as well
as the _body_ of a child; but, of late years, it has been so used as to
have no sense applied to it but that of _book-learning_, with which, nine
times out of ten, it has nothing at all to do. It is, indeed, proper, and
it is the duty 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, comparatively
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
conceited: into some course of desperation he falls; and the end is but
too often not only wretched but ignominious.