12. Understand me clearly here, however; for it is the duty of parents to
give, if they be able, book-learning 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 idleness 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, therefore, of a very different
kind. You should bear constantly 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 reason 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, the harm is not very great to us or to them. Nor does it
hence follow that the descendants of labourers are _always_ to be
labourers. The path upwards is steep and long, to be sure. Industry, care,
skill, excellence, in the present parent, lay the foundation of _a rise_,
under more favourable circumstances, for his children. The children of
these take _another rise_; and, by-and-by, the descendants of the present
labourer become gentlemen.

14. This is the natural progress. It is by attempting to reach the top at
a _single leap_ that so much misery is produced in the world; and the
propensity to make such attempts has been cherished and encouraged by the
strange projects that we have witnessed of late years for making the
labourers _virtuous_ and _happy_ by giving them what is called
_education_. The education which I speak of consists in bringing children
up to labour with _steadiness_, with _care_, and with _skill_; to show
them how to do as many useful things as possible; to teach them to do them
all in the best manner; to set them an example in industry, sobriety,
cleanliness, and neatness; to make all these _habitual_ to them, so that
they never shall be liable to fall into the contrary; to let them always
see a _good living_ proceeding from _labour_, and thus to remove from them
the temptation to get at the goods of others by violent or fraudulent