servants hired for wages,
and exempts him from all the laws of family government, so that a master
seems now to have nothing to do with his apprentice, any other than in
what relates to his business.

And as the servant knows this, so he fails not to take the advantage of
it, and to pay no more service than he thinks is due; and the hours of
his shop business being run out, he claims all the rest for himself,
without the above restraint. Nor will the servants, in these times, bear
any examinations with respect to the disposing of their waste time, or
with respect to the company they keep, or the houses or places they go
to.

The use I make of it is this, and herein it is justly applicable to the
case in hand; by how much the apprentices and servants in this age are
loose, wild, and ungovernable, by so much the more should a master think
himself obliged not to depend upon them, much less to leave his business
to them, and dispense with his own attendance in it. If he does, he must
have much better luck then his neighbours, if he does not find himself
very much wronged and abused, seeing, as I said above, the servants and
apprentices of this age do very rarely act from a principle of
conscience in serving their master's interest, which, however, I do not
see they can be good Christians without.

I knew one very considerable tradesman in this city, and who had always
five or six servants in his business, apprentices and journeymen, who
lodged in his house; and having a little more the spirit of government
in him than most masters I now meet with, he took this method with them.
When he took apprentices, he told them beforehand the orders of his
family, and which he should oblige them to; particularly, that they
should none be absent from his business without leave, nor out of the
house after nine o'clock at night; and that he would not have it thought
hard, if he exacted three things of them:--

1. That, if they had been out, he should ask them where they had been,
and in what company? and that they should give him a true and direct
answer.

2. That, if he found reason to forbid them keeping company with any
particular person, or in any particular house or family, they should be
obliged to refrain from such company.

3. That, in breach of any of those two, after being positively charged
with it, he would, on their promising to amend it, forgive them, only
acquainting their friends of it; but the second time, he woul