It follows, from this general rule, that parents should carefully avoid bringing up children in a manner in which they have not the means of being afterwards maintained; and that, in the second place, when they cannot leave them in an independent fortune, they should, by making them learn a trade or profession, give them the means of obtaining what they have been accustomed to consider as necessary for them to enjoy.

There are, indeed, great numbers, and the greatest numbers of all; unable even to have their children taught what is called a trade.  But there are none whom poverty prevents from bringing their children up to industry; and, if they have been taught to live according to their situation, they will find themselves above their wants, and therefore the same general rule will still apply.

Most writers have considered the subject of education as relative to that portion of it only which applies to learning; but the first object of all, in every nation, is to make a man a good member of society; and this can never be done, unless he is fitted to fill the situation of life for which he is intended.

Governments and writers on education fall, generally speaking, into the same errors.  They would provide for the education of persons destined for the learned professions and sometimes for the fine arts; but agriculture, commerce, and manufactures, are totally left out:  {86} the most essential, the most generally useful, are not noticed at all.

As so much value is set upon the language of the Greeks and Romans, surely we might pay a little attention to the example of those distinguished nations.

The Greeks studied the Egyptian learning, and improved upon it; but this was only confined to those who followed learning as a profes-

—–­ {86} Lord Somerville has some excellent observations, relative to this, in his publication on Agriculture, published in 1800. -=-

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sion, or whose means allowed them to prosecute it as a study.  The common education of citizens was different; it consisted in teaching them to perform what was useful, and to esteem what was excellent.  It was a principle with them that all men ought to know how happiness is attained, and in what virtue consists; but they neither trusted to precept nor example.  They enforced by habit and practice, and in this the Romans followed the plan the Greeks had laid down, and, by that means, they surpassed all other nations.

When those great nations of antiquity abandoned their attention to the useful parts of education, they soon sunk in national character.  It so happens, in this case, that the mode of education and the manners of a people are so closely connected that it is difficult, from observation, to know which is the cause, and which the effect.  Youth, badly educated, make bad men, and bad men neglect the education of their children; they set them a wrong example:  such is the case, when a government does not interfere.  How this is to be done with advantage is the question.