charges, and beggary." The real cure is to make drunkards take care of wife and children ; spendthrifts lay up for a wet day ; idle, lazy fellows diligent ; and thoughtless, sottish men provident." If this were done there would be no need to "transpose our manufactures and confound our trade. … For every skein of worsted spun in a workhouse there must be a skein the less spun by some poor person or family that spun it before … to set poor people to work in the same thing that other poor people are employed upon before is giving to one what you take away from another, putting a vagabond in the honest man's employment." Defoe was the first to lay his finger upon the central difficulty of manufactured employment, which is even now very imperfectly understood by the public in general. It is a difficulty which has been very obvious to all those who are engaged in the administration of the Unemployed Workmen's Act.
The next writer of note who dealt with the question was Mandeville, who in 1733 published "The Fable of the Bees," in which he attacks Charity Schools, which were the favourite panacea of his day. He anticipates the present reaction against purely intellectual education. Education, he says, should fit a man for his position in life, and his language is vigorous. "Going to school is, in comparison with working, idleness, and the longer boys continue in this easy sort of life the more unfit they will be when grown up for downright labour both as to strength and inclination." Moreover, "the poor have nothing to stir them up to labour but their wants, which it is wisdom to relieve but folly to cure."
Henry Fielding, police magistrate and novelist, wrote in 1754 his "Enquiry into the Causes of the late Increase of Robbers," with a chapter upon the
