[The Writings of Thomas Paine Volume II by Thomas Paine]@TWC D-Link bookThe Writings of Thomas Paine Volume II CHAPTER V 42/118
The amount of this expense will be, For six hundred and thirty thousand children at four pounds per annum each L2,520,000 By adopting this method, not only the poverty of the parents will be relieved, but ignorance will be banished from the rising generation, and the number of poor will hereafter become less, because their abilities, by the aid of education, will be greater.
Many a youth, with good natural genius, who is apprenticed to a mechanical trade, such as a carpenter, joiner, millwright, shipwright, blacksmith, etc., is prevented getting forward the whole of his life from the want of a little common education when a boy. I now proceed to the case of the aged. I divide age into two classes.
First, the approach of age, beginning at fifty.
Secondly, old age commencing at sixty. At fifty, though the mental faculties of man are in full vigour, and his judgment better than at any preceding date, the bodily powers for laborious life are on the decline.
He cannot bear the same quantity of fatigue as at an earlier period.
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