13.  Start, I beseech you, with a conviction firmly fixed on your mind, that you have no right to live in this world; that, being of hale body and sound mind, you have no right to any earthly existence, without doing work of some sort or other, unless you have ample fortune whereon to live clear of debt; and, that even in that case, you have no right to breed children, to be kept by others, or to be exposed to the chance of being so kept.  Start with this conviction thoroughly implanted on your mind.  To wish to live on the labour of others is, besides the folly of it, to contemplate a fraud at the least, and, under certain circumstances, to meditate oppression and robbery.

14.  I suppose you in the middle rank of life.  Happiness ought to be your great object, and it is to be found only in independence.  Turn your back on Whitehall and on Somerset-House; leave the Customs and Excise to the feeble and low-minded; look not for success to favour, to partiality, to friendship, or to what is called interest:  write it on your heart, that you will depend solely on your own merit and your own exertions.  Think not, neither, of any of those situations where gaudy habiliments and sounding titles poorly disguise from the eyes of good sense the mortifications and the heart-ache of slaves.  Answer me not by saying, that these situations ‘must be filled by somebody;’ for, if I were to admit the truth of the proposition, which I do not, it would remain for you to show that they are conducive to happiness, the contrary of which has been proved to me by the observation of a now pretty long life.

15.  Indeed, reason tells us, that it must be thus:  for that which a man owes to favour or to partiality, that same favour or partiality is constantly liable to take from him.  He who lives upon anything except his own labour, is incessantly surrounded by rivals:  his grand resource is that servility in which he is always liable to be surpassed.  He is in daily danger of being out-bidden; his very bread depends upon caprice; and he lives in a state of uncertainty and never-ceasing fear.  His is not, indeed, the dog’s life, ‘hunger and idleness;’ but it is worse; for it is ‘idleness with slavery,’ the latter being the just price of the former.  Slaves frequently are well fed and well clad; but slaves dare not speak; they dare not be suspected to think differently from their masters:  hate his acts as much as they may; be he tyrant, be he drunkard, be he fool, or be he all three at once, they must be silent, or, nine times out of ten, affect approbation:  though possessing a thousand times his knowledge, they must feign a conviction of his superior understanding; though knowing that it is they who, in fact, do all that he is paid for doing, it is destruction to them to seem as if they thought any portion of the service belonged to them!  Far from me be the thought, that any youth who shall read this page would not rather perish than submit to live in a state like this!  Such a state is fit only for the refuse of nature; the halt, the half-blind, the unhappy creatures whom nature has marked out for degradation.