Innumerable circumstances reduce men to want; and pressing poverty
obliges some people to make their cases public, or starve; and from
thence came the custom of begging, which sloth and idleness has
improved into a trade. But the method I propose, thoroughly put in
practice, would remove the cause, and the effect would cease of
course.

Want of consideration is the great reason why people do not provide
in their youth and strength for old age and sickness; and the
ensuing proposal is, in short, only this--that all persons in the
time of their health and youth, while they are able to work and
spare it, should lay up some small inconsiderable part of their
gettings as a deposit in safe hands, to lie as a store in bank to
relieve them, if by age or accident they come to be disabled, or
incapable to provide for themselves; and that if God so bless them
that they nor theirs never come to need it, the overplus may be
employed to relieve such as shall.

If an office in the same nature with this were appointed in every
county in England, I doubt not but poverty might easily be
prevented, and begging wholly suppressed.


THE PROPOSAL IS FOR A PENSION OFFICE.


That an office be erected in some convenient place, where shall be a
secretary, a clerk, and a searcher, always attending.

That all sorts of people who are labouring people and of honest