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In professions in which there are no benefices, such as law and

physic, if an equal proportion of people were educated at the

public expense, the competition would soon be so great as to sink

very much their pecuniary reward. It might then not be worth any

man's while to educate his son to either of those professions at

his own expense. They would be entirely abandoned to such as had

been educated by those public charities, whose numbers and

necessities would oblige them in general to content themselves

with a very miserable recompence, to the entire degradation of

the now respectable professions of law and physic.