It may be true, that too much of the complaint is well-founded. The taste of our provincial gentry may be something coarse; and their houses, none of the best schools of civility and politeness: so that low and even immoral habits may be, and, I doubt, too often are, the fruit of an ordinary domestic education. But then what remedy does your Lordship prescribe for the removal of them? Why, you send them abroad with all their imperfections upon their heads; to get rid of their bad habits, as they can, and to pick up better, as they will: or, do you perhaps imagine that the ill qualities, they take out with them, will drop off, of themselves? and that the good ones they stand in need of, like new leaves in the spring, will immediately put forth and take their places?
LORD SHAFTESBURY.
I do but imagine, that bad habits are only to be expelled by better; and that therefore the readiest way for our countrymen to get quit of their ill manners, is, to force them into good company. And, with your leave, I see nothing very absurd or unreasonable in this imagination.
MR. LOCKE.
Certainly not, in prescribing good habits as a cure for bad ones. But your Lordship had done well to shew what there is in a foreign air, that is so propitious to good habits, as that none but such can thrive in it; or, if there be a mixture of good and bad, as with us, how your traveller shall be secured against an ill choice. Otherwise our young spark may pick up new habits indeed; but they may only be different from what he took from home, not better or more reasonable.
I doubt, my Lord, that, when such rude and untutored boys find themselves removed from that restraint which the eye of a parent, though but little accustomed to civility himself, imposed upon them, they will rather give way to a freer indulgence of their own froward humours, than be in any disposition to check and reform them. What inclination will such persons have to benefit by good company? or how indeed will they gain admittance into it?
I appeal to your own observation, whether, when this sort of ill-educated people get abroad, and settle for a time in some frequented city, their usual way be not to keep at distance from the better company of the place, and to flock together into little knots and clubs of their own countrymen, or of such others as are most resembling in taste and manners to themselves; where all their low humours are freely indulged, and even inflamed, by the mutual society and countenance of one another. This, your Lordship knows, is most frequently the case; while the obsequious tutor is at length more likely to be swayed by the importunity, and perverted by the ill example, of his disciples, than they are to be restrained by his advice and authority.
But, though foreign travel should be indeed a remedy for the mischiefs, complained of, I still question whether it would be a proper one. Suppose our young gentleman to be of so pliant a make, as to lay aside his rustic and illiberal habits in complaisance to the better company, he is obliged to live with: does it immediately follow, that he will adopt none but what are fit for him to assume; and, with so raw and undiscerning a judgment as he carried out with him, that he will have the skill to select only and assume such manners as are most becoming and ornamental?
LORD SHAFTESBURY.
As if one needs be in any pain, on that head; when the habits, I spoke of, are not only different from those he must assume abroad, but the very reverse of them!