that a man is obtrusive and shameless in his requests, and that it
is impossible to bring him to reason, I must first of all hear the
whole of your conduct towards him; for you may have taken from him
so much in the first instance that, in spite of a long series of
restitution, a vast latitude for petition may still remain behind.

There is a village, no matter where, in which the inhabitants, on
one day in the year, sit down to a dinner prepared at the common
expense: by an extra-ordinary piece of tyranny, which Lord
Hawkesbury would call the wisdom of the village ancestors, the
inhabitants of three of the streets, about a hundred years ago,
seized upon the inhabitants of the fourth street, bound them hand
and foot, laid them upon their backs, and compelled them to look on
while the rest were stuffing themselves with beef and beer; the next
year the inhabitants of the persecuted street, though they
contributed an equal quota of the expense, were treated precisely in
the same manner. The tyranny grew into a custom; and, as the manner
of our nature is, it was considered as the most sacred of all duties
to keep these poor fellows without their annual dinner. The village
was so tenacious of this practice, that nothing could induce them to
resign it; every enemy to it was looked upon as a disbeliever in
Divine Providence, and any nefarious churchwarden who wished to
succeed in his election had nothing to do but to represent his
antagonist as an abolitionist, in order to frustrate his ambition,
endanger his life, and throw the village into a state of the most
dreadful commotion. By degrees, however, the obnoxious street grew
to be so well peopled, and its inhabitants so firmly united, that
their oppressors, more afraid of injustice, were more disposed to be
just. At the next dinner they are unbound, the year after allowed
to sit upright, then a bit of bread and a glass of water; till at