Notice how the idea in the topic statement of each of the following paragraphs is repeated in those which follow:—­

1.  No man ever made a complete new system of law and gave it to a people.  No monarch, however absolute or powerful, ever had the power to change the habits of a people to that extent.  Revolution generally means, not a change of law, but merely a change of government officials; even when it is a change from monarchy to democracy.  Our Revolution made practically no changes in the criminal and civil laws of the colonies.

—­Clark:  The Government.

2.  People talk of liberty as if it meant the liberty to do just what a man likes.  I call that man free who fears doing wrong, but fears nothing else.  I call that man free who has learned the most blessed of all truths,—­that liberty consists in obedience to the power, and to the will, and to the law that his higher soul reverences and approves.  He is not free because he does what he likes; but he is free because he does what he ought, and there is no protest in his soul against the doing.

—­Frederick William Robertson.

3.  This dense forest was to the Indians a home in which they had lived from childhood, and where they were as much at ease as a farmer on his own acres.  To their keen eyes, trained for generations to more than a wild beast’s watchfulness, the wilderness was an open book.  Nothing at rest or in motion escaped them.  They had begun to track game as soon as they could walk; a scrape on a tree trunk, a bruised leaf, a faint indentation of the soil, which no white man could see, all told them a tale as plainly as if it had been shouted in their ears.

—­Theodore Roosevelt:  The Winning of the West.

4.  Public enterprises, whether conducted by the municipality or committed to the public service corporation, exist to render public services.  Streets are public highways.  They exist for the people’s use.  Nothing should be placed in them unless required to facilitate their use by or for the people.  Only the general need of water, gas, electricity, and transportation justifies the placing of pipes and wires and tracks in the streets.  The public need is the sole test and measure of such occupation.  To look upon the streets as a source of private gain, or even municipal revenue, except as incidents of their public use, is to disregard their public character.  Adequate service at the lowest practicable rates, not gain or revenue, is the test.  The question is, not how much the public service corporation may gain, but what can be saved to the people by its employment.

—­Edwin Burrett Smith:  The Next Step in Municipal Reform
("Atlantic Monthly").

+Theme XXVII.+—­Develop one of the following topic statements into a paragraph, using the method, of repetition as far as possible:—­

1.  It is difficult to become angry with one who is always good-natured.