are very apt to cry out before they are hurt; a man who sees after an election one of his customers buying a pair of gloves on the opposite side of the way, roars out that his honesty will make him a bankrupt, and the county papers are filled with letters from Brutus, Publicola, Hampden, and Pym.
This interference with the freedom of voting, bad as it is, produces no political delibration; it does not make the Tories stronger than the Whigs, nor the Whigs than the Tories, for both are equally guilty of this species of tyranny; and any particular system of measures fails or prevails, much as if no such practice existed. The practice had better not be at all, but if a certain quantity of the evil does exist, it is better that it should be equally divided among both parties, than that it should be exercised by one, for the depression of the other. There are politicians always at a white heat, who suppose that there are landed tyrants only on one side of the question; but human life has been distressingly abridged by the flood, there is no time to spare, it is impossible to waste it upon such senseless bigotry.
