bordinations of society; and who would contribute to the
exaltation of that spirit which even want and calamity are not able to
restrain from rudeness and rebellion?

But no better success will commonly be found to attend servility and
dejection, which often give pride the confidence to treat them with
contempt. A request made with diffidence and timidity is easily denied,
because the petitioner himself seems to doubt its fitness.

Kindness is generally reciprocal; we are desirous of pleasing others,
because we receive pleasure from them; but by what means can the man
please, whose attention is engrossed by his distresses, and who has no
leisure to be officious; whose will is restrained by his necessities,
and who has no power to confer benefits; whose temper is perhaps
vitiated by misery, and whose understanding is impeded by ignorance?

It is yet a more offensive discouragement, that the same actions
performed by different hands produce different effects, and, instead of
rating the man by his performances, we rate too frequently the
performance by the man. It sometimes happens in the combinations of
life, that important services are performed by inferiors; but though
their zeal and activity may be paid by pecuniary rewards, they seldom
excite that flow of gratitude, or obtain that accumulation of
recompense, with which all think it their duty to acknowledge the favour
of those who descend to their assistance from a higher elevation. To be
obliged, is to be in some respect inferior to another[h]; and few
willingly indulge the memory of an action which raises one whom they
have always been accustomed to think below them, but satisfy themselves
with faint praise and penurious payment, and then drive it from their
own minds, and endeavour to conceal it from the knowledge of others.

It may be always objected to the services of those who can be supposed
to want a reward, that they were produced not by kindness but interest;
they are, therefore, when they are no longer wanted, easily disregarded
as arts of insinuation, or stratagems of selfishness. Benefits which are
received as gifts from wealth, are exacted as debts from indigence; and
he that in a high station is celebrated for superfluous goodness, would
in a meaner condition have barely been confessed to have done his duty.

It is scarcely possible for the utmost benevolence to oblige, when
exerted under the disadvantages of great inferiority; for, by the
habitual