of the first needs of a new country is roads.

3. The number of people receiving public support is smaller in this
country than in Europe.

4. An efficient postal system is a great aid to civilization.

5. A straight stream is an impossibility in nature.

6. Mountain ranges have great influence upon climate.

7. The United States holds first place as a manufacturing nation.

8. There are many swift rivers in New England.

9. Towns or cities are located at the mouths of navigable rivers.

(Which sentences state causes and which state effects? Would the effects
which you have stated really follow the given causes?)

+50. Development by Repetition.+--The repetition of a thought in different
form will often make plain that which we do not at first understand. This
is especially true if the repetitions are accompanied by new comparisons.
In every school the teacher makes daily use of repetition in her efforts
to explain to the pupils that which they do not understand. In a similar
way a writer makes use of this tendency of ours, and develops the idea of
the topic sentence by repetition. Each sentence should, however, do more
than merely repeat. It should add something to the central idea, making
this idea clearer, more definite, or more emphatic. If repetition is
excessive and purposeless, it becomes a fault.

Repetition may extend through the whole paragraph, or it may be used to
explain any sentence or any part of a sentence. It may tell what the thing
is or what it is not, and in effect becomes a definition setting limits to
the original idea.

EXERCISE

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, an