| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Captain Stormfield by Mark Twain: During the first three hundred years after Columbus's discovery,
there wasn't ever more than one good lecture audience of white
people, all put together, in America - I mean the whole thing,
British Possessions and all; in the beginning of our century there
were only 6,000,000 or 7,000,000 - say seven; 12,000,000 or
14,000,000 in 1825; say 23,000,000 in 1850; 40,000,000 in 1875.
Our death-rate has always been 20 in 1000 per annum. Well, 140,000
died the first year of the century; 280,000 the twenty-fifth year;
500,000 the fiftieth year; about a million the seventy-fifth year.
Now I am going to be liberal about this thing, and consider that
fifty million whites have died in America from the beginning up to
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Plutarch's Lives by A. H. Clough: not give the Greeks a favorable specimen of the Lacedaemonian
government; and the expression of Theopompus, the comic poet, seemed
but poor, when he compared the Lacedaemonians to tavern women,
because when the Greeks had first tasted the sweet wine of liberty,
they then poured vinegar into the cup; for from the very first it had
a rough and bitter taste, all government by the people being
suppressed by Lysander, and the boldest and least scrupulous of the
oligarchical party selected to rule the cities.
Having spent some little time about these things, and sent some
before to Lacedaemon to tell them he was arriving with two hundred
ships, he united his forces in Attica with those of the two kings
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell: not fancy the benches. At a distance great enough to keep the
smoke away from the guests were the long pits where the meats
cooked and the huge iron wash-pots from which the succulent odors
of barbecue sauce and Brunswick stew floated. Mr. Wilkes always
had at least a dozen darkies busy running back and forth with
trays to serve the guests. Over behind the barns there was always
another barbecue pit, where the house servants and the coachmen
and maids of the guests had their own feast of hoecakes and yams
and chitterlings, that dish of hog entrails so dear to negro
hearts, and, in season, watermelons enough to satiate.
As the smell of crisp fresh pork came to her, Scarlett wrinkled
Gone With the Wind |
