| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Democracy In America, Volume 2 by Alexis de Toqueville: eminently democratic desire to get above their own sphere will
often lead them to seek to dignify a vulgar profession by a Greek
or Latin name. The lower the calling is, and the more remote
from learning, the more pompous and erudite is its appellation.
Thus the French rope-dancers have transformed themselves into
acrobates and funambules.
In the absence of knowledge of the dead languages,
democratic nations are apt to borrow words from living tongues;
for their mutual intercourse becomes perpetual, and the
inhabitants of different countries imitate each other the more
readily as they grow more like each other every day.
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Woman and Labour by Olive Schreiner: old, free, monogamous, labouring woman, which, twenty hundred years ago,
floated over the forests of Europe. We shall bear it on, each generation
as it falls passing it into the hand of that which follows, till we plant
it so high that all nations of the world shall see it; till the women of
the humblest human races shall be gathered beneath its folds, and no child
enter life that was not born within its shade.
We are not new! If you would understand us, go back two thousand years,
and study our descent; our breed is our explanation. We are the daughters
of our fathers as well as of our mothers. In our dreams we still hear the
clash of the shields of our forefathers as they struck them together before
battle and raised the shout of "Freedom!" In our dreams it is with us
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