| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Crisis in Russia by Arthur Ransome: and the result can only be a drainage of good workmen away
from the hungry central industrial districts where they are
most of all needed.
Summing up the facts collected in this chapter and in the
first on the lack of things and the lack of men, I think the
economic crisis in Russia may be fairly stated as follows:
Owing to the appalling condition of Russian transport, and
owing to the fact that since 1914 Russia has been practically
in a state of blockade, the towns have lost their power of
supplying, either as middlemen or as producers, the simplest
needs of the villages. Partly owing to this, partly again
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories by Mark Twain: quadruped that's foreordained to perish"; and then he laughed,
and said: "Why, look at me--I'm a sarcasm! bless you, with all
my grand intelligence, the only think I inferred was that the dog
had gone mad and was destroying the child, whereas but for the
beast's intelligence--it's REASON, I tell you!--the child would
have perished!"
They disputed and disputed, and _I_ was the very center of subject
of it all, and I wished my mother could know that this grand honor
had come to me; it would have made her proud.
Then they discussed optics, as they called it, and whether a certain
injury to the brain would produce blindness or not, but they could
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