| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin: deadly, as these masked words; they are the unjust stewards of all
men's ideas: whatever fancy or favourite instinct a man most
cherishes, he gives to his favourite masked word to take care of for
him; the word at last comes to have an infinite power over him,--you
cannot get at him but by its ministry.
And in languages so mongrel in breed as the English, there is a
fatal power of equivocation put into men's hands, almost whether
they will or no, in being able to use Greek or Latin words for an
idea when they want it to be awful; and Saxon or otherwise common
words when they want it to be vulgar. What a singular and salutary
effect, for instance, would be produced on the minds of people who
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Common Sense by Thomas Paine: hereditary succession can derive no glory. For as in Adam all sinned,
and as in the first electors all men obeyed; as in the one all mankind
we re subjected to Satan, and in the other to Sovereignty; as our innocence
was lost in the first, and our authority in the last; and as both disable
us from reassuming some former state and privilege, it unanswerably
follows that original sin and hereditary succession are parallels.
Dishonourable rank! Inglorious connection! Yet the most subtle sophist
cannot produce a juster simile.
As to usurpation, no man will be so hardy as to defend it; and that
William the Conqueror was an usurper is a fact not to be contradicted.
The plain truth is, that the antiquity of English monarchy will not
Common Sense |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Jolly Corner by Henry James: attention, never in his life before so fine, on the pulse of the
great vague place: he preferred the lampless hour and only wished
he might have prolonged each day the deep crepuscular spell. Later
- rarely much before midnight, but then for a considerable vigil -
he watched with his glimmering light; moving slowly, holding it
high, playing it far, rejoicing above all, as much as he might, in
open vistas, reaches of communication between rooms and by
passages; the long straight chance or show, as he would have called
it, for the revelation he pretended to invite. It was a practice
he found he could perfectly "work" without exciting remark; no one
was in the least the wiser for it; even Alice Staverton, who was
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