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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Woman and Labour by Olive Schreiner: conditions may render exactly those subtile qualities, which in one social
state were a disadvantage, of the highest social advantage in another.
The skilled diplomatist or politician, so powerful in his own element, on
board ship during a storm becomes at once of less general value or
consideration than the meanest sailor who can reef a sail or guide a wheel;
and, were we to be reduced again suddenly to a state of nature, a company
of highly civilised men and women would at once, as we have before
remarked, find their social value completely inverted; landed on a desert
shore, unarmed and naked, to encounter wild beasts and savages, and to
combat nature for food, the primitive scale of human values would at once
reassert itself. It would not then be the mighty financier, the learned
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