| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom by William and Ellen Craft: "And often, from that other world, on this
Some gleams from great souls gone before may shine,
To shed on struggling hearts a clearer bliss,
And clothe the Right with lustre more divine.
"Farewell! good man, good angel now! this hand
Soon, like thine own, shall lose its cunning, too;
Soon shall this soul, like thine, bewildered stand,
Then leap to thread the free unfathomed blue."
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.
In the preceding pages I have not dwelt upon
the great barbarities which are practised upon the
Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx: simultaneously old recollections; personal animosities, fears and hopes;
prejudices and illusions; sympathies and antipathies; convictions, faith
and principles bound these factions to one House or the other, who
denies it? Upon the several forms of property, upon the social
conditions of existence, a whole superstructure is reared of various and
peculiarly shaped feelings, illusions, habits of thought and conceptions
of life. The whole class produces and shapes these out of its material
foundation and out of the corresponding social conditions. The
individual unit to whom they flow through tradition and education, may
fancy that they constitute the true reasons for and premises of his
conduct. Although Orleanists and Legitimists, each of these factions,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories by Mark Twain: without any imagination in it. He will go out and stand at the
front door, and when these two come out he will "arrest Ambulinia
from the hands of the insolent Elfonzo," and thus make for himself
a "more prosperous field of immortality than ever was decreed
by Omnipotence, or ever pencil drew or artist imagined." But, dear me,
while he is waiting there the couple climb out at the back window
and scurry home! This is romantic enough, but there is a lack
of dignity in the situation.
At this point McClintock puts in the whole of his curious play--
which we skip.
Some correspondence follows now. The bitter father and the
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