| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Collected Articles by Frederick Douglass: must be manfully grappled with by this. No political skirmishing will avail.
The occasion demands statesmanship.
Whether the tremendous war so heroically fought and so victoriously ended
shall pass into history a miserable failure, barren of permanent results,--
a scandalous and shocking waste of blood and treasure,--a strife for empire,
as Earl Russell characterized it, of no value to liberty or civilization,
--an attempt to re-establish a Union by force, which must be the
merest mockery of a Union,--an effort to bring under Federal authority
States into which no loyal man from the North may safely enter,
and to bring men into the national councils who deliberate with daggers
and vote with revolvers, and who do not even conceal their deadly hate
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan by Honore de Balzac: offered himself as an instance for this theory, he who had seen an
angel in the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse. This strange fancy of d'Arthez
might, however, be explained in other ways; perhaps he had despaired
of meeting here below with a woman who answered to that delightful
vision which all men of intellect dream of and cherish; perhaps his
heart was too sensitive, too delicate, to yield itself to a woman of
society; perhaps he thought best to let nature have her way, and keep
his illusions by cultivating his ideal; perhaps he had laid aside love
as being incompatible with his work and the regularity of a monastic
life which love would have wholly upset.
For several months past d'Arthez had been subjected to the jests and
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Merry Men by Robert Louis Stevenson: I passed whole days there, debating with myself the various
elements of our position; now leaning to the suggestions of love,
now giving an ear to prudence, and in the end halting irresolute
between the two.
One day, as I was sitting on my rock, there came by that way a
somewhat gaunt peasant wrapped in a mantle. He was a stranger, and
plainly did not know me even by repute; for, instead of keeping the
other side, he drew near and sat down beside me, and we had soon
fallen in talk. Among other things he told me he had been a
muleteer, and in former years had much frequented these mountains;
later on, he had followed the army with his mules, had realised a
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