The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from War and the Future by H. G. Wells: machine guns in another couple of hours. The French claim that
they have located new batteries, got their /tir de
demolition/ upon them in and destroyed them within five
hours. The British I told of that found it incredible. Every
day the French print special maps showing the guns, sham guns,
trenches, everything of significance behind the German lines,
showing everything that has happened in the last four-and-twenty
hours. It is pitiless. It is indecent. The map-making and
printing goes on in the room next and most convenient to the
examination of the photographs. And, as I say, the German army
knows of this, and knows that it cannot prevent it because of its
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Baby Mine by Margaret Mayo: fondness? Her letters indicated an undying devotion.
These were some of the thoughts that were going through Alfred's
mind just three months after his departure from Chicago, and all
the while his hostess was mentally dubbing him a "dull person."
"What an abstracted man he is!" she said before he was down the
front steps.
"Is he really so clever in business?" a woman friend inquired.
"It's hard to believe, isn't it?" commented a third, and his host
apologised for the absent Alfred by saying that he was no doubt
worried about a particular business decision that had to be made
the next morning.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Russia in 1919 by Arthur Ransome: violent conflict with any definitely bourgeois government
that may be brought in by counter-revolution.
In the resolution on the economic position which was
finally passed unanimously, one point reads as follows: "It is
necessary to strive for just economic relations with other
countries in the form of state regulated exchange of goods
and the bringing of the productive forces of other countries
to the working out of the untouched natural resources of
Soviet Russia." It is interesting to notice the curiously mixed
character of the opposition. Some call for "a real socialism,"
which shall make no concessions whatsoever to foreign
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