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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin by Robert Louis Stevenson: loved but yet mistrusted.
But this is to look forward: these were the days not of Victor
Emanuel but of Charles Albert; and it was on Charles Albert that
mother and son had now fixed their eyes as on the sword-bearer of
Italy. On Fleeming's sixteenth birthday, they were, the mother
writes, 'in great anxiety for news from the army. You can have no
idea what it is to live in a country where such a struggle is going
on. The interest is one that absorbs all others. We eat, drink,
and sleep to the noise of drums and musketry. You would enjoy and
almost admire Fleeming's enthusiasm and earnestness - and, courage,
I may say - for we are among the small minority of English who side
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