| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: wolves, each in the nearest wood. And so arise those truly
monstrous Eastern despotisms, of which modern Persia is, thank God,
the only remaining specimen; for Turkey and Egypt are too amenable
of late years to the influence of the free nations to be counted as
despotisms pure and simple--despotisms in which men, instead of
worshipping a God-man, worship the hideous counterfeit, a Man-god--a
poor human being endowed by public opinion with the powers of deity,
while he is the slave of all the weaknesses of humanity. But such,
as an historic fact, has been the last stage of every civilisation--
even that of Rome, which ripened itself upon this earth the last in
ancient times, and, I had almost said, until this very day, except
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from War and the Future by H. G. Wells: accumulation of future dangers in Ireland, Egypt, India, and
elsewhere, for an apparent absence of internal friction. These
people have no gratitude for tacit help, no spirit of intelligent
service, and no sense of fair play to the outsider. The latter
deficiency indeed they call /esprit de corps/ and prize it
as if it were a noble quality.
It becomes more and more imperative that the foreign observer
should distinguish between this narrower, older official Britain
and the greater newer Britain that struggles to free itself from
the entanglement of a system outgrown. There are many Englishmen
who would like to say to the French and Irish and the Italians
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne: Eugenius; but I triumph'd over him as I always do, like a fool.--'Tis my
comfort, however, I am not an obstinate one: therefore
I define a nose as follows--intreating only beforehand, and beseeching my
readers, both male and female, of what age, complexion, and condition
soever, for the love of God and their own souls, to guard against the
temptations and suggestions of the devil, and suffer him by no art or wile
to put any other ideas into their minds, than what I put into my
definition--For by the word Nose, throughout all this long chapter of
noses, and in every other part of my work, where the word Nose occurs--I
declare, by that word I mean a nose, and nothing more, or less.
Chapter 2.XXV.
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