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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Plutarch's Lives by A. H. Clough: condition; but what he thought he could effect by persuasion upon the
pliable, and by force upon the stubborn, this he did,
as he himself says,
With force and justice working both one.
And, therefore, when he was afterwards asked if he had left the
Athenians the best laws that could be given, he replied, "The best they
could receive." The way which, the moderns say, the Athenians have of
softening the badness of a thing, by ingeniously giving it some pretty
and innocent appellation, calling harlots, for example, mistresses,
tributes customs, a garrison a guard, and the jail the chamber, seems
originally to have been Solon's contrivance, who called canceling debts
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