| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain: that's the idea. While it is true that with you a good
mechanic is allowed about three dollars and a half a year,
and with us only about a dollar and seventy-five --"
"There -- ye're confessing it again, ye're confess-
ing it again!"
"Confound it, I've never denied it, I tell you!
What I say is this. With us HALF a dollar buys more
than a DOLLAR buys with you -- and THEREFORE it stands
to reason and the commonest kind of common-sense,
that our wages are HIGHER than yours."
He looked dazed, and said, despairingly:
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Memorabilia by Xenophon: longing to contract a friendship. Do not hide from me, therefore, whom
you would choose as a friend, since, owing to the pains I take to
please him who pleases me, I am not altogether unversed, I fancy, in
the art of catching men.[24]
[23] "An authority in matters of love." Cf. Plat. "Symp." 177 D; Xen.
"Symp." viii. 2.
[24] See below, III. xi. 7; cf. Plat. "Soph." 222; N. T. Matt. iv. 19,
{alieis anthropon}.
Critobulus replied: Why, these are the very lessons of instruction,
Socrates, for which I have been long athirst, and the more
particularly if this same love's lore will enable me to capture those
The Memorabilia |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Straight Deal by Owen Wister: forever outweigh whatever of legal argument may be on the other side, he
could have done nothing. "I believe I have no lawful right." There were
thousands in the North who also thus believed. It was only an extremist
minority who disregarded the Constitution's acquiescence in slavery and
wanted emancipation proclaimed at once. Had Lincoln proclaimed it, the
North would have split in pieces, the South would have won, the Union
would have perished, and slavery would have remained. Lincoln had to wait
until the season of anguish and meditation had unblinded thousands
besides himself, and thus had placed behind him enough of the North to
struggle on to that saving of the Union and that freeing of the slave
which was consummated more than two years later by Lee's surrender to
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