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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Lady Baltimore by Owen Wister: "I don't see how that took the bloom off us."
"It didn't. It merely waked Europe up to the facts."
"Our battleships, you mean?"
"Our steel rails, our gold coffers, our roaring affluence."
"And our very accurate shooting!" he insisted; for he was a Southerner,
and man's gallantry appealed to him more than man's industry.
I laughed. "Yes, indeed! We may say that the Spanish War closed our first
volume with a bang. And now in the second we bid good-by to the virgin
wilderness, for it's explored; to the Indian, for he's conquered; to the
pioneer, for he's dead; we've finished our wild, romantic adolescence and
we find ourselves a recognized world power of eighty million people, and
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