| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Statesman by Plato: they are only servants and ministers.
And who are these who next come into view in various forms of men and
animals and other monsters appearing--lions and centaurs and satyrs--who
are these? I did not know them at first, for every one looks strange when
he is unexpected. But now I recognize the politician and his troop, the
chief of Sophists, the prince of charlatans, the most accomplished of
wizards, who must be carefully distinguished from the true king or
statesman. And here I will interpose a question: What are the true forms
of government? Are they not three--monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy? and
the distinctions of freedom and compulsion, law and no law, poverty and
riches expand these three into six. Monarchy may be divided into royalty
Statesman |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Proposed Roads To Freedom by Bertrand Russell: term of imprisonment. For some years he lived in
Italy, where he founded in 1864 an ``International
Fraternity'' or ``Alliance of Socialist Revolutionaries.''
This contained men of many countries, but
apparently no Germans. It devoted itself largely to
combating Mazzini's nationalism. In 1867 he moved
to Switzerland, where in the following year he
helped to found the ``International Alliance of So-
cialist Democracy,'' of which he drew up the program.
This program gives a good succinct resume of
his opinions:--
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from In the South Seas by Robert Louis Stevenson: hero is less eccentric than appears. Few men who come to the
islands leave them; they grow grey where they alighted; the palm
shades and the trade-wind fans them till they die, perhaps
cherishing to the last the fancy of a visit home, which is rarely
made, more rarely enjoyed, and yet more rarely repeated. No part
of the world exerts the same attractive power upon the visitor, and
the task before me is to communicate to fireside travellers some
sense of its seduction, and to describe the life, at sea and
ashore, of many hundred thousand persons, some of our own blood and
language, all our contemporaries, and yet as remote in thought and
habit as Rob Roy or Barbarossa, the Apostles or the Caesars.
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