| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe: said party so visited and escaped to be carried and brought back again
by night, and the parties in this case offending to be punished at the
direction of the alderman of the ward, and the house of the receiver of
such visited person to be shut up for twenty days.
Every visited House to be marked.
'That every house visited be marked with a red cross of a foot long
in the middle of the door, evident to be seen, and with these usual
printed words, that is to say, "Lord, have mercy upon us," to be set
close over the same cross, there to continue until lawful opening of
the same house.
Every visited House to be watched.
A Journal of the Plague Year |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from In the South Seas by Robert Louis Stevenson: artist, illustrated public events, and was the occasion and
attraction of a feast. To-day they are paying the penalty of this
bloody commixture. The civil power, in its crusade against man-
eating, has had to examine one after another all Marquesan arts and
pleasures, has found them one after another tainted with a cannibal
element, and one after another has placed them on the proscript
list. Their art of tattooing stood by itself, the execution
exquisite, the designs most beautiful and intricate; nothing more
handsomely sets off a handsome man; it may cost some pain in the
beginning, but I doubt if it be near so painful in the long-run,
and I am sure it is far more becoming than the ignoble European
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from In the South Seas by Robert Louis Stevenson: its original, the most healthful, if not the most humane, of all
field sports - hedge-warfare. From this, as well as from the rest
of his amusements and interests, the islander, upon a hundred
islands, has been recently cut off. And to this, as well as to so
many others, the Samoan still makes good a special title.
Upon the whole, the problem seems to me to stand thus:- Where there
have been fewest changes, important or unimportant, salutary or
hurtful, there the race survives. Where there have been most,
important or unimportant, salutary or hurtful, there it perishes.
Each change, however small, augments the sum of new conditions to
which the race has to become inured. There may seem, A PRIORI, no
|
