| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: neither parliament, nor estates, nor governors. It is upon thirty
masters of request, despatched into the provinces, that their evil
or their good, their fertility or their sterility, entirely depend."
To do everything for the people, and let them do nothing for
themselves--this was the Ancien Regime. To be more wise and more
loving than Almighty God, who certainly does not do everything for
the sons of men, but forces them to labour for themselves by bitter
need, and after a most Spartan mode of education; who allows them to
burn their hands as often as they are foolish enough to put them
into the fire; and to be filled with the fruits of their own folly,
even though the folly be one of necessary ignorance; treating them
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Soul of a Bishop by H. G. Wells: classes of London. The house agents perceived intimations of
helplessness in their manner, adopted a "rushing" method with
them strange to people who had hitherto lived in a glowing halo
of episcopal dignity. "Take it or leave it," was the note of
those gentlemen; "there are always people ready for houses." The
line that property in land and houses takes in England, the
ex-bishop realized, is always to hold up and look scornful. The
position of the land-owning, house-owning class in a crowded
country like England is ultra-regal. It is under no obligation to
be of use, and people are obliged to get down to the land
somewhere. They cannot conduct business and rear families in the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift: But I am not in the least pain upon that matter, because it is
very well known, that they are every day dying, and rotting, by
cold and famine, and filth, and vermin, as fast as can be
reasonably expected. And as to the young labourers, they are now
in almost as hopeful a condition. They cannot get work, and
consequently pine away from want of nourishment, to a degree,
that if at any time they are accidentally hired to common labour,
they have not strength to perform it, and thus the country and
themselves are happily delivered from the evils to come.
I have too long digressed, and therefore shall return to my
subject. I think the advantages by the proposal which I have made
A Modest Proposal |
