| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Firm of Nucingen by Honore de Balzac: happen, it often happens, that a shopkeeper gets hold of damaged
goods, for the seller always cheats the buyer. Go and ask the most
upright folk in Paris--the best known men in business, that is--and
they will all triumphantly tell you of dodges by which they passed off
stock which they knew to be bad upon the public. The well-known firm
of Minard began by sales of this kind. In the Rue Saint-Denis they
sell nothing but 'greased silk'; it is all that they can do. The most
honest merchants tell you in the most candid way that 'you must get
out of a bad bargain as best you can'--a motto for the most
unscrupulous rascality. Blondet has given you an account of the Lyons
affair, its causes and effects, and I proceed in my turn to illustrate
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Kenilworth by Walter Scott: services, man, and care not whom else thou canst delude with thy
philosophical charlatanry."
"My son Varney," said the alchemist, "the unbelief, gathered
around thee like a frost-fog, hath dimmed thine acute perception
to that which is a stumbling-block to the wise, and which yet, to
him who seeketh knowledge with humility, extends a lesson so
clear that he who runs may read. Hath not Art, thinkest thou,
the means of completing Nature's imperfect concoctions in her
attempts to form the precious metals, even as by art we can
perfect those other operations of incubation, distillation,
fermentation, and similar processes of an ordinary description,
Kenilworth |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Vision Splendid by William MacLeod Raine: He got a job with a brewery and charged the McGuire matter to
profit and loss.
As for Jeff the incident only served to make clearer what he
already knew. More and more he began to understand the forces that
dominate our cities, the alliance between large vested interests
and the powers that prey. These great corporations were seekers of
special privileges. To secure this they financed the machines and
permitted vice and corruption. He saw that ultimately most of the
shame for the bad government of American cities rests upon the
Fromes and the Merrills.
As for the newspapers, he was learning that between the people and
|
