| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from War and the Future by H. G. Wells: art of war is the manufacture in overwhelming quantities, the
carriage and delivery of shell upon the vulnerable points of the
enemy's positions. That is, so to speak, the essential blow.
Even the infantryman is now hardly more than the residuary
legatee after the guns have taken their toll.
I have now followed nearly every phase in the life history of a
shell from the moment when it is a segment of steel bar just cut
off, to the moment when it is no more than a few dispersed and
rusting rags and fragments of steel--pressed upon the stray
visitor to the battlefield as souvenirs. All good factories are
intensely interesting places to visit, but a good munition
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Melmoth Reconciled by Honore de Balzac: infidelities; and now all that blind passion had passed away as a
cloud vanishes in the sunlight.
Jenny was delighted to succeed to her mistress' position and fortune,
and did the cashier's will in all things; but Castanier, who could
read the inmost thoughts of the soul, discovered the real motive
underlying this purely physical devotion. He amused himself with her,
however, like a mischievous child who greedily sucks the juice of the
cherry and flings away the stone. The next morning at breakfast time,
when she was fully convinced that she was a lady and the mistress of
the house, Castanier uttered one by one the thoughts that filled her
mind as she drank her coffee.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Court Life in China by Isaac Taylor Headland: of all the provinces declaring it to be a law, and ordering the
"viceroys, governors and literary chancellors to see that it was
obeyed."
Dr. Hayes and Yuan Shih-kai soon split upon a regulation which
the Governor thought it best to introduce, viz., "That the
Chinese professors shall, on the first and fifteenth of each
month, conduct their classes in reverential sacrifice to the Most
Holy Confucius, and to all the former worthies and scholars of
the provinces." Dr. Hayes and his Christian teachers withdrew,
and it was not long until those who professed Christianity were
excused from this rite, while the Christian physicians who taught
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