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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Soul of Man by Oscar Wilde: and elsewhere, who were not slaves themselves, nor owners of
slaves, nor had anything to do with the question really. It was,
undoubtedly, the Abolitionists who set the torch alight, who began
the whole thing. And it is curious to note that from the slaves
themselves they received, not merely very little assistance, but
hardly any sympathy even; and when at the close of the war the
slaves found themselves free, found themselves indeed so absolutely
free that they were free to starve, many of them bitterly regretted
the new state of things. To the thinker, the most tragic fact in
the whole of the French Revolution is not that Marie Antoinette was
killed for being a queen, but that the starved peasant of the
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