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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Woman and Labour by Olive Schreiner: those forms of intelligence which make him amenable to the new condition of
life and valuable in them. The same inversion in the value of qualities
may be traced in the history of human species. The Jews, whose history has
been one long story of oppression at the hands of more muscular, physically
powerful and pugilistic peoples; whom we find first making bricks under the
lash of the Egyptian, and later hanging his harp as an exile among the
willow-trees of Babylon; who, for eighteen hundred years, has been
trampled, tortured, and despised beneath the feet of the more physically
powerful and pugilistic, but not more vital, keen, intelligent, or
persistent races of Europe; has, today, by the slow turning of the wheel of
life, come uppermost. The Egyptian task-master and warrior have passed;
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