| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Iron Puddler by James J. Davis: going with them, guiding our careers along their courses, they
will bear us to the port we're steering for.
The mob spirit in man is one of those blind forces that so
often lead to shipwreck. The mob-mind differs from the mind of
reason. To tell them apart is like distinguishing mushrooms from
toadstools. They look alike, but one means health and the other
is poison. Life has taught me the difference between a movement
and a mob. A movement is guided by logic, law and personal
responsibility. A mob is guided by passion and denies
responsibility.
I have seen meetings turned into mobs and mobs dissolved again
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain: and reconnoitres, cautiously; the silence still continuing,
bodies follow heads, and jaded, half smothered creatures group
themselves about, stretch their cramped limbs, draw in deep draughts
of the grateful fresh air, gossip with the neighbors from the next cave;
maybe straggle off home presently, or take a lounge through the town,
if the stillness continues; and will scurry to the holes again,
by-and-bye, when the war-tempest breaks forth once more.
There being but three thousand of these cave-dwellers--
merely the population of a village--would they not come
to know each other, after a week or two, and familiarly;
insomuch that the fortunate or unfortunate experiences of one
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Collected Articles by Frederick Douglass: rebellious States stand to- day, in point of law, precisely where
they stood when, exhausted, beaten, conquered, they fell powerless
at the feet of Federal authority. Their State governments were overthrown,
and the lives and property of the leaders of the Rebellion were forfeited.
In reconstructing the institutions of these shattered and overthrown States,
Congress should begin with a clean slate, and make clean work of it.
Let there be no hesitation. It would be a cowardly deference
to a defeated and treacherous President, if any account were made of
the illegitimate, one-sided, sham governments hurried into existence
for a malign purpose in the absence of Congress. These pretended governments,
which were never submitted to the people, and from participation in which
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