| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Collection of Beatrix Potter by Beatrix Potter: shoe of the grocer's horse which
had picked up a stone.
The grocer flicked his whip--
"Papers? Pig licence?" Pigling
fumbled in all his pockets, and
handed up the papers. The grocer
read them, but still seemed dissatisfied.
"This here pig is a young
lady; is her name Alexander?"
Pig-wig opened her mouth and shut
it again; Pigling coughed asthmatically.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: You inquire, and you find that they usually know not themselves.
They are usually--I had almost dared to say, always--foreigners.
They have crossed the neighbouring mountains. The have come by sea,
like Dido to Carthage, like Manco Cassae and Mama Belle to America,
and they have sometimes forgotten when. At least they are wiser,
stronger, fairer, than the aborigines. They are to them--as Jacques
Cartier was to the Indians of Canada--as gods. They are not sure
that they are not descended from gods. They are the Children of the
Sun, or what not. The children of light, who ray out such light as
they have, upon the darkness of their subjects. They are at first,
probably, civilisers, not conquerors. For, if tradition is worth
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx: from the past, it can draw that only from the future. It cannot start
upon its work before it has stricken off all superstition concerning the
past. Former revolutions require historic reminiscences in order to
intoxicate themselves with their own issues. The revolution of the
nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead in order to reach
its issue. With the former, the phrase surpasses the substance; with
this one, the substance surpasses the phrase.
The February revolution was a surprisal; old society was taken unawares;
and the people proclaimed this political stroke a great historic act
whereby the new era was opened. On the 2d of December, the February
revolution is jockeyed by the trick of a false player, and what is seer
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