| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from War and the Future by H. G. Wells: trucks stood as if they sheltered under a footbridge. The grass
poked out through their wheels. The railway signals seemed
uncertain in their intimations; some were up and some were down.
And it was as still and empty as a summer afternoon in Pompeii.
No train has come into Arras for two long years now.
We lunched in a sunny garden with various men who love Arras but
are weary of it, and we disputed about Irish politics. We
discussed the political future of Sir F. E. Smith. We also
disputed whether there was an equivalent in English for
/embusque./ Every now and then a shell came over--an
aimless shell.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: driving all persons of a certain age out of industry, leaving them to
find something experimental to occupy them on pain of perpetual
holiday. Men will then try to spend twenty thousand a year for the
sake of having to earn it. Instead of being what we are now, the
cheapest and nastiest of the animals, we shall be the costliest, most
fastidious, and best bred. In short, there is no end to the
astonishing things that may happen when the curse of Adam becomes
first a blessing and then an incurable habit. And in that day we must
not grudge children their share of it.
The Infinite School Task
The question of children's work, however, is only a question of what
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Death of the Lion by Henry James: my thought, as I was sure Paraday's was doing, performed within the
minute a great distant revolution. I saw just how emphatic I
should make my rejoinder to Mr. Pinhorn, and that having come, like
Mr. Morrow, to betray, I must remain as long as possible to save.
Not because I had brought my mind back, but because our visitors
last words were in my ear, I presently enquired with gloomy
irrelevance if Guy Walsingham were a woman.
"Oh yes, a mere pseudonym - rather pretty, isn't it? - and
convenient, you know, for a lady who goes in for the larger
latitude. 'Obsessions, by Miss So-and-so,' would look a little
odd, but men are more naturally indelicate. Have you peeped into
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