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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from In the South Seas by Robert Louis Stevenson: government. He played his part of bravo in the past, following the
line of least resistance, butchering others in his own defence:
to-day, grown elderly and heavy, a convert, a reader of the Bible,
perhaps a penitent, conscious at least of accumulated hatreds, and
his memory charged with images of violence and blood, he
capitulates to the Old Men, fuddles himself with opium, and sits
among his guards in dreadful expectation. The same cowardice that
put into his hand the knife of the assassin deprives him of the
sceptre of a king.
A tale that I was told, a trifling incident that fell in my
observation, depicts him in his two capacities. A chief in Little
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