| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Lay Morals by Robert Louis Stevenson: of this description should become less common, as men learn
to suspect some serious analogy underneath. Thus a comical
story of an ape touches us quite differently after the
proposition of Mr. Darwin's theory. Moreover, there lay,
perhaps, at the bottom of this primitive sort of fable, a
humanity, a tenderness of rough truths; so that at the end of
some story, in which vice or folly had met with its destined
punishment, the fabulist might be able to assure his
auditors, as we have often to assure tearful children on the
like occasions, that they may dry their eyes, for none of it
was true.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Wrong Box by Stevenson & Osbourne: him on Tonti, the ass that started tontines. He's incredible on
Tonti.'
'By Jove!' cried Wickham, 'then you're one of these Finsbury
tontine fellows. I hadn't a guess of that.'
'Ah!' said the other, 'do you know that old boy in the carriage
is worth a hundred thousand pounds to me? There he was asleep,
and nobody there but you! But I spared him, because I'm a
Conservative in politics.'
Mr Wickham, pleased to be in a luggage van, was flitting to and
fro like a gentlemanly butterfly.
'By Jingo!' he cried, 'here's something for you! "M. Finsbury, 16
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Collected Articles by Frederick Douglass: the limits of the nineteenth century but for the Rebellion,
and perhaps only have disappeared at last in a fiery conflict,
even more fierce and bloody than that which has now been suppressed.
It is no disparagement to truth, that it can only prevail
where reason prevails. War begins where reason ends.
The thing worse than rebellion is the thing that causes rebellion.
What that thing is, we have been taught to our cost. It remains now
to be seen whether we have the needed courage to have that cause
entirely removed from the Republic. At any rate, to this grand work
of national regeneration and entire purification Congress must
now address Itself, with full purpose that the work shall this time
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