| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from War and the Future by H. G. Wells: far will the burthen of the /rentier/ class, their call, tat
is, for goods and services, be lightened. This expectation is
very generally entertained, and I can see little reason against
it. The intensely stupid or dishonest "labour" press, however,
which in the interests of the common enemy misrepresents
socialism and seeks to misguide labour in Great Britain, ignores
these considerations, and positively holds out this prospect of
rising prices as an alarming one to the more credulous and
ignorant of its readers.
But now comes the second way of meeting the after-the-war
obligations. This second way is by increasing the wealth of the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Crisis in Russia by Arthur Ransome: revolution has died away, and people talk about little but
what they are able to get for dinner, or what somebody else
his been able to get. I, like other foreign visitors coming to
Russia after feeding up in other countries, am all agog to
make people talk. But the sort of questions which interest
me, with my full-fed stomach, are brushed aside almost
fretfully by men who have been more or less hungry for two
or three years on end.
I find, instead of an urgent desire to alter this or that at
once, to-morrow, in the political complexion of the country,
a general desire to do the best that can be done with things
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Maid Marian by Thomas Love Peacock: to accomplish the pious purpose of bringing a blessing on the land
by rescuing it from the frail hold of carnal and temporal
into the firmer grasp of ghostly and spiritual possessors.
But the earl, confident in the number and attachment of
his retainers, stoutly refused either to repay the money,
which he could not, or to yield the forfeiture, which he would not:
a refusal which in those days was an act of outlawry in a gentleman,
as it is now of bankruptcy in a base mechanic; the gentleman
having in our wiser times a more liberal privilege of gentility,
which enables him to keep his land and laugh at his creditor.
Thus the mutual resentments and interests of the king and the abbot
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