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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Catherine de Medici by Honore de Balzac: ill.
Strozzi thus began, early in life, his apprenticeship in the
misfortunes of an honest man in politics,--a man whose conscience
cannot lend itself to the capriciousness of events; whose actions are
acceptable only to the virtuous; and who is therefore persecuted by
the world,--by the people, for opposing their blind passions; by power
for opposing its usurpations. The life of such great citizens is a
martyrdom, in which they are sustained only by the voice of their
conscience and an heroic sense of social duty, which dictates their
course in all things. There were many such men in the republic of
Florence, all as great as Strozzi, and as able as their adversaries
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