| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom by William and Ellen Craft: slave shall assault and strike such white person,
such slave may be LAWFULLY KILLED."--2 Brevard's
Digest, 231.
"Provided always," says the law, "that such
striking be not done by the command and in the
defence of the person or property of the owner, or
other person having the government of such slave;
in which case the slave shall be wholly excused."
According to this law, if a slave, by the direction
of his overseer, strike a white person who is beating
said overseer's pig, "the slave shall be wholly
Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Protagoras by Plato: them severally their proper qualities. Epimetheus said to Prometheus:
'Let me distribute, and do you inspect.' This was agreed, and Epimetheus
made the distribution. There were some to whom he gave strength without
swiftness, while he equipped the weaker with swiftness; some he armed, and
others he left unarmed; and devised for the latter some other means of
preservation, making some large, and having their size as a protection, and
others small, whose nature was to fly in the air or burrow in the ground;
this was to be their way of escape. Thus did he compensate them with the
view of preventing any race from becoming extinct. And when he had
provided against their destruction by one another, he contrived also a
means of protecting them against the seasons of heaven; clothing them with
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Research Magnificent by H. G. Wells: think if we are unthinking that it passes into agony and so beyond
endurance to destruction. It probably does nothing of the kind.
Benham compared pain to the death range of the electric current. At
a certain voltage it thrills, at a greater it torments and
convulses, at a still greater it kills. But at enormous voltages,
as Tesla was the first to demonstrate, it does no injury. And
following on this came memoranda on the recorded behaviour of
martyrs, on the self-torture of Hindoo ascetics, of the defiance of
Red Indian prisoners.
"These things," Benham had written, "are much more horrible when one
considers them from the point of view of an easy-chair";--White gave
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