| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Madam How and Lady Why by Charles Kingsley: anything in the world but themselves; and instead of feeding on
moths or mice, they feed upon hard dry fruits, which they pick off
the trees after the set of sun. And wise men will tell you, that
in making such a bird as that, and giving it that peculiar way of
life, and settling it in that cavern, and a few more caverns in
that part of the world, and therefore in making the caverns ready
for them to live in, Madam How must have taken ages and ages, more
than you can imagine or count.
But that is among the harder lessons which come in the latter part
of Madam How's book. Children need not learn them yet; and they
can never learn them, unless they master her alphabet, and her
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from War and the Future by H. G. Wells: are just a little displaced! (This lens is rather better for
that.) /That's/ one gun. You see? Here, I will show you
another....
That process goes on two or three miles behind the front line.
Very clean young men in white overalls do it as if it were a
labour of love. And the Germans in the trenches, the German
gunners, /know it is going on./ They know that in the
quickest possible way these observations of the aeroplane that
was over them just now will go to the gunners. The careful
gunner, firing by the map and marking by aeroplane, kite balloon
or direct observation, will be getting onto the located guns and
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: a similar misdirection, and consequently of The Machine. They do not
want liberty. They have not been educated to want it. They choose
slavery and inequality; and all the other evils are automatically
added to them.
And yet we must have The Machine. It is only in unskilled hands under
ignorant direction that machinery is dangerous. We can no more govern
modern communities without political machinery than we can feed and
clothe them without industrial machinery. Shatter The Machine, and
you get Anarchy. And yet The Machine works so detestably at present
that we have people who advocate Anarchy and call themselves
Anarchists.
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