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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Life in the Iron-Mills by Rebecca Davis: world! Fading, flashing before him now! What, in that world of
Beauty, Content, and Right, were the petty laws, the mine and
thine, of mill-owners and mill hands?
A consciousness of power stirred within him. He stood up. A
man,--he thought, stretching out his hands,--free to work, to
live, to love! Free! His right! He folded the scrap of paper
in his hand. As his nervous fingers took it in, limp and
blotted, so his soul took in the mean temptation, lapped it in
fancied rights, in dreams of improved existences, drifting and
endless as the cloud-seas of color. Clutching it, as if the
tightness of his hold would strengthen his sense of possession,
 Life in the Iron-Mills |