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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Maid Marian by Thomas Love Peacock: His followers, who were only paid with the wages of hope,
began to murmur and fall off; for, as those unenlightened
days were ignorant of the happy invention of paper machinery,
by which one promise to pay is satisfactorily paid with another
promise to pay, and that again with another in infinite series,
they would not, as their wiser posterity has done,
take those tenders for true pay which were not sterling;
so that, one fine morning, the knight found himself sitting
on a pleasant bank of the Trent, with only a solitary squire,
who still clung to the shadow of preferment, because he did
not see at the moment any better chance of the substance.
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