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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: are proud of our ancestors in direct proportion to their remoteness
from ourselves, thus permitting Democracy to revenge its
insignificance by smiling at our self-imposed satire. To esteem a
man in inverse ratio to the amount of remarkable blood he has
inherited is, to say the least, bathetic. Others, again, make
themselves objectionable by preferring their immediate relatives to
all less connected companions, and cling to their cousins so closely
that affection often culminates in matrimony, nature's remonstrances
notwithstanding. But with all the pride or pleasure which we take
in the members of our particular clan, our satisfaction really
springs from viewing them on an autocentric theory of the social
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