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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Collected Articles by Frederick Douglass: The occasion demands statesmanship.
Whether the tremendous war so heroically fought and so victoriously ended
shall pass into history a miserable failure, barren of permanent results,--
a scandalous and shocking waste of blood and treasure,--a strife for empire,
as Earl Russell characterized it, of no value to liberty or civilization,
--an attempt to re-establish a Union by force, which must be the
merest mockery of a Union,--an effort to bring under Federal authority
States into which no loyal man from the North may safely enter,
and to bring men into the national councils who deliberate with daggers
and vote with revolvers, and who do not even conceal their deadly hate
of the country that conquered them; or whether, on the other hand,
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