| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde: making for you a terrible sacrifice. Take my advice, Lady Chiltern,
and do not accept a sacrifice so great. If you do, you will live to
repent it bitterly. We men and women are not made to accept such
sacrifices from each other. We are not worthy of them. Besides,
Robert has been punished enough.
LADY CHILTERN. We have both been punished. I set him up too high.
LORD GORING. [With deep feeling in his voice.] Do not for that
reason set him down now too low. If he has fallen from his altar, do
not thrust him into the mire. Failure to Robert would be the very
mire of shame. Power is his passion. He would lose everything, even
his power to feel love. Your husband's life is at this moment in
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Woman and Labour by Olive Schreiner: last, bathed from the mire and dust of ages in the streams of friendship
and freedom, leap upwards, with white wings spread, resplendent in the
sunshine of a distant future--the essentially Good and Beautiful of human
existence.
I have given this long and very wearisome explanation of the scope and
origin of this little book, because I feel that it might lead to grave
misunderstanding were it not understood how it came to be written.
I have inscribed it to my friend, Lady Constance Lytton; not because I
think it worthy of her, nor yet because of the splendid part she has played
in the struggle of the women fighting today in England for certain forms of
freedom for all women. It is, if I may be allowed without violating the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Economist by Xenophon: while the demand which these base mechanic arts makes on the time of
those employed in them leaves them no leisure to devote to the claims
of friendship and the state. How can such folk be other than sorry
friends and ill defenders of the fatherland? So much so that in some
states, especially those reputed to be warlike, no citizen[1] is
allowed to exercise any mechanical craft at all.
[1] "In the strict sense," e.g. the Spartiates in Sparta. See "Pol.
Lac." vii.; Newman, op. cit. i. 99, 103 foll.
Crit. Then which are the arts you would counsel us to engage in?
Soc. Well, we shall not be ashamed, I hope, to imitate the kings of
Persia?[2] That monarch, it is said, regards amongst the noblest and
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