| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from First Inaugural Address by Abraham Lincoln: many perils, and generally with great success. Yet, with all this scope
of precedent, I now enter upon the same task for the brief Constitutional
term of four years under great and peculiar difficulty. A disruption of
the Federal Union, heretofore only menaced, is now formidably attempted.
I hold that, in contemplation of universal law and of the Constitution,
the Union of these States is perpetual. Perpetuity is implied,
if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments.
It is safe to assert that no government proper ever had a provision
in its organic law for its own termination. Continue to execute all
the express provisions of our National Constitution, and the Union will
endure forever--it being impossible to destroy it except by some action
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Reign of King Edward the Third by William Shakespeare: When feathered fowls do bandy on our side!
What need we fight, and sweat, and keep a coil,
When railing crows outscold our adversaries?
Up, up, Artois! the ground it self is armed
With Fire containing flint; command our bows
To hurl away their pretty colored Ew,
And to it with stones: away, Artois, away!
My soul doth prophecy we win the day.
[Exeunt.]
ACT IV. SCENE VII. The same. Another Part of
the Field of Battle.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from An Episode Under the Terror by Honore de Balzac: and her features were proud and grave. The manners and habits of
people of condition were so different from those of other classes in
former times that a noble was easily known, and the shopkeeper's wife
felt persuaded that her customer was a ci-devant, and that she had
been about the Court.
"Madame," she began with involuntary respect, forgetting that the
title was proscribed.
But the old lady made no answer. She was staring fixedly at the shop
windows as though some dreadful thing had taken shape against the
panes. The pastry-cook came back at that moment, and drew the lady
from her musings, by holding out a little cardboard box wrapped in
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