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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Village Rector by Honore de Balzac: have been sacrificed to the valleys; the government has chosen to give
all its help to those regions of country which can take care of
themselves.
Most of these luckless uplands are without water, the first essential
for production. The mists which ought to fertilize the gray, dead soil
by discharging oxygen upon it, sweep across it rapidly, driven by the
wind, for want of trees which might arrest them and so obtain their
nourishment. Merely to plant trees in such a region would be carrying
a gospel to it. Separated from the nearest town or city by a distance
as insurmountable to poor folk as though a desert lay between them,
with no means of reaching a market for their products (if they
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