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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Alkahest by Honore de Balzac: craving for liberty which, later, permeated all Europe. Thus the
compactness of their ideas, and the tenacity which education grafted
on their nature made the Flemish people a formidable body of men in
the defence of their rights. Among them nothing is half-done,--neither
houses, furniture, dikes, husbandry, nor revolutions; and they hold a
monopoly of all that they undertake. The manufacture of linen, and
that of lace, a work of patient agriculture and still more patient
industry, are hereditary like their family fortunes. If we were asked
to show in human form the purest specimen of solid stability, we could
do no better than point to a portrait of some old burgomaster,
capable, as was proved again and again, of dying in a commonplace way,
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