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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Firm of Nucingen by Honore de Balzac: pail of water. You take a man's life, you are guillotined. But if, for
any political conviction whatsoever, you take five hundred lives,
political crimes are respected. You take five thousand francs out of
my desk; to the hulks you go. But with a sop cleverly pushed into the
jaws of a thousand speculators, you can cram the stock of any bankrupt
republic or monarchy down their throats; even if the loan has been
floated, as Couture says, to pay the interest on that very same
national debt. Nobody can complain. These are the real principles of
the present Golden Age."
"When the stage machinery is so huge," continued Bixiou, "a good many
puppets are required. In the first place, Nucingen had purposely and
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