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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Lay Morals by Robert Louis Stevenson: told, no doubt correctly; and rival historians expose each
other's blunders with gratification. Yet the worst historian
has a clearer view of the period he studies than the best of
us can hope to form of that in which we live. The obscurest
epoch is to-day; and that for a thousand reasons of inchoate
tendency, conflicting report, and sheer mass and multiplicity
of experience; but chiefly, perhaps, by reason of an
insidious shifting of landmarks. Parties and ideas
continually move, but not by measurable marches on a stable
course; the political soil itself steals forth by
imperceptible degrees, like a travelling glacier, carrying on
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