Now, unlikely characters are rushing to fill it using both hands.
Cause and effect.
Below, words from Charles Dickens on the power of a single day to change the life of a man or alter the fate of a nation.
Left: 1850 photo of Sutter's Mill, in Coloma, California, where mill construction worker James W. Marshall discovered gold on January 24, 1848. Right: The ceremony for the driving of the golden spike at Promontory Summit, Utah, on the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad, May 10, 1869.
"That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me.
But, it is the same with any life.
Left: The Lincoln-Douglas debates on the central question of allowing the spread of slavery into western US states/territories, 1858. Right: Confederate dead along the Hagerstown Road in southern Maryland after the Battle of Antietam, September 1862.
Imagine one selected day struck out of it,
Left: Hitler and co-conspirators in the Munich Beer Hall Putsch, a failed coup which launched Hitler's rise to power, November 1923. Right: Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, April 1945.
and think how different its course would have been.
Left: New York Stock Exchange traders, 1921. Right: San Francisco breadline, 1932. [Dorothea Lange photo]
Pause you who read this,
and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold,
Left: Communist Viet Minh troops planting their flag over the captured French headquarters at Dien Bien Phu, Vietnam, May 1954. Right: American helicopter evacuates Americans and others from the roof of a Saigon apartment building, April 30, 1975. [Hugh van Es photo.]
of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you,
Left: Manhattan, September 11, 2001. Right: Iraqi and US army troops on field patrol near Al Taji, Iraq, September 2004.
but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day."
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