|
|
|
More "Arbitrary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... execution is made impossible, not only by inherent defects, but also by a general disinclination to abandon the present system, which at least offers certain attractions to concrete men and women, despite its unfavourable effects upon the unborn. Women would oppose the substitution of chance or arbitrary fiat for the existing struggle for the plain reason that every woman is convinced, and no doubt rightly, that her own judgment is superior to that of either the common hangman or the gods, and that her own enterprise is more favourable to her opportunities. And men would oppose it because ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... I have founded my account of the slaty crystallines:—"Fidele a mon principle, de ne regarder comme des couches, dans les montagnes schisteuses, que les divisions paralleles aux feuillets des schistes dont elles sont composees."—Voyages, Sec. 1747. I know that this is an arbitrary, and in some cases an assuredly false, principle; but the assumption of it by De Saussure proves all that I want to prove,—namely, that the beds of the slaty crystallines are in the Alps in so large a plurality of instances correspondent in direction ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... state's right to intervene in the management of private enterprise. In addition to the burdens imposed by high inflation, businesses have been subject to pressure on the part of central and local governments, e.g., arbitrary changes in regulations, numerous rigorous inspections, and retroactive application of new business regulations prohibiting practices that had been legal. Further economic problems are two consecutive bad harvests, 1998-99, and persistent trade deficits. Close relations with Russia, possibly leading ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Gospel, when there is nothing in the phraseology in which the promises are expressed, that could possibly suggest any such ideas, nay, when the promise itself in the most definite language expresses the contrary, is so arbitrary a construction as nothing can warrant. By this mode of interpretation, any event may be said to be the ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English
... Apollonia and Oricum. But though he succeeded in taking the latter city, the Romans surprised his camp whilst he was besieging Apollonia, and compelled him to burn his ships and retire. Meanwhile Philip had acted in a most arbitrary manner in the affairs of Greece; and when Aratus remonstrated with him respecting his proceedings, he got rid of his former friend and counsellor by means of a slow ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... of "&there4" is a rather arbitrary selection. There is no font available in general practice which renders the "therefore" symbol correction (three dots in a triangular formation). This can be done, however, in HTML, so if this document is read in a browser, ...
— The Game of Logic • Lewis Carroll
... which follows the self-complacency of the last act! That was an honest attempt to redress a real wrong; this is an arbitrary determination to enforce a Brissotine or Rousseau's ideal on all ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... sometimes was led too far to invade the sovereignty of Providence; and, as it were, arraign the justice of so arbitrary a disposition of things, that should hide that light from some, and reveal it to others, and yet expect a like duty from both: but I shut it up, and checked my thoughts with this conclusion: first, that we do not know by what light and law these should be condemned; but that ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... Andre or his party; and in proportion as the attacks made by Bertrand and his friends gained in vehemence—and we must add, in justice—so did Joan's objections weaken. The Hungarian rule, as it became more and more arbitrary and unbearable, irritated men's minds to such a point that the people murmured in secret and the nobles proclaimed aloud their discontent. Andre's soldiers indulged in a libertinage which would have been intolerable in a conquered ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... irritating to the pagan mind about this arbitrary introduction of the idea of "sin" as the cause of the lamentable misery of the world. Among modern writers the idea of "sin" is ridiculed, and the notion of its supernaturalism scouted. ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... has for its object the vast realm of the beautiful, and it may be most adequately defined as the philosophy of art or of the fine arts. To some the definition may seem arbitrary, as excluding the beautiful in nature; but it will cease to appear so if it is remarked that the beauty which is the work of art is higher than natural beauty, because it is the offspring of the mind. Moreover, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... free states are not so permanent as other forms of government is because the misfortunes and successes which happen to them generally occasion the loss of liberty; whereas the successes and misfortunes of an arbitrary government contribute equally to the enslaving of the people. A wise republic ought not to run any hazard which may expose it to good or ill fortune; the only happiness the several individuals of it should aspire after is to give perpetuity ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... domination overcame the spirit of freedom. It was forecast still earlier in the rise of consuls and triumvirs incident to the thinning out of the sturdy and self-sufficient strains who brooked no arbitrary rule. While the best men were falling in war, civil or foreign, or remained behind in faraway colonies, the stock at home went on repeating its weakling parentage. A condition significant in Roman history is marked by the gradual swelling of the mob, ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... statesmanship, and force of character, or even by mere tact, secure the adhesion of that majority, had become virtually the ruler of the State. But as will easily be seen, his rule even then was something very different indeed from the rule of an arbitrary minister. He would have to satisfy, to convince, to conciliate the majority. A single false step, an hour's weakness of purpose, nay, even a failure for which he was not himself accountable in home or foreign policy, might deprive him of his influence over the majority, ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... 2,520 acres, and averaging nearly 60 acres each, the most distant being less than a mile from the village green. This division is arbitrary; in practice, the more industrious members of the community would buy land from their less industrious neighbors, and the size and arrangement of the farms would vary. Often, too, the division would be into farms averaging more than sixty acres. In such cases there would usually be ...
— Village Improvements and Farm Villages • George E. Waring
... hostilities against this Continent by the British troops, in the bloody scene of the 19th of April last, near Boston—the increase of arbitrary imposition from a wicked and despotic ministry—and the dread of insurrections in the Colonies—are causes sufficient to drive an oppressed people to the use of arms. We, therefore, the subscribers, inhabitants ...
— The Life of Francis Marion • William Gilmore Simms
... the confusion which would arise among the princes of the imperial house were they each to adopt an arbitrary name, the emperor K'ang-hi decreed that each of his twenty-four sons should have a personal name consisting of two characters, the first of which should be Yung, and the second should be compounded with the determinative shih, "to manifest," ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... able to read the God-given signs as to what the infant nature really requires, we give it instead an arbitrary supply, based upon what we think it ought to need, and then marvel that it does not thrive upon its unnatural diet. We have not supplied what it craved but that which, from our preconceived notion, we thought it ought ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... Church must be growing Survey must therefore deal with the Native Church The reason for beginning with self-support The meaning of self-supporting Churches In rare cases it means independence of external support In most cases it means attainment of an arbitrary standard In most cases it does not represent the power of the people to supply their own needs In most cases it is not sure evidence of growing liberality Nevertheless we must begin by considering ...
— Missionary Survey As An Aid To Intelligent Co-Operation In Foreign Missions • Roland Allen
... with happiness as our being's end and aim, with pain and pleasure as the ultimate principles of conduct; and upon this foundation he proceeded to build up his system of politics and legislation. Any attempt to derive morality from other sources, or to measure it by other standards, he denounced as arbitrary and misleading; he threw aside metaphysics, and therefore theology, as illusory. The exclusive appeal to experience, to plain reasoning from the evidence of our senses, from actual observation of human propensities, was sufficient for his ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... suffocation. "One can breathe here," he seemed to be saying. The atmosphere, untainted by spies, venal officials, and jeering soldiery, seemed fresh and sweet. Here the ground was stable, not mined in all directions; no arbitrary ukase—veritable sword of Damocles—hung over the head and darkened the sunshine. In such a country, where faith was free and action untrammelled, mere living was an ecstasy when remembrance came over one, and so Joseph Strelitski sometimes threw ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... which we are so apt to be misled by the tendency we have to mix up constantly our own previously acquired notions with the simple facts that present themselves to us, and to explain the latter by the former. With our habits and improved ideas of morality, we see in theft both a trespass upon the arbitrary enactments of society, which demands the correction of the civil magistrate, and a violation of that natural equity which is independent of all political arrangements, and would make it unfair and wrong for one man to take to himself what belongs to ...
— John Rutherford, the White Chief • George Lillie Craik
... used to cover the reigns of William and Mary, Queen Anne, George I, and a part of the reign of George II, or, in other words, all the time of Dutch influence. The more usual method is to leave out William and Mary, but at best the classification of furniture is more or less arbitrary, for in England, as well as other countries, the different styles overlap each other. Chippendale's early work was ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop
... psychoanalyst will probably tell you off-hand that this is a father-complex dream. Certain symbols seem to be put into complex catalogues. But it is all too arbitrary. ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... sanction of Wordsworth, that harsher opposition of poetry to prose, as savouring in fact of the arbitrary psychology of the last century, and with it the prejudice that there can be but one only beauty of prose style, I propose here to point out certain qualities of all literature as a fine art, which, if they apply to the literature of fact, apply ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... regime, when all was arbitrary, titles, rank, and places were obtained by interest. It was therefore not surprising that a military officer, who left the army scarcely four years before with the rank of colonel, to enter the navy as a captain, should obtain ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... injured the trade of the West Riding manufacturers considerably. Their independence of character, their dislike of authority, and their strong powers of thought, predisposed them to rebellion against the religious dictation of such men as Laud, and the arbitrary rule of the Stuarts; and the injury done by James and Charles to the trade by which they gained their bread, made the great majority of them Commonwealth men. I shall have occasion afterwards to give one or two instances of the warm feelings and extensive knowledge ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... necessary to housekeeping. In the next scene, while Don Pizarro is giving instructions to Rocco, a packet of letters is delivered to him, one of which informs him that Don Fernando is coming the next day to inspect the prison, as he has been informed that it contains several victims of arbitrary power. He at once determines that Florestan shall die, and gives vent to his wrath in a furious dramatic aria ("Ha! welch ein Augenblick!"). He attempts to bribe Rocco to aid him. The jailer at first refuses, but subsequently, after a stormy duet, consents to dig the grave. ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... stupid and domineering, that Frederick was careless in his orders and cynical as to their results. Nor, it is to be hoped, need any Englishman be reminded that the consequences of a system of government in which the arbitrary will of an individual takes the place of the rule of law are apt to be disgraceful ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... Duke admitted, "but I consider his action arbitrary. Not only that, but it was unnecessary, for he has already found another tenant for the place. I have instructed him, therefore, to send you a cheque for the amount you paid him, less the actual cost of ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the prints in figure 347, the number of whorls appearing in the odd fingers is ascertained to be 2. Their positions are noted (1 in No. 1 and 1 in No. 7) and the values assigned to whorls appearing in those fingers are added together (16 plus 2 18). To this sum the arbitrary 1 is added, giving us the total of 19, which constitutes the denominator for this set of prints. To get the numerator, it is ascertained that there are 3 whorls appearing in the even fingers (2, 4 and 6), the values of which are added together (16 plus 8 plus ...
— The Science of Fingerprints - Classification and Uses • Federal Bureau of Investigation
... that half of the property of this country is disfranchised, I mean that the nature of this property is such that it is peculiarly subject to the power of rulers, and that the owners of it have hardly any legitimate way of defending it against the arbitrary exercise of this power. The corporation is created by the legislature; men cannot combine their capitals and avoid unlimited liability for the debts of the combination, unless the law specifically authorizes the proceeding. ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... united, they made but a feeble kingdom, for they did not equal, in extent of territory, several of the States of the American Union. Each of these provinces had its independent government, and its local laws and customs. They were held together by the simple bond of an arbitrary monarch, who claimed, and exercised as he could, supreme control over them all. Under his wise and energetic administration, the affairs of the wide-spread empire were prosperous, and his own Austria advanced rapidly in order, civilization and power. The numerous nobles, ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... over, and well over, than the choleric and arbitrary M. Paul underwent a metamorphosis. His hour of managerial responsibility past, he at once laid aside his magisterial austerity; in a moment he stood amongst us, vivacious, kind, and social, shook hands with us all round, thanked us separately, and announced his determination ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... eighteenth on Poor Rates; but these of course belong to the subject of Taxation properly defined. The present Lord Chancellor (late Earl of Eldon) said on some cause which came before him about a year ago, that Tithes were unjustly called a Tax; meaning only that Tithes were not any arbitrary imposition of the government, but claimed by as good a tenure as any other sort of property. In this doctrine no doubt the Chancellor was perfectly right; and only wrong in supposing that any denial of that doctrine is implied by the Political ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... intriguing politician. Parliament, which had not been called for four years, met in 1593, and there was an immediate collision with the Crown. Elizabeth's tone was much more despotic than of old. Petitions for the settlement of the succession were met by the arbitrary imprisonment of Wentworth ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... solid a work; they vastly preferred the lively sparkle of the Persian Letters; the book was perhaps too clearly influenced by an admiration for the Constitution of England, and by a love for liberty, face to face with the weak arbitrary despotism which was dragging France to ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... at any rate the balance-wheel, of the administrative machine. This it was in theory, for there had never been any formal abolition of its existence or abrogation of its powers. In practice it was just what the sovereign, whether called Emperor or King, allowed it to be. A self-willed and arbitrary monarch, like Caligula or Domitian, would reduce its functions to a nullity. A wise and moderate Emperor, like Trajan or Marcus Aurelius, would consult it on all important state-affairs, and, while reserving to ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... functionaries, employed and superintended, who at first through fear are compelled to be prudent, and then through habit and honor have become honest accountants; there is no waste, no underhand stealing, no arbitrary charges; no sum is turned aside between receipts and expenses to disappear and be lost on the road, or flow out of its channel in another direction. The sensitive taxpayer, large or small, no longer ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Cleveland decided to intervene. In a message to Congress in December, 1895, he reviewed the controversy at length, declared that the acquisition of territory in America by a European power through the arbitrary advance of a boundary line was a clear violation of the Monroe Doctrine, and asked Congress for an appropriation to pay the expenses of a commission which he proposed to appoint for the purpose of determining the true ...
— From Isolation to Leadership, Revised - A Review of American Foreign Policy • John Holladay Latane
... which I am sure is, that the distinction between the organic and inorganic is arbitrary; that it is more coherent with our other ideas, and therefore more acceptable, to start with every molecule as a living thing, and then deduce death as the breaking up of an association or corporation, than to start with inanimate molecules and smuggle life into them; and that, therefore, ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... hesitate to give it his allegiance. Morality, to be depended upon, must be not a mere matter of breeding and convention, or of impulse and emotion, but the result of rational insight and conscious resolve. To many people morality seems nothing but convention, or an arbitrary tyranny, or a mysterious and awful necessity, something extraneous to their own desires, from which they would like to escape. To be able to refute these skeptics, expose the sophisms and specious ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... frantic appeals to me, and then there seemed to be a note as of upbraiding, if not accusation, in her voice. Knowing her feelings, it was easy to interpret them, and her doleful mood and loud yet melodious protests against the arbitrary usage of man affected the wonted serenity of ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... and certain structural resemblances in the flowers, one might guess this plant belonged to the milkweed tribe. Formerly it was so classed; and although the botanists have now removed its family one step away, the milkweed butterflies, especially the Monarch (Anosia plexippus), ignoring the arbitrary dividing line of man, still includes the dogbane on its visiting list. We know that this plant derived its name from the fact that it was considered poisonous to dogs; and we also know that all the tribe of milkweed butterflies are provided ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... 2,240 lbs. Much confusion exists in the copper trade as to the classification of the metal. New York prices are quoted in electrolytic and "Lake"; London's in "Standard." "Standard" has now become practically an arbitrary term peculiar to London, for the great bulk of copper dealt in is "electrolytic" valued ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover
... that each victorious robber, according to his wants, his avarice, and his strength, measured with his sword the extent of his new inheritance. At a distance from their sovereign, the Barbarians might indeed be tempted to exercise such arbitrary depredation; but the firm and artful policy of Clovis must curb a licentious spirit, which would aggravate the misery of the vanquished, whilst it corrupted the union and discipline of the conquerors. [861] The memorable vase of Soissons is a monument ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... being alarmed at this, as another man might, it was answered by a certain humourous play of face; a slight significance of lip and air, quite difficult to characterize. It was not arrogant, nor arbitrary; I do not know how to call it masterful; and yet certainly it expressed no dismay and no apprehension. Perhaps it expressed that he intended to be in a different category from other men. Perhaps he thought Mrs. Bywank meant to read him ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... apparent phenomena, could not actually have a material existence. In the first place, the existence of a material celestial sphere would require that all the myriad stars should be at exactly the same distances from the earth. Of course, no one will say that this or any other arbitrary disposition of the stars is actually impossible, but as there was no conceivable physical reason why the distances of all the stars from the earth should be identical, it seemed in the very highest degree improbable that the stars should ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... our liberty, He never sought for to devour By a usurping tyranny, To rule by arbitrary power; No, no, in all his blessed reign We had ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay
... commit a greater mistake than to make politeness a mere matter of arbitrary forms. It has as real and permanent a foundation in the nature and relations of men and women, as have government and the common law. The civil code is not more binding upon us than is the code of civility. Portions of the former become, from time to time, inoperative—mere dead letters on the statute-book, ...
— How To Behave: A Pocket Manual Of Republican Etiquette, And Guide To Correct Personal Habits • Samuel R Wells
... difficult thing in the world to escape; she is bound to no man and free to make her own terms in life; while if she should have a child, that child is absolutely her own, and she is not liable to have it torn from her arms by the hands of the law. Apart from arbitrary and accidental circumstances, due to the condition of social feeling, the prostitute enjoys a position of independence which the married woman is still struggling ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... commercial city, intimately concerned in such a revolution, would be most anxious,—the establishment of law and the security of property. The king pledges himself to introduce no foreign law and to make no arbitrary confiscations of property. To win the steady adhesion of that most influential body of men who were always at hand to bring the pressure of their public opinion to bear upon the leaders of the state, the inhabitants of London, this measure was as wise as was the building of the Tower for ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams
... art of arranging a special code of signals, whose arbitrary import it is difficult to understand. At a ball, a flower placed in some odd way in the hair; at the theatre, a pocket handkerchief unfolded on the front of the box; rubbing the nose, wearing a belt of a particular color, putting ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... further would but add to the instances, without deepening the impression, of the measureless power of the ideal element in war, alike in the history of the great races of the past and of the present. Even the wars which seem most arbitrary and, to the judgment of their contemporaries, purposeless, acquire, upon a deeper scrutiny and in after ages, a profound enough significance. Behind the immediate occasion, trivial or capricious, sordid or grandiose, the destiny of the race, like the Nemesis ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... his people all the benefits of constitutional government. A first step was to choose a popular Minister, and Cardinal Gizzi was called to the counsels of the State. This Cardinal was beloved at Rome, and not undeservedly. When Legate at Forli, he had opposed the establishment of an arbitrary court, and thus won for himself the sympathies of all national reformers. His loyalty, sincerity and patriotism were well known; nor was he wanting in any other quality of the statesman. Of a patient and enquiring mind, he was incapable of coming hastily to ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... without our Consent: For depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury: For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences: For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies: For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable ...
— The Declaration of Independence of The United States of America • Thomas Jefferson
... removing, from time to time, the trees which compose it, are too obvious to require to be more than hinted at. In conducting these operations, we must have a diligent eye to the requirements of nature, and must remember that a wood is not an arbitrary assemblage of trees to be selected and disposed according to the caprice of its owner. "A forest," says Clave, "is not, as is often supposed, a simple collection of trees succeeding each other in long perspective, without bond of union, and capable of isolation from each other; ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... sympathy the French people may have had for America as the nation which set the example of resistance to arbitrary rule, the French government certainly was moved by no enthusiasm for abstract rights. Its only object was to check the power of their ancient enemy, and deprive it of its empire beyond the seas. Nevertheless, France did contribute materially ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... on my part of neglect of true consideration, courtesy, or good manners. But where is the "lack of breeding" in sopping up gravy with a piece of bread or "crumming," or eating soup with a spoon of one shape or another? These are purely arbitrary rules, laid down by people who have more time than sense, money than brains, and who, as I have elsewhere remarked, are far more anxious to preserve the barand unimportant conventions when engaged in conive ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... Pacific coast to buy machinery, Bruce had mapped out for the crew the work to be done in his absence and now, upon his return, he found great changes had come to the quiet bar on the river. There was a kitchen where Toy reigned, an arbitrary monarch, and a long bunk-house built of lumber sawed by an old-fashioned water-wheel which itself had been laboriously whip-sawed from heavy logs. Across the river the men were straining and lifting and tugging ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... Philippine public waited for the reforms also promised. After the celebration of the compact of June and the disposition of the arms of the revolutionists the Governor-General again began to inflict on the defenseless natives of the country arbitrary arrest and execution without judicial proceedings solely on the ground that they were merely suspected of being secessionists; proceedings which indisputably do not conform to the law ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... withdrawing every case as it arises from the dangerous power of discretion, and subjecting it to inflexible rules; extending the dominion of justice and reason, and gradually contracting, within the narrowest possible limits, the domain of brutal force and of arbitrary will. This subject has been treated with such dignity by a writer who is admired by all mankind for his eloquence, but who is, if possible, still more admired by all competent judges for his philosophy; a writer, of ...
— A Discourse on the Study of the Law of Nature and Nations • James Mackintosh
... Clanricarde, his to Miss Gallatin. Here occurred a touch of character that is worthy to be mentioned, as showing of how very little account an American, male or female, is in the estimation of a European, and how very arbitrary are the laws of etiquette among our English cousins. Mr. Canning actually gave way to his son-in-law, leaving the oldest of the two ladies to come after the youngest, because, as a marquis, his son-in-law took ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... me at each moment towards a safe harbor, in a land that pays homage to the memory of Margaret Fuller. Our ship sailed on, taking him from a land where he had been taught to worship royalty, whatever its worth or crime; where he had paid cringing submission to an arbitrary rule of police; where he had been surrounded by the degrading effects of the mightiest military system on the globe. The ship plowed on and on through the waves, bringing him to a republic, not one ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... assemblage must remain for ever shrouded from human discernment, owing to the gradual extinction of light in its passage through space,[109] and sought to confer upon this celebrated hypothesis a definiteness and certainty far beyond the aspirations of its earlier advocates, Cheseaux and Olbers; but arbitrary assumptions vitiated his reasonings on this, as well as ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... careless sojourner could see that the day seemed pervaded by an atmosphere of holy and peaceful rest from the secular cares and occupations unavoidable on other days. All thoughts about these were, as far as possible, laid aside. No arbitrary rules were enforced, but it was plainly Mr. Raymond's earnest desire that the day should be devoted especially to growing in the knowledge of the Lord, and should be considered as sacred to Him who had set it apart. And by providing pleasant and varied occupation suitable for the ...
— Lucy Raymond - Or, The Children's Watchword • Agnes Maule Machar
... assume some arbitrary dictate of a missionary to be of equal authority and importance with a moral command of God, unless you take care. Of course the missionary ought not to attempt to impose any arbitrary rule at all; but many missionaries do, and usually ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... lover: The man is supposed to be the lover, the woman the beloved. Now, in the urge of power, it is the reverse. The woman must submit, but deeply, deeply submit. Not to any foolish fixed authority, not to any foolish and arbitrary will. But to something deep, deeper. To the soul in its dark motion of power and pride. We must reverse the poles. The woman must now submit—but deeply, deeply, and richly! No subservience. None of that. No slavery. A deep, unfathomable ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... lapses into the arbitrary are infrequent after all; and as "Fromont and Risler" was followed first by one and then by another novel, the evil influence of theatrical conventionalism disappears. Daudet occasionally permits himself an underplot; but he acts always on the principle he once formulated to his son: "every book ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... the various parts of the Digest is purely arbitrary.... The division must have originated in an accidental separation ...
— Readings in the History of Education - Mediaeval Universities • Arthur O. Norton
... based on the principle of borrowing from existing language: their artificiality consists in choice of words and in regularization and simplification of vocabulary and grammar. They avoid, as far as possible, any elements of arbitrary invention, and confine themselves to adapting and making easier what usage has ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... It is arbitrary to say where the development of the moving pictures began and it is impossible to foresee where it will lead. What invention marked the beginning? Was it the first device to introduce movement into the pictures ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... have not to fear Such hard and arbitrary measure here; Else could a law, like that which I relate, Once have the sanction of our triple state, Some few that I have known in days of old Would run most dreadful risk of catching cold. While you, my friend, whatever wind should blow, Might traverse England safely to and fro, An honest ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... essence of the thing are independent of these changes. An oak is an oak, whether green with spring, or red with winter; a dahlia is a dahlia, whether it be yellow or crimson; and if some monster hunting florist should ever frighten the flower blue, still it will be a dahlia; but not so if the same arbitrary changes could be effected in its form. Let the roughness of the bark and the angles of the boughs be smoothed or diminished, and the oak ceases to be an oak; but let it retain its universal structure and ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... don't see any use in spelling a word right—and never did. I mean I don't see any use in having a uniform and arbitrary way of spelling words. We might as well make all clothes alike and cook all dishes alike. Sameness is tiresome; variety is pleasing. I have a correspondent whose letters are always a refreshment to me; there is such a breezy, unfettered originality about ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... chances that, by one error all the latitudes in the first column should be brought so nearly to an agreement as they are in the second column? The circumstance of the number of divisions of the level being almost arbitrary within limits, might perhaps be alleged as diminishing this extraordinary improbability: but let any one consider, if he choose the error of each set, as independent of the others, still he will find the odds ...
— Decline of Science in England • Charles Babbage
... open court had been base enough to accuse Mr. Jennings of the murder. Mr. Jennings indeed! a strict man of high character, lately dismissed, after twenty years' service, in the most arbitrary manner by young Sir John, who had taken a great liking to the Actons. People could guess why, when they looked on Grace: and Grace, too, was sufficient reason to account for Jonathan's wicked suspicions; of course, it was the lover's interest ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... minister, no one ever made less use of what may he called the influence of society than Cavour. He never tried to make himself agreeable at Turin, least of all to the king. For a long time he was considered haughty by those who did not know him, and arbitrary by those who did. But abroad he underwent a change which probably came about from his revealing not less but more of his natural self. "He has that petulance," Massimo d'Azeglio said, "which is exactly what they like in Paris." Abroad he could give this quality freer play than in Italy, where ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... supporting him, it was clear to Bertram from the fierce looks of the reformer, as he kept turning round his head, that this 'nestling' of Captain le Harnois was now taking his revenge, by reading to that arbitrary person a most rigorous lecture on the bill of rights. It was equally clear that the captain was in rueful perplexity as to Mr. Dulberry's meaning; not knowing whether to understand his jargon, so wholly new to himself, as bearing a warlike or an amorous ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. II. • Thomas De Quincey
... distributed among individuals. Another party demanded that all written constitutions, set forms of government, legislative acts, statute-books, and everything else on which human invention had endeavored to stamp its arbitrary laws, should at once be destroyed, leaving the consummated world as free as ...
— Earth's Holocaust (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... is not surprising that they should have mapped out the apparent course of the moon and the visible planets in their nightly tour of the heavens, and that they should have divided the stars of the firmament into more or less arbitrary groups or constellations. That they did so is evidenced by various sculptured representations of constellations corresponding to signs of the zodiac which still ornament the ceilings of various ancient temples. ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... willingness, but not in Lord Lindsay's three-masted vessel, with its balancing topmasts of Sense, Intellect, and Spirit. We are utterly tired of the triplicity; and we are mistaken if its application here be not as inconsistent as it is arbitrary. Turning back to the introduction, which we have quoted, the reader will find that while Architecture is there taken for the exponent of Sense, Painting is chosen as the peculiar expression of Spirit. "The painting of Christendom is that of an immortal spirit ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... by the labours of Sedgwick, Murchison, De la Beche, Ramsay, and a host of followers, still considerable doubt prevails as to which constitutes the oldest truly stratified series, and the difficulty has only been partially circumvented by the adoption of an arbitrary base-line, from which the succession is worked out both upwards and downwards. So the problem is only removed a stage further back. In the study of human origins a similar difficulty is felt with special ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... had a philosophy of life in which motives and actions were tagged and labeled according to their kind. He had lost his old confidence in certain arbitrary moral dicta which are the special refuge of those whose intelligence is keen enough to grapple competently with any material problem but who stand aghast, apprehensive and uncomprehending, before a spiritual struggle, before the wavering gusts of ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... it went for a considerable succession of arbitrary twenty-four hour day-periods. As long as he kept his attention on the tasks in hand, he was okay—he felt fine. Still, the project was proceeding almost automatically, just now. The first cluster of prefabs ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... course of time all had undergone even greater changes than had passed upon their owners. They had altered—that is, their descendants had altered—into such creatures as I have not attempted to describe except in the vaguest manner—the various parts of their bodies assuming, in an apparently arbitrary and self-willed manner, the most abnormal developments. Indeed, so little did any distinct type predominate in some of the bewildering results, that you could only have guessed at any known animal as the original, and even then, what likeness ...
— The Princess and the Goblin • George MacDonald
... what a turn has been given to our whole Society by the fact that we live under the sign of Aquarius—that our climate is essentially wet. A mere arbitrary distinction, like the walking-swords of yore, might have remained the symbol of foresight and respectability, had not the raw mists and dropping showers of our island pointed the inclination of Society to another exponent of those ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... all-powerful operations of the Press-gang was actually brought home to an old Roystonian, who, while crossing London Bridge, was seized and made to serve his seven years! Though the regular mode of enlistment had less of this arbitrary character it was, nevertheless, often very burdensome in our rural districts and led to some curious expedients for meeting its demands. The Chief Constable of the hundred served a notice upon the Overseers, and sometimes the number required was not one ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... clear afternoon air touching their healthy faces, and Jack Frost nipping their noses, raced Miss West and Kate Dancox up and down the hawthorn walk. It had pleased that arbitrary young damsel, who was still very childish, to enter a protest against going beyond the grounds that fine winter's day; she would be in the hawthorn walk, or nowhere; and she would run races there. As Miss West gave in to her whims for peace' sake in things not important, and as she was ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 5, May, 1891 • Various
... into intellectual ability. The same daring, confidence, enterprise, and passion for action, which in after life made him an explorer, were first expressed in that love of mischief which vexes the hearts of parents and calls into exercise the pedagogue's ferule. All arbitrary authority found him a resolute little rebel. Dr. Elder furnishes some amusing instances of his audacity and determination. Though smaller than other boys of his age, he possessed "the clear advantage of that energy of nerve and that sort of twill in the muscular texture ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... priesthood, but anything like mysticism was too repellent to his matter-of-fact mind. Then, as many of his family had been lawyers, he naturally turned toward that career. But the practice as taught him seemed senseless and arbitrary. Its rational basis upon a logical theory only dawned upon him later. In spite of his literary tastes, there was something extremely mundane about the pleasure-loving bachelor, so fond of good eating and of jovial cafe revels with Racine, Furetiere, Ninon de L'Enclos, and other witty Bohemians. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... stone, gloomy as the cave from which their plan may have originated. Carving and color were used to brighten and enliven the interior. The battles, the judgment scenes, the Pharaoh playing at draughts with his wives, the religious rites and ceremonies, were all given with brilliant arbitrary color, surrounded oftentimes by bordering bands of green, yellow, and blue. Color showed everywhere from floor to ceiling. Even the explanatory hieroglyphic texts ran in colors, lining the walls and winding around the cylinders of stone. The lotus capitals, ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... arbitrary beetle man! Well, as I've wasted so much of your time to-day, I'll accept ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... he considers to be a slight discrepancy: that Taruffi refers to the danseuse, about whom the duel was fought, as La Casacci, while Casanova refers to her as La Catai. In this manuscript Casanova always refers to her as La Casacci; La Catai is evidently one of M. Laforgue's arbitrary alterations ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... ancient deity, most likely worshipped on the island. This deity was probably the god of the Shannon river: and the name of the saint is clearly reminiscent of the name of the river. In their present form the two names are not philologically compatible: the name of the saint may be explained as an arbitrary modification, designed to differentiate the Christian saint from the pagan river-god. That pagan names should survive (modified or otherwise) in ancient holy places re-consecrated to Christianity is ...
— The Latin & Irish Lives of Ciaran - Translations Of Christian Literature. Series V. Lives Of - The Celtic Saints • Anonymous
... grew. The spirit of resistance to the arbitrary act of tyranny was everywhere to be met ...
— True to His Home - A Tale of the Boyhood of Franklin • Hezekiah Butterworth
... and 1855, and now in substance incorporated in the Revised Statutes, the practice of arbitrary appointments to the several subordinate grades in the great Departments was condemned, and examinations as to capacity, to be conducted by departmental boards of examiners, were provided for and made conditions of admission to the ...
— Messages and Papers of Rutherford B. Hayes - A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents • James D. Richardson
... tribes which had been at perpetual war among themselves or with some neighbour were reduced to quietude. Communities which had been liable to sudden invasion and to all manner of arbitrary changes in their conditions of life, in their burdens of taxation, and even in their personal freedom, now knew exactly where they stood, and, for the most part, perceived that they stood in a much more tolerable and a distinctly more assured position than before. If there must sometimes be it ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... business he was rigidly honest, and it was his pleasure to protect the treasury against the contractors; he loved work, and never wearied amid the driest and most exacting toil; he was prompt and decisive rather than judicial or correct in his judgments concerning men and things; he was arbitrary, harsh, bad-tempered, and impulsive; he often committed acts of injustice or cruelty, for which he rarely made amends, and still more rarely seemed disturbed by remorse or regret. These traits bore hard ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... autobiography, and which has passed through several editions in England within the present century, we are taught, that, "though the moods [in Greek] are not to be rejected entirely, yet their signification is sometimes so very arbitrary, that they are put for one another through all tenses." Lancelot himself seems to have had a glimmering of the essential incredibility of this statement; for, though he attempts to substantiate it by citing from Greek authors a number of passages in which the Greek idiom happens ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... consisting of precepts, is so far arbitrary and immethodical, that many of the paragraphs may change places with no apparent inconvenience; for of two or more positions, depending upon some remote and general principle, there is seldom any cogent reason why one should precede the other. But for the order in which they ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... of five members, whose functions were to remain only during the first struggles of the country for independence; but this body had now assumed a permanent right to dictatorial control, whilst there was no appeal from their arbitrary conduct, except to themselves. They arrogated the title of "Most Excellent," whilst the Supreme Director was simply "His Excellency;" his position, though nominally head of the executive, being really that of ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 1 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... content; but the national idealism of an Englishman, a German, or even a Frenchman, is heavily mortgaged to his own national history and cannot honestly escape the debt. The good patriot is obliged to offer faithful allegiance to a network of somewhat arbitrary institutions, social forms, and intellectual habits—on the ground that his country is exposed to more serious dangers from premature emancipation than it is from stubborn conservatism. France is the only European ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... fourth-dimensional cube which he describes is a reality, for it is quite a familiar figure upon the astral plane. He has now perfected a new method of representing the several dimensions by colours instead of by arbitrary written symbols. He states that this will very much simplify the study, as the reader will be able to distinguish instantly by sight any part or feature of the tesseract. A full description of this new method, with plates, is said to be ready for the press, and is expected to appear within ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... most common devices of composers are based on conceptions that are wholly arbitrary. A musical tone cannot have position in space such as is indicated by high or low, yet so familiar is the association of acuteness of pitch with height, and gravity of pitch with depth, that composers continually delineate high things with acute tones and low things with grave ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... The dispensing of spiritual corn is not to be carried on in an arbitrary fashion, but chiefly according to the appointment and disposition of God, and in the second place according to the appointment of the higher prelates, in whose person it is said (1 Cor. 4:1): "Let a man so account of us as of the ministers of Christ, and the dispensers ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... Alberti were exiled in a body, declared rebels, and deprived of their possessions, for no reason except that they seemed dangerous to the Albizzi. It was in vain that the people murmured against these arbitrary acts. The new rulers were omnipotent in the Signory, which they packed with their own men, in the great guilds, and in the Guelf College. All the machinery invented by the industrial community for its self-management ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... the same," said Miss Miniver. "And then they are swollen up and inflamed and drunken with matter. They are blinded to all fine and subtle things—they look at life with bloodshot eyes and dilated nostrils. They are arbitrary and unjust and dogmatic and brutish ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... moment of momentum on which the tides can make draughts for application to the enlargement of the revolution. The proportions in which these two available sources can be drawn upon for contributions is not left arbitrary. The laws of dynamics provide the shares in which each of the bodies is to contribute for the joint purpose of driving them ...
— Time and Tide - A Romance of the Moon • Robert S. (Robert Stawell) Ball
... by regarding the scene of labor in its true light, as a community of intellectual and moral beings, and governing it by moral and intellectual power. It is, in fact, the pleasure of exercising power. I do not mean arbitrary, personal authority, but the power to produce, by successful but quiet contrivance, extensive and happy results; the pleasure of calmly considering every difficulty, and, without irritation or anger, devising the proper moral means to remedy ...
— The Teacher • Jacob Abbott
... her aunt when the news came. Not because she wanted to, for the old lady was dreadfully deaf and fearfully arbitrary, but because Lucinda had said that she must go to her cousin's wedding, and the family always had to bow to Lucinda's mandates. Lucinda was Aunt Mary's maid, but she had become so indispensable as a sitter at the off-end of the latter's ear-trumpet that none of the grand-nephews ...
— The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary • Anne Warner
... with equal austerity and resolution, yet in a voice persuasive and conciliatory rather than arbitrary or dictatorial, the mere form and manner of this quixotic undertaking thrilled all my fibres in defiance of its sense. It was like the blare of bugles in a dubious cause; one's blood responded before one's brain; and but for Raffles, little as his friends were to me, and much ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... indeed that the national domain is ours. It is true it was acquired by the valor and with the wealth of the whole nation. But we hold, nevertheless, no arbitrary power over it. We hold no arbitrary authority over anything, whether acquired lawfully or seized by usurpation. The Constitution regulates our stewardship; the Constitution devotes the domain to union, to justice, to defense, to welfare, and to liberty. But there is a higher law than the ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... dependencies, areas of special sovereignty, and other miscellaneous entities; ethnicity, culture, race, religion, and language have divided states into separate political entities as much as history, physical terrain, political fiat, or conquest, resulting in sometimes arbitrary and imposed boundaries; maritime states have claimed limits and have so far established over 130 maritime boundaries and joint development zones to allocate ocean resources and to provide for national security at sea; boundary, borderland/resource, ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... lives to China, constitute a violation of the principles of public international law at present in force; the tolerance of their application would have as a result the introduction into international law of arbitrary principles incompatible with even legitimate commercial intercourse between neutral states and between neutral ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... insisting that 7 times 7 amounted to 47. The injustice of it seemed so flagrant. Why not 47 as much as 49? One number was no prettier than the other to look at, and it was evidently only a matter of arbitrary taste and preference, and, anyhow, it had always been 47 to him, and would be to the end of time. So when Selina came in out of the sun, leaving the Trappers or the Far West behind her, and putting off the glory of being an Apache squaw in order to hear him his tables and win his ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... satellites with his. As, however, none of these alternatives have been followed, the uniformity must be considered, in this case as in all others, evidence of subordination to some general law—implies what we call natural causation, as distinguished from arbitrary arrangement. ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... thoroughness and ingenuity of Linnaeus's work, repelled by his method. Thus by way of reaction, his thought was brought into its own creative movement: 'As I sought to take in his acute, ingenious analysis, his apt, appropriate, though often arbitrary laws, a cleft was set up in my inner nature: what he sought to hold forcibly apart could not but strive for union according to the inmost ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... be left nearly in a state of nature, or we may find, by our own unhappy experience, that there is a natural and necessary progression from the extreme of anarchy to the extreme of tyranny; and that arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 4 (of 5) • John Marshall
... prosecutor as that of a judge. One of Darrel's friends complained bitterly that the exorcist was not allowed to make "his particular defences" but "was still from time to time cut off by the Lord Bishop of London."[31] No doubt the bishop may have been somewhat arbitrary. It was his privilege under the procedure of the high commission court, and he was dealing with one whom he deemed a very evident impostor. In fine, a verdict was rendered against the two clergymen. They were deposed from the ministry and put in close prison.[32] So great was the stir they ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... with his sisters "whiles," she acknowledged in secret; he was arbitrary with his little brothers when they neglected tasks of his giving; and tried his mother and his grandmother, now and then, as young lads always have, and always will try their mothers and grandmothers, until old heads can ...
— David Fleming's Forgiveness • Margaret Murray Robertson
... 'superior person.' His conception of ousia, or essence, is not an advance upon Plato, but a return to the poor and meagre abstractions of the Eleatic philosophy. The dry attempt to reduce the presocratic philosophy by his own rather arbitrary standard of the four causes, contrasts unfavourably with Plato's general discussion of the same subject (Sophist). To attempt further to sum up the differences between the two great philosophers would ...
— Philebus • Plato
... exorbitant prices in other markets. Davis wrote to various Governors urging them to obtain state legislation to reduce extortion in the food business. In the provisioning of the army the Confederate Government had recourse to impressment and the arbitrary fixing of prices. Though the Attorney-General held this action to be constitutional, it led to sharp contentions; and at length a Virginia court granted an injunction to a speculator who had been paid by the Government for flour less than it ...
— The Day of the Confederacy - A Chronicle of the Embattled South, Volume 30 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... wholly; but she understood it better than he supposed or desired, inasmuch as she was convinced that the whole proceeding was an elaborate mystification, addressed to herself and destined to act upon her imagination. He had wanted to do something sudden and arbitrary, something unexpected and refined; to mark the difference between his sympathies and her own, and show that if he regarded his daughter as a precious work of art it was natural he should be more and more careful about the finishing touches. ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... the lower savages successfully subject all the members of their tribe to the most ruthless discipline. Their lives, he says, "are lived in fear, in restraint, in submission, in suffering, subject to galling, unreasoning, unnecessary, arbitrary prohibitions and taboos, and to customary duties equally galling, unreasoning, unnecessary, and arbitrary. They endure painful mutilations, they submit to painful sacrifices.... How are these wild, unstable, wayward, impulsive, passionate ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... news of Judge Gordon's suicide and Vorse's death, had spread from mouth to mouth. Amazement and incredulity had been followed by an aroused feeling of anger, for to the Mexicans it appeared that the crushing blow dealt the leaders of the town was the arbitrary act of the man they believed a lawless gun-man. Were not Weir's foremen and engineers guarding the jail? Men who were strangers, not even citizens ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... Neve wrote in the Lutheran Church Review: "The different Protestant Churches, that is, the leading ones, are not arbitrary developments with no right to exist, but they represent the historical endeavors to bring to an expression within the Church of Christ the truth of Scripture." (167.) This view was at the bottom of the pulpit, altar, and church-work fellowship ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 2: The United Lutheran Church (General Synod, General - Council, United Synod in the South) • Friedrich Bente
... excuse they would decide on taking a holiday, or, as it is termed, "playing." Strikes for higher wages generally took place whenever any good orders from foreign markets were known to have reached the town. By these arbitrary proceedings, arising from an ignorance of the common principles of political economy, which it is to be hoped that the spread of education will remove, the Sheffield cutlery trade has been seriously injured. A few years ago large numbers of the ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... that there is no God other than the deathless germ of deity within each one of us. I have said that the conventions and beliefs and usages and customs of civilisation were old, outworn, and tyrannical; and that there was no need to regard them or to obey the arbitrary laws ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... defiance of the King's proclamation, will be looked on as a confirmation of that independent spirit with which we are daily reproached." Jefferson said that if his advice were followed, all the use the Virginians should make of their charter would be "to prevent any arbitrary or oppressive government to be established within the boundaries of it"; and that it was his wish "to see a free government established at the back of theirs [Virginia's] properly united with them." He would not consent, however, that Congress ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... here; steam is valuable, and noise onpolite. They call it a "subdued tone." Poor tame things, they are subdued, that's a fact; slaves to an arbitrary tyrannical fashion that don't leave 'em no free will at all. You don't often speak across a table any more nor you do across a street, but p'raps Mr. Somebody of West Eend of town, will say to a Mr. Nobody from West Eend of ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... and forever to pay; to work, suffer and be silent, without aspiring to anything, without aspiring to know or even to understand Spanish, without separating himself from his carabao, as the priests shamelessly say, without protesting against any injustice, against any arbitrary action, against an assault, against an insult; that is, not to have heart, brain or spirit: a creature with arms and a purse full of gold ............ there's the ideal native! Unfortunately, or because the brutalization is not yet complete and because the nature of man is ...
— The Indolence of the Filipino • Jose Rizal
... of Rhizanths, as well as that of Gymnosperms, I consider as a retrograde step in Botanical science. It is totally opposed to all sound principles of classification, and is a proof that, in the nineteenth century, arbitrary characters are still sought for, and when found ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... not sufficiently established in society to stand alone. Still, he had too high an opinion of his personal beauty, fine clothes, and general merits, to believe that the ladies of Lucca would permit of his banishment by any arbitrary ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... next breath, that it would be useless, since the minds of the others were fully made up. I knew she thought Winston arbitrary, and Mabel credulous; but she was afraid to interfere. As for myself, what could I have told you that you had not already heard? I could only hope that the cloud was not heavy, and would soon blow over. From the hour in which it cast the first shadow ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... that the poem had made some sensation there. It is singular that Collinson should, throughout his composition, speak of Nazareth as being on the sea-shore—which is the reverse of the fact. The Praeraphaelites, with all their love of exact truth to nature, were a little arbitrary in applying the principle; and Collinson seems to have regarded it as quite superfluous to look into a map, and see whether Nazareth was near the sea or not. Or possibly he trusted to Dante Rossetti's poem "Ave," in which likewise Nazareth is a marine town. My brother ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... character. He was a favourite; and favourites have always been odious in this country. No mere favourite had been at the head of the Government since the dagger of Felton had reached the heart of the Duke of Buckingham. After that event the most arbitrary and the most frivolous of the Stuarts had felt the necessity of confiding the chief direction of affairs to men who had given some proof of parliamentary or official talent. Strafford, Falkland, Clarendon, Clifford, Shaftesbury, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... market-area, will of necessity increase. The railway and shipping industries, for example, in countries like England and the United States, have already reached a stage of industrial development when the social danger arising from an arbitrary fixing of rates by a line or a "pool" of lines, from a strike or lock-out of "dockers" or railway men, is gaining keener recognition every year. The rapidly growing organisation of both capital and labour, especially in the ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... Abrupt, arbitrary, disconnected creative acts may serve to illustrate the Divine power; but that continuous unbroken chain of organisms which extends from palaeozoic formations to the formations of recent times, a chain in which ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... posts were indeed to be vacated by June 1, 1796, though without indemnity for the past, but a British right of search and impressment was implicitly recognized, the French West Indian trade not rendered secure, and arbitrary liberty accorded to Great Britain in defining contraband. Opposition to ratification was bitter and nearly universal. The friends of France were jubilant. Jay was burned in effigy, Washington himself attacked. The utmost that Hamilton ...
— History of the United States, Volume 2 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... Deity; but he has often tried to excite the powers that be against the least of his critics." This was very true of Voltaire, who was as thin-skinned as he was violent; and who is believed to have tried sometimes to silence his opponents by the arbitrary method of procuring from some man in power a royal order to have them locked up. Palissot, in a very readable comedy, makes fun of Diderot and his friends. As for invective, the supply is endless ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... capacities of men are different, and that their situations in life must be different; but when I considered the laws which should secure to each individual his life and property, I found nothing but a wild chaos, which tyrannical power had artfully mixed up in order to make herself the sole and arbitrary mistress of the happiness and the existence of the subject. After this discovery, the whole human race appeared to me as a flock of sheep, which a band of robbers had conspired to plunder and devour by means of laws enacted by themselves, and to which they themselves ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... the Maccabee had become strained and unnatural in his manner. There was a vehemence in all he did which seemed to be a final resolution against despair. His decisions were arbitrary; his methods extreme. Laodice, sensing something climacteric in his atmosphere, kept aloof from him, and regarded him from the dusk of her corner with wonder and a pity that she could not explain. ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... had suddenly, by one of those arbitrary twists as difficult to account for as the changed course of a river, assumed a theatrical twist, had taken over, on cleverly obtained backing, the Union Family Theater from an insolvent client. Within a year it had made a disappearing island of the law ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... huddling for protection. Only ten per cent of the adult population was born in the county, and yet the blacks outnumber the whites four or five to one. There is undoubtedly a security to the blacks in their very numbers,—a personal freedom from arbitrary treatment, which makes hundreds of laborers cling to Dougherty in spite of low wages and economic distress. But a change is coming, and slowly but surely even here the agricultural laborers are drifting to town and leaving the broad acres behind. Why ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... sufferings! They seem to be (as in reason they should be) more than my services. Everybody points at me, and speaks of me as by far the most afflicted minister in all New England. And many look on me as the greatest sinner, because the greatest sufferer; and are pretty arbitrary in their conjectures ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... and charms of style with which that feeling may be expressed, are informed and vitalized by the sympathy itself. But whether a man who writes verses has genius,—whether he be a poet according to arbitrary canons,—whether some of his lines resemble the lines of other writers,—and whether he be original, are questions which may be answered in every way of every poet in history. Who is a poet but he whom the heart ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... summoned him to their court at Grenada, forwarding money to enable him to proceed there in a style befitting his rank. They then received him with all possible signs of distinction; repudiated Bobadilla's arbitrary proceedings; and promised the admiral compensation and satisfaction. As a mark of their disapprobation of the way in which Bobadilla had acted under their commission, they pointedly refused to enquire into the charges against Columbus, and dismissed ...
— The Life of Columbus • Arthur Helps
... (d) The purely arbitrary arrangement, (as Mr. Scrivener phrases it), by which the Book of Genesis, instead of the Gospel, is appointed to be read(357) on the week days of Lent, is discovered to have been fully recognised in the time of Chrysostom. Accordingly, the two series of Homilies ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon
... it a visionary idea, or the untried theory of an enthusiast, this triumphant reliance upon moral and intellectual power for the reform of political abuses, for the overthrowing of tyranny and the pulling down of the strongholds of arbitrary power. The emancipation of the Catholic of Great Britain from the thrall of a century, in 1829, prepared the way for the bloodless triumph of English reform in 1832. The Catholic Association was the germ of those political unions which ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... dogged obstinacy and determination. What made it all the worse was that the officers, in the maintenance of proper order and discipline in the ship, were compelled—very much against their will—to support and countenance the skipper in his arbitrary mode of dealing with the crew; thus dividing the inmates of the frigate into two well- defined parties—namely, those on the quarter-deck and those on the forecastle. We were all unpopular in varying degrees, from the captain down to the midshipmen. I have good reason to believe that the ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... March—product as he was of an arbitrary system of thought and training, and by so much divorced from the natural instincts of youth and age alike, the confident joy of the one, the mature acquiescence of the other—in overhearing this brief ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... gracious God, of our unfeigned thanks, for filling our hearts again with joy and gladness, after the time that thou hadst afflicted us, and putting a new song into our mouths, by bringing his majesty King William, upon this day, for the deliverance of our church and nation from popish tyranny and arbitrary power." And again, "And didst likewise upon this day, wonderfully conduct thy servant King William, and bring him safely into England, to preserve us from the attempts of our enemies to bereave us of our religion and laws." And the following, ...
— Guy Fawkes - or A Complete History Of The Gunpowder Treason, A.D. 1605 • Thomas Lathbury
... my journey I reached Ganhard, which was formerly one of the most prosperous towns in Central India, but is now much decayed and governed by a wealthy, arbitrary, violent, generous, and cruel prince. His name is Rajah Maddan, a true Oriental potentate, delicate and barbarous, affable and sanguinary, combining ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... with an account of what he had done to compose the differences in Utah. He explained and justified the appointments he had made there—appointments that had been recommended by Southern senators and representatives who, because they were Southerners, were opposed to the undue extension and arbitrary use of Federal power. He had made Caleb W. West of Kentucky governor of Utah on the recommendation of Senator Blackburn of Kentucky, my father's friend. He had made Frank H. Dyer, originally of Mississippi, United States Marshal. He had appointed a District Attorney in ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... George the Third himself, with all his arbitrary notions, and willing religious acquiescence, could not endure the creed of St. Athanasius with its damnatory enjoinments of the impossible, what would have been said to the inscription over Dante's hell-gate, or the account ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... anything to do with his relatives simply because he did not like them, but I clearly recognized that my friends in the city meant more to me than any of my Wisconsin neighbors and it became more and more evident that to make and keep an arbitrary residence in a region which did not in itself stimulate or satisfy me, was a mistake. There was nothing to do in West Salem ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... matter in at all the same light as Madelon. In the first place, if formed part of the furniture of the room, and had always been there, so far as he knew—which, to the nun, whose life was founded on a series of unquestioned precedents, allowing of nothing arbitrary but the will of the Superior, appeared an unanswerable reason why it should always remain; and, in the next place, with the lack of sympathy that one sometimes remarks in unimaginative minds, she ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... of Cox at the proper juncture would have been wise as a peace-offering, but perhaps it would have let off the Senate too easily from the effect of their arbitrary act. Now the dislodging of Stanton and filling the office even temporarily without the consent of the Senate would raise a question as to the legality of the President's acts, and he would belong to the attacked instead of the attacking party. If ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... mother and sister could not counterbalance the terrible severity of the cruel King. Gradually Fritz changed from the sunny lad who had played in the gardens of Potsdam with Wilhelmina to a severe and arbitrary monarch. ...
— Historic Boyhoods • Rupert Sargent Holland
... see their votes against my Lord Chiefe Justice Keeling, that his proceedings were illegal, and that he was a contemner of Magna Charta (the great preserver of our lives, freedoms, and properties) and an introduction to arbitrary government; which is very high language, and of the same sound with that in the year 1640. I home, and there wrote my letters, and so to supper and to bed. This day my Lord Chancellor's letter was burned ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... of greatest power, and had but just begun, in England at least, to develop into the corporations of the towns; but the towns themselves were beginning to gain their freedom and to become an important element in the society of the time, as little by little they asserted themselves against the arbitrary rule of the feudal lords, lay or ecclesiastical: for as to the latter, it must be remembered that the Church included in herself the orders or classes into which lay society was divided, and while by its lower clergy of the parishes and by the friars it touched the people, its upper ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... the 'love one another' verse. You may try as hard as you like and you can't love your neighbor as yourself, unless he, or she, as the case may be, is a lovable person, and loves back. There can be no arbitrary rules that will bind you against what you think is right. Suppose your neighbor is a horsethief, or a liar, who belongs to another political party, and backbites, and steals your wood, and kicks your dog, and puts up jobs ...
— Peck's Uncle Ike and The Red Headed Boy - 1899 • George W. Peck
... it ever intended that men and women should so exhaust each other. The marriage law is too arbitrary; it allows no scope for individual action, and yet the subject is so delicate, so intricate, that none but the keenest and nicest balanced minds dare attempt to criticise, much less improve it. The misconstructions of a person's motives are so great that many who ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams
... cases as those of Byron and Girard should teach those who have the charge of youth the crime it is to permit such defects to be the subject of remark. Girard also early lost his mother, an event which soon brought him under the sway of a step-mother. Doubtless he was a wilful, arbitrary, and irascible boy, since we know that he was a wilful, arbitrary, and irascible man. Before he was fourteen, having chosen the profession of his father, he left home, with his father's consent, and went to sea in the capacity of cabin-boy. He used to ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... was quickly absorbed in a variety of calculations and, lost in this arbitrary occupation, forgot all else until the clock chimed ten. Then with a sigh he folded away a note of results and ordered the closing of the house. A new light was immediately on his face, and he went upstairs like a man who has a purpose. This purpose took him to little Martha's ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... not our correspondent a little mistaken in supposing that the last letter in "viz." as originally a letter z? Was it not one of the arbitrary marks of contraction used by the scribes of the middle ages, and being in form something like a "z," came to be represented by the early printers by that letter? In short, the sign3 was a common abbreviation in records for terminations, as omnib3 for omnibus, ...
— Notes & Queries 1849.12.22 • Various
... papers relating to disputes which had lately happened between his excellency Charles Knowles, esq., and some of the principal inhabitants of the island of Jamaica. This governor was accused of many illegal, cruel, and arbitrary acts, during the course of his administration; but these imputations he incurred by an exertion of power, which was in itself laudable, and well intended for the commercial interest of the island. This was his changing the seat of government, and procuring an act of ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... workers and laborers, and, to a lesser extent, commercial sexual exploitation; the most common offense was forcing workers to accept worse contract terms than those under which they were recruited; other conditions include bonded labor, withholding of pay, restrictions on movement, arbitrary detention, and physical, mental, and sexual abuse tier rating: Tier 3 - Qatar failed, for the second consecutive year, to enforce criminal laws against traffickers, or to provide an effective mechanism ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... in brick-yards, sawmills, lumber woods, or harvest fields, there was no arbitrary limit put upon the amount of work to be done. If I chose to do the work of a man and a half, I got $1.50 for doing it, and it would have been a bold and sturdy delegate who tried to hold me from it. I felt no ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... and by virtue of the Convention's own decrees, not only have the Jacobins the whole of the executive power in their hands, as this is found in civilized countries, but likewise the discretionary power of the antique tyrant or modern pasha, that arbitrary, strong arm which, singling out the individual, falls upon him and takes from him his arms, his freedom, and his money. After the 28th of March, we see in Paris a resumption of the system which, instituted by the 10th of August, was completed by the 2nd of September. In ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... the interests of his employer, and to what he considered the true objects of the enterprise in which he was engaged. He certainly was to blame occasionally for the asperity of his manners, and the arbitrary nature of his measures, yet much that is exceptionable in this part of his conduct may be traced to rigid notions of duty acquired in that tyrannical school, a ship of war, and to the construction given by his companions to the orders of Mr. Astor, so little in ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... is customary to describe three stages in the progress of hip disease, but this is arbitrary and only adopted for ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... Bishop Horsley, and President Forbes contain most earnest attacks upon the ideas of Newton, such attacks being based upon Scripture. Dr. John Owen, so famous in the annals of Puritanism, declared the Copernican system a "delusive and arbitrary hypothesis, contrary to Scripture"; and even John Wesley declared the new ideas to "tend ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... depend upon honesty and confidence for their value, and are at a sad discount in hard times of fraud and corruption. Unprincipled men find means of evading the written agreement upon their face by ingenious subterfuges or downright repudiation. An arbitrary majority will construe the partnership articles to suit their own interests, and stat pro constitutione voluntas. It is true that the litera scripta remains, but the meaning is found to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... He drops into madame's and finds her in the midst of plans. She is to give an elegant little musicale about the 10th, and he must surely bring his wife, who is to stay all night. She, madame, will hear of nothing to the contrary. No woman was ever more charming in these daintily arbitrary moods, and he promises. All the singers will be professional, there will be several instrumental pieces, and the invitations are to be ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... touch upon Defects no more than is necessary." Beyond this it seeks to set up a right taste for the age. His own purpose is to examine a great tragedy "according to the Rules of Reason and Nature, without having any regard to those Rules established by arbitrary Dogmatizing Critics ..." More specifically, he proposes to show the why of our pleasure in this piece: "And as to those things which charm by a certain secret Force, and strike us we know not how, or why; I ...
— Some Remarks on the Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Written by Mr. William Shakespeare (1736) • Anonymous
... proclamation, will be looked on as a confirmation of that independent spirit with which we are daily reproached." Jefferson said that if his advice were followed, all the use the Virginians should make of their charter would be "to prevent any arbitrary or oppressive government to be established within the boundaries of it"; and that it was his wish "to see a free government established at the back of theirs [Virginia's] properly united with them." He would not consent, however, that Congress should ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... will be such as appear to illustrate most plainly the various elements of the craft; one need not range widely to find them, nor does it matter if the selection, from any other point of view, should seem arbitrary. Many great names may be passed over, for it is not always the greatest whose method of work gives the convenient example; on the other hand the best example is always to be found among the great, and it is essential ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... soul—how mysterious they were! There was animalism in the soul, and the body had its moments of spirituality. The senses could refine, and the intellect could degrade. Who could say where the fleshly impulse ceased, or the physical impulse began? How shallow were the arbitrary definitions of ordinary psychologists! And yet how difficult to decide between the claims of the various schools! Was the soul a shadow seated in the house of sin? Or was the body really in the soul, as ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... "You see, it is all through those long-winded chaps, who won't be content with what the Creator gives them, but must put a cause and reason for everything beyond God's own will and pleasure, and who lay down arbitrary rules of their own for the guidance of Dame Nature, though, between you and I and the binnacle, Haldane, the old lady got on well enough for a good many scores of years—I'd be sorry to say how many—without their precious help! Now these gentlemen, who know everything, ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson
... these hot-headed cavaliers would submit thus quietly to an arbitrary act of confiscation and of arrest. Hardly were the last words out of the man's mouth than a dozen blades flashed ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... species may have this advantage conferred on it; or if this would be still too much, one sex of a certain variety. Probably there is scarcely a dash of colour on the wing or body of which the choice would be quite arbitrary, or which might not affect its duration for thousands of years." The significance of the last sentence is immense, and when we reflect that this bold but cautious thinker was in constant intercourse with Darwin, we can readily comprehend ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... making a mistake," said he; "of course that constable was very arbitrary in his manner, but he IS the constable, just the same. I inquired and found that he is. The arrest was perfectly legal. You had much better stay in jail until morning, and submit to a fine which would probably be merely nominal. As it is, ...
— The Voyage of the Hoppergrass • Edmund Lester Pearson
... only is there no lesson in the Dutchman, but the whole idea is so absurd that only the power of the music enables us to swallow it at all. The condition on which the Dutchman can be saved is purely arbitrary; what difference ought it to make to him that some one, for the sake of an idea, sacrifices herself? The "good angel" who proposed it must have been temporarily out of her senses, and the Creator when he agreed must have been ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... From the arbitrary point where the four territories met, New Reno flung its sprawling, dirty carcass over the muddy soil and roared and hooted endlessly, laughed with the rough boisterousness of miners and spacemen, rang with the brittle, brassy laughter of women following ...
— Foundling on Venus • John de Courcy
... had been transformed into an intriguing politician. Parliament, which had not been called for four years, met in 1593, and there was an immediate collision with the Crown. Elizabeth's tone was much more despotic than of old. Petitions for the settlement of the succession were met by the arbitrary imprisonment of Wentworth ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... book-buying, I divide English literature, not strictly into historical epochs, but into three periods which, while scarcely arbitrary from the historical point of view, have nevertheless been calculated according to the space which they will occupy on the shelves and to the demands which they will ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett
... passed the entire winter season of this year at Elatia, where he had established the winter quarters of his army, in adjusting political arrangements, and reversing the measures which had been introduced in the several states under the arbitrary domination of Philip and his deputies, who crushed the rights and liberties of others, in order to augment the power of those who formed a faction in their favour. Early in the spring he came to Corinth, where he had summoned a general convention. Ambassadors ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... marked Pale-parto on the map; the Trionto laves its foot. But the local pronunciation of this name is Palepite, and I cannot help thinking that here we have a genuine old Greek name perpetuated by the people and referring to this covering of hoary pines—a name which the cartographers, arbitrary and ignorant as they often are, have unconsciously disguised. (It occurs in some old charts, however, as Paleparto.) An instructive map of Italy could be drawn up, showing the sites and cities wrongly named from corrupt etymology or falsified inscriptions, and those deliberately ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... supply? My dear friend, these rough illustrations are only approximations to the absolute impossibility that Christ can help, heal, or save any man without the man's personal faith. 'Whosoever believeth' is no arbitrary limitation, but is inseparable from the very ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... an adventure not unlike that which befell me at Vienna. The whole of Europe, remember, was in a state of political ferment. Poland was at least as ready to rise against its oppressor then as now; and the police was proportionately strict and arbitrary. An army corps was encamped on the right bank of the Vistula, ready for expected emergencies. Under these circumstances, passports, as may be supposed, were carefully inspected; except in those of British subjects, the person of the bearer was described - his height, the colour ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... the House of Parliament, where at a great committee I did hear as long as I would the great case against my Lord Mordaunt, for some arbitrary proceedings of his against one Taylor whom he imprisoned and did all the violence to imaginable, only to get him to give way to his abusing his daughter. [John Mordaunt, younger son to the first, and brother to the second Earl of Peterborough, having incurred considerable personal risk ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... a constituent of a proposition into a variable, there is a class of propositions all of which are values of the resulting variable proposition. In general, this class too will be dependent on the meaning that our arbitrary conventions have given to parts of the original proposition. But if all the signs in it that have arbitrarily determined meanings are turned into variables, we shall still get a class of this kind. This one, however, is not dependent on any convention, but solely on the nature of the pro ...
— Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus • Ludwig Wittgenstein
... will have this Double-Marriage, and it shall be possible. Pour Lady, she was very obstinate; and her Husband was very arbitrary. A rough bear of a Husband, yet by no means an unloving one; a Husband who might have been managed. She evidently made a great mistake in deciding not to obey this man; as she had once vowed. By perfect prompt obedience she might have had a very tolerable life with ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... long and familiar use, as has been said, come to excite in men certain ideas so constantly and readily, that they are apt to suppose a natural connexion between them. But that they signify only men's peculiar ideas, and that BY A PERFECT ARBITRARY IMPOSITION, is evident, in that they often fail to excite in others (even that use the same language) the same ideas we take them to be signs of: and every man has so inviolable a liberty to make words stand for what ideas he pleases, that no one hath the power to make others ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... of suffering men and women and children, He will make plain to me, and to us all; for as Gideon looked for a sign before he, at the bidding of the heavenly messenger, undertook the leading of the chosen people against the hosts of Midian, even so do I look for a sign. Gideon's sign was arbitrary. He selected it. He dictated his own terms; and out of compassion for his halting faith, a sign was given to him, and that twice over. First, his fleece was dry when all the country round was drenched with dew; and, secondly, his fleece was drenched with ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... being too weak to have your own way, is due from either to the other. This shallow and mischievous notion rests either on a misinterpretation of the experience of civilised societies, or else on nothing more creditable than an arbitrary and unreflecting temper. Those who have thought most carefully and disinterestedly about the matter, are agreed that in advanced societies the expedient course is that no portion of the community should insist on imposing its own will upon any ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... been asked, in another place, Why do not the rich Catholics endow foundations for the education of the priesthood? Why do you not permit them to do so? Why are all such bequests subject to the interference, the vexatious, arbitrary, peculating interference of the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... the rights even of brute matter and arbitrary symbols. If he writes the same word twice in succession, by accident, he always erases the one that stands second; has not the first-comer the prior right? This act of abstract justice, which I trust many of my readers, like myself, have often performed, is ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... before was only a spectator, is introduced as speaking by the Centurion's voice."—Murray's Gram., Vol. i, p. 347. "You cannot deny, that the great Mover and Author of nature constantly explaineth himself to the eyes of men, by the sensible intervention of arbitrary signs, which have no similitude to, or connexion with, the things signified."—Berkley cor. "The name of this letter is Double-u, its form, that of a double V."—Dr. Wilson cor. "Murray, in his Spelling-Book, wrote Charlestown ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... "local" birds at bottom (very well arranged), "British" next (not so well arranged), and "foreign" at top (not well arranged at all), and these arbitrary and totally unnatural divisions were supposed to "drive home the truths of natural history into the minds of casual visitors," to be "applicable to all the departments of a museum, so that, if it ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... annoyed; for, in point of fact, it was the exercise of a fresh act of authority, a repetition of the arbitrary act, if, indeed, it is to be considered as such. He took hold of his pen slowly, and evidently in no very good temper; and then he wrote, 'Order for M. le Chevalier d'Artagnan, captain of my musketeers, to ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... each other's wants. Nobody, I believe, has observed with any reflection what market is, without being astonished at the truth, the correctness, the celerity, the general equity, with which the balance of wants is settled. They, who wish the destruction of that balance, and would fain by arbitrary regulation decree, that defective production should not be compensated by increased price, directly lay their AXE to the root ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... even greater extent than measures previously taken which have already cost so many human lives to China, constitute a violation of the principles of public international law at present in force; the tolerance of their application would have as a result the introduction into international law of arbitrary principles incompatible with even legitimate commercial intercourse between neutral states, and between neutral ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... for these reproaches by the summary and arbitrary commitment of many individuals, who had addressed the king in terms expressing their abhorrence of the vehement petitions presented by the other party for the sitting of parliament, and were thence distinguished by the name of Abhorrers. This course was ended ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... the poetical conception of man developed from an infant in long-clothes into a boisterous but dreamy youth, ascribing to every incomprehensible effect an arbitrary, poetical cause. Goethe's Mephistopheles, lastly is the truthful conception of evil as it really exists in a thousand forms, evolved from our own misunderstood and ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... by the revolution has been, in many respects, abused, and in too many, perhaps, relative to places of public amusement. But must it, on that account, be entirely lost to the stage, and falling into a contrary excess, must recourse be had to arbitrary measures, which might also be abused by those to whose execution they were intrusted? The unlimited number of theatres may be a proper subject for the interference of the government: but as to the liberty of ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... famous pamphlet "An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England," printed at Amsterdam and recommended to the reading of all English Protestants, 1678, which made a prodigious stir and (it is sad to think) paved the way for the "Popish Plot," Marvell sets forth his view of our constitution in language as lofty as it is precise. ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... smiled to think of man's arbitrary distinction between that which has life and that which has not. Here, quite apart from such recognisable sounds as the scampering of mice, the falling of plaster behind his panelling, and the popping of purses or coffins from his fire, was a whole house talking to him had he ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... found her more alluring than ever, but more devoted to her pleasures also; and then Marshall Langham had come into her life. North had divined that the course of their love-making was far from smooth, for Langham's temper was high and his will arbitrary, nor was he one to bear meekly the crosses she laid on him, crosses which other men had borne in smiling uncomplaint, reasoning no doubt, that it was unwise to take her favors too seriously; that as they were easily achieved ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... than usual, and there were fewer things occurred in its course, which reminded me of the divisions of time; still the church-going, where I heard nothing that had any connection with my inward life, and these rules, gave me associations with the day of empty formalities, and arbitrary restrictions; but though the forbidden book or walk always seemed more charming then, I ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... was a man of small capacity, whimsical, jealous and arbitrary. But if he cuffed his apprentice Benjamin when the compositor blundered, and when he didn't, it was his legal right; and the master who did not occasionally kick his apprentices was considered derelict to duty. The boy ran errands, cleaned the presses, swept the shop, tied up bundles, did the tasks ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... had he taken a cursory glance at the morning's newspaper, than it was borne in upon him that not only a new leaf, but a whole sheaf of new leaves, had been turned in his prospects—by a hand infinitely more powerful and arbitrary than his own. He realized within the space of a few moments that the leisure Eve might have claimed, the leisure he might have been tempted to devote to her, was no longer his to dispose of—being already demanded of him from a quarter that ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... leper, at Bethany, and the anointing of the feet by 'a woman that was a sinner' in the city, with the anointing of the head by Mary the sister of Martha, adopt principles of criticism so reckless and arbitrary that their general acceptance would rob the Gospels of all credibility, and make them hardly worth study as truthful narratives. As for the names Simon and Judas, which have led to so many identifications of different persons and different incidents, they were at least as common among ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... concerning the effect which will result from it, without consulting past observation, after what manner, I beseech you, must the mind proceed in this operation? It must invent or imagine some event, which it ascribes to the object as its effect; and it is plain that this invention must be entirely arbitrary. The mind can never possibly find the effect in the supposed cause by the most accurate scrutiny and examination. For the effect is totally different from the cause, and, consequently, can never ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... (August 18, 1921), that credibility varies as to classes of witnesses and classes of events, and also as to type of perception. Thus, perceptions of touch, odor, and taste have low evidential value. Our hearing is defective and arbitrary when it judges the source and direction of sound, and in listening to the talk of other people "words which are not heard will be supplied by the witness in all good faith. He will have a theory of the purport of the conversation, and will arrange the sounds he ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... minister; let him receive the honours he gives me, but receive them with fear and trembling; let him be proud of the approbation of his absolute lord, I appeal to the people, as my rightful judges, and masters; and if they are not inclined to condemn me, I fear no arbitrary high-flying proceeding, from the Court faction at Button's. But after all I have said of this great man, there is no rupture between us. We are each of us so civil, and obliging, that neither thinks he's obliged: And I for my part, treat with him, as we do with the Grand Monarch; ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... was ardent and tender expressions of affection for the wife and children he adored. These effusions of the heart had no separate place, except in my somewhat arbitrary analysis of the honest sailor's letter; they were the under current. Mrs. Dodd read part of it out to Julia; in fact all but the money matter: that concerned the heads of the family more immediately; and Cash was a topic her ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... 101,) convey to the person accustomed to read by the eye, ideas and perceptions which he has hitherto associated with the sight—to him accustomed to read by touch, ideas associated with touch—and so of the rest, and that not of sight or touch of the object itself, but of a mere arbitrary symbol ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... recognizes the Nicene Creed and the doctrine of Photius. So that Homyakov's assertion that this church, united by love, and consequently holy, is the same church as the Greek Orthodox priesthood profess faith in, is even more arbitrary than the assertions of the Catholics or the Orthodox. If we admit the idea of a church in the sense Homyakov gives to it—that is, a body of men bound together by love and truth—then all that any man can predicate in regard to this body, if ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... idolatry highly soothing to men in official position, who are themselves subjected to almost similar debasement before their imperial master. In some instances, especially at a distance from the capital, the acts of cruelty perpetrated by these cringing and venal nobles, as an offset to the arbitrary rule under which they themselves exist, are enough to make the blood curdle. The knout, a terrible instrument made of thick, heavy leather, and sometimes loaded with leaden balls, is freely used to punish the most ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... several adjacent counties of the said State, and to extend the laws of Georgia over the said territory, and persons inhabiting the same; and, in particular, the act on which this indictment vs. this defendant is grounded, to wit: "An act entitled an act to prevent the exercise of assumed and arbitrary power, by all persons, under pretext of authority from the Cherokee Indians, and their laws, and to prevent white persons from residing within that part of the chartered limits of Georgia, occupied by the Cherokee Indians, and to provide a guard for the protection ...
— Opinion of the Supreme Court of the United States, at January Term, 1832, Delivered by Mr. Chief Justice Marshall in the Case of Samuel A. Worcester, Plaintiff in Error, versus the State of Georgia • John Marshall
... for anxiety. In 1674 he tells of what will happen 'whenever we get a fair and unpraelimited Parliament, which may be long ere we see it.' In 1683 he writes sadly: 'Though we change the Governors, yet we find no change in the arbitrary government. For we are brought to that pass we must depend and court the Chancelor, Treasurer, and a few other great men and their servants, else we shall have difficulty to get either justice or despatch in our actions, or to save ourselves from scaith, or being quarrelled on patched up, ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... sovereign took matters into his own hands by seizing the franchise, and even the Plantagenets repeatedly suspended or revoked the liberties of London,—often, no doubt, for cause, but sometimes also to make money by a resale; and a succession of these arbitrary forfeitures demonstrated that charters to be of value must be beyond the grantor's control. Resort was had to the courts, as a matter of course, and finally it was settled that relief should be given by a writ of quo warranto, upon which the question of the violation ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... recognize if they will. Allow a boy to stretch out his legs, climb spouts, jump gutters,—he is still perfectly manly; but a girl cannot do these things in a community without censure, unless necessity requires. I know that the custom which demands different decorum for a girl is arbitrary, and not of divine origin. To go unveiled is not allowed in some countries. But conformity is surely enjoined upon us; and that, so far as it is reasonably observed, is a really womanly trait. I cannot help thinking that girls are made of finer ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... reconciliation of freedom and restraint. If it bind the artist by determinate rules, it is in order to free him from routine, to recall him to the general law of being and of his own individuality. It is in order that he may study himself, in the place of submitting to arbitrary prescriptions. In such study every marked personality will find itself ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... theory of the universe that nobody any longer holds. They are Ptolemaic in their origin, not Copernican. They sprang out of a time when it was believed that this was a little tiny world, and God was outside of it, governing it by the arbitrary imposition of his law. Every one of these creeds is fitted to that theory of things; and that theory of things has passed away absolutely ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... present knowledge in the world should be extinguished. Nothing but a stroke of imbecility upon the race, nothing but the destruction of its libraries, nothing but the paralysis of the printing-press, and the annihilation of these means of intercommunication,—nothing but some such arbitrary intervention could accomplish it. The facts already in human possession, and the constitution of the mind, together insure what we have as imperishable, and what we are ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... d'Orsay, Brummel, Grammont-Caderousse, shared this favor, and have remained legendary characters, to whom their disdain for everything vulgar, their worship of their own persons, and many costly follies gave an ephemeral empire. Their power was the more arbitrary and despotic in that it was only nominal and undefined, allowing them to rule over the fashions, the tastes, and the pastimes of their contemporaries with undivided sway, making them envied, ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... his arrival, and of his disgrace, than they issued immediate orders for his liberation, and summoned him to their court at Grenada, forwarding money to enable him to proceed there in a style befitting his rank. They then received him with all possible signs of distinction; repudiated Bobadilla's arbitrary proceedings; and promised the admiral compensation and satisfaction. As a mark of their disapprobation of the way in which Bobadilla had acted under their commission, they pointedly refused to enquire into the charges against Columbus, and dismissed ...
— The Life of Columbus • Arthur Helps
... leaders. His description of December 2nd was such as had never been excelled even by Cicero or by Berryer: "At that time there grouped themselves around a pretender a number of men without talent, without honour, sunk in debt and in crime, such as in all ages have been the accomplices of arbitrary violence, men of whom one could repeat what Sallust had said of the foul mob that surrounded Catiline, what Caesar said himself of those who conspired along with him: 'Inevitable dregs of organized society.'" The word ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... time, nor since, has there been a more capable editor of a weekly newspaper. As a literary man, he was not without his faults. That which the cabman is reported to have said of him before the magistrate is quite true. He was always "an arbitrary cove." As a critic, he belonged to the school of Bentley and Gifford,—who would always bray in a literary mortar all critics who disagreed from them, as though such disagreement were a personal offence requiring personal castigation. But that very eagerness made him a good editor. ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... the things which were revealed as he drew near. In the last two years of his course his soul-revolt often took the form of open protest to his preceptors against indulgences and the sacramental graces, against the arbitrary Index Expurgatorius, and the Church's stubborn opposition to modern progression. Like Faust, his studies were convincing him more and more firmly of the emptiness of human hypotheses and undemonstrable philosophy. The growing conviction that the ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... half bewildered with the suddenness of the transaction. What had he been seized for? Who were the men who had got hold of him? and why were they gripping his wrists so tightly? He had heard of arbitrary treatment in the Russian army, but that a colonel should have a captain seized in this extraordinary way merely because he was absent from his post without leave was beyond anything ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty
... attributed only to that which attains an ideal end; and a necessary succession has no end in itself. The "type," in this sense, is perfectly hollow. To say that the modern chrysanthemum is better than that of our forbears because it is more chrysanthemum-like is true only if we make the latter form the arbitrary standard of the chrysanthemum. If the horse of the Eocene age is inferior to the horse of to-day, it is because, on M. Brunetiere's principle, he is less horse-like. But who shall decide which is more like a horse, the original or the latter development? No species which is constituted ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... phenomena, could not actually have a material existence. In the first place, the existence of a material celestial sphere would require that all the myriad stars should be at exactly the same distances from the earth. Of course, no one will say that this or any other arbitrary disposition of the stars is actually impossible, but as there was no conceivable physical reason why the distances of all the stars from the earth should be identical, it seemed in the very highest degree improbable that the ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... of man to man, brought into the direst confusion by our social state, our war of each against all, necessarily remain confused and foreign to the working-man when mixed with incomprehensible dogmas, and preached in the religious form of an arbitrary and dogmatic commandment. The schools contribute, according to the confession of all authorities, and especially of the Children's Employment Commission, almost nothing to the morality of the working-class. So short-sighted, so stupidly narrow-minded is ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... think the best that we can do will be to leave them to find a solution of the problem between them. Depend upon it that, whatever solution they do arrive at, it will be more accurate and will stand the test of time better than any arbitrary action which you or I ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... bureaucracy, but whereas in Assyria the bureaucracy was military, in Babylonia it was theocratic. The high-priest was the equal and the director of the king, and the king himself was a priest, and the adopted child of Bel. In Assyria, on the contrary, the arbitrary power of the monarch was practically unchecked. Under him was the Turtannu or Tartan, the commander-in-chief, who commanded the army in the absence of the king. The Rab-saki, Rab-shakeh, or vizier, who ranked a little below him, ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... besides paying the rent, were anciently, it was supposed, bound to perform a great number of services to the landlord, which were seldom either specified in the lease, or regulated by any precise rule, but by the use and wont of the manor or barony. These services, therefore, being almost entirely arbitrary, subjected the tenant to many vexations. In Scotland the abolition of all services not precisely stipulated in the lease, has, in the course of a few years, very much altered for the better the condition of the ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... David in hand and toyed with him and spanked him, and pelted and petted him, until finally she made him her favorite son. Dame Fortune went about this work in an abrupt and arbitrary manner. ...
— The Boy Scout and Other Stories for Boys • Richard Harding Davis
... of the one 'sensible man' or 'superior person.' His conception of ousia, or essence, is not an advance upon Plato, but a return to the poor and meagre abstractions of the Eleatic philosophy. The dry attempt to reduce the presocratic philosophy by his own rather arbitrary standard of the four causes, contrasts unfavourably with Plato's general discussion of the same subject (Sophist). To attempt further to sum up the differences between the two great philosophers would be out of place here. Any real discussion ...
— Philebus • Plato
... you may readily perceive how God punishes vice and rewards virtue. He does not do it by any abstract law, or arbitrary mode of procedure, but lie has in infinite wisdom interwoven, the whole in the very constitution of our natures, so that the wicked cannot go unpunished, nor the righteous unrewarded. To teach that man can indulge in vice, and ...
— Twenty-Four Short Sermons On The Doctrine Of Universal Salvation • John Bovee Dods
... of tonnage and poundage without authority of Parliament; the exaction of monopolies; the extension of the forests; the arbitrary restraints of proclamations; above all, the general exaction of ship-money, form the principal articles of charge against the government of Charles, so far as relates to its inroads on the subject's property. These were maintained by ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... an old and unprofitable quarrel between those who identify, and those who contrast, morality with nature. To adjudicate this quarrel, it is necessary to define a point at which nature somehow exceeds herself. Strictly speaking, it is as arbitrary to say that morality, which arose and is immersed in nature, is not natural, as to say that magnetism and electricity are not natural. If nature be defined in terms of the categories of any stage of complexity, all beyond will wear the aspect of a miracle. It would be proper to dismiss the ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... bound to no man and free to make her own terms in life; while if she should have a child, that child is absolutely her own, and she is not liable to have it torn from her arms by the hands of the law. Apart from arbitrary and accidental circumstances, due to the condition of social feeling, the prostitute enjoys a position of independence which the married woman ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... separated in two sub-families: the Phaethornithinae, found in shady tropical forests; and the Trochilinae, comprising humming-birds which inhabit open sunny places—and to this division they mostly belong. In both of these purely arbitrary groups, however, the aerial habits and manner of feeding poised in the air are identical, although the birds living in shady forests, where flowers are scarce, obtain their food principally from the under surfaces of leaves. In their procreant habits the uniformity is also very great. In all cases ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... line of pine. We saw few travelers, passed a ragged squad or two of colored boys and girls, and met some colored women on their way to or from church, perhaps. Never ask a colored person—at least the crude, rustic specimens—any question that involves a memory of names, or any arbitrary signs; you will rarely get a satisfactory answer. If you could speak to them in their own dialect, or touch the right spring in their minds, you would, no doubt, get the desired information. They are as local in their notions and habits as the animals, ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... of war require prompt and unquestioning obedience. You may sometimes think the command arbitrary and the officer supercilious, but it is yours to obey. An undisciplined army is a curse to its friends and a derision to its foes. Give your whole influence, therefore, to the maintenance of lawful authority and of strict ...
— Detailed Minutiae of Soldier life in the Army of Northern Virginia, 1861-1865 • Carlton McCarthy
... prison as a fugitive slave. When her husband called upon Isaac T. Hopper and related all the circumstances, he thought there must be some mistake; for he could not believe that any magistrate would be so unjust and arbitrary, as to commit a woman to prison as a fugitive, when he had seen the money paid for her ransom, and the deed of manumission given. He went to Mr. Bussier immediately, and very civilly told him that he had called to make inquiry concerning a colored woman ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... act which Congress passed authorized the chartering of the Union Pacific Railroad with a capital of $100,000,000. In addition to granting the company the right of way, two hundred feet wide, through thousands of miles of the public domain, of arbitrary rights of condemnation, and the right to take from the public lands whatever building material was needed, Congress gave as a gift to the company alternate sections of land twenty miles wide along the entire line. Still further, the company was empowered ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... people's money on a private yacht which she has used but a few times, and which is one of three she insists upon keeping at the State's expense. It is the old story: make any human being believe he is born to position and he becomes arbitrary and inconsiderate of those who have exalted him. Serves the foolish ones right, I suppose is the proper verdict. But one is not indignant at the worship of their emperor by the Japanese: he is a real ruler, has power, and ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... choice of three moral maxim-writers to exemplify the sources of modern French sentiment must be in some measure an arbitrary one. The moralists of the end of the seventeenth century in France are legion, and I would not have it supposed that I am not aware of the relative importance of some of them. But although La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyere were not the inventors of ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... countless instances of municipal success under various forms, yet all based upon the same fundamental principle, that there be separately constituted departments of government. One of the fatal objections to the gentlemen's proposition is that they are attempting to blanket the whole country with one arbitrary form, regardless of differing conditions. They have completely ignored our cases of successful city government. We demand that ...
— Elements of Debating • Leverett S. Lyon
... mix up constantly our own previously acquired notions with the simple facts that present themselves to us, and to explain the latter by the former. With our habits and improved ideas of morality, we see in theft both a trespass upon the arbitrary enactments of society, which demands the correction of the civil magistrate, and a violation of that natural equity which is independent of all political arrangements, and would make it unfair and wrong for one man to take to ...
— John Rutherford, the White Chief • George Lillie Craik
... lifted my veil. Oh, I know very well that I had not the right to influence your own man to disobey your orders. But my cause was so pressing and your seclusion seemingly so arbitrary. How could I dream that your nerves could not bear any sudden shock? or that Bela—that giant among negroes—would be so affected by his emotions that he would not see or hear an approaching automobile? You must not blame me for these tragedies; and you must not blame ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... constitutional party and overthrew Redmond's power. We had incurred the very great odium of accepting even temporary partition—and a partition which, owing to this arbitrary extension of area, could not be justified on any ground of principle; we had involved with us many men who voted for that acceptance on the faith of Redmond's assurance that the Government were bound by their written word; and now we ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... to the area, A N{1} V J N A, Fig. 2, it is probable that, while self-sustaining, some at least of the lower portion must derive its initial support from the "centering" below, and the writer has made the arbitrary assumption that the lower half of it is carried by the structure while the upper half is entirely independent of it, and, in making this assumption, he believes he is adding a factor of safety thereto. The area, then, which is assumed to be carried by an underground structure the depth of which is ...
— Pressure, Resistance, and Stability of Earth • J. C. Meem
... the planetary paths might be roughly represented by a combination of circles, their speeds could not, on the hypothesis of uniform motion in each circle round the earth as a fixed body. Hence was introduced the idea of an Equant, i.e. an arbitrary point, not the earth, about which the speed might be uniform. Copernicus, by making the sun the centre, had been able to simplify a good deal of this, ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... supplemented by some letters not admitted therein but borrowed from other Aryan tongues. My host looked on with some interest whilst I did this, and bent his head as if in approval. Here then was the alphabet of the Martial tongue—an alphabet not arbitrary, but actually produced by the vocal sounds it represented! The elaborate machinery modifies the rough signs which are traced by the mere aerial vibrations; but each character is a true physical type, a visual image, of the spoken sound; the voice, temper, accent, sex, of a speaker affect ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... the forged note; I proved it to the judge's satisfaction, and he directed the prisoner to be acquitted on that count. Miss Rolleston, the lawyers often do sneer at experts; but then four experts out of five are rank impostors, a set of theorists, who go by arbitrary rules framed in the closet, and not by large and laborious comparison with indisputable documents. These charlatans are not aware that five thousand cramped and tremulous but genuine signatures are written every day ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... service she grew hard to please." She also arrived at a settled persuasion that the extreme of severity was safer than that of indulgence; an opinion which, being communicated to her officers and ministers, was the occasion, especially in Ireland, of many a cruel and arbitrary act. ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... Egypt, urges that a few young artists should be sent out with orders to copy all the hieroglyphics on the most important temples, as well as the numerous tablets and fragments which are daily brought to light. "A work pursued with such materials—all theories and arbitrary classification being excluded—would ever remain as a lasting monument, and would reflect great credit on the Government which should order its execution." Less than one-half of the money required for the removal of the Obelisk would amply cover ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... was noted for being a hard worker and a wit, but feeling about him was sharply divided. One could not be neutral; either one hailed him as a prophet and seer, or one hated him as an abandoned cynic, a vicious and arbitrary egoist whose presence in the community was a menace. There appeared to be evidence in support of either view. It was true that the Dean's office was frequently absorbed by problems of his making. He ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... the economists, the historians—and how many more?—who befog you with the rigmarole of theory, who declare the inter-antagonism of nationalities at a time when the only unity possessed by each nation of to-day is in the arbitrary map-made lines of her frontiers, while she is inhabited by an artificial amalgam of races; there are the worm-eaten genealogists, who forge for the ambitious of conquest and plunder false certificates of philosophy and imaginary ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... mile of rock and mountain land, as well as some fertile valleys, in which reposed a hardy and contented peasantry. The old Count de Hugo de Verole had quitted life early, and had left his only son, the then Count Hugo de Verole, a boy of scarcely ten years, under the guardianship of his mother, an arbitrary and unscrupulous woman. ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
Copyright © 2024 Free Translator.org
|
|
|
