|
|
|
More "Extort" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... doctors had killed." I had some reluctance to tell her the cause of my tristesse; for I knew her zeal, and I dreaded her plunging into some hazard with the authorities. But who has ever been able to keep a secret, where it was the will of the sex to extort it? Juliet obtained mine before she left the ward for the night; and desired me to give her a letter, which she pledged herself to transmit to my regiment. But this I determined to refuse, and I kept my determination. I had no desire ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... claimed their fitness to rule as the embodiment of the wealth and intelligence (which are generally the ruling factors world-wide), and would have at an early date derived a just "power from the consent of the governed," did not history record the unnecessary and inhuman means resorted to to extort it, the obliquity of which can be erased only by according him the rights of an American citizen. Mutual hostility, opposition on the one hand to the assumption and exercise of these rights, and consequent distrust by the freedman, often fostered by unscrupulous leaders, have been alike detrimental ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... same appellation. Whoever is arraigned at her tribunal has heaven and earth against him; the interrogatory is already a species of torture. When the church accuses, she seems already convinced; all her efforts tend to extort the confession of the crime, which, in virtue of her infallibility, she discovers in darkness; from this anticipated conviction of the guilt of the accused are produced all those ambushes and snares laid for the purpose of obtaining, by surprise, the confession ...
— The Christian Foundation, June, 1880
... my parts, When I am sure you hate me with your hearts. You both are rivals, and love Hermia; And now both rivals, to mock Helena: A trim exploit, a manly enterprise, To conjure tears up in a poor maid's eyes With your derision! None of noble sort Would so offend a virgin, and extort A poor soul's patience, ...
— A Midsummer Night's Dream • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... hold this happy course, we drew more from the colonies than all the impotent violence of despotism ever could extort from them. We did this abundantly in the last war; it has never been once denied; and what reason have we to imagine that the colonies would not have proceeded in supplying government as liberally, if you had not stepped in and ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... said Hester, "now seven years ago, it was your pleasure to extort a promise of secrecy, as touching the former relation betwixt yourself and me. As the life and good fame of yonder man were in your hands, there seemed no choice to me, save to be silent, in accordance with your behest. Yet it was not without ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... for Father Canon's wine shop, in the Rue St. Honore, where he met Florestan, who was as saucy and supercilious to Tantaine as he was obsequious to Mascarin. But although he paid for Florestan's dinner, all that he could extort from him was, that Sabine was terribly depressed. It was fully eight o'clock before Tantaine had got rid of Florestan, and hailing another cab, he ordered the driver to take him to the Grand Turk, in the ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... are paid by the inhabitants, who, in most places, have made it a rule never to take a domestic that has once lived in an English family; the consequence is that those engaged by the English are of the worst description, a sort of pariahs among the community, who extort and cheat their employers without mercy. If not permitted so to do, they leave them at a minutes warning; and you cannot go to any foreign colony of English people without listening to very justified tirades of the villany ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... their stores for a year and a half, before it becomes worth the while of the captain of any of the vessels which frequent the colony, to give them ship-room; and even then they do it as a matter of favour, not forgetting, however, to extort an exorbitant return for their kindness and condescension. The owners, indeed, of these vessels are so well aware of the inability of the colony to furnish them with cargoes on freight, that they generally manage before their departure, to contract for freights from ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... simple. The Government have refused to the workman the right to extort unearned increment out of the country in its dire necessity. The workman may not strike or cease work or even change employment without the permission of the State. Assuredly the State has the right to exact that ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... your hearts. You both are Riuals, and loue Hermia; And now both Riuals to mocke Helena. A trim exploit, a manly enterprize, To coniure teares vp in a poore maids eyes, With your derision; none of noble sort, Would so offend a Virgin, and extort A poore soules patience, all to make you sport, Lysa. You are vnkind Demetrius; be not so, For you loue Hermia; this you know I know; And here with all good will, with all my heart, In Hermias loue I yeeld you vp my part; And yours of Helena, To me bequeath, Whom ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... provide a Ladder of Ropes. She tells him she has so great a Confidence in his Virtue and Love, that she will refuse him nothing, tho' it would be a very bold Venture for a Maid, to trust her self with a passionate young Man, in silence of Night: and tho' she did not extort a Vow from him to secure her, she expected he would have a care of her Honour. He swore to her, his Love was too religious for so base an Attempt. There needed not many Vows to confirm her Faith; and it was agreed on between them, that he should come ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... misery, as born I was, I met my sire, not knowing whom I met or what I did, and slew him, how canst thou With justice blame the all-unconscious hand? And for my mother, wretch, art not ashamed, Seeing she was thy sister, to extort From me the story of her marriage, such A marriage as I straightway will proclaim. For I will speak; thy lewd and impious speech Has broken all the bonds of reticence. She was, ah woe is me! she was my mother; I knew it not, nor she; and she my mother Bare children to the son ...
— The Oedipus Trilogy • Sophocles
... Navarre, might justly assert. To establish herself in opposition to all these, her sagacity taught her was impossible. To prevail by allying herself to the most powerful and those from whom she could extort the best terms seemed to be the most politic course. Her choice was quickly made. It was unfortunate for France that her prudence partook more of the character of low cunning than of true wisdom, and that, in ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... an unanswerable objection: also a machine formerly used in Holland by robbers; it was of iron, shaped like a pear; this they forced into the mouths of persons from whom they intended to extort money; and on turning a key, certain interior springs thrust forth a number of points, in all directions, which so enlarged it, that it could not be taken out of the mouth: and the iron, being case-hardened, could not be filed: the only methods of getting rid ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... Nature does the rest. On the second morning of their acquaintance Mortimer invited her to walk round the links with him and watch him play. He did it a little diffidently, for his golf was not of the calibre that would be likely to extort admiration from a champion. On the other hand, one should never let slip the opportunity of acquiring wrinkles on the game, and he thought that Miss Somerset, if she watched one or two of his shots, might tell him just what he ought to do. And sure enough, the opening ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... under again; all our labor is lost, and sooner or later must be done over again." He repeated almost the same words to E.B. Washburne, a member of the House. Duff Green tried hard to get something out of him for the comfort of Mr. Buchanan, but failed to extort more than commonplace generalities. To Seward he wrote that he did not wish to interfere with the present status, or to meddle with slavery as it now lawfully existed. To like purport he wrote to Alexander H. Stephens, induced thereto ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... they arrested fifteen of those whom they most strongly suspected of attachment to the deposed viceroy, among whom was Diego Lopez de Zuniga. Having thrown these men into prison, the Pizarrians were inclined to have given them the torture to extort confession, and afterwards to have procured their condemnation by Pedro Martin the provost marshal of the city; so that they were in imminent danger of being put to death, if Lorenzo de Aldana had not exerted ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... this he questioned such as had for many years been separated from the Christian community, but though apostates rarely speak well of the society to which they formerly belonged, he could find out nothing. He then applied torture to two female-slaves, deaconesses, to extort from them the truth. After all, he could learn only that the {74} Christians were in the habit of meeting together on a certain day; that they then united in a hymn of praise to their God, Christ; and that they bound one another—not to commit crimes, but to refrain from theft, from adultery, to ...
— Mysticism and its Results - Being an Inquiry into the Uses and Abuses of Secrecy • John Delafield
... entirely without reason—that the English, with whom the republic was on terms not only of friendship but of alliance, should burn their ships on the high seas, plunder their merchants, and torture their sea-captains in order to extort information as to the most precious portions of their cargoes. Sharp language against such malpractices was considered but proof of democratic vulgarity. Yet it would be hard to maintain that Martin Frobisher, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... would assuredly have then realized to be unfounded. Instead the lieutenant accepted the most ridiculous statements, brought charges of attempted murder against Alberto and his sister, Mrs. Rizal, and evidently figured that he would be able to extort money from the rich man and gratify his revenge at ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... had personally visited almost every English gaol, and in nearly all of them he found frightful abuses which had been noticed half-a-century before, but which had been left unredressed by Parliament. Gaolers who bought their places were paid by fees, and suffered to extort what they could. Even when acquitted, men were dragged back to their cells for want of funds to discharge the sums they owed to their keepers. Debtors and felons were huddled together in the prisons which Howard found crowded by the legislation ...
— History of the English People, Volume VIII (of 8) - Modern England, 1760-1815 • John Richard Green
... sent out of the way, for, with a broad grin that had made her blush painfully, he had said he knew she would be well taken care of, and that he hoped she was not breaking her heart for want of an escort. She tried to extort Eberhard's permission to let him at least know how it was; but Eberhard laughed, saying he believed the old fox knew just as much as he chose; and, in effect, Sorel, though now and then gratifying his daughter's scruples, by ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... this spirit. It was inevitable, also, that in the confusion which followed the victory of the foreigners, some "wolves'' should put on "sheep's clothing,'' and, under the pretense of being Christians, extort money from the terror- stricken villagers, or try to deceive the foreigner with false claims ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... proprietors. They then prosecuted these proprietors for having encroached, as they called it, upon the crown lands, and the Star Chamber assessed very heavy fines upon them. The people said all this was done merely to get pretexts to extort money from the nation, to make up for the want of a Parliament to assess regular taxes; but the government said it was a just and legal mode of protecting the ancient and ...
— Charles I - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... said the Colonel, complacently, leading her forth; he hadn't near done his recital of the morning's field-day, which required that delicate tact and judicious prompting to extort from him that, though not really Brigadier on the occasion, his opinion and authority ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... wish and it will be fulfilled. But they say that the truth of this thing has never had a chance to be proved, for the reason that before any stranger can walk from the drawbridge to the appointed place, the beauty of the palace front will extort an ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Indiana town where their son was born, and throve in it from the start. He could remember his mother helping his father make the sausage and head-cheese and pickle the pigs' feet, which they took turns in selling at as great a price as they could extort from the townspeople. She was a good and tender mother, and when her little Yawcup, as the boys called Jacob in mimicry after her, had grown to the school-going age, she taught him to fight the Americans, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... exhibited by these unhappy creatures in giving vent to these indignant outbreaks, which a sense of the wicked injustice of their fate, and seeing their own offspring brought up in evidence against them, through the most detestable acts, and by the basest subornation, would naturally extort from minds even of iron mould. If ever Lear's or Timon's power of malediction could be justifiably called into exercise, it would be against such a tribunal and such witnesses as ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... it always reached my ears. She played a pious, modest, reserved part, in order to excite my curiosity. And at last, to-day she plays the prude. She refuses my forgiveness, in hopes by this generous device, to extort it from my compassion. ...
— The Stranger - A Drama, in Five Acts • August von Kotzebue
... Roman host on yonder plain Am I, but Magnus' most illustrious son, Lord of the world or heir to death and doom. The unknown affrights me: I can firmly face The certain terror. Bid my destiny Yield to thy power the dark and hidden end, And let me fall foreknowing. From the gods Extort the truth, or, if thou spare the gods, Force it from hell itself. Fling back the gates That bar th' Elysian fields; let Death confess Whom from our ranks he seeks. No humble task I bring, but worthy of Erichtho's skill ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... official plunders; the Governor-general extorts from all sides; he fills his private pockets by throwing every conceivable obstacle in the way of progress, and embarrasses every commercial movement in order to extort bribes from individuals. Following the general rule of his predecessors, a new governor upon arrival exhibits a spasmodic energy. Attended by cavasses and soldiers, he rides through every street of Khartoum, abusing ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... good-natured shrewdness, and the consummate, intricate cunning that fat people possess, the corpulent matron succeeded in vanquishing Germinie's last resistance by dint of this tacit assurance and promise of marriage; and she finally allowed the young man's ardor to extort from her what she believed that she was giving ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... will I do aught to injure the child. No, no. Dinah North is not such a fool. If I do it to gratify my own revenge, that's another thing. I have this bad, bold Robert in my power. This secret will be a fortune in itself—will extort from his mean, avaricious soul, a portion of his ill-gotten wealth. Ha, my child! you did well and wisely, and may die in peace, without the stain of blood upon ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... man has in some way found it out, and wishes to trade upon it, to extort money from you? I have often heard of such things. ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... match for the dusky-visaged outcast of the plains. Gautier had been deputied to convey certain information to Lablache by the patriarchs of the camp. And with his native cunning he had decided, on the appearance of Sergeant Horrocks, to extort a price for that which it was his duty to tell. Besides this, as matters had turned out, Horrocks was to receive gratis that for which he ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... whom the successes of the former soon after attracted, having totally subdued that country, built Milan, Verona, Brescia, and several other considerable towns, and governed with such tyrannic sway, especially over the nobility, whose riches they coveted and sought by every means to extort from them, that most of the principal families, joining under the conduct of Rhaetus[F], one of the most distinguished personages among them, retired with the best part of their effects and attendants among the steepest mountains of ...
— Account of the Romansh Language - In a Letter to Sir John Pringle, Bart. P. R. S. • Joseph Planta, Esq. F. R. S.
... could not grow. It remained in the gristle—hardly more than a sentiment. But the sentiment was a seed, the promise and potency of kindlier times. With the close of the long struggle other questions arose; got the people's ears; fixed the attention of the leaders. Scant notice could emancipation extort from men who had to repair the ravages of an exhausting war, reconstruct shattered fortunes, restore civil society in parts tumbling into ruinous disorder. The instinct of self-preservation was altogether too masterful for the moral starveling. It ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... butcher's daughter of Gloucester, mother of the Colonel, and afterwards Countess of Berkeley. Such a character as Molloy, otherwise Westmacott, was bound to get sometimes into trouble (in these days he would probably receive his reward for "endeavouring to extort money by threats"); and if he did not get exactly what he deserved, he did get, on the tenth of October, 1830, a tremendous thrashing from Charles Kemble. References to the memorandum books of this Ishmaelite of the press, in which he entered (for future ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... Spaniards, and that they had consequently escaped a terrible death by the very skin of their teeth. And when Dick further pressed him with several very obvious questions, the only reply which he could extort was, that in the excitement of the moment certain words, the meaning of which he did not in the least understand, had involuntarily escaped his lips, and that it was undoubtedly those mysterious words which had wrought the singular change in the priests' ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... of the individual? Winding himself up with twopenny-worth of cheese! Pleading for the additional penny for the waitress, whose personal charms and obliging disposition must be considered to extort the amount! And above all, unable to conceive any motive, except aversion to trouble, for disliking to carry "his chop" upon a skewer through the streets of London. How every line revels in the recollection of having dined, and speaks how seldom! while the well-buttered ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... assent to it, and without their aid the project has no chance. To obtain that aid, "the Prince" must secretly swear that after four years more he will turn France over to Henry V.; this promise only the last extreme of desperation could extort from him, and then to no purpose, since he could not fulfill it and the Legitimists could not trust him. And thus, alike by its own strength and by its enemies' divisions, the safety of the Republic ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... a little, and then observed to Holden, "It is evident some unfair practices have been resorted to with our respected friend, to extort a promise from him which he cannot violate. It is also possible, from what he let fall at first, that an attempt may be made to detain us prisoners within this house, and, for aught I know, Master Nowell may have given his word not to ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... Gladstone's proposal to take away the time of private members. And it is reported that one member of the Liberal party had begun operations as many as four weeks before Mr. Gladstone's Bill came on, and had tried to extort a number of pledges, the full meaning of which would only come upon the unhappy people who made them when they had endangered or destroyed the best ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... who professed the most entire accord with the teachings of Rome. In the absence of overt acts, it was difficult to reach the secret thoughts of the sectary. Trained experts were needed whose sole business it should be to unearth the offenders, and extort ...
— The Inquisition - A Critical and Historical Study of the Coercive Power of the Church • E. Vacandard
... darling! strange that with all my care and watchfulness you should have been subjected to such a trial. Some ruffian has been trying to extort money from you, I presume, by threatened violence to yourself, Travilla, and me. Where ...
— Elsie's Womanhood • Martha Finley
... Bokhara, and Samarcand, were surrounded beyond their fortifications by a suburb of fields and gardens, which was in turn protected by exterior works; its plains were well cultivated, and its commerce extended from China to Europe. Its riches were proportionally great; the Saracens were able to extort a tribute of two million gold pieces from the inhabitants; we read, moreover, of the crown jewels of one of the Turkish princesses; and of the buskin of another, which she dropt in her flight from Bokhara, as being worth two thousand pieces of gold.[34] ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... know it, Monsieur Joyeuse. But in order to get out of it with honor, we must have money, much money, must sacrifice two or three millions more; and we haven't them. That is why I am going to Tunis, to try and extort from the bey's rapacity a small portion of the great fortune which he so unjustly withholds. At this moment I have some chance of success, whereas a little ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... place of tombs, And touch'd not the pollutions of the Dead"—but your "fierce vivacity" is a faint copy of the "fierce & terrible benevolence" of Southey. Added to this, that it will look like rivalship in you, & extort a comparison with S,—I think to your disadvantage. And the lines, consider'd in themselves as an addition to what you had before written (strains of a far higher mood), are but such as Madame Fancy loves in some of her more familiar ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... merchant "who is acquainted with the operation of a monopoly... will send out or order tea to America when those who have it at first hand send to the same market." And therefore, since the Company have the whole supply, America will "ultimately be at their mercy to extort what price they please for their tea. And when they find their success in this article, they will obtain liberty to export their spices, silks, etc." This was the light in which the matter appeared to the ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... Luke; Chap. xxiii. 28.) weep not for him, but for themselves, their posterity, and their country; and who, whilst he was suspended upon the cross, prayed for his murderers, "for they know not," said he, "what they do." The urgency also of his judges and his prosecutors to extort from him a defence to the accusation, and his unwillingness to make any (which was a peculiar circumstance), appears in Saint John's account, as well as in that of the other evangelists. (See John xix. 9. Matt. ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... Dreadful has provided an eternity of excruciations,—except the false oath be taken in the interest of a Brahmin, in which case the perjurer may confidently expect a posthumous good time. For the rich to extort money from the poor, says Asirvadam, is an affront to the Gooroos and the Gods, which must be punished by forfeiture to the Brahmins of the whole sum extorted, the poor client to pay an additional charge for the trouble his protectors ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... factor; by this man, what they pretended to be the king's order was delivered to me, of the same purport with that which Dr Solander had received from Lange. We were all clearly of opinion that this was a mere artifice of the factors to extort money from us, for which we had been prepared by the account of a letter from Concordia; and while we were hesitating what step to take, the Portuguese, that he might the sooner accomplish his purpose, began to drive away the people who had brought down poultry and syrup, and others that were ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... but the handsome tenor is nought. The audience seemed to me both indulgent and discriminating. They applauded the pretty prima donna con furor; they praised the bass when he deserved it, the tenor when it was possible; but where he sang false, nothing could extort from them a solitary viva. This discrimination makes their applause worth having, and proceeds less from experience or cultivation, than from ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... acquaintance. The dignity and firmness of his manner provoked her pride; she wished to coquet with him—she tried to excite his jealousy by talking of Lord Bradstone: but vain were all her airs and inuendoes; they could not extort from him even a sigh. She was somewhat consoled, however, by observing in his sister's countenance the expression, as she ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... responsibility ends. Your daughter's life rests literally in your hands; for unless you consent to furnish the money to pay for a surgical operation, which may restore her health, she will certainly die. I am indulging in no exaggeration to extort alms. In this letter is the certificate of a distinguished physician, corroborating my statement. If you, the author of her being, prefer to hasten her death, then your choice of an awful revenge must be settled between your hardened conscience and ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... might be readily obtained from some of the weaker brethren in order to receive the pardon which was promised by the King. But no such confession was made. All the prisoners denied the charges brought against them. Then the usual mediaeval expedient was resorted to, and torture was used to extort acknowledgments of guilt. The unhappy Templars in Paris were handed over to the tender mercies of the tormentors with the usual results. One hundred and forty were subjected to ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... you tip the hat-check girl she gets the tip? She doesn't. It goes to a man who rents from the restaurant the privilege of bullying you out of a dime or a quarter. The girl holds you up, because if she doesn't extort fifteen dollars a week, she loses her job and her own munificent wages of seven dollars. The 'Clarion' takes pleasure in announcing a series of portraits of the high-minded pirates of finance whom ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... to pour French troops into Italy so as to extort better terms: the next was to declare war on Venice. For this there was now ample justification; for, apart from the massacre at Verona, another outrage had been perpetrated. A French corsair, which had persisted in anchoring in a forbidden part of the harbour of ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... discrimination in the psychotechnical field. The psychologist may point out the methods by which an involuntary confession can be secured from a defendant, but whether it is justifiable to extort involuntary confessions is a problem which does not concern the psychologist. The lawyers or the legislators must decide as to the right or wrong, the legality or illegality, of forcing a man to show his bidden ideas. If such an end is ...
— Psychology and Industrial Efficiency • Hugo Muensterberg
... felicity, they are undeserving we think, fortune is a stepmother to us, a parent to them. "We envy" (saith [4822]Isocrates) "wise, just, honest men, except with mutual offices and kindnesses, some good turn or other, they extort this love from us; only fair persons we love at first sight, desire their acquaintance, and adore them as so many gods: we had rather serve them than command others, and account ourselves the more beholding to them, the more service they ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... and the institutions which they regulate, are somewhat grim presents for one people to make to another, and are little calculated to excite affection; but they are eminently well calculated to protect peaceable men and to beat down wrongdoers, to extort respect and to enforce obedience.' The code was re-enacted in 1882 under the care of Mr. Whitley Stokes. It was then extended to the High Courts, which had been previously omitted, and alterations were made both in ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... talent. It is true they did not fully appreciate the weakness of the king, or the strength of his enemies; but they saw his distress, and tried to remove it. They, very naturally in such an age, recommended violent courses—to grant new monopolies, to extort fines, to exercise all his feudal privileges, to pawn the crown jewels, even, in order to raise money; for money, at all events, he must have. They advised him to arrest turbulent and incendiary members of the Commons, to prorogue and dissolve parliaments, to raise ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... society those who possess intelligence, who are in easy circumstances and conscientious, form a small select class; the great mass is egotistic, ignorant, and needy, and lets its money go only under constraint; there is but one way to collect the taxes, and that is to extort them. From time immemorial, direct taxes in France have been collected only by bailiffs and seizures; which is not surprising, as they take away a full half of the net income. Now that the peasants of each village are armed and form a band, let the collector come ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... antagonist parties each hold possession of different States of the Republic, and the fortunes of the war are constantly changing. Meanwhile the most reprehensible means have been employed by both parties to extort money from foreigners, as well as natives, to carry on this ruinous contest. The truth is that this fine country, blessed with a productive soil and a benign climate, has been reduced by civil dissension to a condition of almost hopeless anarchy and imbecility. It would be vain for this ...
— State of the Union Addresses of James Buchanan • James Buchanan
... little good did that do him, when he could not fix the vision, talk with it face to face, and extort the fulfilment of the ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... a very favorable effect on our hero's amatory enterprise: still, he could never extort anything at all resembling a confession of love; but he had the felicity of living on terms of intimacy with Clelia. Every morning, and often at evening also, there was a long conversation with the alphabets; every evening ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... worried him in short. He talked of this and that but watched her close. Tea over, he endeavoured to extort The cause of her excitement. She arose And stood beside him, trying to compose Herself, all whipt to quivering, curdled life, And he, poor fool, ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... other, he was trying with all his might to extort a confession from him. But Dutreuil drew himself up and coldly, with a sort of scorn ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... the thought of her parents' displeasure. Her young sister, Carrie, a sweet girl of thirteen, had shed many tears for her, and had used all her eloquence to bring about a reconciliation, apparently in vain, but finally she had so far prevailed with her mother as to extort a promise from her that she would write to her, which fact she straightway communicated to Lizzie, who was, at the opening of our story, looking anxiously for this promised letter, which might contain words of love, perhaps forgiveness. But she had looked so long and had been ...
— 'Three Score Years and Ten' - Life-Long Memories of Fort Snelling, Minnesota, and Other - Parts of the West • Charlotte Ouisconsin Van Cleve
... him. And so with Storri; he would hide until he could command that old-time manner of unclouded ease. He would stifle every surmise, deny every rumor if rumor blew about, of the blow he had received. A few days, and Storri would be himself again. As for immediate money, Storri would extort that from Mr. Harley, who, in his dull-head ignorance or worse, had been the author of his losses. Who first spoke of Northern Consolidated? Who suggested the "bear" raid? Was it not Mr. Harley? The affair had been his; the loss should be his; ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... of the whole system is the treatment of prisoners to make them confess. The Chinese theory is that no one should be punished unless he confesses with his own mouth. Consequently the most brutal, sickening tortures are practised to extort confession, and, in the end, thousands and thousands of innocent men, no doubt, rather than live longer in miseries far worse than death, have professed crimes of ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... many Passages, that could not be taken, which past between the Jury and the Court. The Jury went up again, having received a fresh Charge from the Bench, if possible to extort ...
— The Tryal of William Penn and William Mead • various
... Rabourdin assessed the sums to be brought into the treasury by indirect taxation as so much per cent on each individual share. A tax is a levy of money on things or persons under disguises that are more or less specious. These disguises, excellent when the object is to extort money, become ridiculous in the present day, when the class on which the taxes weigh the heaviest knows why the State imposes them and by what machinery they are given back. In fact the budget is not a strong-box to hold what is put into it, but ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... cause of Christianity; declaring, that any Christian who may first come, shall oblige these false gods to confess publicly, that they are but devils; and consenting that this Christian shall be immediately killed, if he does not extort such a confession from the mouth of these gods. Nisi se daemones confessi fuerint Christiano mentiri non audentes, ibidem illius Christiani procacissimi sanguinem fundite. St. Austin likewise makes frequent mention ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... naval expeditions to kill, burn, and destroy tribes and villages for knocking an Englishman on the head are so common a part of our Imperial routine that the last dozen of them has not called forth as much pity as can be counted on by any lady criminal. The judicial use of torture to extort confession is supposed to be a relic of darker ages; but whilst these pages are being written an English judge has sentenced a forger to twenty years penal servitude with an open declaration that the sentence will be carried out in full unless he confesses where he has hidden ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... what a free daughter of Freeland must feel at the mere suggestion of leaving these happy fields, this home of justice and human affection, in order, afar off in your miserable country, not to wipe away, but to extort the tears of the downtrodden—not to alleviate the horrors of your slavery, but to become one of the slave-holders! I love Carlo so much above all measure that I should be ready by his side to exchange the land of happiness for that of misery if any imperative duty called him thither; ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... the appearance of dawning intelligence, "that's so, Coach, Hicks never has disclosed the details of his achievement; we were about to extort a confession from him, when Thor broke up the league with his announcement, and since then, Bannister has been too worried over Thorwald to trifle ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... again to seek out his old mother, to extort money from her; that was beyond a doubt. But would he of necessity recognise the wife of twenty-three years ago in the very middle-aged person Aunt M'riar saw in the half of a looking-glass that Mr. Bartlett's careful myrmidons had not broken? ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... apparitions (e.g., to Manoah and to Abraham offering up Isaac) occurred during sleep, for that no one with his eyes open ever could see an angel, but this is mere nonsense. The sole object of such commentators seemed to be to extort from Scripture confirmations of Aristotelian quibbles and their own inventions, a proceeding which I regard as ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... administered, may be incomparably more beneficial to the subject than a good constitution administered corruptly. Burke's great leading principle was: Be just—and can a man have a nobler end? To suppress an insurrection cruelly, to tax a people unjustly, or to extort money from a nation on false pretences, was to him deeply abhorrent. His first object was to secure the incorruptibility of ministers and of members of parliament. When the post of royal scullion could be confided to a member of parliament, and ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... and to Violet it seemed as if they were losing their gloss by being produced whenever the friends wanted something to talk about. Moreover, Emma, who was now within a few months of twenty-one, was seized with a vehement desire to extort her mother's consent to put them at once in execution, and used to startle Violet by pouring out lamentations over her promise, as if it was a cruel thraldom. Violet argued that the scheme was likely to be much better weighed by taking ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection. When we speak of Nature in this manner we have a distinct but most poetical sense in the mind. We mean the integrity of impression made ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... his sister, "how do you know but that this is a scheme to extort money. How can you be sure it is your child? There are so many swindlers ...
— The Girls at Mount Morris • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... about the position and duties of a chorus-girl, but it certainly had the air of being a last desperate resort. There sprang from that a vague hope that perhaps she might extort a capitulation from her father by a threat to seek that position, and then with overwhelming clearness it came to her that whatever happened she would never be able to tell her father about her debt. The completest capitulation would not ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... halt, intimating his own intention to move to the margin of the woods, in order to reconnoitre. Both his companions heard this announcement with satisfaction, for Willoughby was eager to say to Maud directly that which he had so plainly indicated by means of the box, and to extort from her a confession that she was not offended; while Maud herself felt the necessity of letting the major know the melancholy circumstance that yet remained to be told. With these widely distinct feelings uppermost, our two lovers saw Nick quit ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... school discipline, they were not the less diligently applied to." This high-soaring ambition was the source both of his weakness and his strength in art, as well as in his commerce with the world of men. The boy who despised discipline and sought to extort her secrets from nature by magic, was destined to become the philanthropist who dreamed of revolutionizing society by eloquence, and the poet who invented in "Prometheus Unbound" forms of grandeur too colossal to ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... or intercourse, with any of the Earl's dependents or domestics. But, judiciously considering that the restriction did not extend to himself, who was the person entrusted with the convoy, he used every measure in his power to extort from Edie the nature of his confidential and secret interview with Lord Glenallan. But Edie had been in his time accustomed to cross-examination, and easily evaded those of his quondam comrade. "The secrets of grit folk," said ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... the peasants. They see the peasant smiles very little, and altogether is not very kindly disposed and wants to disaccustom himself to the authorities. The other day in Smolyakov, a village not far from here, they came to extort the taxes; and your peasants got stubborn and flew into a passion. The police commissioner said straight out: 'Oh, you damned scoundrels! why, this is disobedience to the Czar!' There was one little peasant there, Spivakin, and says he: 'Off with you to the evil mother with your ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... her room, preyed upon by some inscrutable disease, were weeks of darkness and solitude. Temperance and Aunt Merce took as much care of her as she would allow; but she preferred being alone most of the time. Thus she acquired the fortitude of an Indian; pain could extort no groan from her. It reacted on her temper, though, for after an attack she was exasperating. Her invention was put to the rack to tease and offend. I kept out of her way; if by chance she caught sight of me, she forced me to hear the ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... limbs broken and distorted, in order, by exposing them thus maimed, to excite the pity and commiseration of the public; and every species of artifice was made use of to agitate the sensibility, and to extort the contributions of ...
— ESSAYS, Political, Economical and Philosophical. Volume 1. • Benjamin Rumford
... great stress on the state of the army. "It is dreadful, I know," replied the emperor: "from Wilna, half of it consisted of stragglers; now they form two-thirds; there is, therefore, no time to be lost: we must extort peace; it is at Moscow. Besides, this army cannot now stop: with its composition, and in its disorganization, motion alone keeps it together. One may advance at the head of it, but not stop or go back. It ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... ever did in my life," Mr. Shaw is reported to have said to his American interviewer, "was to force my friendship on Webb, to extort his, and keep it." Mr. Sidney Webb was then, as now, the constructive encyclopaedist, the man who, wherever he went, "knew more than anybody present." "The truth of the matter is that Webb and I are very useful to each other. We are ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... thou art not a place of yesterday:—long before the Roses red and white battled in fair England, thou didst exist—a place of throng and bustle—place of gold and silver, perfumes and fine linen. Centuries ago thou couldst extort the praises even of the fiercest foes of England. Fierce bards of Wales, sworn foes of England, sang thy praises centuries ago; and even the fiercest of them all, Red Julius himself, wild Glendower's bard, had a word of praise for London's 'Cheape,' for so the bards of Wales styled thee in their ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... I was vexed by the insolence of this Jewish dog, that I was not, as he imagined, a beggar: that I had the means of paying him my just debt, but that I hoped he would not extort from me all that exorbitant interest which none but a Jew could exact. He smiled, and answered that if a Turk loved opium better than money this was no fault of his; that he had supplied me with what I loved best in the world, and that I ought ...
— Murad the Unlucky and Other Tales • Maria Edgeworth
... their capture was the result of treachery on the part of Arthur Vane, they well understood the motives of the robbers, and knew, as well as if Pierre had explained the matter to them, that they were to be used as a means to extort money from their relatives, and that they had nothing to fear, so long as they submitted quietly to their enemies. But this was something that one of the three boys, at least, had no intention of doing. Frank's brain was already busy ...
— Frank Among The Rancheros • Harry Castlemon
... persons—four of them bowmen, and twelve billmen. They were arrayed in blue and red (after my Lord Norfolk's fashion), hats and hose red and blue, and with doublets of white fustian." This same year, the greedy despot Henry having discovered some slight inaccuracy in the assay, contrived to extort from the poor abject goldsmiths a mighty fine of 3,000 marks. The year this English Ahab died, the Goldsmiths resolved, in compliment to the Reformation, to break up the image of their patron saint, and also a great standing cup with an image of the same ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... knew that to extort alms from me would place her on the pinnacle as an artist. Among all the Cooper clan, to which she was allied, there was not one who ever begged from me, they having all found that the ripest nuts are those which fall from the tree of their own accord, or ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... speake at all, these let you know Your power on me, yet not that I will showe 10 The loue I beare you, in that lofty height, So cleere expression, or such words of weight, As into Spanish if they were translated, Might make the Poets of that Realme amated; Yet these my least were, but that you extort These numbers from me, when I should report In home-spunne prose, in good plaine honest words The newes our wofull England vs affords. The Muses here sit sad, and mute the while A sort of swine vnseasonably defile 20 Those sacred springs, which from the by-clift hill Dropt their pure Nectar ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... blow that humbled the Barbary flag—which, for a hundred years, had been the terror of Christendom,—drove it from the Mediterranean, and put an end to the infamous tribute it had been accustomed to extort? It was the American sailor, and the name of Decatur and his gallant companions will be as lasting as ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... two Letters I want to send Lowell: but I do not like writing as if to extort answers from him. You see Carlyle's Note within: I do not want it back, thank you. Good night: for Night it is: and my Reader is coming. We look forward to The Lammermoor, and Old Mortality before long. I made another vain attempt on George Eliot ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... princes violently extort many things from their subjects: and this seems to savor of robbery. Now it would seem a grievous matter to say that they sin in acting thus, for in that case nearly every prince would be damned. Therefore in ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... for the ignorant and unwary. A fourth class attend horse-races, being skilled in those mysterious practices by which the knowing ones are taken in. Nor is this community unfurnished with those who lay wanton wives and old rich widows under contribution, and extort money, by prostituting themselves to the embraces of their own sex, and then threatening their admirers with prosecution. But their most important returns are made by that body of their undertakers who exercise their understandings in the innumerable stratagems of the card table, at which no sharper ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... cannot suddenly command from him that species of deference, which is compounded of habitual respect for the person, and conventional submission to his station; the young master must, therefore, effect a change in his footman's manner of thinking and speaking by violent means; he must extort that tribute of respect which he has neglected so long, and to which, consequently, his right is disputed.[35] He is sensible, that his superiority is merely that of situation, and he, therefore, exerts his dormant prerogatives with jealous ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... verre with me. You see I don't stand on ceremony with you; I say whatever comes into my head, because I know you to be a fair-minded man. Now I tell you your prefet is all wrong in trying to extort those forty-two thousand francs from the city. Just think once of all our losses since the beginning of the war. In the first place, before the battle, we had the entire French army on our hands, a set of ragged, hungry, exhausted ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... abstract conceptions, but takes it as a complete work of art, which must reveal its contents spontaneously to an intelligent observer." Goethe never became a thorough experimentalist; he did not want "to extort the secret from nature by pumps and retorts." He waited patiently for a voluntary revelation, i.e., until he could surprise that secret by an intuitive glance; for it was his conviction that ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... few syllables. It illuminated the long vista of the past, and cast a gloomy shadow into that of the future, alluding to a people driven from their haunts, never to find another resting-place on earth. That this young warrior so meant to express himself—not in an abject attempt to extort sympathy, but in the noble simplicity of a heart depressed by the fall of his race—Fuller could not doubt; and every generous feeling of his soul was enlisted in ...
— The Lake Gun • James Fenimore Cooper
... infamous character, who by some means was implicated in the conspiracy, deserves to be mentioned as an instance of female fortitude. She was condemned to the torture, but the united force of racks, stripes and fire, could not extort a word from her. The next day she was conducted in a chair to be tortured afresh, (for her limbs were so mangled and disjointed, that she could not stand,) she hung herself with her girdle to the top of the chair, voluntarily ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... I, "the enigma seems still in as bad a condition as ever. How is it possible to extort a meaning from all this jargon about 'devil's seats,' 'death's heads,' ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... doctrines of a renovated Catholicism. A spell which acted so widely and so marvellously could not be altogether unfelt by a mind whose peculiar property it was to yield itself to every influence in order to extort its secret and comprehend its power. Beyond this point the magic failed. "In all my transitions,"—thus he has written of himself,—"I have never alienated my judgment and my will; I have never pledged my belief. But I had a power of comprehending persons and things which gave rise ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... years past, there have been many instances of suspected persons, or those falsely accused, being tortured till death ensued. From Hoopih province, an appeal is now before the emperor, against a magistrate who tortured a man to death, to extort a confession of homicide; and we have just heard, from Kwang-se province, that on the 24th of the 11th moon, one Netseyuen, belonging to Canton, having received an appointment for his high literary attainments, to the magistracy of a Heen district, in a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 326, August 9, 1828 • Various
... told upon Mme. de Marville, who, moreover, had formed a tolerably correct estimate of her husband. A temper naturally shrewish was soured till she grew positively terrible. She was not old, but she had aged; she deliberately set herself to extort by fear all that the world was inclined to refuse her, and was harsh and rasping as a file. Caustic to excess she had few friends among women; she surrounded herself with prim, elderly matrons of her own stamp, who lent each other mutual support, and people stood in awe ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... a public character. The desert woods of Servia, are the common refuge of thieves, who rob fifty in a company, so that we had need of all our guards to secure us; and the villages are so poor, that only force could extort from them necessary provisions. Indeed the janizaries had no mercy on their poverty, killing all the poultry and sheep they could find, without asking to whom they belonged; while the wretched owners durst not put in their claim, for fear of being beaten. Lambs just fallen, ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... the tyrant from his power. So deadly is this secret, that Zeus will, in the lapse of ages, be forced to reconcile himself with Prometheus, to escape dethronement. Finally, Hermes, the messenger of Zeus, appears with fresh threats, that he may extort the mystery from the Titan. But Prometheus is firm, defying both the tyrant and his envoy, though already the lightning is flashing, the thunder rolling, and sky and sea are mingling their fury. Hermes can say no more; the sea nymphs resolutely ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... that the French Government, after having failed to extort concessions upon the Turkish Question, by menaces of foreign war, should now endeavour to obtain those concessions, by appealing to fears of another kind, and should say that such concessions are necessary in order to prevent revolution in France; but Viscount ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... slight proof of his force of character and energy, as well as of his address, that, as the National Guard could not be employed out of the routine of their regular duty without a special authorisation from the civil power, he contrived to extort from Petion, as mayor of the city, a formal authority to augment his brigade for the special occasion, and, if force should be used against him, ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... a large business to depress wages by the possession of a total or partial monopoly of local employment, the corresponding power to obtain raw material at low prices, or to extort higher prices from consumers than would obtain under the pressure of free competition, represent individual business economies which may enable a large business to obtain ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... It seemed dreadful that Carnac should fight his own father, repeating what Fabian had done in another way. Yet at the bottom of her heart there was a secret joy. Some native revolt in her had joy in the thought that the son might extort a price for her long sorrow and his ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... jurisdiction in their respective governments. Even the higher clergy gloried in feudal inequalities, and were selected from the noble classes. The people were not powerful enough to make combinations and extort their rights, unless they followed the standards of military chieftains, arrayed perhaps against the crown and against the parliaments. We see no popular, independent political movements; even the people, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... question intricate and rare Did I there strow; But all I could extort was, that he now Did there repair Such losses as befell him in this air, And would erelong Come forth most ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... would never dare to release Trent, even if he could. It's simply a trick. They are playing artfully upon the anxiety, the suspense, the wretched state of fear and hope and dread in which young Trent's friends are held, to extort from them a little money, which will keep them in comfort while they wear out either the father ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch
... will for the most part be systematically misplaced; that though the beneficent and disinterested spirit of Christianity, and her obvious tendency to promote domestic comfort and general happiness, cannot but extort applause; yet that her aspiring after more than ordinary excellence, by exciting secret misgivings in others, or a painful sense of inferiority not unmixed with envy, cannot fail often to disgust ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... expect that I must always concur in what he said. At times however I was obliged to dissent from his sayings, and then would follow a little controversy. Those controversies were never very profitable, in consequence of his constant desire to force his own opinions on me, and to extort from me assent to his whimsical and foolish observations. Yet he still continued ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... the criticism is chiefly verbal. In the note the reader may peruse an ample specimen of the kind of wit, or rather banter, employed by this facetious person.[20] The letters were written successively at different periods; for Clifford in the last complains that he cannot extort an answer, and therefore seems to conceive ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... at any cost, the great hulk on the river front before the first of January, would not be likely to stop to quibble at paying the five thousand dollars or so that Grady, who, as the business agent of his union was simply in masquerade, would like to extort. ...
— Calumet 'K' • Samuel Merwin
... woman had regained her breath, and her eyes were riveted on the purse. Then, anxious to extort as large a sum as possible, she displayed considerable cunning, and spoke of the other lady. Nobody could say that she was not a charitable lady; still, she did not know what to do with her money—it never did one much good. Warily did she glance at Helene ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... than a poor Bedlam beggar, who had crept into this deserted hovel for shelter, and with his talk about devils frighted the fool, one of those poor lunatics who are either mad, or feign to be so, the better to extort charity from the compassionate country people, who go about the country, calling themselves poor Tom and poor Turlygood, saying: 'Who gives anything to poor Tom?' sticking pins and nails and sprigs of rosemary into their arms to ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... wrong to extort this much punishment for my most inhospitable reception? Sometimes now I think that it was cruel. In that night much had occurred to breed viciousness in a man of the most equable temper. But the thing had now gone ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... on the other hand, increased their wealth by "farming" the public revenues; i.e. the state would let out to them, for a stipulated sum, the privilege of collecting all import and other duties. These, in turn (called in later times Publicans), would extort all they could from the tax-payers, thus enriching themselves unlawfully. So the hard times, the oppression of the tax-gatherer, and the unjust law about debt, made the condition of ...
— History of Rome from the Earliest times down to 476 AD • Robert F. Pennell
... defenders have been warned of their coming, and attempt to starve them into submission. In the old days it was not uncommon for a strong party of Kayans to descend upon a settlement of the more peaceable coastwise people, and to extort from them a large payment of brass-ware as the price of their safety. If the unfortunate household submitted to this extortion, the Kayans would keep faith with them, and would ratify a treaty of peace by making the headman ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... only, but to Mr. Cole himself: For whatever Influence Prejudice, or Enthusiasm, may have on some Minds, there are certain Seasons, wherein Truth will display itself to the Realm and Understanding of Mankind, and extort, even from the Mouths of those, who sometimes oppose her, the most ample Concessions in her Favour. Take the following as an Instance—Cole's Sovereignty of God, Page 41, 2d Edit. "To this also might be added the strict Injunctions that God hath laid ...
— Free and Impartial Thoughts, on the Sovereignty of God, The Doctrines of Election, Reprobation, and Original Sin: Humbly Addressed To all who Believe and Profess those DOCTRINES. • Richard Finch
... but the adventurers, imagining that they were already in the enemy's country, began their usual service of fire and sword. In Barbastro they pillaged the houses, killed the burghers or tortured them to extort ransom, and set fire to a church in which some had taken refuge, burning alive more ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume VII • Charles Morris
... Unable to extort a word from Jim that would lead to the arrest of his jocker, the officers dragged the staggering, heart-broken lad back to his cell and locked him up. When from sheer exhaustion he fell asleep late in the night, he dreamed that Kansas Shorty's grinning face was ...
— The Trail of the Tramp • A-No. 1 (AKA Leon Ray Livingston)
... lovers alone, pardon it in each other. No services, no talents, no powers of pleasing, render it endurable. Gratitude, admiration, interest, fear, scarcely prevent those who are condemned to listen to it from indicating their disgust and fatigue. The childless uncle, the powerful patron can scarcely extort this compliance. We leave the inside of the mail in a storm, and mount the box, rather than hear the history of our companion. The chaplain bites his lips in the presence of the archbishop. The midshipman yawns at the table of the First Lord. Yet, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... roof, without faith or honor, he could find persons easily to undertake any task, and still more easily others who, if they sniffed coin on his person, would begin, but when they had received earnest money, would extort the whole sum by threatening to deliver him to justice. Besides, for a certain time past Chilo had felt a repulsion for nakedness, for those disgusting and terrible figures lurking about suspected ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... companion to find Vetch and to assure Mistress Lucy that her troubles were at an end. And there was Vetch, trying to batter down the door of the cabin in which she had locked herself. His design, I guessed, was to seize her and use her to extort terms from us. He had the advantage of me in that I was coming from the full daylight into the dimness of below decks, and before I had reached the ladder foot he fired his pistol at me, the bullet striking my thigh. ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... presence of these honest Citizens, could in no wise perswade him to leave his extort power, no nor yet to cause any temperance of his tongue, but the more they went about with gentle words to tell him his faults, the more would he fret and likewise fume, swearing all the oathes under God, that he little regarded the presence of the whole City, ...
— The Golden Asse • Lucius Apuleius
... right to withdraw, it clearly follows that we have no right to tax him, which is only one mode of inflicting a fine or penalty for an act, the right to do which we have acceded. In the strong language of the Committee of Correspondence of Maryland:[94] "The object of Masonry never was to extort, nolens volens, money from its votaries. Such are not its principles or teaching. The advocating such doctrines cannot advance the interest or reputation of the institution; but will, as your committee fear, do much to destroy ...
— The Principles of Masonic Law - A Treatise on the Constitutional Laws, Usages And Landmarks of - Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... was no pleasant time, they had so much to do with meeting distinguished guests, complimenting, and the delivery of presents. No less had the magistrate, both in general and in particular, to defend himself, to resist, and to protest, as every one on such occasions desires to extort something from him, or burden him with something; and few of those to whom he appeals support him, or lend him their aid. In short, all that I had read in "Lersner's Chronicle" of similar incidents on similar occasions, ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... Mithridates taught me this. Having in vain attacked with combustibles a wooden tower, I took it by stratagem, and found within it a mass of alum, which, if a great hurry had not been observed by us among the enemy in the attempt to conceal it, would have escaped our notice. I never scrupled to extort the truth from my prisoners; but my instruments were purple robes and plate, and the only wheel in my armoury destined to such purposes was the wheel ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... him a promise that in consideration for his nomination he should, if elected, permit no temperance legislation during his term. It was the brewing interests of Indiana, not the distillers, that sought on the eve of election, after his nomination in spite of their opposition, to extort a like promise as the ...
— Government By The Brewers? • Adolph Keitel
... duties, was building. In this amusement he followed his own ideas, sifting the plans of architects with the most rigid scrutiny, and never hesitating to alter, and sometimes to pull to pieces, what it had cost hours of hard brain-work to devise. No amount of entreaty could extort his consent to what did not commend itself as clear and faultless to his understanding. It might not be a very agreeable process to some of those concerned, but the result was generally satisfactory to the one who ...
— Memoirs of James Robert Hope-Scott, Volume 2 • Robert Ornsby
... odious and dangerous. He demanded whether nothing was to be allowed for genius. Trefusis warmly replied that genius cost its possessor nothing; that it was the inheritance of the whole race incidentally vested in a single individual, and that if that individual employed his monopoly of it to extort money from others, he deserved nothing better than hanging. The artist lost his temper, and suggested that if Trefusis could not feel that the prerogative of art was divine, perhaps he could understand that a painter was not such a fool as to design a tomb for ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... clothes.—Houses were likewise not unfrequently abandoned by the servants through fear of sharing the fate of their masters, and sometimes exposed equally by the arrest of those who had been left in charge, in order to extort discoveries of plate, money, &c. the concealment of which they might be supposed ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... undoubted fidelity who in this way extort from their feeling husbands cashmere shawls, diamonds, the payment of their debts, or the rent of a box at the theatre; but almost always vapors are employed as decisive weapons ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part III. • Honore de Balzac
... with it. Whether he made conditions, or no, is uncertain; but he seems to have sent a pretty numerous body of horse to the support of the "Liberators" against their antagonists. Perhaps he trusted to obtain from the gratitude of Cassius what he had failed to extort from the fears of Pompey. Or, perhaps, he was only anxious to prolong the period of civil disturbance in the Roman State, which secured his own territory from attack, and might ultimately give him an opportunity of helping himself to some portion of ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson
... to an end of this easy life if he had not maintained a sort of martial law over his family, which compelled them to work for the preservation of it. When he had brought up his children, at the cost of those from whom his wife was able to extort gifts, the following charter and budget were the ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... dreamed of a personal action. She longed to tear him with her nails, outrage him in people's eyes and make him suffer in his flesh; but that passed: she knew she could not do it. A man was needed to extort punishment from Raymond. But no man existed who would undertake the task. She must then find such a man. She even sought him. But she did not find him. The search led to bitter discoveries. If women could forgive her ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... the cheerful sun is for ever excluded, the victim lay extended upon the rack, until death itself became a welcome relief; and upon its walls were arranged, in dreadful order, all the infernal instruments of torture, by which the cruelty of man endeavoured to extort from the wretched prisoners a confession of crimes, perhaps never committed, and of conspiracies, existing only in the guilty imaginations of their oppressors. A little court within the precincts of the ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... hours when Hanno's father and brothers visited the Hydra to induce her captain to make money out of the captive sculptor, and either sell him at a high price or extort a large ransom from him; but Bias had overheard how resolutely Ledscha opposed these proposals, and represented to old Satabus of what priceless importance Myrtilus might become to them if either ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Derek Pruyn, having practically announced an engagement which did not exist, found himself in a somewhat ludicrous situation. Too proud to extort a promise of secrecy from Mrs. Bayford, he knew the value of his indiscretion—if indiscretion it were—to any purveyor of tea-table gossip; and while Diane and he remained in the same relative positions he ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... Natalie and I won't marry until she is of age; that is a good year and a half yet. Did you hear of Calabressa's mad proposal that he should extort from Lind his consent to our marriage as the price of the good news that he, Calabressa, had to reveal? Like him, ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... wedge-wise, with both the Warings in all his future dealings, by promising to reveal to one or other of them a matter of importance and probable money-value, and he could use it also as a perpetual threat to hold over Colonel Kelmscott, if ever it should be needful to extort blackmail from the possessor of Tilgate, or to thwart his ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... safety of Clotelle, while she felt glad that Jerome had escaped. In vain did they try to extort from the girl the whereabouts of the man whose escape she had effected. She was not aware that he had fled on a steamer, and when ...
— Clotelle - The Colored Heroine • William Wells Brown
... it was time for the flattery. As if I couldn't extort that from any man. It's the A B C of our education. But the truth about one's self—the unpalatable, bitter truth—there's a sting of unexpected ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... please don't; I cannot bear it—and I am not worth it," he protested. "I ought never to have told you. I was a selfish brute to extort your sympathy by the miserable recital of my own misfortunes; I have basely ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... showing their disapprobation. After this he is borne to the market-place, where he again proclaims his displeasure as before; and removes to different parts of the town, until he thinks all the town are informed of the man's behaviour; and after endeavouring to extort a fine from the party, which he sometimes does, all repair to a public-house, to regale themselves at his expense. Unless the delinquent can ill afford it, they take his "goods and chattels," if he will not surrender his money. The origin ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 348, December 27, 1828 • Various
... themselves) a lesson which they took care to remember to his cost, that they could hope nothing from his sense of justice, but every thing from his fears. Godfrey remained encamped for several weeks in the neighbourhood of Constantinople, to the great annoyance of Alexius, who sought by every means to extort from him the homage he had extorted from Vermandois. Sometimes he acted as if at open and declared war with the Crusaders, and sent his troops against them. Sometimes he refused to supply them with food, and ordered the markets to ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... CISALPINE GUAL.—The Carthaginians were for some time busy at home in putting down a revolt of mercenary troops, whose wages they refused to pay in full. The Romans snatched the occasion to extort a cession of the island of Sardinia (238), which they subsequently united with Corsica in one province. They entered, about ten years later (229-228), upon an important and successful war against the Illyrian pirates, whose depredations ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... Yes, on the rack. Wild horses should not tear it out of my heart; boiling lead, falling on me drop by drop, should not extort it from me." ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... she inquired if anything dreadful had happened. "Oh no—nothing," I answered. "Only an odd man appeared in the woods, and said something strange—but it's all right now." This was the only account I ever gave of the adventure. It was surmised that I had met a gipsy, who probably hoped to extort money from me. My father made inquiries in every direction, and gave notice that he should prosecute any rogues and vagabonds found trespassing ...
— Tales of the Sea - And of our Jack Tars • W.H.G. Kingston
... record complete. The man is a skilful blackmailer; he has practiced in many cities and has served more than one term in jail. I knew at once what had occurred; the two men fancied they 'had something on' Miss Cavanaugh regarding this murder, and had endeavored to extort money from her. I leave it to you," with a smiling nod toward Nora, "to tell how near ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre
... teacher drew up a petition, and Mrs. Judson herself presented it to the Viceroy. He received it kindly, and at once gave orders that Mr. Hough was not to be troubled further. They afterwards found out that the thing had been arranged by the minor officials, in order to extort ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... own intention to move to the margin of the woods, in order to reconnoitre. Both his companions heard this announcement with satisfaction, for Willoughby was eager to say to Maud directly that which he had so plainly indicated by means of the box, and to extort from her a confession that she was not offended; while Maud herself felt the necessity of letting the major know the melancholy circumstance that yet remained to be told. With these widely distinct feelings uppermost, our two lovers saw Nick quit them, each ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... of persons, distinguished either by the offices which they had filled, or by the favor which they had enjoyed, were thrown into prison. Every mode of torture was put in practice, and the court, as well as city, was polluted with many bloody executions. But as it was found impossible to extort any discovery of this mysterious transaction, it seems incumbent on us either to presume the innocence, or to admire the resolution, of the sufferers. A few days afterwards Galerius hastily withdrew himself from Nicomedia, declaring, that ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... Skinner, who, admiring the preparations, had stood a silent spectator of their progress. He obeyed; and it was not until he found his neckcloth removed, and hat thrown aside, that he took the alarm. But he had so often resorted to a similar expedient to extort information, or plunder, that he by no means felt the terror an unpracticed man would have suffered, at these ominous movements. The rope was adjusted to his neck with the same coolness that formed the characteristic of the whole movement, and a fragment of board being laid ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... thrives With perpetual trouble: How he cheats and how he strives, His estate t' enlarge and double; Extort, oppress, grind and encroach, To be a squire and keep a coach, And to be one o' th' quorum; Who may with's brother-worships sit, And judge without law, fear, or wit, Poor petty thieves, that nothing get, And ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay
... illuminating. It threw into relief two methods of action which hitherto we had been hazily seeking to combine, seesawing between one and the other, each of us influenced at different times by different motives. One was to rely on independent research; the other to extort the secret from Dollmann direct, by craft or threats. The moral of to-day was to abandon the first ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... ceases to be a citizen army.] The citizen was lost in the professional, and patriotism was superseded by the personal attachment of soldiers of fortune, who knew no will but that of their favourite commander or their own selfishness. Their general could reward them with money, and extort land for them from the State; and when Marius after Vercellae gave the franchise to two Italian cohorts, saying that he could not hear the laws in the din of arms, he was giving to what was becoming a standing ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... doubtless also imaginary) follows, kind but timid, to advise submission; then appears Io, victim of Zeus' love and Hera's jealousy, to whom Prometheus prophesies her future wanderings and his own fate; lastly Hermes, insolent messenger of the gods, who tries in vain to extort Prometheus' secret knowledge of the future. Oceanus, the well-meaning palavering old mentor, and Hermes, the blustering and futile jack-in-office, gods though they be, are vigorous, audacious and very human character-sketches; ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... no proofs of its inconstancy and desertion, are cut off, by this cruel interruption, from the enjoyment of their prerogatives, and doomed to lose four months in inactive obscurity. Many complaints do vexation and desire extort from those exiled tyrants of the town, against the inexorable sun, who pursues his course without any regard to love or beauty; and visits either tropick at the stated time, whether shunned or courted, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... have a petit verre with me. You see I don't stand on ceremony with you; I say whatever comes into my head, because I know you to be a fair-minded man. Now I tell you your prefet is all wrong in trying to extort those forty-two thousand francs from the city. Just think once of all our losses since the beginning of the war. In the first place, before the battle, we had the entire French army on our hands, a set of ragged, hungry, exhausted men; and then along came ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... theories have occurred to me as possibly true respecting this most remarkable assault: First—The aim may have been simply to extort from me such admissions as in the hands of money and influence would have sent me to the Penitentiary for libel. This, however, seems unlikely, because any statements elicited by fear or force could not be evidence in law or could be so explained as to have no force. The statements wanted so badly ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... her, so that he might wholly claim the credit of regaining all that he had lost; but now, in the recklessness of despair, he proposed not only to ask for all the money he could obtain, but, if necessary, extort it by any means ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... Acquet faithfully made over the money to Vannier, reserving only fifteen francs for her trouble; moreover, she was obliged to submit to her host's obscene allusions as to the means she had employed to extort this ridiculous sum from Buquet. She bore everything unmoved; her indifference resembled stupefaction; she no longer appeared conscious of the horrors of her situation or the dangers to which she was exposed. Her happiest days were spent in walks round the town with ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... cunning volubility sprung upon Mrs. Cox in pumping fashion failed to extort from her anything but good-humoured smiles and laughs. If I have not taken the trouble to describe this beloved Mrs. Cox to you before this, it is because I fear you will say the picture is Unreal, no ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... spite of him. He had gone back to her to share her bounty. When she repulsed him he had entered into a conspiracy to spy on her. He had waited impatiently for a rich man to compromise her, so that he could surprise them in guilt and extort money from them. ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... avoiding imitation, trying to be singular and yet like other people. In the exquisitely fashionable and in the entirely vulgar the sheep-like longing is triumphant, and the revolting individual has disappeared. The former is a mechanical vehicle upon which the new 'correct thing' rides forth, to extort the astonishment of men; the latter a lifeless bier bearing its corrupt and unrecognisable remains away to final oblivion, amidst ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... pace. A member of the Administration rushed his attorney as courier to the women in the workhouse to implore them not to consent to the habeas corpus proceedings. He was easily admitted and tried to extort from one prisoner at a time a promise to reject the plan. The women suspected his solicitude and refused to make any promise whatsoever without first being allowed to see ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... client was ready to restore the gold, but only to both the men who had committed it to her charge, and that therefore both must appear to claim it. This was a blow to the rogues, who attempted to escape, and, failing to do so, at length confessed that they had plotted to extort money from the widow, the chest containing nothing but pieces of ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... by a newspaper writer. Perhaps it has no organization. But, Professor Kennedy, to me it is no myth. What if the real Black Hand is any gang of criminals who choose to use that convenient name to extort money? Is it the less ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various
... force me to speak, though you know already what I have to say! That I love you, love you! And that you love me! That your whole life leaps to mine as mine to yours! You know all this; if I were stricken dumb, you could read it in my face, but you will have it spoken—you will extort from me the whole secret of my madness!—yes, for you to take a cruel joy in knowing that I AM mad—mad for the love of you! And you cannot be too often or too thoroughly assured that your own passion finds its ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... ourselves! However, we proved worthy of the trust, I am proud to say, we neither broke the knees nor the wind of the spirited animal which had us in tow, nor did we smash the ketureen; on the contrary, we arrived at our journey's end with both in such excellent condition as to extort a compliment upon our skilful driving from our somewhat surprised but by no means disconcerted hostess. We also faithfully delivered the message anent the saddle-horse, and then, feeling that we had ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... lui."—Memoire autographe de l'Abbe Jean Cavelier, MS.] When they crossed the tropic, the sailors made ready a tub on deck to baptize the passengers, after the villanous practice of the time; but La Salle refused to permit it, to the disappointment and wrath of all the crew, who had expected to extort a bountiful ransom, in money and liquor, from their victims. There was an incessant chafing between the two commanders; and when at length, after a long and wretched voyage, they reached St. Domingo, Beaujeu showed clearly that he was, to say the least, utterly indifferent to the interests ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... least, of the guilty men involved. Those papers had passed through the hands of a second Lucretia Borgia, and not without reason had she applauded herself that night at the opera when she permitted her dupe to extort from her the little key which ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... to extort confession, we have ample proof, both written and traditional: of one Collins observes, "when he trifled he was punished again; he then declared that the plunder was buried. He went to the spot, but could not ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... well to say extort, for you may sooner wrest Hercules's Club out of his Hands than get a Play-day from him; but Time was when Nobody lov'd Play ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... caution you, sir, and to remind you once more, if you are unaware of it," the prosecutor began, with a peculiar and stern impressiveness, "that you have a perfect right not to answer the questions put to you now, and we on our side have no right to extort an answer from you, if you decline to give it for one reason or another. That is entirely a matter for your personal decision. But it is our duty, on the other hand, in such cases as the present, to explain and set before you the degree of injury you will be doing yourself ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... own, and assured the judge he had put twenty sequins into it. Upon which the judge called me before him; "Come, young man," said he, "confess the truth. Was it you that took the gentleman's purse from him? Do not wait for the torture to extort confession." Then with downcast eyes, thinking that if I denied the fact, they, having found the purse upon me, would convict me of a lie, to avoid a double punishment I looked up and confessed my guilt. I ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 2 • Anon.
... cried, turning to the old cashier. "I will give you just ten minutes to get out of this building—you and the girl, both of you. It was a plan hatched up between you and her to extort money from me." ...
— Mischievous Maid Faynie • Laura Jean Libbey
... to be nothing more than a poor Bedlam beggar, who had crept into this deserted hovel for shelter, and with his talk about devils frighted the fool, one of those poor lunatics who are either mad, or feign to be so, the better to extort charity from the compassionate country people, who go about the country, calling themselves poor Tom and poor Turlygood, saying, "Who gives anything to poor Tom?" sticking pins and nails and sprigs of rosemary into their arms to ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb
... extort a confession from me, Louisa,' said Miss Tox instantly, 'I have no alternative but to confide to you that ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... having time to provide a Ladder of Ropes. She tells him she has so great a Confidence in his Virtue and Love, that she will refuse him nothing, tho' it would be a very bold Venture for a Maid, to trust her self with a passionate young Man, in silence of Night: and tho' she did not extort a Vow from him to secure her, she expected he would have a care of her Honour. He swore to her, his Love was too religious for so base an Attempt. There needed not many Vows to confirm her Faith; and it was agreed on between them, that he should ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... pretence of misapprehension, and if modesty merely had been the obstacle, such questions would not have been wanting; but we considered, that, if the disclosure were productive of pain or disgrace, it was inhuman to extort it. ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... women of undoubted fidelity who in this way extort from their feeling husbands cashmere shawls, diamonds, the payment of their debts, or the rent of a box at the theatre; but almost always vapors are employed as decisive weapons in ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... from him would be payment for it all. But all his love, all his sweetness, all his truth, all his eloquence should avail nothing with her towards overcoming that spirit of self-sacrifice by which she was dominated. Though he should extort from her all her secret, that would be her strength. Though she should have to tell him of her failing health,—her certainly failing health,—though even that should be necessary, she certainly would not be won from her purpose. It ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... in listening to melodious voices and the harmony of stringed woods, it was usual to take part in sit-round games of various kinds. (And while it is on his brush this person would say with commendable pride that a well-trained musician among us can extort more sound from a hollow wooden pig, costing only a few cash, than the most skilful here ever attain on their largest instrument—a highly-lacquered coffin on legs, filled with bells and hidden springs, and frequently sold ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... more it vexes me," said he. "It is bad enough to be a scribbler, without having recourse to such shifts to extort praise or deprecate censure, ... and all without my wish, and contrary to my ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... way, and to receive them as the stroke of God, with an awful submission and meekness. But Beatrix's nature was different to that tender parent's; she seemed to accept her grief and to defy it; nor would she allow it (I believe not even in private and in her own chamber) to extort from her the confession of even a tear of humiliation or a cry of pain. Friends and children of our race, who come after me, in which way will you bear your trials? I know one that prays God will give you love rather than pride, and that ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... east!—mighty mart of old renown!—for thou art not a place of yesterday:—long before the Roses red and white battled in fair England, thou didst exist—a place of throng and bustle—place of gold and silver, perfumes and fine linen. Centuries ago thou couldst extort the praises even of the fiercest foes of England. Fierce bards of Wales, sworn foes of England, sang thy praises centuries ago; and even the fiercest of them all, Red Julius himself, wild Glendower's bard, had a word of praise for London's 'Cheape,' for so the bards of Wales ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... voyage is smooth and the Cheerful One is denied the joy of making sea-sick folk feel sicker, he is disappointed but not idle, for he may still extort confessions from untravelled persons. You know him: the solid, red-faced man who dresses for dinner and sits at the head of the table eating fried things loud and long when it is rough. He wears travel as though it were the Order of ...
— Ship-Bored • Julian Street
... the fury of the French Revolution combined to make kings and aristocracies wary of all organizations and associations of plain folk. And when we add to this the favor which the new employing class, the industrial masters, were able to extort from the governing class, because of their power over foreign trade and domestic finance, we can understand the compulsory laws at length declaring against all combinations of ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... prove that people of Johannesburg have not fulfilled the conditions which were to precede the handing over of the prisoners and consideration of grievances. I should not be surprised if, before releasing the prisoners or redressing grievances, an attempt were now made to extort an alteration of the London Convention of 1884, and the abrogation of Article No. 4 of that instrument. I intend, if I find that the Johannesburg people have substantially complied with the ultimatum, to insist on the fulfilment ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... this seems clearly to be the Kings intention, I would ask what need there was of the late Petition from the City, for another Parliament; unless they had rather seem to extort it from his Majesty, than to have it pass for his own gracious action? The truth is, there were many of the Loyal Party absent at that Common Council: and the whole strength of the other Faction was ...
— His Majesties Declaration Defended • John Dryden
... certain degree I do," said the Englishman, from whom it was difficult to extort praise of a despotic king—"to a certain degree, I do; but you will observe, that this trial by jury, which is a matter of favour to you Prussians, is a matter of right to us Englishmen. Much as I admire your king of Prussia, I admire ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... must know, Till the iniurious Romans, did extort This Tribute from vs, we were free. Caesars Ambition, Which swell'd so much, that it did almost stretch The sides o'th' World, against all colour heere, Did put the yoake vpon's; which to shake off Becomes a warlike people, whom we reckon ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... the sunlight and the starlight processions. But this continual entreaty of every second was beyond computation. It seemed as if the faithful were determined to weary the ears of the Divinity, determined to extort favours and forgiveness by the very multitude, the vast multitude of their prayers. The priests said that it was necessary to offer to God the acts of expiation which the sins of France required, and that when the number of these acts of expiation should be large ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... having to provide themselves with food and clothes, and yet having to work for him, are led to prey on the defenceless population, from whom, in the name of their Rajah-master, they extort whatever there is to get, and on whom they sometimes visit those cruelties which they have themselves ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... should pass through his dominions without disorder; but the adventurers, imagining that they were already in the enemy's country, began their usual service of fire and sword. In Barbastro they pillaged the houses, killed the burghers or tortured them to extort ransom, and set fire to a church in which some had taken refuge, burning alive more ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume VII • Charles Morris
... tragically sad, but calm and resolute. The spots of red had faded out of her cheeks. There was no fever in her manner. Miss Van Tuyn's wonder grew as she looked at her former friend, who now dominated her, and began to extort from her a strange and unwilling admiration, which recalled to her the admiration of that past time when she had first met ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... other books you have taken from my shelves at various times.' Here he produced his list, with the prices all affixed, and a certain small sum added by way of interest. Hereupon Monsieur Y. stormed and raved, swore it was an attempt to extort money from him, and threatened legal proceedings. 'If,' said the dealer, 'you can empty your pockets now without producing any book of mine, except those you have paid for, I will withdraw my claim and apologize, otherwise I shall ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... commence the action. It was then perceived that the British right was advancing in line; and as Stevens led on his brigade in good order, Colonel Williams advanced in front with a few volunteers, intending by a partial fire to extort that of the enemy at some distance, and thereby diminish its effect on the militia. The experiment did not succeed. The British rushed forward with great impetuosity, firing and huzzaing at the same time; and the terrified militia, disregarding ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 3 (of 5) • John Marshall
... contempt will for the most part be systematically misplaced; that though the beneficent and disinterested spirit of Christianity, and her obvious tendency to promote domestic comfort and general happiness, cannot but extort applause; yet that her aspiring after more than ordinary excellence, by exciting secret misgivings in others, or a painful sense of inferiority not unmixed with envy, cannot fail often to disgust and offend. ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... with a look of appeal that somehow touched her, for she gave me hers at once, and even eagerly. I held it for a while in mine, and gazed into her eyes. It was she who first tore her hand away, and, forgetting all about her request and the promise she had sought to extort, ran at the top of her speed, and without turning, till she was out of sight. And then I knew that I loved her, and thought in my glad heart that she—she herself—was not indifferent to my suit. Many a time she has denied it in after days, but it was with a smiling and not a serious ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... extirpation, extermination; ejection &c 297; export &c (egress) 295. extractor, corkscrew, forceps, pliers. V. extract, draw; take out, draw out, pull out, tear out, pluck out, pick out, get out; wring from, wrench; extort; root up, weed up, grub up, rake up, root out, weed out, grub out, rake out; eradicate; pull up by the roots, pluck up by the roots; averruncate^; unroot^; uproot, pull up, extirpate, dredge. remove; educe, elicit; evolve, extricate; eliminate &c (eject) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... not persuaded. He felt sure that Rufus meant to mislead him, and, being unreliable himself, he put no confidence in the promise made by our hero. He prepared to follow him home, as the knowledge of where Rose lived would probably enable him to extort more than a dollar from the fear and anxiety ...
— Rufus and Rose - The Fortunes of Rough and Ready • Horatio Alger, Jr
... on self-aggrandisement, and the acquisition of personal wealth. Careful enquiry has established the fact that no less than 60,000l. is annually paid in fees, penances, and gifts to the Church by the Roman Catholic section of the population; and we may fairly infer that the Greek priests extort an equally large sum. Of late schools have been established in different parts of the province, but the subjects of education are too confined to work any salutary change in the rising generation. Nor is it probably intended that such ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... very natural that the French Government, after having failed to extort concessions upon the Turkish Question, by menaces of foreign war, should now endeavour to obtain those concessions, by appealing to fears of another kind, and should say that such concessions are necessary ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... Prometheus? Take our own breed of these parasites; note how they grind down the stipend they are compelled to bestow upon the human tools they must use to still further swell their ungodly gains! Note how they take advantage of the public; how they extort, with Shylock avarice, every penny they possibly can from those who are compelled to use the appliances which wealth enables them to contrive for the public convenience and comfort; how they corrupt legislatures and dictate to the unscrupulous minions of the law. The Athenians were wise who ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... soon afterwards to be raised in support of the opposite cause, was proclaiming the sternest doctrines of a renovated Catholicism. A spell which acted so widely and so marvellously could not be altogether unfelt by a mind whose peculiar property it was to yield itself to every influence in order to extort its secret and comprehend its power. Beyond this point the magic failed. "In all my transitions,"—thus he has written of himself,—"I have never alienated my judgment and my will; I have never pledged my belief. But I had a power of comprehending persons and things which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... who, delighted to maintain the coldness which had grown up between the mother and son, hastened to insinuate to Marie de Medicis that Louis had expressed his gratification at her refusal, and to assure her that should she suffer the Prince to extort her consent to such an act of wilful revolt against the royal command she would inevitably ruin her ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... step in our favor; that she has no particular interest in terminating the war; that as she means to assume the character of a mediator, she must preserve that of justice and impartiality; that nothing, therefore, can extort from her measures that are favorable to us, but a conviction, that we cannot be brought back to the dominion of Great Britain. That this should lead us to think (a sentiment which he desires the Minister to inculcate) that our success depends upon our exertions, ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. XI • Various
... impart to him that hath none; and he that hath food, let him do likewise. And there came also publicans to be baptized, and they said unto him, Teacher, what must we do? And he said unto them, Extort no more than that which is appointed you. And soldiers also asked him, saying, And we, what must we do? And he said unto them, Extort from no man by violence, neither accuse any one wrongfully; and be content with ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... European in a sulky frame of mind. Hajjee Ali has very kindly offered to take Marie down to Cairo and start her off to Alexandria, whence Ross's people can send her home. If she wants to stay in Alexandria and get placed by the nuns who piously exhorted her to extort ninety francs a month from me, so much the better for me. Ali refuses to take a penny from me for her journey—besides bringing me potatoes and all sorts of things: and if I remonstrate he says he and all his family and ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... almost every English gaol, and in nearly all of them he found frightful abuses which had been noticed half-a-century before, but which had been left unredressed by Parliament. Gaolers who bought their places were paid by fees, and suffered to extort what they could. Even when acquitted, men were dragged back to their cells for want of funds to discharge the sums they owed to their keepers. Debtors and felons were huddled together in the prisons which Howard found crowded by the legislation of the day. No separation was preserved between different ...
— History of the English People, Volume VIII (of 8) - Modern England, 1760-1815 • John Richard Green
... his shoulders. He then looked Skinner full in the face, and said, "Nobody was ever seized with apoplexy in my office. Nobody ever gave me L. 14,000. And if this is the probable tale with which you come here to break the law and extort money, leave my house this instant: and if ever you dare to utter this absurd and malicious slander, you shall lie within four stone walls, and learn what it is for a shabby vagabond to come without a witness to his back, and libel a man of ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... and to assure Mistress Lucy that her troubles were at an end. And there was Vetch, trying to batter down the door of the cabin in which she had locked herself. His design, I guessed, was to seize her and use her to extort terms from us. He had the advantage of me in that I was coming from the full daylight into the dimness of below decks, and before I had reached the ladder foot he fired his pistol at me, the bullet striking my thigh. I fell to the floor; he sprang over my body and up ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... Montpellier. He was happy, he said, in dying away from the tears of his household, and "safe from insult." He dreaded, one may suppose, lest priests and friars should force their way to his bedside, and try to extort some recantation from the great savant, the honour and glory of their city. So they sent for no priest to Realmont: but round his bed a knot of Calvinist gentlemen and ministers read the Scriptures, and sang David's psalms, and prayed; and Rondelet prayed ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... appearing, he made shift to get upon his legs again, and, with the blood trickling over his nose, followed one of the servants into the dining-room, resolved to come to an explanation with the assailant, and either extort money from him by way of satisfaction, or provoke him to a second application before witnesses. With this view, he entered the room in a peal of clamour, to the amazement of all present, and the terror of Mrs. Trunnion, who shrieked at the appearance ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... declarations of the individual? Winding himself up with twopenny-worth of cheese! Pleading for the additional penny for the waitress, whose personal charms and obliging disposition must be considered to extort the amount! And above all, unable to conceive any motive, except aversion to trouble, for disliking to carry "his chop" upon a skewer through the streets of London. How every line revels in the recollection ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... spontaneously. But in society those who possess intelligence, who are in easy circumstances and conscientious, form a small select class; the great mass is egotistic, ignorant, and needy, and lets its money go only under constraint; there is but one way to collect the taxes, and that is to extort them. From time immemorial, direct taxes in France have been collected only by bailiffs and seizures; which is not surprising, as they take away a full half of the net income. Now that the peasants of each village are armed and form a band, let the collector ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... if they retracted their confessions, they held back for a time until solemnly assured by the papal commissioners that they had nothing to fear, and might freely speak. Ponzardus de Gysiaco, preceptor of Payens, then came forward and disclosed the atrocious means used to extort confessions, and said if he were so tortured again he would confess anything that were demanded of him; he would face death, however horrible, even by boiling and fire, in defence of his order, but long-protracted ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... defended by George Clinton, afterwards the first governor of the State of New York. In the course of the following month a writ of habeas corpus was sued out, but without result, and he was not liberated until March 4, 1771, when the assembly was prorogued. When the Assembly attempted to extort from him a humiliating recantation, he undauntingly answered their threat, that "rather than resign my rights and privileges as a British subject, I would suffer my right hand to be cut off at the bar of the house." When set at liberty he entered into ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... I replied; "and no torture shall ever extort a consent from me. You may render me the most miserable of men, but you shall never make me base in my own eyes. Shall I create another like yourself, whose joint wickedness might desolate the world. Begone! I have answered you; you may torture ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... Mr. Meiklewham, before any thing like decent preparation could be made for the ensuing entertainment; and they were left to their unassisted endeavours by Clara, who, during both the Tuesday and Wednesday, obstinately kept herself secluded; nor could her brother, either by threats or flattery, extort from her any light concerning her purpose on the approaching and important Thursday. To do John Mowbray justice, he loved his sister as much as he was capable of loving any thing but himself; and when, in several ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... of ruin was working on by a steady and natural process, this supposed infatuated State was, it is extremely possible, directing its chief care to maintain the splendor of a court, or to extort the means for prosecuting some object of vain and wicked ambition, some project of conquest and military glory. And probably nothing could have appeared to many of its privileged persons more idle and ridiculous, or to others of them more offensive and ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... disasters; yet how often do young men go through a course of school studies without a plan, even for the moment, and enter upon life the slaves of chance, the victims of what they call fortune, while they might by industry, system and firmness of will, rise superior to circumstances, and extort a measure of success not ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... Parliament in London that was very much engrossed with other matters. We cannot do better than to quote the Puritan biographer Clarke.[31] "A report was carried to the Parliament ... as if some busie men had made use of some ill Arts to extort such confession; ... thereupon a special Commission of Oyer and Terminer was granted for the trial of these Witches." Care was to be used, in gathering evidence, that confessions should be voluntary and should ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... thought it was time for the flattery. As if I couldn't extort that from any man. It's the A B C of our education. But the truth about one's self—the unpalatable, bitter truth—there's a sting of unexpected pleasure in ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... what I am going to say, to extort another letter from you before I have the pleasure of seeing you at Hampton; but I really shall be much obliged to you for a single line soon, only to tell me if Miss Williams is at Stoke with the Duchess of Beaufort. To a short note, cannot you add a short P. S. on the fate of Earl Goodwin?(687) ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... All that I could extort from him is as follows.—He will give me time, and this negotiable paper in exchange for stock.—Also notes for forty-seven thousand francs, to be collected from a man named Michonnin, a gentleman broker, not considered very solvent, who may be a crook but has ...
— Mercadet - A Comedy In Three Acts • Honore De Balzac
... hung in two separate flaps. Valiantly he strove to extort some penalty by thrust of massive shoulder and clash of fangs. But Bill to all seeming was twice his own length away in the same instant that he flashed in to the attack. Jan breathed ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... comprehend all statesmen; or in our Sordido, all farmers; and so of the rest: than which nothing can be uttered more malicious or absurd. Indeed there are a sort of these narrow-eyed decypherers, I confess, that will extort strange and abstruse meanings out of any subject, be it never so conspicuous and innocently delivered. But to such, where'er they sit concealed, let them know, the author defies them and their writing-tables; and hopes no sound or safe judgment will infect itself with their contagious ...
— Every Man Out Of His Humour • Ben Jonson
... extorting money for which she has several times applied to Sir William Wilde with threats of more annoyance if not given, I think it right to inform you, as no threat of additional insult shall ever extort money from our hands. The wages of disgrace she has so basely treated for and demanded shall never be ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... could subject Ram Lal to an investigation that would, at least, extort a confession as to his ability to allude to the ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... Tandy? That won't convince a living soul who isn't convinced already. The rest will say that you are naturally very angry with the man who found you out—the man from whom you unsuccessfully tried to extort a bribe. You see there were no witnesses present when your interview with Tandy occurred. That was a capital mistake on your part. Then, too, you went to his house for this business, and people will say that that, too, looks bad. You have destroyed the invitation ...
— A Captain in the Ranks - A Romance of Affairs • George Cary Eggleston
... justice, though I think him to be a good member in the commonwealth. Because I hold this for a ground infallible—that no poor man ought to be in authority. My reason is this: he will so bribe you and extort you that the sweet scent of riches and gain taketh away and confoundeth the true taste of justice and equity." [Footnote: Townshend, Proceedings, 953, 954] But burdensome as the duties of a justice must have been, and almost unpaid as they were, the office does not seem to have been avoided ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... the most violent language against the Republic, the men of science, and those whom they regarded as the authors of the expedition. Nevertheless these brave fellows, from whom it was not astonishing that such great privations should extort complaints, often compensated by their pleasantries for the ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... means was the dismission of clerks, agents, &c., from the employ of a white men. As soon as a merchant discovered that his clerk was implicated in the correspondence, he first threatened to discharge him unless he would promise to desert his brethren: if he could not extort this promise, he immediately put his threat in execution. Edward Jordon, Esq., the talented editor of the Watchman, then first clerk in the store of a Mr. Briden, was prominently concerned in the correspondence, ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... expense of protecting our islands. Rather than give up their carrying trade it would be better to give up themselves." The entrepot system herein found additional justification, for not only did it foster navigation by the homeward voyage, confined to British ships, and extort toll in transit, but the re-exportation made a double voyage which was more than doubly fruitful in seamen; for from the nearness of the British Islands to the European continent, which held the great body of consumers, this second carriage could be done, and actually was ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... palpable to be mistaken, that he aimed at getting every thing he possibly could, and leaving us without the means of making any presents to the Esquimaux, or other Indians we might meet. I resolved, therefore, on steadily refusing every request; and when he perceived that he could extort nothing more, he rose in an angry manner, and addressing his young men, said: "There are too few goods for me to distribute; those that mean to follow the white people to the sea may ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 2 • John Franklin
... pretty darn good to me in their kooky ways, the actors have. Not one of them has tried to take advantage of my situation to extort anything out of me, beyond asking me to sew on a button or polish some boots or at worst clean the wash bowl. Not one of the boys has made a pass I didn't at least seem to invite. And when my crush on Sid was at its worst he shouldered me off by getting ...
— No Great Magic • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... plains. Gautier had been deputied to convey certain information to Lablache by the patriarchs of the camp. And with his native cunning he had decided, on the appearance of Sergeant Horrocks, to extort a price for that which it was his duty to tell. Besides this, as matters had turned out, Horrocks was to receive gratis that for which he would shortly ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... legally abolished, they continued to be used in many parts. Having been joint judge at Chinese trials at which, in spite of my protests, prisoners were hung up by their thumbs and made to kneel on chains in order to extort confession (without which no accused person could be punished), I can testify that the true meaning of the "proper end of punishments" had no more entered into the Chinese mind at the close of the monarchical regime than it ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... the bird, but at least ninety yards to the right of the mallard—roared out lustily that I had killed him. I saw that the drake was knocked over as dead as a stone, and consequently laughed at the fellow, and set it down as a cool trick to extort money, not uncommon among the fen men, as applied to members of the University. I had just finished loading, and my retriever had just brought in the dead bird, which was quite riddled, cut up evidently by the whole body of the charge—both the wings broken, one in three places, one leg ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... hundred Moorish horsemen, to co-operate with them in an effort to expel Daisy from Gedingooma; for until Daisy should be vanquished or humbled, they considered that they could neither return to their native towns, nor live in security in any of the neighbouring kingdoms. With a view to extort money from these people, by means of this treaty, Ali dispatched his son to Jarra, and prepared to follow him in the course of a few days. This was an opportunity of too great consequence to me to be neglected. I immediately applied to Fatima, (who, ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... fitness to rule as the embodiment of the wealth and intelligence (which are generally the ruling factors world-wide), and would have at an early date derived a just "power from the consent of the governed," did not history record the unnecessary and inhuman means resorted to to extort it, the obliquity of which can be erased only by according him the rights of an American citizen. Mutual hostility, opposition on the one hand to the assumption and exercise of these rights, and consequent distrust by the freedman, often fostered by unscrupulous ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... make such rascality profitable, illustrators of advertising pamphlets, and so-called frescoe painters, who ornament ceilings with sentimental clouds, with two or three cupids thrown in according to the price they extort from ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 3, May 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... however, was not the only concession which the threat of the premunire gave opportunity to extort; and it is creditable to the clergy that the demand which they showed most desire to resist was not that which most touched their personal interests. In the preamble of the subsidy bill, under which they were to levy their ransom, they ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... "No," said, "I will not extort your reasons. It is a shame of me. Your bare will ought to be law in this house; and what reasons could reconcile me to losing you so suddenly? You are the joy of our eyes, the delight of our ears, the idol of all our hearts. ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... children's presence; for gold, brides were scourged to death before their husbands' eyes. Wherever treasure was suspected, every expedient which ingenuity, sharpened by greediness, could suggest, was employed to extort it from its possessors. The fire, spreading more extensively and more rapidly than had been desired through the wealthiest quarter of the city, had unfortunately devoured a vast amount of property. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... wealthy merchants would assemble for mutual protection, because of the audacious outlaws, often headed by some powerful baron, who lay in wait for them to despoil them of their merchandise, and often to carry them off prisoners and extort heavy ransom. My grandfather would tell hew long files of mules, laden with rich silks, cloths, serges, camlets, and furs, from Montpelier, from Narbonne, from Toulouse, from Carcassonne, and other places, would wend towards Beaucaire, as the day called the ...
— Jacques Bonneval • Anne Manning
... is a moral issue. When a few men get possession of one of the necessaries of life, either through ownership of a natural resource or through unfair business methods, and use that control to extort undue profits, as in the recent cases of the Sugar Trust and the beef-packers, they injure the average man without good reason, and they are guilty of a moral wrong. It does not matter whether the undue profit comes through stifling competition ...
— The Fight For Conservation • Gifford Pinchot
... into the courts, where Fisk was all powerful. The matter went from bad to worse, until at length Stokes and Mrs. Mansfield instituted a libel suit against Fisk, which was commonly regarded in the city as simply an attempt on their part to extort money from him. The suit dragged its slow way through the court in which it was instituted, and every day diminished the chances of the success ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... them. Yet, unless he sets up as a saint, he need not hate himself for them. He is better employed, as it humbly seems to me, in giving thanks that power to resist was vouchsafed to him, than in fretting over wicked impulses which come unsought and extort an unwilling hospitality from the weakness ...
— The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... Now, as for those in our church who contend for the ceremonies, many of them are led by such argumenta inartificialia, as wealth, preferment, &c., and if conscience be at all looked to by them, yet they only throw and extort an assent and allowance from it, when worldly respects have made them to propend and incline to an anterior liking of the ceremonies. We do not judge them when we say so, but by their fruits we know them. As Pope Innocent VII., while he was yet a cardinal, used to ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... In this amusement he followed his own ideas, sifting the plans of architects with the most rigid scrutiny, and never hesitating to alter, and sometimes to pull to pieces, what it had cost hours of hard brain-work to devise. No amount of entreaty could extort his consent to what did not commend itself as clear and faultless to his understanding. It might not be a very agreeable process to some of those concerned, but the result was generally satisfactory to the one who had a right to be the most interested. As for contractors, he latterly abjured ...
— Memoirs of James Robert Hope-Scott, Volume 2 • Robert Ornsby
... morning, a frightened look in her face and evidences of tears in her eyes. Marie was generally assumed to be of rather weak intellect, chiefly perhaps because she made no complaint against the drudgery of her life, and because, unlike the other servants, she did not copy the rapacity of the master and extort fees at every opportunity. She was especially attached to Mademoiselle St. Clair, who had in times past befriended her aged mother, and she had endeavored to repay the debt by special devotion to ...
— The Light That Lures • Percy Brebner
... not learn till after the reconciliation, 'How 'scap'd I killing when I crost you so?' gives double force to all that has gone before. The scene between Brutus and Portia, where she endeavours to extort the secret of the conspiracy from him, is conceived in the most heroical spirit, and the burst of tenderness ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... going, and of course Hugh Redmond would be there, but they were not engaged then. Margaret had induced Raby to let me accompany her, for I was nearly seventeen then, and very womanly for my age. He consented rather reluctantly, I thought, and the subject dropped. Another time I should have tried to extort a more gracious permission, for my heart was set on the ball; but for some time I had noticed a slight change in Raby's manner to me, an imperceptible reserve that made me a little less at my ease with him; it was not that he failed in kindness, for he had ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... Heaven are so severe as those for mercies abused; and no instrumentality employed in their infliction is so dreadful as the wrath of man. No spasms are like the spasms of expiring liberty, and no wailing such as her convulsions extort. ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... gendarmes are identical with those employed in the famous conspiracy trials. I read affidavits, now on their way to the United States and British Governments, which made one's blood boil, so frightful were the means used in trying to extort confessions from prisoners. And many of these had no part in the ...
— Korea's Fight for Freedom • F.A. McKenzie
... Millicent," suggested Leslie with an uneasy laugh. "These heroics hardly become you—and nobody can extort a great deal in return for—nothing better than you. In any case, it's no use now debating whether one or both of us were foolish. I'm speaking no more than the painful truth when I say that if I can't get the man back into my hands I shall have to make a break without a dollar from ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... life was no punishment; the major's powers were, therefore, limited to the cat and the gallows. And as the first gallows had been built to carry only eight passengers, his daily death sentences were also limited to that number. For twenty years torture was used to extort confession— even women were flogged if they refused to give evidence, and an order of the Governor was held to be equal to law. ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... objected to the ostentation of the ceremony, to its eclat, to the noise and bustle, smoke and heat it would create in the close sick chamber. He appears to have objected to more than it was discreet to object to in Rome: and all that his family and his confessor could extort from him on the subject was, that he would permit himself to be carried from his bed to the parish church, and there, with the humility of a contrite heart, would consent to receive the sacrament at the foot of ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... They were still followed by their armed retainers, and had almost unlimited jurisdiction in their respective governments. Even the higher clergy gloried in feudal inequalities, and were selected from the noble classes. The people were not powerful enough to make combinations and extort their rights, unless they followed the standards of military chieftains, arrayed perhaps against the crown and against the parliaments. We see no popular, independent political movements; even the people, like all classes above them, were firm and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... (backed by that little face, with that strange flush of joy upon it, that spoke more eloquently to the father's heart than any words could have done), to induce that gentleman to allow Harry to remain where he was all day; likewise to extort a promise that he might come to see the lady whenever and as often as she chose to trouble herself with the care of him: and this being nicely arranged, Harry's papa went his way and they went theirs. And Harry did that ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Herakleia, the soldiers became impatient that their generals (for the habit of looking upon Xenophon as one of them still continued) took no measures to procure money for them. The Achaean Lykon proposed that they should extort a contribution of no less than 3000 staters[99] of Kyzikus from the inhabitants of Herakleia: another man immediately outbid this proposition, and proposed that they should require 10,000 staters[99]—a full month's ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... Unquestionably a bad constitution well administered, may be incomparably more beneficial to the subject than a good constitution administered corruptly. Burke's great leading principle was: Be just—and can a man have a nobler end? To suppress an insurrection cruelly, to tax a people unjustly, or to extort money from a nation on false pretences, was to him deeply abhorrent. His first object was to secure the incorruptibility of ministers and of members of parliament. When the post of royal scullion could be confided to a member of parliament, and a favourable ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... occupation he followed of a treacherous spy who, residing in the Canadas, came, for the mere consideration of gold, to sell political information to the enemies of the country that gave him asylum and protection. I added that his visit to me was to extort money, under a threat of publishing our consanguinity, and that dread of his (my lover's) partiality being decreased by the disclosure, had induced me to throw my arms, in the earnestness of entreaty ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... lodging in them, among men without a roof, without faith or honor, he could find persons easily to undertake any task, and still more easily others who, if they sniffed coin on his person, would begin, but when they had received earnest money, would extort the whole sum by threatening to deliver him to justice. Besides, for a certain time past Chilo had felt a repulsion for nakedness, for those disgusting and terrible figures lurking about suspected houses in the Subura or in the ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... preyed upon by some inscrutable disease, were weeks of darkness and solitude. Temperance and Aunt Merce took as much care of her as she would allow; but she preferred being alone most of the time. Thus she acquired the fortitude of an Indian; pain could extort no groan from her. It reacted on her temper, though, for after an attack she was exasperating. Her invention was put to the rack to tease and offend. I kept out of her way; if by chance she caught ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... rather abashed, dropped into the cold green tub, splashed, rubbed down, dressed, and sat down to breakfast. As he ate his waffles, though, out of the blue breakfast set which Dolly's charming, puzzle-browed economy had managed to extort from the recalcitrant family budget, his usual glowing loquacity of after-the-bath was lacking. His eyes wandered furtively about the little encumbered room; thoughts, visibly, rolled within his head which did not find ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... enigma seems still in as bad a condition as ever. How is it possible to extort a meaning from all this jargon about 'devil's seats,' 'death's-heads,' and ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... had done him, and a resolve to exact vengeance on the man whom he regarded as untrue to his oath. The difficulties in the way of his enterprise were indeed enormous. He could reckon on no support within England itself. At home he had to extort the consent of his own reluctant baronage; to gather a motley host from every quarter of France and to keep it together for months; to create a fleet, to cut down the very trees, to build, to launch, to man the vessels; and ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... Place only before the most determined advocate of this odious traffic the exact image of himself in the garb and harness of a slave, dragged and whipped about like a beast; place this image also before him, and paint it as that of one without a ray of hope to cheer him; and you would extort from him the reluctant confession, that he would not endure for an hour the misery to which he condemned his fellow-man for life. How dared he, then, to use this selfish plea of interest against the voice of the generous sympathies ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... things which belong to the silent life of the spirit in God, unless, side by side with these, there is the doing of the common deeds which the world is actually able to appraise in such a fashion as to extort, even from them, the confession, 'We find no ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... through accident or disease. Furthermore, he was said to be of a sincere and charitable disposition, and many persons declared that on no occasion had he been known to make use of the helpless condition of those who visited him in order to extort money from them. ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... their councils and to carry his orders into execution. The Mameluke government is exceedingly oppressive to the merchants and even to the other Mahometan inhabitants of Damascus. When the Soldan thinks fit to extort a sum of money from any of the nobles or merchants, he gives two letters to the governor of the castle, in one of which is contained a list of such as he thinks proper to be invited into the castle, and in the other is set ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... was no second course—they left the table. Joel Barton made a fresh attempt to extort a small sum from his wife, but was met with an inflexible refusal. Mrs. Barton proved deaf alike to entreaties and threats. She was a strong, resolute woman, and not one ...
— Helping Himself • Horatio Alger
... a promise of this kind, made in writing or in the presence of witnesses, certain of the more selfish or less manly and honorable class of creditors are ever seeking to extort by fair or foul means, from an unfortunate debtor, who has honestly given up every thing, an acknowledgment of his indebtedness to them, in order that they may reap the benefit of his first efforts to get ...
— Off-Hand Sketches - a Little Dashed with Humor • T. S. Arthur
... of compelling us to supply what's wanted! But hadn't you really been able to contribute any more, no one would have a word to say; but the gold and silver, round as well as flat, have with their heavy weight pressed down the bottom of the box! and your sole object is to harass us and to extort from us. But raise your eyes and look about you; who isn't your venerable ladyship's son and daughter? and is it likely, pray, that in the future there will only be cousin Pao-yue to carry you, our old lady, on his head, up the Wu T'ai Shan? You ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... classes of Europe demanded that heresy should be exterminated at whatever cost, and yet with the suppression of open resistance the desired end seemed as far off as ever.... Trained experts were needed, whose sole business it should be to unearth the offenders and extort a confession of their guilt.... Thus to the public of the thirteenth century the organization of the Inquisition and its commitment to the children of Saint Dominic and Saint Francis appeared a perfectly natural or rather inevitable development arising from the admitted necessities of the time ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... to taste the luxury of sleep, and dispatched messengers to his friends. No answers were returned; and upon that he went personally with a small retinue to their hotels. But he found their doors every where closed; and all his importunities could not avail to extort an answer. Sadly and slowly he returned to his own bedchamber; but there again he found fresh instances of desertion, which had occurred during his short absence; the pages of his bedchamber had fled, carrying with them the coverlids of the imperial bed, ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... went, his mission was successful, and, by a happy accident, he was able at Tunis and Tripoli to extort further from the rulers a promise that thereafter captives should be treated as in civilized countries; in other words, that they should no longer be reduced to slavery. Algiers refused this concession; and the admiral ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... of bullying swagger in his air, which towards the end gave place to the brutal vehemence of an undisguised ruffian—a transition which had tempted me into a belief that he might seek even forcibly to extort from me a consent to his wishes, or by means still more horrible, of which I scarcely dared to trust myself to think, to ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume II. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... very likely that, however artful Bourgonef might be, a severe examination might extort from him sufficient confirmation of my suspicion to warrant further procedure. But knowing also that THIS resort was open to me when all others had failed, I resolved to ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... creatures in giving vent to these indignant outbreaks, which a sense of the wicked injustice of their fate, and seeing their own offspring brought up in evidence against them, through the most detestable acts, and by the basest subornation, would naturally extort from minds even of iron mould. If ever Lear's or Timon's power of malediction could be justifiably called into exercise, it would be against such a tribunal and such witnesses as they ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... half-conscious, or even wholly unconscious manner, that the error oftenest lurks. In order to detect the fallacy, the proposition thus silently assumed must be supplied; but the reasoner, most likely, has never really asked himself what he was assuming; his confuter, unless permitted to extort it from him by the Socratic mode of interrogation, must himself judge what the suppressed premise ought to be in order to support the conclusion. And hence, in the words of Archbishop Whately, "it must be often a matter of doubt, or, rather, of arbitrary choice, not only to ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... party will never assent to it, and without their aid the project has no chance. To obtain that aid, "the Prince" must secretly swear that after four years more he will turn France over to Henry V.; this promise only the last extreme of desperation could extort from him, and then to no purpose, since he could not fulfill it and the Legitimists could not trust him. And thus, alike by its own strength and by its enemies' divisions, the safety of ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... them all. Place only before the most determined advocate of this odious traffic the exact image of himself in the garb and harness of a slave, dragged and whipped about like a beast: place this image also before him, and paint it as that of one without a ray of hope to cheer him; and you would extort from him the reluctant confession, that he would not endure for an hour the misery, to which he condemned his fellow-man for life. How dared he then to use this selfish plea of interest against the voice of the generous sympathies of his nature? But ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... say something that would still, at the last moment, gain her John's approval, or his understanding at least. But she could think of nothing to say. He had promised to manage it all for her: he had not reproached her; and yet not content with that she wanted to extort a favourable word from him before he should go. But she could not find a word to say. He it was only who spoke. He asked when she was going to return home, with his hand upon the ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... From this search they almost immediately returned with the well-known steel-bound, russet leather pocket-book which the old gentleman had been in the habit of carrying for years. Its valuable contents, however, had been abstracted, and the magistrate in vain endeavored to extort from the prisoner the use which had been made of them, or the place of their concealment. Indeed, he obstinately denied all knowledge of the matter. The constables, also, discovered, between the bed and sacking of the unhappy man, a shirt and ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... animated historian, "whose vocation it was to persecute the repose of his last moments, sought, by the terrors of his sentence, to extort repentance; but his behaviour, firm and dignified to the end, repelled their insulting advances with scorn and disdain. He was prouder, he replied, to have his head affixed to the prison-walls, than to have his picture placed in the king's bed-chamber: 'and, far from being troubled ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... practiced in many cities and has served more than one term in jail. I knew at once what had occurred; the two men fancied they 'had something on' Miss Cavanaugh regarding this murder, and had endeavored to extort money from her. I leave it to you," with a smiling nod toward Nora, "to tell how near ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre
... money, may be counterfeited or stolen, but that which they represent, namely, knowledge and virtue, cannot be counterfeited or stolen. These ends of labor cannot be answered but by real exertions of the mind, and in obedience to pure motives. The cheat, the defaulter, the gambler, cannot extort the knowledge of material and moral nature which his honest care and pains yield to the operative. The law of nature is, Do the thing, and you shall have the power: but they who do not the thing ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... walking near the chapel, had just seen his worthy old friend, the priest, most barbarously murdered there. Sir Maurice Beevor had set Gaussen upon him; his reverence was coming with the papers concerning Norman's birth, which Beevor wanted in order to extort money from the countess. Gaussen was, however, obliged to run before he got the papers; and the clergyman had time, before he died, to tell Norman the story, and give him the documents, with which Norman sped off to the castle to have an ...
— Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... listening to melodious voices and the harmony of stringed woods, it was usual to take part in sit-round games of various kinds. (And while it is on his brush this person would say with commendable pride that a well-trained musician among us can extort more sound from a hollow wooden pig, costing only a few cash, than the most skilful here ever attain on their largest instrument—a highly-lacquered coffin on legs, filled with bells and hidden springs, and frequently sold for ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... attributes of the house of Waverley. With a grace and delicacy worthy the hero of a romance, Sir Everard withdrew his claim to the hand of Lady Emily. He had even, before leaving Blandeville Castle, the address to extort from her father a consent to her union with the object of her choice. What arguments he used on this point cannot exactly be known, for Sir Everard was never supposed strong in the powers of persuasion; but the young officer, immediately after ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... waiting-women: take them, and extort By any kind of torment the truth from them. —Our present business is, I take it, this: That I should win the wife of Pamphilus To return home; which so I but effect, I sha'n't regret the same of having done What others ...
— The Comedies of Terence • Publius Terentius Afer
... inconstancy and desertion, are cut off, by this cruel interruption, from the enjoyment of their prerogatives, and doomed to lose four months in inactive obscurity. Many complaints do vexation and desire extort from those exiled tyrants of the town, against the inexorable sun, who pursues his course without any regard to love or beauty; and visits either tropick at the stated time, whether shunned or courted, deprecated ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... principal of the Academy Squadron, was in the main cabin, though he had been fully informed in regard to the events which had transpired on deck. The young commander despaired of his own ability to extort an explanation from the waif, and he concluded to refer the ...
— Up The Baltic - Young America in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark • Oliver Optic
... the calm reply, "I have checkmated you, count. You will extort no more money from me, nor will you threaten ...
— The Coquette's Victim • Charlotte M. Braeme
... that with all my care and watchfulness you should have been subjected to such a trial. Some ruffian has been trying to extort money from you, I presume, by threatened violence to yourself, Travilla, and me. ...
— Elsie's Womanhood • Martha Finley
... advisers were men of sagacity and talent. It is true they did not fully appreciate the weakness of the king, or the strength of his enemies; but they saw his distress, and tried to remove it. They, very naturally in such an age, recommended violent courses—to grant new monopolies, to extort fines, to exercise all his feudal privileges, to pawn the crown jewels, even, in order to raise money; for money, at all events, he must have. They advised him to arrest turbulent and incendiary members of the Commons, to prorogue and ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... rape are very often made. The motive may be to extort blackmail, revenge, or mere delusion. On examining such cases bruises are seldom found, but scratches which the woman has made on the front of her body may be discovered, and the local injuries to the generative organs are slight, ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... chief of the Stanley Pool District in the early eighties. He demanded and received a large quantity of goods for the permission to establish a station here. After the explorer had camped within ten miles of the Pool the old pirate pretended that he had not received the goods and sought to extort more. Stanley refused to be bullied, whereupon the chief threatened to attack him in force. Let Stanley now tell the story, for it is an illustration of the way he combated the usury and ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... this is simple. The Government have refused to the workman the right to extort unearned increment out of the country in its dire necessity. The workman may not strike or cease work or even change employment without the permission of the State. Assuredly the State has the right to exact that obedience from him. But it is essential that ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... Death snatched away the persons for whom they were originally designed! And here they are in the ignoble custody of some avaricious vender, who having obtained them at the sale of some departed amateur for less than half their first cost, now expects to extort more than double. ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... world. It is a tendency in all minds. One of its annoying forms is a craving for sympathy. The sufferers parade their miseries, tear the lint from their bruises, reveal their indictable crimes, that you may pity them. They like sickness, because physical pain will extort some show of interest from the bystanders; as we have seen children, who, finding themselves of no account when grown people come in, will cough till they choke, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... move with all things from their prime? Who shall expound the mystery of the lyre? In far retreats of elemental mind Obscurely comes and goes The imperative breath of song, that as the wind Is trackless, and oblivious whence it blows. Demand of lilies wherefore they are white, Extort her crimson secret from the rose, But ask not of the Muse that she disclose The meaning of the riddle of her might: Somewhat of all things sealed and recondite, Save the enigma of herself, she knows. The master could not tell, with all his lore, Wherefore he sang, or whence the ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... mean to try and extort a confession from Laleli herself? How in the world do you mean to do it? It is a case of ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... passages declarations of the individual? Winding himself up with twopenny-worth of cheese! Pleading for the additional penny for the waitress, whose personal charms and obliging disposition must be considered to extort the amount! And above all, unable to conceive any motive, except aversion to trouble, for disliking to carry "his chop" upon a skewer through the streets of London. How every line revels in the recollection ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, December 11, 1841 • Various
... ways of the Breed. Horrocks, with all his experience, was no match for the dusky-visaged outcast of the plains. Gautier had been deputied to convey certain information to Lablache by the patriarchs of the camp. And with his native cunning he had decided, on the appearance of Sergeant Horrocks, to extort a price for that which it was his duty to tell. Besides this, as matters had turned out, Horrocks was to receive gratis that for which he would shortly ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... behold, I received a letter informing me of the existence of a bundle of documents which prove the complicity of our one and only Prasville! And who is my informant? Vorenglade himself! Vorenglade, who, tired of living in poverty, wants to extort money from Prasville, at the risk of being arrested, and who will be delighted to come to terms with me. And Prasville will get the sack. Oh, what a lark! I swear to you that he will get the sack, the villain! ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... and fatherly, falls far short of that finest type of countryside pastor which represents the genius of priesthood; but he is equally far above the base type in which a strongminded and unscrupulous peasant uses the Church to extort money, power, and privilege. He is a priest neither by vocation nor ambition, but because the life suits him. He has boundless authority over his flock, and taxes them stiffly enough to be a rich man. The old Protestant ascendency is now too broken to gall him. On the whole, an easygoing, ...
— John Bull's Other Island • George Bernard Shaw
... little, and then observed to Holden, "It is evident some unfair practices have been resorted to with our respected friend, to extort a promise from him which he cannot violate. It is also possible, from what he let fall at first, that an attempt may be made to detain us prisoners within this house, and, for aught I know, Master Nowell may have given his word not to go forth ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... hers at once, and even eagerly. I held it for a while in mine, and gazed into her eyes. It was she who first tore her hand away, and, forgetting all about her request and the promise she had sought to extort, ran at the top of her speed, and without turning, till she was out of sight. And then I knew that I loved her, and thought in my glad heart that she—she herself—was not indifferent to my suit. Many a time she has denied it in after days, but it was ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... enjoying life as far as you can, and I want to see you getting actual benefit from the money which you have earned by your many years of conscientious industry. To me there is no other spectacle in the world so humiliating as that of people laying themselves out to extort money from others. Do tear yourself away from the sponges. You and Miss Eva ought to have a quiet winter in a congenial climate. I hope you will go to Florida, and, after doing Jacksonville and St. Augustine, why not rent a little furnished cottage and keep house for ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... bringing with them 20,000 pieces of eight, several mules laden with household goods and merchandise, and twenty prisoners, men, women, and children. Some of these were put to the rack, to make them confess where they had hid the rest of the goods; but they could extort very little from them. Lolonois, who valued not murdering, though in cold blood, ten or twelve Spaniards, drew his cutlass, and hacked one to pieces before the rest, saying, "If you do not confess and declare where you have hid the rest of your goods, I will do the like to all your companions." ...
— The Pirates of Panama • A. O. (Alexandre Olivier) Exquemelin
... longer the majority that would rule: the power would be transferred to the minority. Were the defensive privilege limited to particular cases, an interested minority might take advantage of it to screen themselves from equitable sacrifices to the general weal, or, in particular emergencies, to extort unreasonable indulgences. Lastly, it would facilitate and foster the baneful practice of secessions; a practice which has shown itself even in States where a majority only is required; a practice subversive of all the ...
— The Federalist Papers
... put in. 'You have been deceiving Mrs. Evelegh. It blackens silver. And you told her lies in order to extort ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... humanity. This is humility and it is love. The motive will determine the quality of the act. I may serve my family regardless of the sufferings I may cause to others. As for instance, I may accept an employment which enables me to extort money from people, I enrich myself thereby and then satisfy many unlawful demands of the family. Here I am neither serving the family nor the State. Or I may recognise that God has given me hands and feet only to work with for my sustenance and for that of those who may be dependent ...
— Third class in Indian railways • Mahatma Gandhi
... cleverest thing I ever did in my life," Mr. Shaw is reported to have said to his American interviewer, "was to force my friendship on Webb, to extort his, and keep it." Mr. Sidney Webb was then, as now, the constructive encyclopaedist, the man who, wherever he went, "knew more than anybody present." "The truth of the matter is that Webb and I are very useful to each other. We are in perfect contrast, each supplying ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... these honest Citizens, could in no wise perswade him to leave his extort power, no nor yet to cause any temperance of his tongue, but the more they went about with gentle words to tell him his faults, the more would he fret and likewise fume, swearing all the oathes under God, ...
— The Golden Asse • Lucius Apuleius
... my friendship—at cut rates, Mr. Carey. I was worthy of Hennage's trust and friendship until a few minutes ago. Harley P. Hennage never did a mean or a cowardly act, and to-day I used my power over you to extort half a million dollars from you to further a scheme of mine. I figured that the end justified the means. It did not, and I ask you ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... subject Ram Lal to an investigation that would, at least, extort a confession as to his ability to allude ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... senate, and the conditions of their tenure were such as to preclude both the independence of action and the accumulation of resources which is essential to absolutism. As early as 1282 the nobles were able to extort from the crown a haandfaestning, or charter, and almost every sovereign after that date was compelled, once at least during his reign, to make a grant of chartered privileges. To the Danehof, or national assembly, fell at times a (p. 555) goodly measure of authority, although eventually ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... so great a Confidence in his Virtue and Love, that she will refuse him nothing, tho' it would be a very bold Venture for a Maid, to trust her self with a passionate young Man, in silence of Night: and tho' she did not extort a Vow from him to secure her, she expected he would have a care of her Honour. He swore to her, his Love was too religious for so base an Attempt. There needed not many Vows to confirm her Faith; and it was agreed on between them, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... fulfilled the conditions which were to precede the handing over of the prisoners and consideration of grievances. I should not be surprised if, before releasing the prisoners or redressing grievances, an attempt were now made to extort an alteration of the London Convention of 1884, and the abrogation of Article No. 4 of that instrument. I intend, if I find that the Johannesburg people have substantially complied with the ultimatum, to insist on the fulfilment of ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... travelling down to Bowood with her, which she insisted upon, naturally enough declined coming all the way down again from London to see her safe home; so not being able to accomplish his fetching her back to town, she contrived to extort from him a letter stating that, owing to the late heavy rains, her journey back to London upon the railroad would probably be both tedious and uncomfortable, and advising her by all means to go home "by land," which, considering that the Great Western ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... Piper, who the Pythian Measure plays, In fear of a hard matter learnt the lays: But if to desp'rate verse I would apply, What needs instruction? 'tis enough to cry; "I can write Poems, to strike wonder blind! Plague take the hindmost! Why leave me behind? Or why extort a truth, so mean and low, That what I have not ...
— The Art Of Poetry An Epistle To The Pisos - Q. Horatii Flacci Epistola Ad Pisones, De Arte Poetica. • Horace
... cried in her sternest and most angry voice; 'perfectly disgraceful! You aid and abet this wretched creature—whose object is only to extort money by false pretences out of your brother Herbert—you aid and abet her in her abominable stratagems, and you even venture to introduce her clandestinely into my own breakfast-room. I wonder you're not ashamed of yourself. ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... all signs of contempt or undervaluing naturally endeavours, as far as he dares (which among them that have no common power to keep them quiet, is far enough to make them destroy each other), to extort a greater value from his contemners by damage, and from others by the example.... Hereby it is manifest, that during the time that men live without a power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... Every official plunders; the Governor-general extorts from all sides; he fills his private pockets by throwing every conceivable obstacle in the way of progress, and embarrasses every commercial movement in order to extort bribes from individuals. Following the general rule of his predecessors, a new governor upon arrival exhibits a spasmodic energy. Attended by cavasses and soldiers, he rides through every street of Khartoum, abusing the underlings for past neglect, ordering ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... proposal to take away the time of private members. And it is reported that one member of the Liberal party had begun operations as many as four weeks before Mr. Gladstone's Bill came on, and had tried to extort a number of pledges, the full meaning of which would only come upon the unhappy people who made them when they had endangered or destroyed the best of ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... thought. She had tacitly said herself that under the bitter pains of the rack they would be able to extort a false confession from her. It was a hint worth ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... sister, Carrie, a sweet girl of thirteen, had shed many tears for her, and had used all her eloquence to bring about a reconciliation, apparently in vain, but finally she had so far prevailed with her mother as to extort a promise from her that she would write to her, which fact she straightway communicated to Lizzie, who was, at the opening of our story, looking anxiously for this promised letter, which might contain words ...
— 'Three Score Years and Ten' - Life-Long Memories of Fort Snelling, Minnesota, and Other - Parts of the West • Charlotte Ouisconsin Van Cleve
... settle for those other books you have taken from my shelves at various times.' Here he produced his list, with the prices all affixed, and a certain small sum added by way of interest. Hereupon Monsieur Y. stormed and raved, swore it was an attempt to extort money from him, and threatened legal proceedings. 'If,' said the dealer, 'you can empty your pockets now without producing any book of mine, except those you have paid for, I will withdraw my claim and apologize, otherwise I shall at once send my man' (whom he then called) ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... receive them as the stroke of God, with an awful submission and meekness. But Beatrix's nature was different to that tender parent's; she seemed to accept her grief and to defy it; nor would she allow it (I believe not even in private and in her own chamber) to extort from her the confession of even a tear of humiliation or a cry of pain. Friends and children of our race, who come after me, in which way will you bear your trials? I know one that prays God will give you love rather than pride, and that the Eye all-seeing shall find you in the ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... conceded, they had every thing in their own hands. They could march out of the Union at their own will and caprice, without resistance from the National Government, and they could come back upon such conditions as, with the President's aid, they might extort from an alarmed and weakening North. Assured by the language of the President that they could with impunity defy the constitutional authority of the government, the Secessionists were immeasurably encouraged. The Southern men had for three generations been cherishing the belief ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... third sister, who, in spite of having seen her two sisters' heads, could not control her curiosity, and opened the door. She saw her mistress reclining in a beautiful bed. In the evening the lady returned and asked her what she had seen; but she answered: "I have seen nothing." The lady could extort no other answer from her, and finally clothed her in her peasant's dress, and took her back to the ...
— Italian Popular Tales • Thomas Frederick Crane
... pride of London's east!—mighty mart of old renown!—for thou art not a place of yesterday:—long before the Roses red and white battled in fair England, thou didst exist—a place of throng and bustle—place of gold and silver, perfumes and fine linen. Centuries ago thou couldst extort the praises even of the fiercest foes of England. Fierce bards of Wales, sworn foes of England, sang thy praises centuries ago; and even the fiercest of them all, Red Julius himself, wild Glendower's bard, had a ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... the required draught, he made a sort of apology, which was intended for the ears of all his customers nigh the stranger, for the manner in which an individual, in the further end of the long narrow room, not only monopolized the discourse, but appeared to extort the attention of all within hearing to some portentous legend ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... tortured in their children's presence; for gold, brides were scourged to death before their husbands' eyes. Wherever treasure was suspected, every expedient which ingenuity, sharpened by greediness, could suggest, was employed to extort it from its possessors. The fire, spreading more extensively and more rapidly than had been desired through the wealthiest quarter of the city, had unfortunately devoured a vast amount of property. Six millions, at least, had thus been swallowed; a destruction by which no one had profited. There ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... 1860 was of no small importance in Huxley's career. It was not merely that he helped to save a great cause from being stifled under misrepresentation and ridicule—that he helped to extort for it a fair hearing; it was now that he first made himself known in popular estimation as a dangerous adversary in debate—a personal force in the world of science which could not be neglected. From this moment he entered ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... examination this spirit proved to be nothing more than a poor Bedlam beggar, who had crept into this deserted hovel for shelter, and with his talk about devils frighted the fool, one of those poor lunatics who are either mad, or feign to be so, the better to extort charity from the compassionate country people, who go about the country, calling themselves poor Tom and poor Turlygood, saying, "Who gives anything to poor Tom?" sticking pins and nails and sprigs of rosemary into their arms to make them bleed; and with such horrible ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb
... did Argenson, the Minister of Police, order the arrest of every person from amongst the populace against whom there was the least suspicion; in vain did La Regnie rage and try to extort confessions; in vain did they strengthen their watch and their patrols;—they could not find a trace of the evil-doers. The only thing that did to a certain extent avail was to take the precaution of ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... to exact, to extort. 'The church is pilled and polled by its own flocks.'—South, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... truth. For the moment the vigorous action which John had taken after the warnings received on the eve of the Welsh campaign had put an end to the disposition to revolt, and had left him again all powerful. He had even been able to extort from the clergy formal letters stating that the sums he had forced them to pay were voluntarily granted him. But he had been made to understand on how weak a foundation his power rested. He must have known that Philip Augustus had for some time been considering the possibility ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams
... taste is pretty steady. The old favourites hold their own. Every now and again an immortal joins their ranks. Puffing and pretension may win the ear of the outside public, and extort praise from the press, but inside the rooms of a Sotheby, a Puttick, or a Hodgson, these foolish persons count for nothing, and their names are seldom heard. Were an author to turn the pages of Book Prices Current, ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... the town. For all that we are filled with a profound respect for a man who can fight in himself so great a fight, and win so great a victory. It is the sturdy peasant blood which he derived from his mother that enables him to wrestle thus mightily with the Lord, and extort at last the tardy blessing; for we are assured in the last pages of the book that he makes a marriage, which is a further step toward health and virtue. We are not assured that he conquers happiness either for himself or for ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... are angry!" cried Morris, who wished immensely that he could extort some flash of passion from her mildness. In that case he ...
— Washington Square • Henry James
... You deny them as yours; what can they be but forgeries? There is no other explanation. I think the whole matter a conspiracy to extort money; but I may be wrong—let that pass. If it be, on the contrary, an imitation of both our signatures that has been palmed off upon these usurers, it is open to other treatment. Compensated for their pecuniary loss, they can have no need to press the matter further, unless they find out ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... successes of the former soon after attracted, having totally subdued that country, built Milan, Verona, Brescia, and several other considerable towns, and governed with such tyrannic sway, especially over the nobility, whose riches they coveted and sought by every means to extort from them, that most of the principal families, joining under the conduct of Rhaetus[F], one of the most distinguished personages among them, retired with the best part of their effects and attendants ...
— Account of the Romansh Language - In a Letter to Sir John Pringle, Bart. P. R. S. • Joseph Planta, Esq. F. R. S.
... to the contributor, and to every other person. Where it is otherwise, every person subject to the tax is put more or less in the power of the tax-gatherer, who can either aggravate the tax upon any obnoxious contributor, or extort, by the terror of such aggravation, some present or perquisite to himself. The uncertainty of taxation encourages the insolence, and favours the corruption, of an order of men who are naturally unpopular, even where ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... what I said: the atrocity of the action carries you beyond contempt, and hence my sincerity. I wished you to know to what a degree I excelled in my art, to extort from you the admission that I was at least original in my abasement, to rank me in your mind on the line of the great good-for-noughts, and to hail me henceforth—Vivat ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... seen how, with calm indifference, they had listened to the deserted wife, the betrayed maiden, to the woman, who implored the withheld blessing of children, to the anxious mother, the forlorn widow,—and sought only to take advantage of sorrow, to extort gifts for the Goddess, or better still for their own ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... easily be made to appear that he was endeavoring to extort money from Miss Pilgrim upon a flimsy pretext that a worthless rug had been substituted for a valuable one, and the police would know how to deal with him. Mr. Baruch put the ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... her neck, and gave way to tears, such as Cipher could not extort by his pounding. She gave him a good-night kiss,—so sweet that it seemed to lie upon his lips ...
— Our Young Folks, Vol 1, No. 1 - An Illustrated Magazine • Various
... and their hearts depraved, its applauses and contempt will for the most part be systematically misplaced; that though the beneficent and disinterested spirit of Christianity, and her obvious tendency to promote domestic comfort and general happiness, cannot but extort applause; yet that her aspiring after more than ordinary excellence, by exciting secret misgivings in others, or a painful sense of inferiority not unmixed with envy, cannot fail often to disgust and offend. The word of God teaches us, that though ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... a person who wished to consult him came to the house when the conjuror was in the kitchen, he would disappear as before, stating that he was going to consult his books, and then his faithful helper would proceed to extort the necessary information from the visitor. On this, he would re-appear and exhibit his wonderful knowledge ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... brutal; but there was something that irritated me in the softness of her resignation, and I wished to extort from her ...
— Four Meetings • Henry James
... sixty guineas at your service. I beg you will command them. Before they are gone, I'll take care you shall be further supplied. I don't think you'll have a shilling or a shilling's worth of your own from your relations, unless you extort ...
— Clarissa, Volume 3 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... to the rajah, and to urge him in every way in my power to do what he was bound to do as an act of common honesty. Should these means fail, after making the strongest representations and giving amplest time, I considered myself free to extort by force what I could not ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... consciousness. Throughout dinner he took a dry delight in making Sarah Pocket greener and yellower, by often referring in conversation with me to my expectations; but here, again, he showed no consciousness, and even made it appear that he extorted—and even did extort, though I don't know how—those references ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... (riding a griffin, doubtless also imaginary) follows, kind but timid, to advise submission; then appears Io, victim of Zeus' love and Hera's jealousy, to whom Prometheus prophesies her future wanderings and his own fate; lastly Hermes, insolent messenger of the gods, who tries in vain to extort Prometheus' secret knowledge of the future. Oceanus, the well-meaning palavering old mentor, and Hermes, the blustering and futile jack-in-office, gods though they be, are vigorous, audacious and very human character-sketches; the soft entrance of the consoling nymphs is ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... refuse it," I replied; "and no torture shall ever extort a consent from me. You may render me the most miserable of men, but you shall never make me base in my own eyes. Shall I create another like yourself, whose joint wickedness might desolate the world. Begone! I have answered you; you may torture me, ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... to seek such remuneration; if it were not that, by your verdict, you may prevent those little innocent defrauded wretches from becoming wandering beggars, as well as orphans on the face of this earth. Oh, I know I need not ask this verdict from your mercy; I need not extort it from your compassion; I will receive it from your justice. I do conjure you, not as fathers, but as husbands:—not as husbands, but as citizens:—not as citizens, but as men:—not as men, but as Christians:—by all your obligations, public, private, moral, and religious; by the hearth profaned; ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... said Percival, sitting up, and regarding his visitor with contemptuous disgust, "don't go bringing Miss Murray's name into this business, for, if you do, I'll call a policeman and give you in charge for trying to extort money on false pretences, and you may thank your priest's dress, or whatever it is, that I don't kick you out of the house. ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... senses. Do but, I say, retire inwardly, and ask in sobriety and sadness, what thy conscience thinks of it, and undoubtedly it shall confess a divine majesty, or at least tremble at the apprehension of what it either will not confess or slenderly believes. The very evidence of truth shall extort an acknowledgment from it. If any man denied the divine majesty, I would seek no other argument to persuade him than what was used to convince an old philosopher who denied the fire: they put his hand in it till ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... surely," said Rochester, "the plain meaning of all this is that I must turn Catholic or go out." He put many questions for the purpose of ascertaining whether the communication was made by authority, but could extort only vague and mysterious replies. At last, affecting a confidence which he was far from feeling, he declared that Barillon must have been imposed upon by idle or malicious reports. "I tell you," he said, "that the King will not dismiss me, and I will not resign. I know him: he knows me; and ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... which the lesser members received more minute instructions for the carrying out of their duties on the Wednesday. No information otherwise was forthcoming for them from either Minky or the president, and all attempt to extort any was promptly nipped in the bud by the latter without the ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... that had no shipping said it would never do; for New England, by controlling the carrying trade, would extort ruinous prices for ...
— Hero Stories from American History - For Elementary Schools • Albert F. Blaisdell
... as her object in insulting me is in the hope of extorting money for which she has several times applied to Sir William Wilde with threats of more annoyance if not given, I think it right to inform you, as no threat of additional insult shall ever extort money from our hands. The wages of disgrace she has so basely treated for and demanded shall never ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... Emperor became of importance in his day, he relaxed his severity to some extent, and at times at least showed him the respect due to an ally. On other occasions he would relapse into his original practice of violent and scornful attack—to such a point, as is seen elsewhere, as to extort the vigorous protests of Thackeray and Ruskin. "It is a tradition," it is said, "that when, during the entente cordiale, the Emperor and Empress paid a visit to Her Majesty in London, two cartoons were suggested at the Punch Table to celebrate ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... she had great influence over him, and nothing delighted her more than to exercise it. The submission of his will to hers was sure to be liberally rewarded; for it gave her great happiness to extort, from his indifference or his affection, the concessions which she never sought by force of reason, or by appeals to principle—concessions which he frequently withheld, solely for the sake of asserting his independence ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... military officers the only offenders. A swarm of civil servants flew westwards from Byzantium and lighted on the unhappy country. Their duty was to extort money by any and all means for their master, their pleasure to accumulate fortunes for themselves; but whether the logothete plundered for the Emperor or for himself, the Italian tax-payer equally had the life-blood sucked from his veins. Even the soldiers by ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... tell me what's on your mind," Mamise suggested, but he shook his head. The car rolled into the gloom of the park, a gloom rather punctuated than diminished by the street-lamps. Mamise realized that she could not extort Nicky's secret from him ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... from his stiffness of manner and his execrable habit of leaving letters unanswered. This defect had become incurable, witness the complaint of Wilberforce to Addington—"You know how difficult, I may say next to impossible, it is to extort a line from Pitt."[564] ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... fears and credulity of stray travellers, making them believe the pass is dangerous and charging them a small sum for his services as guard. It is not at all unlikely that he is the present incumbent of an hereditary right to extort blackmail from such travellers along this lonely road as may be prevailed upon without resorting to violence to pay it, and is but humbly following in the footsteps of his worthy sire and still more ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... ability of a large business to depress wages by the possession of a total or partial monopoly of local employment, the corresponding power to obtain raw material at low prices, or to extort higher prices from consumers than would obtain under the pressure of free competition, represent individual business economies which may enable a large business to ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... before Godwin and his sons returned from exile, and the Normans had to fly the land, save those around the person of the king. He may beg so many bishoprics for Norman priests. There is no saying what concessions he may extort. Of all princes in Europe I had rather Harold had fallen into the hands of any other than into those of ...
— Wulf the Saxon - A Story of the Norman Conquest • G. A. Henty
... personally at the solemnity. He rode into Erfurt with a stately train of friends and relations. But in his opinion of the step taken by his son he remained unalterably firm. At the entertainment which was given in the convent to the young priest, the latter tried to extort from him a friendly remark upon the subject, by asking him why he seemed so angry, when monastic life was such a high and holy thing. His father replied in the presence of all the company, 'Learned brothers, have you not read in Holy Writ, that a man must honour father and mother?' ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... shrewdness, and the consummate, intricate cunning that fat people possess, the corpulent matron succeeded in vanquishing Germinie's last resistance by dint of this tacit assurance and promise of marriage; and she finally allowed the young man's ardor to extort from her what she believed that she was giving in advance to ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... week Derek Pruyn, having practically announced an engagement which did not exist, found himself in a somewhat ludicrous situation. Too proud to extort a promise of secrecy from Mrs. Bayford, he knew the value of his indiscretion—if indiscretion it were—to any purveyor of tea-table gossip; and while Diane and he remained in the same relative positions he ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... Monmouth was not that highest sort of fortitude which is derived from reflection and from selfrespect; nor had nature given him one of those stout hearts from which neither adversity nor peril can extort any sign of weakness. His courage rose and fell with his animal spirits. It was sustained on the field of battle by the excitement of action. By the hope of victory, by the strange influence of sympathy. All such aids were now taken away. The spoiled darling of the court and of the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... 'unless you yield to my demand: for, come what may, you shall not quit the castle till then.' Madame Montoni burst into loud lamentation, which she as suddenly checked, considering, that her husband's assertions might be only artifices, employed to extort her consent. She hinted this suspicion, and, in the next moment, told him also, that his designs were not so honourable as to serve the state, and that she believed he had only commenced a captain of banditti, to join the enemies ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... foreseen, sense of duty would only extort such admonitions from a pious parent, at the solemn period of his departure; for like a neglected gospel, they are "a favor of death unto death," to those who ...
— Sermons on Various Important Subjects • Andrew Lee
... are mentioned, one for compressing the ankle-bones, and the other for squeezing the fingers, to be used if necessary to extort a confession in charges of robbery and homicide, confession being regarded as essential to the completion of the record. The application, however, of these tortures is fenced round in such a way as to impose great responsibility upon the presiding magistrate; ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... some moments. "Suppose we agree to purchasing your silence at this price," he said, "what guarantee have we that you will not come and extort more money, or that you may not ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... all likelihood to meet the priest; shall we wait his return, and extort some information of ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Derry, Lord Bristol, a vain and half-crazy prelate, advocated the admission of catholics to the franchise, and tried to excite the volunteers, who were then no longer exclusively protestant, and were recruited from the rabble, to extort reform from parliament by force. He attended parliament with an escort of volunteers and in regal state, and appeared in a purple coat and volunteer cap fiercely cocked. His seditious behaviour, the claim made for ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... You must know, Till the injurious Romans did extort This tribute from us, we were free: Caesar's ambition .... against all colour, here Did put the yoke upon us; which to shake off, Becomes a warlike people, whom we reckon Ourselves to be. We do say then to Caesar, Our ancestor was that Mulmutius, which ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... Wong Li Fu is aware I have been liberated?" said Mrs. Forbes. "It's rather odd, is it not, that nothing has been heard from him or his gang if I was to be held a prisoner in order to extort terms?" ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... which the American left was ordered to commence the action. It was then perceived that the British right was advancing in line; and as Stevens led on his brigade in good order, Colonel Williams advanced in front with a few volunteers, intending by a partial fire to extort that of the enemy at some distance, and thereby diminish its effect on the militia. The experiment did not succeed. The British rushed forward with great impetuosity, firing and huzzaing at the same time; and the terrified militia, disregarding the exertions of Stevens, who, in the firm tone ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 3 (of 5) • John Marshall
... combining together or otherwise organizing their resistance, were almost always compelled to submit. They were often oppressed and maltreated in the most cruel manner. The great object of the government seems to have been to extort money from them in every possible way, and to this end taxes and imposts were levied upon them to such an extent as to leave them enough only for bare subsistence. The most cruel means were often resorted to to compel the payment of these taxes. The unhappy Jews ...
— Richard II - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... drawers of water. And there be good things in this place, the which we may not have. Ah, master, never has my nose lied to me, and I have followed it to secret caches and among the fur-bales of the igloos. Good provender did these people extort from the poor whalemen, and this provender has wandered into few hands. The woman Ipsukuk, who dwelleth in the far end of the village next she igloo of the chief, possesseth much flour and sugar, and even have my eyes told me of molasses smeared on her face. And ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... inheritance, Philip and Juana were driven on English shores. Henry VII. treated them with all possible courtesy, and made Philip a Knight of the Garter, while Philip repaid the compliment by investing Prince Henry with the Order of the Golden Fleece.[61] But advantage was taken of Philip's plight to extort from him the surrender of the Earl of Suffolk, styled the White Rose, and a commercial treaty with the Netherlands, which the Flemings named the Malus Intercursus. Three months after his arrival ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... professional duties, was building. In this amusement he followed his own ideas, sifting the plans of architects with the most rigid scrutiny, and never hesitating to alter, and sometimes to pull to pieces, what it had cost hours of hard brain-work to devise. No amount of entreaty could extort his consent to what did not commend itself as clear and faultless to his understanding. It might not be a very agreeable process to some of those concerned, but the result was generally satisfactory to the one who had a right to be the most interested. As for contractors, he latterly abjured ...
— Memoirs of James Robert Hope-Scott, Volume 2 • Robert Ornsby
... Father Inquisitor of a Dominican monastery was able habitually to exercise in the city where it was situated, was in the latter part of the fifteenth century just considerable enough to hamper and irritate cultivated people, but not strong enough to extort any lasting fear or obedience. It was no longer possible to punish men for their thoughts, as it once was, and those whose tongues wagged most impudently against the clergy could easily keep clear of heretical doctrine. Except when some powerful ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... consigned to the torture chamber, where the rack, the thumb-screw, the hot irons, the whip, and other survivals of the Inquisition were applied. When the officers had extorted what they wanted, or had made sure there was nothing to extort, the poor, white wreck of a human being was delivered by the judges to an executioner, and a merciful death ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... assistance even from her, so that he might wholly claim the credit of regaining all that he had lost; but now, in the recklessness of despair, he proposed not only to ask for all the money he could obtain, but, if necessary, extort it by any ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... of this march stolen upon her, this attempt to extort a yard where she had only granted an inch of favour? Perhaps she was dazzled by what would have repelled many another woman, in the primitive, precarious, exciting details of the life of a young colony. Perhaps her heart and imagination were alike taken by storm when she thought ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... waited for him to come down, but instead of doing so, in a second or two he turned round, clambered deliberately up the cliff and vanished. I supposed it was only a ruse to extort offers of more money, and waited for half an hour, but he did not appear again. This was rather embarrassing, for he carried off my knapsack. The choice of action lay between chasing him and going on to Breuil, risking the loss of my knapsack. I chose the latter course, and got to Breuil ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... part of this extensive garden, were open walks for excursions in the morning; in another, thick groves, and silent arbours, and bubbling fountains for repose at noon. All that could solace the sense, or flatter the fancy, all that industry could extort from nature, or wealth furnish to art, all that conquest could seize, or beneficence attract, was collected together, and every perception of ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... black, erect and pointed; they rise from the middle of the forehead a little above the eyes. they offered us a second skin of a full grown sheep which was quite as large as that of a common deer. they discovered our anxity to purchase and in order to extort a great plrice declared that they prized it too much to dispose of it. in expectation of finding some others of a similar kind for sale among the natives of this neighbourhood I would not offer him a greater price ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... were but a very little widened, great numbers who had hitherto lingered near the threshold would press in. Those who still remained without would then not be sufficiently numerous or powerful to extort any further concession, and would be glad to compound for ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... acceded to their claims. I have myself witnessed an altercation between the monks and shepherds on the mountains upon a question of cheeses and goats, which the former claimed as annually due to the monastery; it appeared that prior to the British occupation they had been able by threats to extort this demand, but the shepherds had now determined to free themselves from all payments beyond those which the law compelled, and they resisted the priestly authority, before which they had hitherto remained as slaves. This spirit of independence that has been so quickly developed by the equity ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... injudicious in more respects than one, for princes love not to see their subjects approach them with an air conscious of deserving, and thereby seeming desirous to extort, acknowledgment and recompense for their services; and Louis, the most jealous monarch that ever lived, was peculiarly averse and inaccessible to any one who seemed either to presume upon service rendered or to ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... them, among men without a roof, without faith or honor, he could find persons easily to undertake any task, and still more easily others who, if they sniffed coin on his person, would begin, but when they had received earnest money, would extort the whole sum by threatening to deliver him to justice. Besides, for a certain time past Chilo had felt a repulsion for nakedness, for those disgusting and terrible figures lurking about suspected houses in the Subura or in the Trans-Tiber. ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... this account two theories have occurred to me as possibly true respecting this most remarkable assault: First—The aim may have been simply to extort from me such admissions as in the hands of money and influence would have sent me to the Penitentiary for libel. This, however, seems unlikely, because any statements elicited by fear or force could not be evidence in law or could be so explained as to have no force. The statements wanted so badly ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... have learned to disregard phenomena, the deceitful shows and appearances of things; to have resolved to reach and to grapple with the things themselves. It is the fable of Proteus over again. He will take a thousand shapes wherewith he will seek to elude and delude one who is determined to extort from him that true answer, which he is capable of yielding, but will only yield on compulsion. The true inquirer is deceived by none of these. He still holds him fast; binds him in strong chains; until he takes his proper shape at the last; and answers as a true seer, so far as answer is possible, ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... and the disinterested lover, but a friend, an angel of consolation, the equal of man in character, and his superior in the virtues of the heart and soul. It was not till then that she was seen to have those qualities which extort veneration, and call out the deepest sympathy, whenever life is divested of its demoralizing egotisms. The original beatitudes of the Garden of Eden returned, and man awoke from the deep sleep of four thousand years, to discover, with Adam, that ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... rock than her fears for her own happiness. One kiss from him would be payment for it all. But all his love, all his sweetness, all his truth, all his eloquence should avail nothing with her towards overcoming that spirit of self-sacrifice by which she was dominated. Though he should extort from her all her secret, that would be her strength. Though she should have to tell him of her failing health,—her certainly failing health,—though even that should be necessary, she certainly would not be won from her purpose. It might ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... was obliged to dissent from his sayings, and then would follow a little controversy. Those controversies were never very profitable, in consequence of his constant desire to force his own opinions on me, and to extort from me assent to his whimsical and foolish observations. Yet he still continued to ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... attack of the scarlet fever, he passed some time at Ballater, a summer resort for health and gaiety, about forty miles up the Dee from Aberdeen. Although the circumstances of Mrs Byron were at this period exceedingly straitened, she received a visit from her husband, the object of which was to extort more money; and he was so far successful, that she contrived to borrow a sum, which enabled him to proceed to Valenciennes, where in the following year he died, greatly to her relief and the gratification of all who were connected ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... sleepless energy, he insisted on and worked for a settlement by consent, with a formal promise of future self-government to the Boers. In this he was in sharp opposition to Lord Milner, who desired to extort an unconditional surrender. Of these two strong, able, high-minded men, the soldier, curiously enough, was the better statesman. In temperament he recalls the General Abercromby of 1797 on the eve of the ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... serious difficulties in our path; first, to make the plant itself consent to give its evidence; second, through plant and instrument combined, to induce it to give it in writing. It is comparatively easy to make a rebellious child obey: to extort answers from plants is indeed a problem! By many years of close contiguity, however, I have come to have some understanding of their ways. I take this opportunity to make public confession of various acts of cruelty which I have from time to time perpetrated ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... resolved to extort, by force of arms, what he could not obtain by negotiation. Suddenly assembling his troops, he appeared before Prague ere the Saxons had time to advance to its relief. After a short resistance, the treachery of some Capuchins opened the gates to one of his regiments; and the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... yet we ought not to expect that she will move a step in our favor; that she has no particular interest in terminating the war; that as she means to assume the character of a mediator, she must preserve that of justice and impartiality; that nothing, therefore, can extort from her measures that are favorable to us, but a conviction, that we cannot be brought back to the dominion of Great Britain. That this should lead us to think (a sentiment which he desires the Minister to inculcate) that ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. XI • Various
... himself, sincerely to believe in them. He is now suffering for those opinions, and suffering with a firmness, which to those who think him wrong, is stubbornness; and, thus, he affords another proof of the extreme impolicy of attempting to impose silence by prosecutions, and extort from the mind the abjuration of opinions by external and physical force. It never succeeds; but, on the contrary, works the very opposite effect to that which is its object. As the author from whom I have just now ...
— A Sketch of the Life of the late Henry Cooper - Barrister-at-Law, of the Norfolk Circuit; as also, of his Father • William Cooper
... bearing, and occasionally referring to scenes which made me shudder; but he was my son, my only son, and I loved him as much as ever. He was now but seldom at home, for he lived almost at the gaming-tables; if he came to me, it was to extort money, and he never failed. I sold out my property to support his extravagance, and by degrees it was rapidly diminishing. I begged him, I entreated him, to be more prudent, but he laughed, and promised to return me all the first lucky hit he should make; but that lucky hit ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... wife, parent and child are ties which at present claim, or rather extort a part of our attention. But oh how poor how insignificant are they, when compared to the claims of eternal justice; which bind man to man in equal and impartial benevolence over the face of the whole earth, and render the wandering Arab, who is in need of aid or instruction from me, as ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... have been put in such terms, that no room should be left for the pretence of misapprehension, and if modesty merely had been the obstacle, such questions would not have been wanting; but we considered, that, if the disclosure were productive of pain or disgrace, it was inhuman to extort it. ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... gold-field. In the bar stood Isaac Zahn, who was flirting with the bar-maid. But the regal dispenser of liquors responded to the young clerk's sallies with merely the brief politeness which she was paid to show towards all the customers of the inn. He could extort no marked encouragement, in spite of every familiarity and witticism at ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... from a just regard to their safety, fled to the seat of Government, it being avowed that the motives to such outrages were to compel the resignation of the inspector, to withstand by force of arms the authority of the United States, and thereby to extort a repeal of the laws of excise and an alteration ...
— State of the Union Addresses of George Washington • George Washington
... and the new company had to remove the rails and discard the rolling stock. But the ten millions were well invested in this public-utility trust, for the company had a monopoly of the street railway service and electric power and gas supply of Salt Lake City; and its franchises left it free to extort whatever it could from the people of the whole country side, by virtue of a partnership with the Church authorities whereby extortion was given the protection of "God's ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... the recent death of his father, had been put in possession of a splendid fortune, the proposition allured her father, who wrote him a complaisant answer, with an invitation to his house.—He then strove to extort a promise from Melissa, that she would break off all connexion with you, see you no more, and ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.
... the letters of the firm without taking any further notice of his partner. The latter sat for some time looking at the letter without venturing to open it. He held it in both hands, and looked fixedly at that address as though from the address itself he was trying to extort ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... of reflexion, he knew that he must do more to satisfy himself, for his suspicions were aroused. He had expected to find Bosio jubilant. From what he had seen, he had understood well enough that there was some mysterious trouble. He could not hope to extort any information from Macomer or his wife, and he had no means of reaching Veronica, nor could he have asked direct questions if he had succeeded ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... see? Instead of periodical, if not permanent, wars, profound peace firmly established throughout the whole Empire; instead of the exactions of chiefs always greedy for gold, and not shrinking from any act of cruelty to extort it, moderate taxes, much lower than those imposed by the feudatory princes; arbitrary rule replaced by even-handed justice; the tribunals, once proverbially corrupt, by upright judges whose example is already beginning to make its influence felt on native morality and notions of right; ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... determinate voyage is mere extravagancy. But I perceive in you so excellent a touch of modesty that you will not extort from me what I am willing to keep in; therefore it charges me in manners the rather to express myself. You must know of me then, Antonio, my name is Sebastian, which I called Roderigo. My father was that Sebastian ...
— Twelfth Night; or, What You Will • William Shakespeare [Hudson edition]
... However, we proved worthy of the trust, I am proud to say, we neither broke the knees nor the wind of the spirited animal which had us in tow, nor did we smash the ketureen; on the contrary, we arrived at our journey's end with both in such excellent condition as to extort a compliment upon our skilful driving from our somewhat surprised but by no means disconcerted hostess. We also faithfully delivered the message anent the saddle-horse, and then, feeling that we had done ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... his fortune-telling as real ones. Such fortune-telling was forbidden to the Hebrews; necessarily forbidden, for astrology had no excuse unless the stars and planets were gods, or the vehicles and engines of gods. Further, all attempts to extort from spirits or from inanimate things a glimpse into the future was likewise forbidden them. They were to look to God, and to His revealed will alone for all ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... of Moses, beginning at the finding in the bulrushes, with Pharaoh's daughter dressed in a rose-coloured gown and blue feathers—his piece is not only the admiration of the school, but of the parish, and is sent triumphantly round from house to house at Christmas, to extort halfpence and sixpences from all encouragers of learning—Montem in miniature. The Mosaic history was so successful, that the produce enabled Jem to purchase a bat and ball, which, besides adding to ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... stone. The armour is linked. This knight was fined L800 by Richard Coeur de Lion for allowing a French prisoner of consequence to escape from his custody. He married a daughter of a King of Scotland, was Sheriff of Cumberland, helped to extort Magna Charta from King John, and gave much public ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... expeditions to kill, burn, and destroy tribes and villages for knocking an Englishman on the head are so common a part of our Imperial routine that the last dozen of them has not called forth as much pity as can be counted on by any lady criminal. The judicial use of torture to extort confession is supposed to be a relic of darker ages; but whilst these pages are being written an English judge has sentenced a forger to twenty years penal servitude with an open declaration that the sentence will be ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... take to fighting, not for dynastic objects, to secure the succession of an Infant to the throne, to fix a Pope in his chair, or to horse a runaway monarch around their necks, not to extort some commercial advantage, or to resist a tampering with the traditional balance of power, but to drive back the billows of Huns or Turks from fields where cities and a middle class must rise, to oppose citizen-right ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... treated like any other attempt to extort money by swindling, and the Marquis will be sent to prison for two months, and the money paid for shares returned to the dupes, and that, I think, is all that I have to tell you, except that by to-morrow M. Gandelu will receive back the ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... a sort of message from the French Court (through Madame de Montjoie) expressive of a hope that a conciliatory disposition would prevail; to which he responded in a strain of insolent invective against France and her designs, saying that her object was to extort concessions from us which we should never make, and that now we were strong in our alliance with the other Powers we might defy her to injure us. This letter Clarendon showed to Melbourne, who had asked ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... Soldan for the latter's diversion; but seeing Bernabo there and thinking there was no need to use farther delay in the matter, he took occasion to procure the Soldan to have Ambrogiuolo and Bernabo brought before him and in the latter's presence, to extort from the former, by dint of severity, an it might not easily be done [by other means,] the truth of that whereof he vaunted himself concerning Bernabo's wife. Accordingly, they both being come, the Soldan, in the presence of ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... told you so. He did come. Came to extort money, goods—I don't know what else. Wanted to set up as a trader—the swine! I kicked his hat into the courtyard, and he went after it, and that was the last of him till he showed up with Abdulla. How could I know that he could do harm ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... Royalist party will never assent to it, and without their aid the project has no chance. To obtain that aid, "the Prince" must secretly swear that after four years more he will turn France over to Henry V.; this promise only the last extreme of desperation could extort from him, and then to no purpose, since he could not fulfill it and the Legitimists could not trust him. And thus, alike by its own strength and by its enemies' divisions, the safety of the ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... compelling us to supply what's wanted! But hadn't you really been able to contribute any more, no one would have a word to say; but the gold and silver, round as well as flat, have with their heavy weight pressed down the bottom of the box! and your sole object is to harass us and to extort from us. But raise your eyes and look about you; who isn't your venerable ladyship's son and daughter? and is it likely, pray, that in the future there will only be cousin Pao-yue to carry you, our old lady, on his head, up the Wu T'ai Shan? You may keep all these things ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... husband, wife, father, mother, or the like; hoping there was the same God, the same spirit of piety, religion, and charity, still dwelling in the house as before the death of the person deceased. These and the like expressions, uttered in a most suppliant and pathetic voice, used to extort not only very handsome contributions, but tears from the person to ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew • Unknown
... last alternative. Caiaphas might put Jesus on His oath, and extort from His own lips the charge on which to condemn Him; but he was evidently reluctant to do it, and only availed himself of this process as a last resource. It was well known to this astute and cunning priest that Jesus on more than one occasion had claimed, ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... occurs of glass being thus employed. The rich were preceded by a slave bearing their lantern. This Cicero mentions as being the habit of Catiline upon his midnight expeditions; and when M. Antony was accused of a disgraceful intrigue, his lantern-bearer was tortured to extort a confession whither he had conducted his master. One of these machines, of considerable ingenuity and beauty of workmanship, was found in Herculaneum, and another almost exactly the same, at Pompeii a few years after. ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... plainly Mr. Simmons' duty to hand young Short over to the authorities, but when he found that Matthew De Vere was the principal offender, a scheme instantly suggested itself to him—a plan to extort money from the rich banker to keep the affair a secret, and save his family from disgrace. Thus Jacob's regard for the law and justice, which was sincere at first, before he saw an opportunity of turning his knowledge to a money value, was now but an assumed position to draw Tim out, and ...
— Under Fire - A Tale of New England Village Life • Frank A. Munsey
... Lord Altamont was firm in resisting this petition at that time. The remote consequence was, that by way of redressing the violated equilibrium to our feelings, we subscribed throughout Wales to extort six horses from the astonished innkeepers, most of whom declined the requisition, and would furnish only four, on the plea that the leaders would only embarrass the other horses; but one at Bangor, from whom we coolly requested eight, recoiled ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... rushed down the companion to find Vetch and to assure Mistress Lucy that her troubles were at an end. And there was Vetch, trying to batter down the door of the cabin in which she had locked herself. His design, I guessed, was to seize her and use her to extort terms from us. He had the advantage of me in that I was coming from the full daylight into the dimness of below decks, and before I had reached the ladder foot he fired his pistol at me, the bullet striking my thigh. I fell to the floor; he sprang over my body and up ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... private merchant "who is acquainted with the operation of a monopoly... will send out or order tea to America when those who have it at first hand send to the same market." And therefore, since the Company have the whole supply, America will "ultimately be at their mercy to extort what price they please for their tea. And when they find their success in this article, they will obtain liberty to export their spices, silks, etc." This was the light in which the matter appeared to the New York Committee ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... strange that such disobedience should be tolerated, but the King wanted money. He was willing to refrain for a season from exasperating the provinces by fresh religious persecution at the moment when he was endeavoring to extort every penny which it was possible to wring from ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... every candidate by such infamous rites as could serve to no other purpose than to degrade the order in his eyes, and destroy forever the authority of all his superiors over him.[*] Above a hundred of these unhappy gentlemen were put to the question, in order to extort from them a confession of their guilt: the more obstinate perished in the hands of their tormentors: several, to procure immediate ease in the violence of their agonies, acknowledged whatever was required of them: forged ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... sprung upon Mrs. Cox in pumping fashion failed to extort from her anything but good-humoured smiles and laughs. If I have not taken the trouble to describe this beloved Mrs. Cox to you before this, it is because I fear you will say the picture is Unreal, no such landlady, no such woman could exist out of England But why not? My story, ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... bankrupt. But if I have found no fortune in the wreck, I have found unmistakable evidences of foul play. Conceive my position: I am ruined through this man, whom I never saw; I might very well desire revenge or compensation; and I think you will admit I have the means to extort either." ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... aspect of the country. Immediately the proud conquerors commenced rearing a palace for the provincial governor. The Palace of Warm Baths rose, with its massive walls and in imposing grandeur. Roman spears drove the people to the work; and Roman ingenuity knew well how to extort from the populace the revenue which was required. Large remains of that palace continue to the present day. It is the most interesting memorial of the past which can now be found in France. The magnificence of its proportions still strike the beholder with awe. "Behold," ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... personal wealth. Careful enquiry has established the fact that no less than 60,000l. is annually paid in fees, penances, and gifts to the Church by the Roman Catholic section of the population; and we may fairly infer that the Greek priests extort an equally large sum. Of late schools have been established in different parts of the province, but the subjects of education are too confined to work any salutary change in the rising generation. Nor is it probably intended that such should be ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... year was over he had personally visited almost every English gaol, and in nearly all of them he found frightful abuses which had been noticed half-a-century before, but which had been left unredressed by Parliament. Gaolers who bought their places were paid by fees, and suffered to extort what they could. Even when acquitted, men were dragged back to their cells for want of funds to discharge the sums they owed to their keepers. Debtors and felons were huddled together in the prisons which Howard found crowded by the ...
— History of the English People, Volume VIII (of 8) - Modern England, 1760-1815 • John Richard Green
... without faith or honor, he could find persons easily to undertake any task, and still more easily others who, if they sniffed coin on his person, would begin, but when they had received earnest money, would extort the whole sum by threatening to deliver him to justice. Besides, for a certain time past Chilo had felt a repulsion for nakedness, for those disgusting and terrible figures lurking about suspected houses in the Subura or in the Trans-Tiber. Measuring ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... think of no one. I know you Americans often speak of the Black Hand as a myth coined originally by a newspaper writer. Perhaps it has no organisation. But, Professor Kennedy, to me it is no myth. What if the real Black Hand is any gang of criminals who choose to use that convenient name to extort money? Is it the less real? ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... to give a vote against Mr. Gladstone's proposal to take away the time of private members. And it is reported that one member of the Liberal party had begun operations as many as four weeks before Mr. Gladstone's Bill came on, and had tried to extort a number of pledges, the full meaning of which would only come upon the unhappy people who made them when they had endangered or destroyed the best of ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... District in the early eighties. He demanded and received a large quantity of goods for the permission to establish a station here. After the explorer had camped within ten miles of the Pool the old pirate pretended that he had not received the goods and sought to extort more. Stanley refused to be bullied, whereupon the chief threatened to attack him in force. Let Stanley now tell the story, for it is an illustration of the way he combated the usury and cunning of ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... ourselves instead of the lawn-mower man—an effect of home, of comfort, cheer and grace, of summer and autumn reminiscences and of spring's anticipations, immeasurably better than any ordinary eye or fancy can extort from the rectangular and stiffened-out nakedness of unplanted boundaries; immeasurably better than the month-by-month daily death-stare of shroud-like snow around houses standing barefooted on the frozen ground. It may be by hearty ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... taxation as so much per cent on each individual share. A tax is a levy of money on things or persons under disguises that are more or less specious. These disguises, excellent when the object is to extort money, become ridiculous in the present day, when the class on which the taxes weigh the heaviest knows why the State imposes them and by what machinery they are given back. In fact the budget is not a strong-box ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... idea of bringing Gilles de Rais to justice, his peers have no intention of combating him for the benefit of peasants whom they disdain, and his liege, the duke of Brittany, Jean V, burdens him with favours and blandishments in order to extort his lands from ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... matter learnt the lays: But if to desp'rate verse I would apply, What needs instruction? 'tis enough to cry; "I can write Poems, to strike wonder blind! Plague take the hindmost! Why leave me behind? Or why extort a truth, so mean and low, That what I have not ...
— The Art Of Poetry An Epistle To The Pisos - Q. Horatii Flacci Epistola Ad Pisones, De Arte Poetica. • Horace
... through his dominions without disorder; but the adventurers, imagining that they were already in the enemy's country, began their usual service of fire and sword. In Barbastro they pillaged the houses, killed the burghers or tortured them to extort ransom, and set fire to a church in which some had taken refuge, burning alive ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume VII • Charles Morris
... claims of kindred are cast aside. Swords ascended and descended with deadly violence; horses raised themselves up on their hind legs, and, catching the deadly enthusiasm, seemed to engage their fellows; riders fell, sternly repressing the groan which pain would extort, while their steeds, less self controlled, uttered, when wounded, those ear-piercing cries only heard from the animals ...
— Edwy the Fair or the First Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... is always a latent love of fame, that prompts to this strong devotion of labour; and he who has given a long life to that which he has so much desired, and can never enjoy, might well be excused receiving our insults, if he cannot extort ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... universal conquest, or impelled by necessity to repel the encroachments of other nations, equally wicked and equally grasping, had been by fleet and army, fighting all over the world. After spending every dollar which the most cruel taxation could extort from the laboring and impoverished masses, the government had incurred the enormous debt of seventy-three millions sterling. This amounted to over three hundred and sixty-five millions ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... Lucy, that she cared in the slightest which was her son; her main object, of course, was to extort money. Edgar does not say anything at all about that; and of course at first she would try and make out that she was ready to sacrifice herself for him, and would scarcely say that she expected him to make her a handsome allowance when he came into the property, but I have ...
— The Dash for Khartoum - A Tale of Nile Expedition • George Alfred Henty
... religious joy, and all the other sweet and sacred things which belong to the silent life of the spirit in God, unless, side by side with these, there is the doing of the common deeds which the world is actually able to appraise in such a fashion as to extort, even from them, the confession, 'We find no ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... gave me hers at once, and even eagerly. I held it for a while in mine, and gazed into her eyes. It was she who first tore her hand away, and, forgetting all about her request and the promise she had sought to extort, ran at the top of her speed, and without turning, till she was out of sight. And then I knew that I loved her, and thought in my glad heart that she—she herself—was not indifferent to my suit. Many a time she has denied it in after days, but it was with ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... her, and claim them back. "O putrid punk, hand back our writing tablets; hand back, O putrid punk, our writing tablets." Not a jot dost heed? O Muck, Brothel-Spawn, or e'en loathsomer if it is possible so to be! Yet think not yet that this is enough. For if naught else we can extort a blush on thy brazened bitch's face. We'll yell again in heightened tones, "O putrid punk, hand back our writing tablets, hand back, O putrid punk, our writing tablets." But naught we profit, naught she budges. Changed must your measure and your manner be, an you would further progress make—"O ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... intricate and rare Did I there strow; But all I could extort was, that he now Did there repair Such losses as befell him in this air, And would erelong Come forth most fair ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... I think, the more it vexes me," said he. "It is bad enough to be a scribbler, without having recourse to such shifts to extort praise or deprecate censure, ... and all without my wish, and contrary to ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... sides with England, in order to establish a claim upon her for concessions advantageous to France in some other quarter. With these views, Vergennes secretly aimed at delaying the negotiations; for as long as hostilities were kept up, he might hope to extort from his American allies a recognition of the Spanish claims and a renouncement of the fisheries, simply by threatening to send them no further assistance in men or money. In order to retard the proceedings, ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... us from our wandering. How oft in prayer and penance there alone, Fasting, I sate, on holy mysteries pondering. There, rich in hope, in faith still firm, I've wept, sighed, wrung my hands and striven This plague's removal to extort (poor worm!) From the almighty Lord of Heaven. The crowd's applause has now a scornful tone; O couldst thou hear my conscience tell its story, How little either sire or son Has done to merit such ...
— Faust • Goethe
... promises went beyond their desires. Her performance followed close upon her promise. She did not treat the nation as an adverse party, as a party which had an interest opposed to hers, as a party to which she was to grant as few advantages as possible, and from which she was to extort as much money as possible. Her benefits were given, not sold; and, when once given, they were never withdrawn. She gave them too with a frankness, an effusion of heart, a princely dignity, a motherly tenderness, which ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... through the court from a cruel and dangerous husband does not make up for the harm he may do and the anxiety he causes. If to force him into periodical payments means that he will be continually excited into seeking out and "beating up" his offending wife, the support she is able to extort from him comes high. It is sometimes necessary to move a family to new quarters and actually help them to hide from the pursuit of one of these insistent gentry. Even if we have some doubt that the wife's protestations of fear or aversion are ...
— Broken Homes - A Study of Family Desertion and its Social Treatment • Joanna C. Colcord
... whether nothing was to be allowed for genius. Trefusis warmly replied that genius cost its possessor nothing; that it was the inheritance of the whole race incidentally vested in a single individual, and that if that individual employed his monopoly of it to extort money from others, he deserved nothing better than hanging. The artist lost his temper, and suggested that if Trefusis could not feel that the prerogative of art was divine, perhaps he could understand that ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... "respectable," in the false sense of the word,—what is not sacrificed? Peace, honesty, truth, virtue,—all to keep up appearances. We must cheat, and scrub, and deceive, and defraud, that "the world" may not see behind our mask! We must torment and enslave ourselves, because we must extort "the world's" applause, or at least obtain "the world's" ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... time indicted for assaulting John du Cummins, a footman, and taking from him a silver watch, a snuff-box, and five guineas in money. Both of which facts he steadily denied after his conviction, but there was a third crime of which he was convicted, viz., sending a letter to extort money from Simon Smith, Esq., and which follows ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... foot upon British ground, they have chosen a very nice way of testifying their respect for their chief: and they have made a mistake which they shall repent having made sooner or later. If you came here upon your own account, with a view to terrify me, or to extort money from me, you have made a mistake. If you think to make a fool of me by any maudlin sentimentality, you make a still greater mistake. I give you fair warning. If you expect any advantage from me, you must make yourself agreeable to me. I am a rich man, and know how ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... or stolen, but that which they represent, namely, knowledge and virtue, cannot be counterfeited or stolen. These ends of labor cannot be answered but by real exertions of the mind, and in obedience to pure motives. The cheat, the defaulter, the gambler, cannot extort the knowledge of material and moral nature which his honest care and pains yield to the operative. The law of nature is, Do the thing, and you shall have the power: but they who do not the thing ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible; but all natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence. Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection. Nature never became a toy to a wise spirit. The flowers, the animals, the mountains, reflected the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they had delighted the simplicity ...
— Nature • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... on the rack. Wild horses should not tear it out of my heart; boiling lead, falling on me drop by drop, should not extort it from me." ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... toward me, and apparently satisfied with the payment made him in return for the refitting of our vessel, which indeed was at a princely rate, when the value of the rubies was considered. He did not attempt to extort more than was justly due to him according to promise, as is the habit with these half-savage potentates, when dealing with foreigners, but this I attributed to the superstition I had so happily aroused in him that the rubies would bring misfortune if not honestly come ...
— Adventures in Southern Seas - A Tale of the Sixteenth Century • George Forbes
... near Brunai, had been from old times the common purse of the numerous nobles who, either by inheritance, or in virtue of their official positions, as I have explained, owned as their followers the inhabitants of the various villages situated on its banks, and many were the devices employed to extort the uttermost farthing from the unfortunate people, who were quite incapable of offering any resistance because the warlike Kyan tribe was ever ready at hand to sweep down upon them at the behest of their Brunai oppressors. The system ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... the authority of Florentius, Julian wrote in answer, that it was a matter to be thankful for, if a province that had been devastated in every direction could still pay its regular taxes, without demanding from it any extraordinary contributions, which indeed no punishments could extort from men in a state of destitution: and then, and from that time forward, owing to the firmness of one man, no one ever attempted to extort anything illegal in Gaul beyond ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... "the enigma seems still in as bad a condition as ever. How is it possible to extort a meaning from all this jargon about 'devil's seats,' ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... whole blame upon himself. Surprised at this magnanimity, the Viceroy—who is described in Don Quixote as "the homicide of all human kind"[74]—sent for him, and found him as good as his word. No threats of torture or death could extort from him a syllable which could implicate any one of his fellow-captives. His undaunted manner evidently overawed the Viceroy, for instead of chastizing he purchased Cervantes from his master ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole
... last spake together," said Hester, "now seven years ago, it was your pleasure to extort a promise of secrecy, as touching the former relation betwixt yourself and me. As the life and good fame of yonder man were in your hands, there seemed no choice to me, save to be silent, in accordance with your behest. Yet it was not without heavy misgivings that I thus ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... for a moment. Then with the air of a martyr, from whom the rack can only extort a fuller confession of his faith—though I fear she had no deeper gospel at the root of it than Byron had ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... awful submission and meekness. But Beatrix's nature was different to that tender parent's; she seemed to accept her grief and to defy it; nor would she allow it (I believe not even in private and in her own chamber) to extort from her the confession of even a tear of humiliation or a cry of pain. Friends and children of our race, who come after me, in which way will you bear your trials? I know one that prays God will give you love rather than pride, and that the Eye all-seeing shall find you in the humble place. Not ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... these passages declarations of the individual? Winding himself up with twopenny-worth of cheese! Pleading for the additional penny for the waitress, whose personal charms and obliging disposition must be considered to extort the amount! And above all, unable to conceive any motive, except aversion to trouble, for disliking to carry "his chop" upon a skewer through the streets of London. How every line revels in the recollection of having dined, and speaks how seldom! while the well-buttered bread infers the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... and extort a confession from Laleli herself? How in the world do you mean to do it? It is a case of ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... regulate, are somewhat grim presents for one people to make to another, and are little calculated to excite affection; but they are eminently well calculated to protect peaceable men and to beat down wrongdoers, to extort respect and to enforce obedience.' The code was re-enacted in 1882 under the care of Mr. Whitley Stokes. It was then extended to the High Courts, which had been previously omitted, and alterations were made both in arrangement ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... keystone of an ethical system; it varies from man to man: or it is 'subjective,' and therefore gives no absolute or independent ground for morality. A morality of 'eudaemonism' must be an 'empirical' morality, and we can never extort from it that 'categorical imperative,' without which we have instead of a true morality a simple system of 'expediency.' From Bentham's point of view the criticism must be retorted. He regards 'happiness' as precisely ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... soldiers' clothes.—Houses were likewise not unfrequently abandoned by the servants through fear of sharing the fate of their masters, and sometimes exposed equally by the arrest of those who had been left in charge, in order to extort discoveries of plate, money, &c. the concealment of which they ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... code message, was to loot Perlmer's desk some time after the man had gone home for the night, and then, at midnight, armed with the false documents, to beard old Nicky Viner in his miserable quarters over on the East Side, and extort from the old miser the neat little sum that Danglar estimated would amount to some ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... the treatment accorded to the recommendations of the Recess Committee and of the Land Conference. The compromise will be repudiated and the millions already advanced for purchase will be used as a lever to extort complete autonomy. The lever is a powerful one. All depends upon ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... conditions of their tenure were such as to preclude both the independence of action and the accumulation of resources which is essential to absolutism. As early as 1282 the nobles were able to extort from the crown a haandfaestning, or charter, and almost every sovereign after that date was compelled, once at least during his reign, to make a grant of chartered privileges. To the Danehof, or national ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... quivering lips. 'What! You have lived among us six weeks, and you have not learned what a free daughter of Freeland must feel at the mere suggestion of leaving these happy fields, this home of justice and human affection, in order, afar off in your miserable country, not to wipe away, but to extort the tears of the downtrodden—not to alleviate the horrors of your slavery, but to become one of the slave-holders! I love Carlo so much above all measure that I should be ready by his side to exchange the land of happiness for that of misery if any imperative duty called him thither; but ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... contained. Both of these officers, from a just regard to their safety, fled to the seat of Government, it being avowed that the motives to such outrages were to compel the resignation of the inspector, to withstand by force of arms the authority of the United States, and thereby to extort a repeal of the laws of excise and an alteration in the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 4) of Volume 1: George Washington • James D. Richardson
... priest—auricular confession—being at that time formally established. This, so far as domestic life was concerned, gave omnipresence and omniscience to the Inquisition. Not a man was safe. In the hands of the priest, who, at the confessional, could extract or extort from them their most secret thoughts, his wife and his servants were turned into spies. Summoned before the dread tribunal, he was simply informed that he lay under strong suspicions of heresy. No accuser was named; but the thumb-screw, the stretching-rope, the boot and wedge, ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... went on Mrs. Wade, "as if Northway really had no intention of using his power to extort money. To be sure, your own income is not to be despised by a man in his position; but most rascals would have gone to Mr. Quarrier.—He is still in love with ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... fourth plan was to prevail on congress, by a show of preparation for war, to extort from the cabinet of Madrid, what ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... excluded, the victim lay extended upon the rack, until death itself became a welcome relief; and upon its walls were arranged, in dreadful order, all the infernal instruments of torture, by which the cruelty of man endeavoured to extort from the wretched prisoners a confession of crimes, perhaps never committed, and of conspiracies, existing only in the guilty imaginations of their oppressors. A little court within the precincts of the building was pointed ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... which are supposed to serve as benefactors of suffering mankind? They have milliards at their disposal, but use most of it for the maintenance of armies, bureaucracies, police forces. With these vast sums, which they extort from the people, they ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... sisters' heads, could not control her curiosity, and opened the door. She saw her mistress reclining in a beautiful bed. In the evening the lady returned and asked her what she had seen; but she answered: "I have seen nothing." The lady could extort no other answer from her, and finally clothed her in her peasant's dress, and took her back to the wood ...
— Italian Popular Tales • Thomas Frederick Crane
... damps. "Take this in thy hand," said Mercury, "and with it boldly enter her gates; when she shall strike thee with her rod, thinking to change thee, as she has changed thy friends, boldly rush in upon her with thy sword, and extort from her the dreadful oath of the gods, that she will use no enchantments against thee; then force her to restore thy abused companions." He gave Ulysses the little white flower, and, instructing him how to use ...
— THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES • CHARLES LAMB
... Harley musingly, "he had nothing to complain about. One more question, my friend. When the lady escaped hurriedly on Wednesday night, what was it that she left behind and what price are you trying to extort ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... a proposal to hand over to these men the government of Ireland, with all the opportunities thence arising to oppress the opposite party in Ireland and to worry England herself. It was all very well to urge that the tactics which the Nationalists had pursued when their object was to extort Home Rule would be dropped, because superfluous, when Home Rule had been granted; or to point out that an Irish Parliament would probably contain different men from those who had been sent to Westminster as Mr. Parnell's nominees. The internal condition of Ireland ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... was taken and sacked, Alphage, the Archbishop, being made prisoner, and carried away by the Danish fleet to Greenwich. Finding it impossible to extort a ransom, they brutally murdered him (19th May, 1012), in one of their drunken moods, pelting him in their open court or "husting" with bones and skulls of oxen.(43) The worthy prelate's corpse was allowed to ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... painting, in lively colors, the murder of Gontharis. One of the assassins uttered a sentiment not unworthy of a Roman patriot: "If I fail," said Artasires, "in the first stroke, kill me on the spot, lest the rack should extort a discovery ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... was not the only concession which the threat of the premunire gave opportunity to extort; and it is creditable to the clergy that the demand which they showed most desire to resist was not that which most touched their personal interests. In the preamble of the subsidy bill, under which they were to levy their ransom, they were required by the council to designate ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... meanest of the Roman race am I, the offspring of an illustrious chieftain, lord of the world in the one case, or in the other the destined heir to my father's calamity. I stand on a tremendous and giddy height: snatch me from this posture of doubt; let me not blindly rush on, and blindly fall; extort this secret from the gods, or force the dead to confess ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... saluting, "I bring a Cuban deserter who claims to have information of pressing importance that he will impart to no one but yourself, so I have ventured to intrude; but if it is your pleasure, I will remove him and seek to extort ...
— "Forward, March" - A Tale of the Spanish-American War • Kirk Munroe
... friendly to the Turkish government. The Kurds, they said, were at this time divided among themselves, a portion of them having adopted conciliatory measures with the government, and the rest holding aloof. But we rather considered their little performance as a scheme to extort a little more ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... hearts. You both are rivals, and love Hermia; And now both rivals, to mock Helena: A trim exploit, a manly enterprise, To conjure tears up in a poor maid's eyes With your derision! None of noble sort Would so offend a virgin, and extort A poor soul's patience, all ...
— A Midsummer Night's Dream • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... sir, and to remind you once more, if you are unaware of it," the prosecutor began, with a peculiar and stern impressiveness, "that you have a perfect right not to answer the questions put to you now, and we on our side have no right to extort an answer from you, if you decline to give it for one reason or another. That is entirely a matter for your personal decision. But it is our duty, on the other hand, in such cases as the present, to explain and set before you the degree of injury ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... better Rules than we are able to practise; we are ashamed not to give into the mistaken Customs of our Country: But at the same time, I cannot but think it a Reproach worse than that of common Swearing, that the Idle and the Abandoned are suffered in the Name of Heaven and all that is sacred, to extort from Christian and tender Minds a Supply to a profligate Way of Life, that is always to be supported, but ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... arbitrary break in an action which we see continuing, after the curtain has fallen. And, as in "Fedora," Duse comes into the play resolved to do what the author has not done. Does she deliberately choose the plays most obviously not written for her in order to extort a triumph out of her enemies? Once more she acts consciously, openly, making every moment of an unreal thing real, by concentrating herself upon every moment as if it were the only one. The result is a performance miraculous in detail, and, if detail were everything, it would be a great part. ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... a Parliament in London that was very much engrossed with other matters. We cannot do better than to quote the Puritan biographer Clarke.[31] "A report was carried to the Parliament ... as if some busie men had made use of some ill Arts to extort such confession; ... thereupon a special Commission of Oyer and Terminer was granted for the trial of these Witches." Care was to be used, in gathering evidence, that confessions should be voluntary and should be backed by ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... private wrong which Harold had done him, and a resolve to exact vengeance on the man whom he regarded as untrue to his oath. The difficulties in the way of his enterprise were indeed enormous. He could reckon on no support within England itself. At home he had to extort the consent of his own reluctant baronage; to gather a motley host from every quarter of France and to keep it together for months; to create a fleet, to cut down the very trees, to build, to launch, to man the vessels; and to find time amidst all this for the common business ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... not try to translate nature into abstract conceptions, but takes it as a complete work of art, which must reveal its contents spontaneously to an intelligent observer." Goethe never became a thorough experimentalist; he did not want "to extort the secret from nature by pumps and retorts." He waited patiently for a voluntary revelation, i.e., until he could surprise that secret by an intuitive glance; for it was his conviction that if you live intimately with Nature ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... five minutes in the street be as though they had never been. He had been brutally attacked, and had thought it best to say nothing on the subject. He would not allow his secret, such as it was, to be wormed out of him. Scarborough was endeavoring to extort from him that which he had resolved to conceal; and he determined at last that he would not become a puppet in his hands. "I don't see why you should care a straw ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... next day, having plundered all they could find, they began to examine some of the prisoners (who had been persuaded by their companions to say they were the richest of the town), charging them severely to discover where they had hidden their riches and goods. But not being able to extort anything out of them, as they were not the right persons that possessed any wealth, they at last resolved to torture them. This they performed with such cruelty that many of them died upon the rack, or presently after. Soon after, the President of Panama had news brought him of the pillage and ...
— The Buccaneers in the West Indies in the XVII Century • Clarence Henry Haring
... trainer that they may not be overfed or drugged against the day of the race. It has come to this, that schools are bidding for clever boys in order to run them in the races, and in France, I read, that parents actually extort money from schools by threatening to take away the young racers that are likely to ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... of Rohatzek, however, was a mere trifle compared with the ordeal by which the tribunal of Paris tried in vain to extort a confession of the would-be regicide, Damiens. Robert Damiens, a native of Arras, had been exiled as an habitual criminal, and returning in disguise made an attempt upon the life of Louis XV, January 5, 1757. His dagger pierced the mantle of ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... where he was always welcome and take up the practice of the law, which he had abandoned since his father's death, and thus earn money enough not to be a burden to Peggy. In the meantime something might turn up. Perhaps another of Gadgem's thumb-screws could be fastened on some delinquent and thus extort a drop or two; or the bank might begin paying ten per cent.; or another prepayment might be squeezed out of a ground rent. If none of these things turned out to his advantage, then Gadgem and Pawson must continue their search ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... shrugging his shoulders. He then looked Skinner full in the face, and said, "Nobody was ever seized with apoplexy in my office. Nobody ever gave me L. 14,000. And if this is the probable tale with which you come here to break the law and extort money, leave my house this instant: and if ever you dare to utter this absurd and malicious slander, you shall lie within four stone walls, and learn what it is for a shabby vagabond to come without a witness to his back, and libel a ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... woods, in order to reconnoitre. Both his companions heard this announcement with satisfaction, for Willoughby was eager to say to Maud directly that which he had so plainly indicated by means of the box, and to extort from her a confession that she was not offended; while Maud herself felt the necessity of letting the major know the melancholy circumstance that yet remained to be told. With these widely distinct feelings uppermost, our two lovers saw Nick quit them, each impatient, ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... and excellence be which can extort this from us, freelivers, like yourself, and all of your just resentments against the rest of her family, and offered our assistance to execute your vengeance on them? But we cannot think it reasonable that you should punish an innocent creature, ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... oppression was greater when the dukes of Moscow farmed this tax, not only from their own subjects, but also from neighboring dukedoms. They were absolutely pitiless in collecting from the poor people as much as they could extort, and this was the disgraceful foundation of their wealth and power. The poll-tax, thereafter, was always a favorite source of revenue ...
— The Story of Russia • R. Van Bergen
... had followed the fellow," Ralph said. "I would not have slain him could I have helped it, but would have left it for the hangman to extort from him the name of his employer; but, in truth, he struck so hard, and you fell so straight before the blow, that I feared the mail had given way, and that you were sorely wounded if not killed. You have ...
— Saint George for England • G. A. Henty
... attributes of some of the plants which Pliny discusses along with the peony are suggestive. Pieces of the root of the achaemenis (? perhaps Euphorbia antiquorum or else a night-shade) taken in wine, torment the guilty to such an extent in their dreams as to extort from them a confession of their crimes. He gives it the name also of "hippophobas," it being an especial object of terror to mares. The complementary story is told of the mandrake in mediaeval Europe. The decomposing ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... his stool in the church of St. Donatian, till this was destroyed by the foolish Revolutionaries in 1799. In a side-chapel of Notre Dame, and carefully boarded up for no reason in the world save to extort a verger's fee for their exhibition, are the splendid black marble monuments, with recumbent figures in copper gilt, of Charles the Bold, who fell at Nancy in 1477 (but lives for ever, with Louis XI. of France, in the pages of "Quentin Durward"), and ...
— Beautiful Europe - Belgium • Joseph E. Morris
Copyright © 2024 Free Translator.org
|
|
|
