"Drastic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... flame was lit, all of the Zards outside, which were many, were gazing with silent wonder at it, and in the second moment, all the rest had joined them in their confused contemplation. But the third moment witnessed a drastic change in their behavior, for their initial bewilderment wore off and suddenly, with a united prelude of the drawing in of a breath, they all began speaking at once, resulting in a clamorous din that lasted for a few moments, before things hushed again and we could hear a few individual voices ...
— The Revolutions of Time • Jonathan Dunn
... available for constructing aeroplanes of factory design. This difficulty was overcome by an expedient well known to all students of law. There was no money for construction, but there was money for repairs and overhaul. The first B.E. was created by the drastic repair and reconstruction of another machine. A Voisin pusher with a sixty horse-power Wolseley engine had been presented to the army by the Duke of Westminster, and was sent to the factory for repair. When it emerged, like ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... was an old man. He had sailed the seas for two-score years, at least half of them as master. At the outbreak of the Great War he was given command of the Doraine, relieving a younger man for more drastic duty in the North Sea. He was an Englishman, and his name, Weatherby Trigger, may be quite readily located on the list of retired naval officers in the British Admiralty offices if one cares to go to the trouble to ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... The hens paid about as much attention to the roar as a gang of ditch diggers might pay to the buzz of a mosquito. Obviously something more drastic than shooing was necessary. The captain stooped and picked up a stone. He threw the stone and hit a hen. She rose in the air with a frightened squawk, ran around in a circle, and then, coming to anchor in a patch of tiny ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... on a little oatmeal. For an Adelaide University was in the air, and took form owing to the benefactions of Capt. (afterwards Sir Walter Watson) Hughes, and Mr. (afterwards Sir Thomas) Elder. But the opposition to Mr. Hartley, which set in soon after his appointment, and his supposed drastic methods and autocratic attitude, continued. I did not knew Mr. Hartley personally, but I knew he had been an admirable head teacher, and the most valuable member of the Education Board which preceded the revolution. I knew, too, that the old school teachers were far ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... there be for these reflections, I felt the force of none of them that radiant Sabbath morning in St. Cuthbert's. My Calvinism, which is regarded by those who know it not as dragonlike and altogether drastic, proved now my comfort and my stay, and within its vast pavilion I seemed to hide as in the covert of the Eternal. For there surged through heart and brain the stately thought that such experimental dealings between a minister and a people might ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... says, when he had climbed back. 'Chips 'as got his bazaar lookin' like a coal-hulk in a cyclone. We must adop' more drastic measures.' Off 'e goes to Number One and communicates with 'im. Number One got the old man's leave, on account of our goin' so slow (we were keepin' be'ind the tramp), to fit the ship with a full set of patent supernumerary sails. Four trysails—yes, ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... received an English peerage and died in all the odor of a distinction as brilliant as it would have been undeserved. The triumph of the American rebellion so soon after he had ignominiously washed his hands of it, sealed forever his own social doom. That, it is certain, was most severe and drastic. The money paid him by the British Government was accursed as were the thirty silver pieces of Iscariot; for his passion to speculate ruined him financially some time before the end of his life, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... finished up the miserable fag end of the season and with modest success carried out their month's contract in the northern towns. But even Andrew's drastic leadership could not prevail on Bakkus's indolence to sign an extension. Montmartre called him. An engagement. He also spoke vaguely of singing lessons. Now that Parisians had returned to Paris, he could not afford to lose his ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... then it is our solemn, bounden duty to put ourselves right in the eyes of our friends—and of society. If I for instance, my dear, heard anything affecting my—let me say, moral-character, I should take steps, the most stringent, drastic, and forceful steps, to put matters to the test. I would not remain under a ...
— The Paradise Mystery • J. S. Fletcher
... attempted to enrich the literary language and to form his new Latin resembled, to use his own striking simile, the exhausted and unwilling population from which the legions could only now be recruited by the most drastic conscription. ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... having the excellent aim of securing and maintaining a wide distribution of property, especially of land, were equally prominent among the achievements of that time. Jefferson himself carried in Virginia a drastic code of Land Laws, which anticipated many of the essential provisions which through the Code Napoleon revolutionized the system of land-owning in Europe. As to the practical effect of such reforms we have the testimony of a man whose instinct for referring all things to practice ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... more opportune moment. Trading upon the heels of his encounter with Valerie, it made a terrific counter-irritant to the violent inflammation which that meeting had set up. Yet if the back of the sickness was broken, disorder and corrective, alike so drastic, were bound seriously to lower the patient's tone. His splendid physical condition supported its brother Mind and saw him well of his faintness, but the two red days left their mark. Looking back upon them later, Anthony found them made of the stuff of which dreams are woven—bitter, monstrous ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... million if he's worth a penny." Her culpable predisposition toward that pleasant and smooth-tongued rascal, Willy Forrest, annoyed him for the time being but was soon forgotten. He believed that the man would not dare to carry pursuit farther, and if he did, the remedy must be drastic. ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... visited the Provincial Governor to make certain demands upon him, the visit being punctuated by an ostentatious surrounding of the Governor's yamen by these troops. Within the past few weeks, two hundred cavalry came to Tsinan and remained there while Japanese officials demanded of the Governor drastic measures to suppress the boycott, while it was threatened to send Japanese troops to police the foreign settlement if the ...
— China, Japan and the U.S.A. - Present-Day Conditions in the Far East and Their Bearing - on the Washington Conference • John Dewey
... winter while he was tending his trap lines he used to stay for a week or a month at a time at the settlers' houses. Frequently the wife of a settler at whose house he was staying would have to take drastic measures to get rid of him; no gentler measures than taking his chair and his plate away from the table or putting his bundle of things out on the doorstep would move him. "As slow to take the hint as old Daddy Goss," came to ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... the more imaginative and impatient reformers find out when they come to themselves, if that calming change ever comes to them. Oftentimes the most immediate and drastic means of bringing them to themselves is to elect them to legislative or executive office. That will reduce over-sanguine persons to their simplest terms. Not because they find their fellow-legislators or officials incapable of high purpose or indifferent to ...
— When a Man Comes to Himself • Woodrow Wilson
... Schiller left the academy and was made doctor to a regiment of soldiers consisting largely of invalids. He dosed them with drastic medicines according to his light, but the service was disagreeable and the pay very small. To make a stir in the world he borrowed money and published The Robbers as a book for the reader, with a preface in which ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... remind me. On the fifth day headache would otherwise appear and perhaps two acts be needful, or, if I forgot about it for a week, three acts running. That I did not abuse the function the fact proves that every year I would forget about it two to three times and have to resort to this drastic mode.[230] But there is quite a different headache that follows on indulgence during convalescence or when the system is otherwise much lowered. Railway traveling greatly accentuates the need with me; also riding. Girls aroused no physical desire, though I chiefly sought their society, and ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... Vallincourt blood which ran in Magda's veins caused her to respond instinctively to this aspect of the matter. But the strain of her passionate, joy-loving mother which crossed with it tempered the tendency toward quite such drastic self-immolation as had appealed to ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... minor is a minor and there is no proposition that divides one degree of minority from another. Major decisions, such as voting, the signing of binding contracts of importance, the determination of a course of drastic medical treatment, are deemed to be matters that require mature judgment. The age for such decisions is arbitrarily set at age twenty-one. Acts such as driving a car, sawing a plank, or buying food and clothing are considered to be "skills" that do not require judgment and therefore the ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... communication with him, on any pretext whatever. He laid down no rule in the case of Mrs. Wappinger, but it would follow as a natural consequence that the mother should be dropped with the son. These might seem drastic measures to Dorothea, to begin with; but she was an eminently reasonable child, and would soon come to recognize their wisdom. After all, they were only the conditions to which, as he had been given to understand, other young girls were subjected, so that she would have nothing ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... his tomb. One of the latter implores the holy gods to deliver such violators up "to a mighty prince who shall rule over them", and was probably suggested by Alexander's recent occupation of Sidon in 332 B.C. after his reduction and drastic punishment of Tyre. King Eshmun-'zar was not unique in his choice of burial in an Egyptian coffin, for he merely followed the example of his royal father, Tabnith, "priest of 'Ashtart and king of the Sidonians", ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... of Companies now existing with the Duke of PUFFBALL, Sir BONUS BARE-ACRES, Bart., Major GUINEA PIG, M.P., and the like, figuring upon the Board of Directors. A short, but drastic Act, making all such figureheads directly responsible, would go far to prevent similar occurrences, and to abolish a delusive, if not a fraudulent system."—Herbert T. Reid's ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 15, 1893 • Various
... but none of us could get much work done if we went around Indian-fashion in blankets. Real simplicity means that which gives the very best service and is the most convenient in use. The trouble with drastic reforms is they always insist that a man be made over in order to use certain designed articles. I think that dress reform for women—which seems to mean ugly clothes—must always originate with plain women ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... Lady Devereux might have expressed some surprise at this drastic way of treating men, presumably well-meaning men, who came to ask for money. Before she spoke again she was startled by the sound of several rifle shots fired in the street outside her house. She was not ...
— Our Casualty And Other Stories - 1918 • James Owen Hannay, AKA George A. Birmingham
... perfectly natural, perhaps almost inevitable. The point is that, without drastic change in me, it was quite unnatural. My will was unaccustomed to brook any resistance, and troubled itself not at all with argument. Till then what I wished to do I did, and there was an end. I ...
— The Dweller on the Threshold • Robert Smythe Hichens
... to be supplied with provisions, but the confidence in her ultimate triumph was at all costs to be kept up in the native mind. German influence was as deep-seated as a cancer: to cut it out required the most drastic of operations. And that operation consisted precisely in letting it be seen that France was strong and prosperous enough for her colonies to thrive and expand without fear while she held at bay on her own frontier the most formidable foe the world ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... that was far harder to bear—blamed her for "my miserable marriage to this low, quarrelsome brute." Presbury let no day pass without telling her openly that she was a beggar living off him, that she would better marry soon or he would take drastic steps to release himself of the burden. When he attacked her before her mother, there was a violent quarrel from which Mildred fled to hide in her room or in the remotest part of the garden. When he hunted her out to insult her alone, she sat or stood with eyes down and face ghastly pale, ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... prevention of waste and the more efficient use of materials, with a view to planning more prudently for future national supplies. The first inquiries seemed to reveal such shortage of mineral supplies as to call for immediate and almost drastic steps to prevent waste, and possibly even to limit the use of certain minerals in the ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... Carrigrohan to Inchigeelagh. Cecil was inclined to think that severity had been pushed too far, and that the wretched Cormac might be left in peace. But Elizabeth had long been accustomed to turn to Raleigh for advice on her Irish policy. He gave, as usual, his unflinching constant counsel for drastic severity. He 'very earnestly moved her Majesty of all others to reject Cormac MacDermod, first, because his country was worth her keeping, secondly, because he lived so under the eye of the State that, whensoever she would, it was in her power to suppress him.' This last, one would think, ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... Negroes the right to vote but not to hold office. Congress, which had already admitted the Georgia representatives, refused to receive the senators and turned the state back to military control. In 1869-70, Georgia was again reconstructed after a drastic purging of the legislature by the military commander, the reseating of the Negro members, and the ratification of both the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. The state was readmitted to representation ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming
... they "didn't believe in vaccination." Shanghai, as I write this, is just recovering from a bubonic plague scare. There were one or two deaths from the plague among the Chinese, whereupon the foreigners put into force such drastic quarantine regulations that the Chinese rebelled with riots. The whites then put their cannon into position, the volunteer soldiers were called out, and it looked at one time as if I should find the city in a state of ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... there is no remedy for this disease like a change of clubs. There may be nothing whatever the matter with the club you have been playing with, and which at one time gave you so much delight, but which now seems so utterly incapable of despatching a single good ball despite all the drastic alterations which you make in your methods. Of course it is not at all the fault of the club, but I think that nearly everybody gets more or less tired of playing with the same implement, and at length looks upon it with familiar contempt. The best ...
— The Complete Golfer [1905] • Harry Vardon
... shake those refulgent vaults With dread reverberations and hurl fire Whither it pleases each, why smite they not Mortals of reckless and revolting crimes, That such may pant from a transpierced breast Forth flames of the red levin—unto men A drastic lesson?—why is rather he— O he self-conscious of no foul offence— Involved in flames, though innocent, and clasped Up-caught in skiey whirlwind and in fire? Nay, why, then, aim they at eternal wastes, And spend themselves in vain?—perchance, ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... Spaniards invaded Holland they resorted to a surer, if a somewhat more drastic, mode of getting rid of lycanthropy—they burned the ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... overhear. Being aggressively in love with his wife, he did not content himself with discharging Schwartz. Instead, he thrashed the stalwart gardener, then and there; and ended the drastic performance by pitching the beaten man, bodily, out of ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... tried the unattractive berries. The acrid burning juice seemed to answer some strange demand of her body; she ate and ate, and all her family joined in the strange feast of physic. No human doctor could have hit it better; it proved a biting, drastic purge, the dreadful secret foe was downed, the danger passed. But not for all—Nature, the old nurse, had come too late for two of them. The weakest, by inexorable law, dropped out. Enfeebled by the disease, the remedy was ...
— Wild Animals I Have Known • Ernest Thompson Seton
... to John Tarwater was like the application of a mustard plaster. For, in his judgment, they were the gentry, more than any other, who had skinned him out of the broad Tarwater acres. So, at the time of his Patagonian fever, the very thought of so drastic a remedy was sufficient to cure him. He quickly demonstrated he was not crazy by shaking the fever from him and agreeing not to ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... he awoke to find that he had all but lost the use of his arms and legs. He therefore sent for some physicians, and having told them what a chill he had gotten, caused them have a care to his health. But, though they treated him with active and most drastic remedies, it cost them some time and no little trouble to restore to the cramped muscles their wonted pliancy, and, indeed, but for his youth and the milder weather that was at hand, 'twould have ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... stood in the way of pleasure, for the 'sixties were very busy years. China was just beginning to realize that she could no longer remain in peaceful self-sufficiency; intercourse with foreign nations she must have, willing or no; that meant drastic changes—changes in which the I.G.'s advice would be valuable. Thus circumstances helped him into a unique position, one without parallel in any other country; he was continually consulted on hundreds of matters not properly connected with Customs administration at all, and ...
— Sir Robert Hart - The Romance of a Great Career, 2nd Edition • Juliet Bredon
... much more concerned, just now, about his public affairs. It seems to me—indeed, it's no use trying to disguise it—that this has arisen out of the fact that as Mayor of Hathelsborough he was concerning himself in bringing about some drastic reforms in the town. You probably know ...
— In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... talk. She has been indulging in drastic reprisals in consequence of Mr. Winston Churchill's memorandum on the captured submarine crews. As a result 39 imprisoned British officers, carefully selected, have been subjected to solitary confinement under distressing conditions in return for Mr. Churchill's ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... explain to my boy why I have kept him from his mother's family all these years. If this packet is opened by him at thirty years of age, he will read this letter, and I hope will forgive a father who feared to lose his boy entirely, so took this drastic course to keep him to himself. If it is opened by strangers, because of his death, I request that his mother's people in Boston be notified at once, and the inclosed package of papers be given, intact, into ...
— Pollyanna Grows Up • Eleanor H. Porter
... was observed that the modern world proceeded as before. Something more drastic appeared to be necessary— some bold and striking measure which should concentrate the forces of the faithful, and confound their enemies. The tremendous doctrine of Papal Infallibility, beloved of all good Catholics, seemed to offer just ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... the routine of the old agricultural life in a very drastic fashion. Suppose that the Duke of Hildesheim was going to the Holy Land. He must travel thousands of miles and he must pay his passage and his hotel-bills. At home he could pay with products of his farm. But he could not well take a hundred dozen eggs and a cart-load of hams with him to satisfy the ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... enmity for the South a fervor closely resembling fanaticism. Even now when, following South Carolina, six other states had seceded, he did not believe that war would ensue; he believed that slavery would be abolished at a lesser price; but he was a supporter of drastic means for its suppression. His Christianity, if it held a book in one hand, grasped a sword in the other, a sword with a bright and ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... narrowness, intensity, and also the irritating conviction that every one else was heretical and anti-Christian, with which men of that age clung to their religious differences, Endicott had some reason for holding this opinion. The Boston authorities believed in no less drastic measures to maintain the civil peace and consequent good name of the colony. John Davenport of New Haven voiced the Massachusetts sentiment as well as his own in: "Civil government is for the common welfare of all, as well in the Church as without; which will then be most certainly effected, when ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... contemplate themselves face to face; for the vision is strange and terrible, and brings awe and contrition in its wake. The life of the seer is changed by it for ever. He is converted, in the deepest and most drastic sense; is forced to take up a new attitude towards himself and all other things. Likely enough, if you really knew yourself—saw your own dim character, perpetually at the mercy of its environment; your true motives, stripped for inspection and measured against ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... find some drastic means of defence," said the Professor, "or we won't last another ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... rights in defence of the liberty laws. Others adopted the cry of the "higher law," and without joining Garrison in denouncing the Government, did not hesitate to oppose in every possible way the operation of this drastic legislation for slave-catching. ...
— History of the United States, Volume 3 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... Harsh, drastic expedients may easily loosen the threads that have begun to get tied, foster national hate, arouse mutual distrust and suspicion, and lead to results the reverse of those aimed at. Assimilative measures ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... urged upon them to advise the President to open the Volksraad with promises of a liberal franchise and drastic reforms. ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot
... the hope that East and West would come to some agreement. Now, because of the growing volume of tests, and the critical tension which prevails, delay will no longer suffice, and far more drastic steps are to ...
— Warning from the Stars • Ron Cocking
... members have known it, the Coach was even at that moment turning a rather drastic plan over in his mind. Something certainly had to be done. Practically every fellow at the Varsity and Second Team training tables had observed the sudden funereal atmosphere being radiated by one Speed Bartlett. His sad and solemn conduct had begun to descend like a pall upon a heretofore ...
— Interference and Other Football Stories • Harold M. Sherman
... was not drastic enough to suit the Hon. Luke P. Poland (Vt.), so he made his own, in ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... this latter period of his government was wholly exercised in the cause of tranquility it would be certainly rash to assert. At the same time it may be doubted whether any better choice was open to the king—short of some very drastic policy indeed. That he used his great authority to overthrow his own enemies and to aggrandize his own house goes almost without saying. The titular sovereignty of the king could hope to count for little beside the real sovereignty of the earl, ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... primitive life there is a drastic repression of any incipient rebelliousness, through the enforcement of custom or explicit law in the ways we have indicated; the fear of a heavy discouragement to any innovator. If men dared to defy the community morals, they were very likely to be put to death before the habit of free ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... he is inclined to use the verbal hammers too much and to be too drastic in his statements, accusations, etc. But he means what he tells you, no more, and usually not ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict
... for all they are so picturesque, have been little visited by painters. They are, indeed, too populous; they have manners of their own, and might resist the drastic process of colonisation. Montigny has been somewhat strangely neglected, I never knew it inhabited but once, when Will H. Low installed himself there with a barrel of PIQUETTE, and entertained his friends in a leafy trellis above the ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... bondage, not for their service, but wholly in consideration of the slaves. A very considerable majority of black masters, unlike the examples above cited, were easily the most benevolent known to history. It was owing to a drastic state policy toward freedmen that this unusually ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... Unconsciously she began to take on something of his dry contempt, and to share his grudge without understanding exactly what it was about. His cynicism seemed to her honest, and the amiability of his pupils artificial. She admired his drastic treatment of his dull pupils. The stupid deserved all they got, and more. Bowers knew that she thought him a ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... Bank; and the fact that this huge and powerful institution had thus branded me was slyly given to the financial reporters of the newspapers. Far and wide it was published; and the public was expected to believe that this was one more and drastic measure in the "campaign of the honorable men of finance to clean the Augean Stables of Wall Street." My daily letter to investors next morning led off with this paragraph—the first notice I had taken publicly of ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... nails and drinking whisky in the intervals between consultation with a dozen different sets of priests, made up his mind to drastic action. It dawned on his exasperated mind that every single priest, including Jinendra's obese incumbent, was trying to take advantage of his predicament in order to feather a priestly nest or forward plans diametrically opposed to his own. (Not that recognition of priestly deception made him ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... that no plan could be a good one unless it entailed murder. The farther we headed eastward, the nearer we came to the pale beyond which her lord and master's word was summary law, the more openly she advocated drastic remedies for everything, and the less she was inclined to take no ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy
... office was being more and more poorly met by Dave. Five times during the fourth year he took ungranted periods of relaxation. The last time the usual draft was not paid. He unwisely signed a check, badly overdrawing his private account. His father seemed waiting for such an opportunity, and took drastic action. Under an old law, he had his son apprehended as a spend thrift, and so adjudged, deprived of his rights and made ward of a guardian. A young physician was made deputy in charge of his person—a man chosen, apparently, with much care. It ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... borrowing heavily from the trusts to finance fiscal deficits. In an effort to stem further escalation of fiscal problems, the government has called for a freeze on wages for two years, a reduction of over-staffed public service departments, drastic cutbacks in hiring new government staff, privatization of numerous government agencies, and ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... enforcement of the new statute, and it still flourishes as the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice; or, as it is better known, the Comstock Society. The new Federal Act, dealing only with the mails, left certain loopholes; they were plugged up by fastening drastic amendments upon the New York Code of Criminal Procedure—amendments forced through the legislature precisely as the Federal Act had been forced through Congress.[52] With these laws in his hands Comstock was ready for his career. It was his part of the arrangement ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... first thing to do, was to test this probability of human agency, and I set to work to make a pretty drastic examination of the people who knew ...
— Carnacki, The Ghost Finder • William Hope Hodgson
... placed under the guidance of Dr. W.G. Anderson, the director of the gymnasium of Yale University. Dr. Anderson reports that on the four last days of the experiment, in February, 1903, Mr. Fletcher was given the same kind of exercises as are given to the 'Varsity crew. They are drastic and fatiguing and cannot be done by beginners without soreness and pain resulting. They are of a character to tax the heart and lungs as well as to try the muscles of the limbs and trunk. "My conclusion, given in condensed form, is this: Mr. Fletcher performs this work with greater ease ...
— The Chemistry of Food and Nutrition • A. W. Duncan
... whole year, Elsa was obstinate. Irma had to resort to sterner measures, and in a country like Hungary, where much of the patriarchal feeling toward parents still exists, a mother's stern measures become very drastic indeed. A child is a child while she is under her parents' roof. If she be forty she still owes implicit obedience, unbounded respect to them. If she fail in these, she becomes an unnatural creature, denounced to her friends as such, under ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... a few little ideas of his own he wants to work in," affably explained the chairman. "Nothing drastic. A little endorsement of some things he's gunning for. It'll be all safe and sane. We backed those resubmission fellows ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... catastrophe as this senseless conflagration could have been possible. No doubt we shall profit by the lesson, but it is one that any individual might have learned for himself from these romances, without paying the fearful price that is now necessary. And because humanity is apt to forget its most drastic punishments, to revert to its original inertia as soon as the smart is healed, I feel that when the worst is over, these books will have a greater value than ever before. I believe that in them may be found just those essentials of detachment and broad ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... "responsibility." The most of us would regard the hopeless infatuation of a young girl committed to our care, either as parents or as guardians, for a middle-aged man of the world with such horror that drastic steps would be taken to stop it, but we are not so careful of the love-affairs of our sons, and view with complaisance their devotion to some blessed damozel of uncertain age, comforting ourselves with the reflection that he is "only a boy" ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... dimly realized, was no time for solving problems. The minute demanded swift and drastic action. He must find, must save, his son! After that other riddles ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... could not bring himself to do that either. And even suppose he were to make the demand. Jane might refuse to comply with it. There was mutiny in her eyes, a mutiny he might not be able to suppress unless he resorted to drastic measures; and, smarting as he was from the scorn and humiliation of his recent defeat, he was in no mood to cut himself off from the only sympathy within his reach by creating a breach between ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... considering as it is the effect on stocks in general, and on the banks. As I understand it, a number of your loans are involved. The gentlemen here have suggested that I call you up and ask you to come here, if you will, to help us decide what ought to be done. Something very drastic will have to be ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... of a besieging army to starve a particular city or territory into submission, so it is the aim of a blockading fleet to enforce the same treatment on the nation as a whole. It is also essential to keep in mind that the question of contraband has nothing to do with a blockade, for, under this drastic method of making warfare, everything is contraband. Contraband is a term applied to cargoes, such as rifles, machine guns, and the like, which are needed in the ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... not this legislation, however, that rendered the period significant; it was the adoption of a new national policy of expansion, incident to the war with Spain. The Spaniards had been unable to put down the Cuban insurrection. The drastic measures, especially the policy of "reconcentration" adopted by General Weyler, had discredited the Spanish cause. The ancient tradition of Spain's cruelty to her colonies predisposed the American people to credit reports of atrocity. The administration ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... of silence seemed suddenly removed. Lord Porthoning leaned forward. Then he began to talk. Any sympathy I might have felt for him, any feeling I may have had that my father-in-law's retributive scheme was of too drastic a nature, vanished before he had finished the first three sentences. Mr. Bundercombe, upon whom he heaped abuse of the most virulent character, remained unmoved. When at last Lord Porthoning paused for breath, I ...
— An Amiable Charlatan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... that the election and control of all the Dispensary Medical Officers of a County shall be vested in the Public Assistance Authority for that County; and that little or no change be made in the present financial basis of the payment of salaries. The Viceregal Commission suggests a bolder and more drastic remedy. It advocates the establishment of a State Medical service on the lines of the existing services in Egypt and India. This would require the payment by the State of the whole, instead of half, of the salaries of Medical Officers. The Commission regards it as proper and equitable ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... pretext to take drastic measures without constraint, he summoned the Priest and ordered him to ring the Church bell at the burial ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant
... Such drastic measures were necessitated by the public demand that every one share alike. The Government found it extremely difficult to control the food. Farmers and rich landowners insisted upon slaughtering their own pigs for their own use. They insisted upon eating the eggs their ...
— Germany, The Next Republic? • Carl W. Ackerman
... two of Henry's earliest troubles and most drastic punishments had come of a propensity to "sweethearts," developed at an indecorously early age, and in fact at the time of which I write he could barely recall the name of Miss This or Miss The Other by the association of ancient physical pangs suffered for their sake. The ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... development of the cables and the telegraph since 1868, and to the enormous progress of America since that time in wealth and population, this "assimilating power" reaches Ireland much more rapidly, and exerts upon the Irish people a very much more drastic influence than in 1868. This establishes, of course, a return current westward, which is as necessary to he watched, and is as much neglected by American as the original eastward current is ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... are better forgotten than recorded." With some difficulty his medical advisers persuaded him to go to the sulphur bath of Aix-la-Chapelle, where, according to Mainwaring, he submitted to prolonged and drastic treatment. His cure was considered remarkably rapid, and the nuns (presumably nursing sisters) who heard him play the organ within a few hours of leaving his bath ascribed it to a miracle. "Such a conclusion," ...
— Handel • Edward J. Dent
... space (lacuna) above the boots, accompanied by an acute sense of humiliation and a morbid anticipation of mockery. The application of treacle to the boots, although commonly recommended, may rightly be condemned as too drastic a remedy. The use of boots reaching to the knee, to be removed only at night, will afford immediate relief. In connection with Contractio is ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... de novo for every fresh improvement, let us be content to forego improvement, and let those who suffer their lawless thoughts to stray in this direction be improved from off the face of the earth as fast as possible. No remedy can be too drastic for such a disease as the pain felt by another person. We find we can generally bear the pain ourselves when we have to do so, but it is intolerable that we should know it is being borne by any one else. The mere sight of pain unfits people for ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... sat down on each side a table in the doctor's gloomy apartment, adorned with skeletons, preserved monsters, etc., and agreed to write Latin billets to each other. Such a scene did I never see. "You," said Johnson, "are timide and gelide," finding that his friend had prescribed palliative, not drastic, remedies. "It is not me," replies poor Lawrence, in an interrupted voice, "'tis nature that is gelide and timide." In fact, he lived but few months after, I believe, and retained his faculties still a shorter time. He was a man of strict piety and profound learning, ...
— Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. - during the last twenty years of his life • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... and Mrs. Dover in their relation to one another the following passage reverberates through one's mind:—"They would sit opposite one another silently, criticising with a drastic pitiless criticism. This in itself showed where they had arrived; for faith has to be shaken before there is room for criticism, and if love survives the criticism of lovers, it is altogether different from the love they began with. Lovers can be almost anything they choose ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... show itself in reduced costs of the finished goods that are made of them, and that these finished goods will be used in greater quantities without substituting themselves for other things in so drastic a way as that which we have described in the case of aluminum. A reduction in the cost of steel would indeed bring about a substitution of that material for others at every point where the steel and something ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... said, "goes without saying in all my poor dear great-grandmother's recipes. When condition or quality is not specified you must get the worst. She was drastic or nothing... And there's one or two possible alternatives to some of these other things. ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... to be developed, responsibility, public spirit, self-respect and so on. This should be aimed at (i) by our own example and teaching, (ii) by a drastic ...
— Letters from Mesopotamia • Robert Palmer
... carrying its Presbyterian uniformity platform. London city and the Parliament are crying out to apply the shears against sectaries and schismatics; the army is less drastic; shows, indeed, an undue tolerance to Presbyterian alarm. With Cromwell's approval the army is to be quartered not less than twenty-five miles from London. This quarrel between army and Parliament waxes; the army gains strength by securing the person ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... want is waste natural land, on which you propose to confer value; he prefers that it shall be valueless, rather than that it shall be yours. Before population can be re-distributed to the advantage of town and country alike, this difficulty must be overcome. It can only be overcome by drastic legislation. Compulsory purchase, regulated by an equitable land court, is the only remedy; and it is hard that Irishmen should have, and grumble over, privileges which their English brethren would ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... plainness of speech never before (or since) heard from the throne—we brought in several Bills of a decidedly heroic character. G. Bernard Shaw, as President of the Local Government Board, and I, as Home Secretary, came in for a good deal of criticism in connection with various drastic measures. An International Freethought Congress, held in London, entailed fairly heavy work, and the science classes were ever with us. Another written debate came with October, this time on the "Teachings of Christianity," ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... my analogy a sound one? We are at the mercy of Labour, certainly; and Labour does not love us; and Labour is not deeply versed in statecraft. But would an unskilled surgeon, however ill-wishing, care to perform a drastic operation on a patient by whose death he himself would forthwith perish? Labour is wise enough—surely?—not to will us destruction. Russia has been an awful example. Surely! And yet, Labour does not seem to think the ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... another long pause. This time, Elshawe waited. Finally, Oler Winstein said: "You think Porter's likely to do something drastic?" ...
— By Proxy • Gordon Randall Garrett
... indignation!" Our correspondent volunteers the information that "a much severer test of the patience of the Western people will come when the art palace is opened"; also that "the treatment the Western people are getting is drastic and cruel, but it will work wonders in cultivating ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... situation, would set him free from all money miseries, and her from greater miseries still—torments of desire, and the horror of being laughed at or pitied by her set. And in any case she felt that the time had arrived when she must do something drastic; must either achieve or frankly and definitely give up. She knew that she was nearing the end of her tether. She could not much longer keep up the brilliant pretence of being an untiring Amazon crammed full of the joie de vivre which she had ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... life-long opponent of reform, did not scruple to magnify these and similar evidences of popular restlessness into proofs of a deep-laid plot against the constitution, and committees of both houses urged the necessity of drastic measures to put down a conspiracy against public order and private property. These measures took the form of bills for the suppression of seditious meetings, and for the suspension until July 1 of the habeas corpus act, which had been uninterruptedly in force since its suspension ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... connection with the conditions of the present those aspects of the question which may guide us into the unknown land of the future. The historical past cannot be killed; it exists and works according to inward laws, while the present, too, imposes its own drastic obligations. No one need passively submit to the pressure of circumstances; even States stand, like the Hercules of legend, at the parting of the ways. They can choose the road to progress or to decadence. "A favoured position in the world will ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... Monetary Fund, the U.S. government should press Iraq to continue reducing subsidies in the energy sector, instead of providing grant assistance. Until Iraqis pay market prices for oil products, drastic ...
— The Iraq Study Group Report • United States Institute for Peace
... Melrose might very well have some information that could be used with ghastly effect even upon a dying man; that Netta was much attached to her father, and would probably not make up her mind to any drastic step whatever in ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... chose publique du votre royaume"—on the public concerns of the realm. And in this memorial the university subjects the fiscal administration of the country, together with other branches of the administration, to a drastic criticism, and passes a verdict of unqualified condemnation upon it. This remonstrance of the University of Paris rises to a degree of boldness, both in its demands and in its tone, that is quite foreign to anything which our house of deputies has done or might be expected to do. It points out ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... pursued his wild career in Tusculum or Rome, Gregory VI remained Pope for nearly two years. His desire was to save the Church, which stood in need of a drastic reform—and which soon afterward obtained it. The papacy, lately a hereditary fief of the counts of Tusculum, was utterly ruined; the dominium temporale, the ominous gift of the Carlovingians, the box of Pandora in the hands of the Pope from which a thousand evils ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... whole, and for our purposes, this man's name certainly belongs on the list with the just-specified, first-class moral physicians of our current era—and with Emerson and two or three others—though his prescription is drastic, and perhaps destructive, while theirs is assimilating, normal and tonic. Feudal at the core, and mental offspring and radiation of feudalism as are his books, they afford ever-valuable lessons and affinities ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... took prompt and drastic steps to stop this extortion. By his order all grocery and provision stores in the outlying districts which had escaped the flames were entered by the police and their ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... had even held a seat in the state senate. As president of the State Agricultural Society, he was quite naturally chosen to head the ticket of the new Liberal Reform party. The brewing interests of the State, angered at a drastic temperance law enacted by the preceding legislature, swung their support to Taylor. Thus reenforced, he won the election. As governor he made vigorous and tireless attempts to enforce the Granger railroad ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... treaty; and dearly has England paid for it ever since, although, for the hundred years that followed, Ireland sank to the very depths under the penal laws, with her trade ruined, her lands stolen, her religion persecuted, and all education and enlightenment forbidden by abominable, drastic laws. ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... social value of mothers is emphasized by many who hold firmly to the monogamic family. It is not clear that any sweeping changes away from the private family should be made to meet a condition that may be changed by less drastic means. ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... early stages in men, gonorrh[oe]a is scarcely curable in women except by means of a grave abdominal operation, involving much risk to life and only to be undertaken after much suffering has failed to be met by less drastic means. The various consequences of gonorrh[oe]a in other parts of the body may and do occur in women as in men. Perhaps the most characteristic consequence of the disease in both sexes is sterility; this being ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... was in peril, therefore, there was ample justification for the action of the Protestant leaders. With regard to religion, the good of the commonwealth might easily be urged as a plea for the most drastic dealing with the national Church. By the admission of its own officials the Church had become a scandal, alike from the character of the clergy and its general neglect of its duties as a spiritual body. For at least a century the scandal had ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... individual has of the cause for which he is fighting, exceed in merit any army in the world. We have only to have a chance of even numbers or anything approaching even numbers to demonstrate the superiority of free-thinking, active citizens over the docile sheep who serve the ferocious ambitions of drastic Kings. [Cheers.] Our enemies are now at the point which we have reached fully extended. On every front of the enormous field of conflict the pressure upon them is such that all their resources are deployed. With every addition to the growing weight of the Russian Army, [cheers,] ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... pieces which could serve for an outrigger frame. He was handicapped as he had been all along by the absence of the vines one could use for lashings. And he had reached the point of considering a drastic sacrifice of his clothing to get the necessary strips when he saw Taggi dragging behind him one of the jointed legs the wolverines had put in ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... drastic measures. The most violent thing she ever did was to get little Annie, Bridget-the-housewoman's Annie, to help her chase them out. They went from room to room periodically (when flies became too numerous), each armed with an old sawed-off broom-handle on which were tacked ...
— The Long Ago • Jacob William Wright
... monogamous race, there will be no such drastic and cruel selection among competing males as would eliminate the vast majority as unfit. Even though some be considered unfit for fatherhood, all human life remains open to them. Perhaps the most important feature of this change comes in right here; along this old line of sex-selection, replacing ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... was disturbed by someone stepping over him to get into the bathroom. A moment later, he heard a faint gurgling sound, as though something were being poured down the washbasin drain. Suddenly, it entered his mind that Em had cracked up, that she was in there doing something drastic ...
— The Big Trip Up Yonder • Kurt Vonnegut
... thirteen or fourteen years of age began to follow him. Turning round, he shouted to the girls that they had better run off home, or their father would give them a good spanking. To his astonished companion he explained that only by such drastic methods was he able, as he thought, to protect himself ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... plentiful supply of fish—in fact, more than his family could consume. But this, even though he often exchanged part of his catches with neighbours, was not sufficient to keep the wolf from the door, and drastic measures had to be taken. The parish was large, and, as many of the people were obliged to come 'from ten to fifteen miles' to church, it seemed possible that some profit might be made by serving refreshments to the parishioners. ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... led by his officials to believe that practically all the Huguenots had been converted by these drastic measures. In 1685, therefore, he revoked the Edict of Nantes, and the Protestants thereby became outlaws and their ministers subject to the death penalty. Even liberal-minded Catholics, like the kindly writer of fables, La Fontaine, and the charming ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... come. Up to then, we hadn't run into anything really drastic after turning a corner. I suppose we had had about a month of it, and God knows where we were, but we had nobody to ask; and then we ran on a sandbar. The jungle met overhead. We were in what was only a dark drain through the forest. So this, I thought, is where we throw in our hand. We might ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... I can't say whether they numbered a million or only a hundred thousand. On arising in the morning and stepping on the floor one would find from three to a dozen on the ankles. The usual remedies for fleas are either drastic or somewhat unsatisfactory. The drastic one is to send the animals to the institutions, where they are asphyxiated, or take the other advice, ...
— Insects and Diseases - A Popular Account of the Way in Which Insects may Spread - or Cause some of our Common Diseases • Rennie W. Doane
... too drastic. It might be better to hold a meeting, state the failure, and adjourn for another trial. It might be well to repeat this several times, in the hope that the fact that absence of original ideas means no proceedings might soak in and germinate. If this does not work, it might be possible to ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... I need sustaining. I hadn't meant to say anything until after dinner, but in view of cook's drastic alterations in the time-table I may as well tell you (looking ...
— The Title - A Comedy in Three Acts • Arnold Bennett
... cheerful and depressed in turn. His company made him happy and the thought that he would come to live at North Hill House also pleased him well; but from time to time the drastic change in his life swept his thoughts like a cloud. The picture of regular work—unloved work that would enable him to live—struck distastefully upon ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... consignments offered for transport abroad by an American citizen for reasons other than lack of space or inadaptability of the vessel to carry the cargo offered. Another measure, the Omnibus Revenue Law, made similar provisions in a more drastic form, aiming specifically at retaliation for the Allies' blacklist of German-American firms, and the various blockades and embargoes in operation against American products. It provided that the owners or agents of vessels affiliated with ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... time of the election. Drury himself had been defeated as a conscriptionist Liberal candidate in 1917. No farmer could be in khaki and overalls at the same time. There was no reason given for the drastic change of face except the message from the front that more men were urgently needed or the West front was doomed. It was not even reckoned that a farmer conscripted after seed-time in 1918 could not possibly be ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... last-named. Being rather the quicker-witted of the two, he had put in three thoughts to the other fellow's one; but the position showed no improvement in the result, and the enemy's second thought, slowly dawning, was obviously of a more practical and drastic nature. His undecided fidgeting with his rifle made this abundantly clear. No time was to be lost. Our friend realised dimly that at all costs he must conceal his nationality. This promised to be a matter of languages, never his strong point. But, there again, he was carefully prepared with a series ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, February 16, 1916 • Various
... to accomplish this. But they were seeing the approaching end of their domination. The "army of education" was proving too powerful for them. And they felt that at the coming election the decline of their power would be apparent—unless something drastic ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... which courts of law ascertain the guilt or innocence of an accused citizen is too slow and too intricate to be applied to an accused soldier. For, of all the maladies incident to the body politic, military insubordination is that which requires the most prompt and drastic remedies. If the evil be not stopped as soon as it appears, it is certain to spread; and it cannot spread far without danger to the very vitals of the commonwealth. For the general safety, therefore, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... be, and will make an epigram on the importation of sentimentality into politics. In plain words, Lord Redford, we, as a party, are asleep to what is going on. One statesman has recognized it, and proposed a startling and drastic remedy. We attack the remedy tooth and nail, but we place forward no counter proposition. It is as though a dying man were attended by two doctors, one of whom has prepared a remedy which the other declines to administer without suggesting ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... take the most minute precautions against the disturbing effects of the secret and avowed conspirators who directed their operations against his life and the overthrow of his government from London. The precautions taken were drastic, skilfully organized, and far-reaching, and his agents kept him advised of the danger that continually beset him. Even though he had no thought of reprieving the Duc, and deliberately allowed him to be shot, the act of self-preservation, extreme ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... this country, which had then recently been decreed by Germany on the ground of danger of disseminating the San Jose scale insect. This precautionary measure was justified by Germany on the score of the drastic steps taken in several States of the Union against the spread of the pest, the elaborate reports of the Department of Agriculture being put in evidence to show the danger to German fruit-growing interests should ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... p. 44. It was recommended to them by Dr. Baylies of Evesham, now of Berlin, as a remedy for this disease. Dr. Wall gave it a tryal, as well externally as internally, but their experiments did not lead them to observe any other properties in it, than those of a highly nauseating medicine and drastic purgative. ...
— An Account of the Foxglove and some of its Medical Uses - With Practical Remarks on Dropsy and Other Diseases • William Withering
... radical tendencies among its members. Even men of a comparatively conservative and cautious disposition admitted that strong remedies were necessary to avert the threatening danger, and they soon turned to the most drastic as the best. Moreover, the partizan motive pressed to the front to reinforce the patriotic purpose. It had gradually become evident that President Johnson, whether such had been his original design or not,—probably not,—would ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... in 1876, and a few months after Lord Carnarvon introduced a bill intituled "An Act to amend the law relating to Cruelty to Animals." It was a more drastic measure than was demanded. As a writer in "Nature" (1876 page 248) puts it: "The evidence on the strength of which legislation was recommended went beyond the facts, the report went beyond the evidence, ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... sobbed by the ages. Men chuckle in the irony of pain, and they smile cold, lessoned smiles in resignation; they laugh in forgetfulness and they laugh lest they die of sadness. A shrug of the shoulders, a widening of the lips, a heaving forth of sound, and the life is saved. The remedy is as drastic as are the drugs used for epilepsy, which in quelling the spasm bring idiocy to the patient. If we are made idiots by our laughter, we are paying dearly for the privilege of continuing ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... Gerstenberg's 'Ugolino', with its horrific picture of the agonies of starvation. He read the early writings of Goethe, of Leisewitz and of Klinger, and was touched by the woes of Miller's Siegwart. In 'Emilia Galotti', with its drastic comment upon the infamies of princely lust, he saw the subject of court life in a light very different from that in which it habitually appeared to the carefully guarded pupils of the Stuttgart academy. He became acquainted with Ossian, and the shadowy forms ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... being and expressing something to which none of the rest of us can ever attain, but in affirming this we actually rob Him of a glory He ought to receive. We make Him unreal, reduce His earthly life to a sort of drama, and effect a drastic distinction in kind between Him and ourselves. If He came from the farther side of the gulf and we only from the hither; if we are humanity without divinity, and He divinity that has only assumed humanity,—perfect fellowship between Him and ourselves ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... to our still imperfect knowledge of the laws of Hebrew metre and partly to the variety of possible readings of the text. Nor is even that all. The claim has been made not only to confine Jeremiah's genuine Oracles to the metrical portions of the Book, but, by drastic emendations of the text, to reduce them to ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... whole system around a central sun—and now without anything else, the fourth proposition concerning the identity of the central sun with our heavenly Father is added as true. And the reader is captivated for at least a minute! What I have tried here to show by means of a drastic example occurs many times in poems, and is especially evident where woman is the subject, so that we may unite in believing that the poet can not teach us that subject, that he may only ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... scandals which distracted Florentine society began to raise up in the minds of the people violent antipathy for a Sovereign whose private example was so abominable, and whose discharge of public duties was so basely marked by turpitude. A revolution of a drastic description seemed to be inevitable, and, really, Cosimo had no other course ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... to be given on every trivial occasion. More mischief has been effected, and more positive disease produced, by the indiscriminate use of the above powerful drug, either alone or in combination with other drastic purgatives, than would be credited. Purgative medicines ought at all times to be exhibited with caution to an infant, for so delicate and susceptible is the structure of its alimentary canal, that disease is but too frequently caused by that which was ...
— The Maternal Management of Children, in Health and Disease. • Thomas Bull, M.D.
... cuttings had become the official act of the department. What that meant, you can perhaps hardly conceive. Here was popular musical comedy censored as it had never been censored before. Time was too short for negotiation; besides the whole thing was too drastic for half measures to be of any avail. Dullness, decorum, and disaster stared the management in the face. Suddenly perceiving that its strength lay in submission, it accepted the situation like a man, and ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... the distribution defends them. The most bigoted British Conservative hesitates to say that his king should be much poorer than Mr. Rockefeller, or to proclaim the moral superiority of prostitution to needlework on the ground that it pays better. The need for a drastic redistribution of income in all civilized countries is now as obvious and as generally admitted as the need ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... the unsavoury beach; vanished for ever is many a landmark of old Naples, and new buildings, streets and squares, blank, dreary, pretentious and staring, have arisen in their places. This thorough sventramento di Napoli, as the citizens graphically term this drastic reconstruction of the old capital of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, is no doubt beneficial, not to say necessary, and we make no protest against these wholesale changes, which have certainly tended to destroy utterly its ancient character and appearance. But all seems commonplace, ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... policy, are thus in relatively the same position as the workers in one of the industrial countries. They are paid for their raw material a fraction of the value of the finished product. They are expected to buy back the finished product, which is a manifest impossibility. There is thus a drastic limitation on the exploitation of undeveloped countries, just as there is a limitation on the exploitation of domestic labor. In both cases the people as consumers can buy back less in value than the exploiters have to sell. Obviously the time must come when all the undeveloped ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing
... the formal declaration of hostilities. Within the United States two political parties—the Federalists and the Republicans—were struggling for mastery. The one defended, though half-heartedly, the British, and demanded drastic action against the French spoliators. The other denounced British insolence and extolled our ancient allies and brothers in republicanism, the French. While the politicians quarreled the British stole our sailors and the French stole our ships. In 1798 ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... potash, but careful investigation both in laboratory pot cultures and in the field, has shown that these can account for only a relatively temporary effect on growth. It is suggested that the composts act mainly by modifying the course of humus decomposition, thus bringing about drastic changes in the biological activities of the organic substrate ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Seventh Annual Report • Various
... regard almost every record outside those of her residence at Antwerp[1] with a suspicion which is in many cases surely unwarranted and undue. Having energetically cleared away the more peccant rubbish, Dr. Bernbaum became, it appears to us, a little too drastic, and had he then discriminated rather than swept clean, we were better able wholly to follow the conclusions at which he arrives. He even says that after '1671'[2] when 'she began to write for the stage ... such meagre contemporary notices ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... is to be done it is done brutally, forthwith and notwithstanding the respective merits, from an heroic point of view, of active and passive agents. Being myself so situated in life that I am never likely to take part in any affair more passionate and drastic than a football match or a law-suit, I found the savage reality, the candour and the unbridled wrath of Where Bonds are Loosed (Duckworth) most welcome by contrast. It gave me pleasure to see a man's annoyance being worked off by the use of fists, knives and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 6, 1914 • Various
... in the case of Prigg v. Pennsylvania that the officers of the State were not legally obligated to assist in the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793, Congress passed another and a more drastic measure in 1850 which, although unusually rigid in its terms, was enthusiastically supported by the Supreme Court in upholding the slavery regime. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 deprived the Negro suspect of the right of a trial by jury to determine the question of his freedom in a competent ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... the position, and such the considerations, that led the three Empires to adopt more drastic proposals. Having found, meanwhile, by informal conferences with the Herzegovinian leaders, what were the essentials to a lasting settlement, they prepared to embody them in a second Note, the Berlin Memorandum, issued on May 13. It was drawn up by the three Imperial Chancellors at Berlin, ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... what that explosion meant, knew that it was part of the punishment promised by the German foe. "Gott strafe England" had come to pass. But they could not understand why the enemy had singled them out for such drastic distinction. The more alert and cool-headed of the men battled with their fellows and shouted instructions to get the women folks and the kiddies back indoors and down into their cellars. The night-gowned and pajamaed ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... of Mark vi. 20 suggests that the Baptist's first sermon before Herod was followed by another, and yet another. The Baptist dealt with general subjects, urged on the King's attention some minor reforms, which were not too personal or drastic, and won his genuine regard. We are told that he used to hear (the imperfect tense) him gladly, and "did many things." It was a relief to Herod's mind to feel that there were many things which he could do, many wrongs which he could set right, while the ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... interests, has been touched upon; how Government loaned vast sums of public money, free of interest, to the traders, while at the same time refusing to assist the impoverished and destitute; how it granted immunity from punishment to the rich and powerful, and inflicted the most drastic penalties upon poor debtors and penniless violators of the law; how it allowed the possessing classes to evade taxation on a large scale, and effected summarily cruel laws permitting landlords to evict tenants for non- payment of ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... South, between their convictions and predilections on one side and expatriation on the other side—resistance to invasion, not secession, the issue. But four years later, when in 1865 all that they had believed and feared in 1861 had come to pass, these men required no drastic measures to bring them to terms. Events more potent than acts of Congress had already reconstructed them. Lincoln with a forecast of this had shaped his ends accordingly. Johnson, himself a Southern man, understood it even better than Lincoln, and backed by the legacy ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... pressure, and I thought it wise to move to a larger and apparently stronger floe about 200 yds. away, off the starboard bow of the ship. This camp was to become known as Dump Camp, owing to the amount of stuff that was thrown away there. We could not afford to carry unnecessary gear, and a drastic sorting of equipment took place. I decided to issue a complete new set of Burberrys and underclothing to each man, and also a supply of new socks. The camp was transferred to the larger floe quickly, and I began there ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... actually given to the world. The 'copy' is not only extremely clear, but remarkably free from erasures and interpolations. But when his first proofs reach him M. Zola revises them with the greatest care. He will strike out whole passages in the most drastic manner, and alter others until ...
— With Zola in England • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... educated classes had been well prepared by their past history for the reception and rapid development of the Socialist virus. For a century and a half the country had been subjected to a series of drastic changes, administrative and social, by the energetic action of the Autocratic Power, with little spontaneous co-operation on the part of the people. In a nation with such a history, Socialistic ideas naturally found favour, because all Socialist systems until quite recent times were founded ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... conditions of life, so long as she could further her own ends, which were those of the pope at Rome; and so stern and strict was her view of life, and so rigid was her discipline, that it was impossible for her to reconcile the lighter-minded Spaniards to her mode of thinking. For a short time, by drastic methods, she subdued to some extent the frivolous temper of her people; but she was so unlovable in her ways, and so unloved by the people at large, that the sum total of her influence upon Spanish life, apart from the somewhat questionable advantage which she gave ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger |
