"Oligarchy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... either House of Congress, or hold any office or enjoy any privilege whereof citizenship of the United States is a necessary qualification, must depend solely on the will of Congress. By virtue of it, though Congress can grant no title of nobility, they may create an oligarchy, in whose hands would be concentrated the entire power of ...
— Report of the Decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, and the Opinions of the Judges Thereof, in the Case of Dred Scott versus John F.A. Sandford • Benjamin C. Howard
... practicable project in his own day, but then it is only a second-best. The ideal state of which Aristotle sketched an outline (Politics, iv. v.) is not set either in time or in place.] and exhibits its gradual deterioration, through the successive stages of timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and despotism. He explains this deterioration as primarily caused by a degeneration of the race, due to laxity and errors in the State regulation of marriages, and the consequent birth ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... unable adequately to respond; and, often with the improvident assent of the masses of the people themselves, new forms of government were set up with oligarchy taking the place of democracy. In oligarchies, militarism has leapt forward, while in those Nations which have retained ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... the Fourth this largeness of borough life was roughly curtailed. The trade companies which vindicated civic freedom from the tyranny of the older merchant gilds themselves tended to become a narrow and exclusive oligarchy. Most of the boroughs had by this time acquired civic property, and it was with the aim of securing their own enjoyment of this against any share of it by "strangers" that the existing burgesses for the most part procured charters of incorporation from the Crown, which turned them ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... enormous impetus to international movements and cosmopolitanism generally. Unfortunately political development, though great, has not by any means kept pace with the economic; in other words, it is still possible in most countries, and in some more possible than in others, for a small oligarchy to gain ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... bishops, priors who were peers and abbots who had mitres. With an outspoken contempt of England, and an overweening admiration of Italy, he avails himself of an opportunity of sneering covertly at our harmonious combination of the three forms of government, the monarchy, the oligarchy and ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... ejected from the senate by the censor Appius Claudius, one of the most zealous among the optimates. The other censor, L. Piso, did not protect either Sallust, or any of the others who shared the same fate with him, against this act of partiality. Rome was at that time governed by the most oppressive oligarchy, which was then mainly directed against Julius Caesar, who, as a reward for his brilliant achievements in extending the Roman dominion in Gaul, desired to be allowed to offer himself in his absence as a candidate for his second consulship—a ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)
... were divided among themselves as to the form of government. Those who lived on the mountains (the poor) preferred the popular form; those of the plain (the middle class), the oligarchs; those by the sea coast, a mixture of oligarchy and democracy. Other dissensions were arising from the inequality of fortunes. The mutual antagonism of the rich and poor had become so violent, that the one-man power seemed the only safe-guard against the revolution with which the republic was ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... Oligarchy - a government in which control is exercised by a small group of individuals whose authority generally is based on wealth ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... bedroom windows. And the tradesmen's boys were continually leaping in and out of carts, or off and on tricycles, busily distributing food and drink, as though Putney had been a beleaguered city. It was extremely interesting and mysterious—and what made it the most mysterious was that the oligarchy of superior persons for whom these boys and girls so assiduously worked, remained invisible. He passed a newspaper shop and found his customary delight in the placards. This morning the Daily Illustrated announced nothing but: "Portrait of a boy aged 12 who weighs 20 stone." And the ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... organization and functions of the League of Nations planned by Mr. Wilson there was little that appealed to one who was opposed to the employment of force in compelling the observance of international obligations and to the establishment of an international oligarchy of the Great Powers to direct and control world affairs. The basic principle of the plan was that the strong should, as a matter of right recognized by treaty, possess a dominant voice in international councils. Obviously the principle of the equality of nations ...
— The Peace Negotiations • Robert Lansing
... If such a man as you, sir, would consent to put himself in nomination at the next election, every true Liberal in this place would rush to support you; and crush the oligarchy who rides over ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... went on,—this politicians' conspiracy, this slaveholders' rebellion, as it was variously called by those who sought its source, now in the disappointed ambition of the Southern leaders, now in the desperate determination of a slaveholding oligarchy to perpetuate their power, and to secure forever their proprietorship in their "human chattels." On this theory the mass of Southern people were but puppets in the hands of political wirepullers, or ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... downfall of a system which Venetians do not yet know whether to lament or execrate; and he was young and generous enough to believe that Bonaparte really meant to build up a democratic republic on the ruins of the fallen oligarchy. Foscolo had been one of the popular innovators before the Republic perished, and he became the secretary of the provisional government, and was greatly beloved by the people. It is related that they were so ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... priest, the literary man, the professor, the artist, and the politician, who, once in authority, are the most dangerous, disastrous, and tyrannical of all the fools, rascals, and impostors. I want a democratic power strong enough to force the intellectual oligarchy to use its genius for the general ...
— Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... that this theory is supported by the social facts of the United States. When we have made allowance for the absence of a number of picturesque phenomena which are due to temporal and physical conditions, and would be equally lacking if the country were an autocracy or oligarchy, there remains in the United States greater room for the development of idiosyncrasy than, perhaps, in any other country. It has been paradoxically argued by an English writer that individualism could not reach its highest point except in a socialistic community; i.e., that ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... whom I have read. I give my judgment for what it is worth. In my view, the victory of Jackson over the Whigs was the turning-point of American history and finally decided that the United States should be a democracy and not a parliamentary oligarchy. And I am further of opinion that, both as soldier and ruler, "Old Hickory" was a hero of whom any nation might well ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... of Government, in the Histories, and books of Policy; as Tyranny, and Oligarchy: But they are not the names of other Formes of Government, but of the same Formes misliked. For they that are discontented under Monarchy, call it Tyranny; and they that are displeased with Aristocracy, called it Oligarchy: so also, they which find themselves grieved under a Democracy, call it ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... may be justified, but coming at the time it did, nearly every Negro in the United States believed that the "high blood pressure" that retired Colonel Young was in the prejudiced heads of the Southern oligarchy who were determined that no American Negro should ever wear ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... feature of the season. And many of these customs, which grew up amid slavery, have survived that institution. The Washington negroes, free, have pretty much the same zest for their time-honoured amusements which they had when under the dominion of the oligarchy. Christmas is still their great gala and occasion for merry-making, and the sable creatures thoroughly understand the art of having a good time, being superior, at least in this respect, to many a blase Prince and Court noble distracted ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... the middle of the eighteenth century the authority of the Turkish pashas had become merely nominal, while that of the beys had increased to such an extent that the government of Egypt became a military oligarchy. The weakness of the Turks left the way open for the rise of any adventurer of ability and ambition who might aspire to lead the Mamluks to overthrow ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... at Venice about 1278, and was elected doge in 1354. For many years the government of the republic, under an oligarchy, had been arbitrarily dominated by the Council of Ten, an assembly that, after serving a special purpose for which it was created, was declared permanent in 1325 and became a formidable tribunal. Professing to guard the republic the Ten in fact destroyed its liberties, disposed of its finances, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... in reaching and touching the lower chords of animal passion, where movement is rapid and light redundant. The breast of the thoughtful writer heaved ever to animal instincts without measure in extolling the complex phases of court, ecclesiastic, and domestic oligarchy. Statesmanship and subjunction rise and peacefully sink together, and in his magnetic touch, are made to harmoniously coalesce in the political balance. Shorthouse the author, a believer in, a champion was of two-fold or dual cosmos: his colour sense ...
— Original Letters and Biographic Epitomes • J. Atwood.Slater
... beautiful conceptions of his brain; such as the actual forecasting of the development theory before Darwin, Spencer and Huxley were born— though not exactly in detail with them; his bolder conception still of the destiny of man, and his Cosmogony; of the progress of present civilization towards an oligarchy of capital, foretold so exactly,—as is now seen by thinking minds, three quarters of a century ago; his profound analysis of the human springs of action; his discovery of the divine laws applicable to the future as well as to ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... daring chariot entering the courtyard of Apsley House? Great was the panic at Brookes', wild the hopes of Carlton Terrace; all the gentlemen who expected to have been made peers perceived that the country was going to be given over to a rapacious oligarchy. ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... old iniquity only worked in new ways. The pity and energy of the humane at home drove a perplexed and sluggish government to pass an act for dealing with the abominations of the prisons to which the unhappy blacks were committed in Jamaica. The assembly of that island, a planter oligarchy, resented the new law from the mother country as an invasion of their constitutional rights, and stubbornly refused in their exasperation, even after a local dissolution, to perform duties that were ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... march of liberty through the land. Like every other aristocracy that has lived, it drew the sword on the people, either to subdue the whole country, or carry off a portion of it, to be governed in the interests of an oligarchy. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... man, that is an unfortunate concession of yours: for the ascendency of the most cultivated minds would be a terrible oligarchy!" ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... saying, though an old one perhaps, that the government of Venice was rich and consolatory like its treacle, being compounded nicely of all the other forms: a grain of monarchy, a scruple of democracy, a dram of oligarchy, and an ounce of aristocracy; as the teriaca so much esteemed, is said to be a composition of the four principal drugs—but can never be got genuine except ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... policy, justice to Ireland, successive reforms in her system, a further wise extension of the suffrage, with the vote by ballot, a cordial moral alliance with her kindred race in America, and a full participation, mutually beneficial, in our ever enlarging commerce. But her oligarchy has chosen coalition with the South and slavery, and war upon our Union and the republican principle. Divide and conquer is their motto, SUICIDE will ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... French people." He seems to have predicted that after his death they would require his "ashes" to tranquillise an enraged people. Of the other contracting party he says in the fifth paragraph of his will:—"I die prematurely, assassinated by the English oligarchy and its deputy; the English nation will not be slow in ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... and talent, ruling on generous principles a people sufficiently educated to obey its natural leaders, is the ideal which is vaguely before his mind. To ask how it is to be produced without hereditary rank, or to be prevented from degenerating into a tyrannical oligarchy, or to be reconciled at all with modern principles, is simply to be impertinent. He answers all such questions by putting himself in imagination into the attitude of a Pericles or Demosthenes or Milton, fulminating against tyrants and keeping the mob in its place ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... convulsions, in that final stage of her transmutations to which Cicero was himself a party—and, as I maintain, a most selfish and unpatriotic party. He was governed in one half by his own private interest as a novus homo dependent upon a wicked oligarchy, and in the other half by his blind hatred of Caesar; the grandeur of whose nature he could not comprehend, and the real patriotism of whose policy could never be appreciated by one bribed to a selfish course. The great mob of historians have but one way of constructing the great ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... the benefit of all classes, and the maintenance of order, the wisest plan was to make it hereditary. It is not to be denied that despotism, when it falls into good hands, has rendered a nation flourishing and happy, that an oligarchy has occasionally, but more rarely, governed with mildness and a regard to justice; but there never yet was a case of a people having seized upon the power, but the result has been one of rapacity and violence, until a master-spirit has sprung up and controlled them ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... long, a sharp contest between the friends of Freedom and the Southern oligarchy, ...
— Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman • Austin Steward
... Vaucluse,—which gives to the humble student the all-acknowledged licence to admonish tyrants, and approach, with haughty prayers, even the Father of the Church;—yes, that same Power, which, working silently throughout Italy, murmurs under the solid base of the Venetian oligarchy; (It was about eight years afterwards that the long-smothered hate of the Venetian people to that wisest and most vigilant of all oligarchies, the Sparta of Italy, broke out in the conspiracy under Marino Faliero.) which, beyond the Alps, has ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... against a masculine oligarchy ceases when the cause is removed, and the cause is simple. Similarly, the revolts of nationalism against Imperial power, though the motives are more complicated, usually cease at the concession of self-government. But even if these political and fairly simple ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... thought so: crazy with conceit and vanity and arrogance. Who am I that I should set up for a critical bookstore-keeper? What is the Republic of Letters, anyway? A vast, benevolent, generous democracy, where one may have what one likes, or a cold oligarchy where he is compelled to take what is good for him? Is it a restricted citizenship, with a minority representation, or is ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... the question of its rapid and cheap transportation is a most important one, both to the producer and consumer. Combinations have been formed in the past whereby the carriage and price was subject to the control of a few, to the great detriment of the producer; but this wheat oligarchy is now likely to receive its quietus in view of this new and competing outlet to eastern ...
— Minnesota; Its Character and Climate • Ledyard Bill
... industries and dominated the lives of its population. This group, intrenched in power in the city's business and also in its government, were facing the opposition of a new and rapidly rising power, that of organized labor, determined to break the oligarchy of business and take over its powers. The struggle of these two groups was coming to its culmination. They were like two mighty wrestlers, locked in a grip of death; two giants in combat, who tear up trees ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... entire management of the property in seven trustees. These men, under the by-laws adopted, became also the spiritual mentors, and the colonists, unacquainted with democratic usages in government, submitted willingly to the leadership of this oligarchy. A new era of great material prosperity now set in. The village was rebuilt. The great house was enlarged so that all the inhabitants could be accommodated in its vast communal dining room. Trees were planted along the streets. Shops and mills were erected, and a hotel became the means of introducing ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... power was increased after the arrival of Governor John Wentworth—afterwards made a baronet—who had been the royal governor of New Hampshire, and had naturally a strong antipathy to democratic principles in any form. In his time there grew up an official oligarchy, chiefly composed of members of the legislative council, then embodying within itself executive, legislative and judicial powers. A Liberal party soon arose in Nova Scotia, not only among the early New England settlers of the time of Governor ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... general thesis was that not only did the people of England not govern, Parliament did not govern either. The Cabinet governed and it was chosen by the real rulers of the party. For each party was run by an oligarchy, and run roughly on the same lines. Lists were given of families whose brothers-in-law and cousins (though not yet their sisters and their aunts) found place in the Ministry of one or other political party. ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... of view, the English with their sort of Doge, are more advanced than we are. Politics have nothing to do with that, my dear fellow. Politics consist in giving the nation an impetus by creating an oligarchy embodying a fixed theory of government, and able to direct public affairs along a straight path, instead of allowing the country to be pulled in a thousand different directions, which is what has been happening for the last forty years in our beautiful ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... of all proportion to that of the free inhabitants. In this respect the history of Aegina does but anticipate the history of Greece as a whole. The constitutional history of Aegina is unusually simple. So long as the island retained its independence the government was an oligarchy. There is no trace of the heroic monarchy and no tradition of a tyrannis. The story of Nicodromus, while it proves the existence of a democratic party, suggests, at the same time, that it could count ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... experienced, and which contributed finally to the creation of a class of office-holding politicians. But the introduction of the spoils system had a meaning superior to its results. It was, after all, an attempt to realize an ideal, and the ideal was based on a genuine experience. The "Virginian Oligarchy," although it was the work of Jefferson and his followers, was an anachronism in a state governed in the spirit of Jeffersonian Democratic principles. It was better for the Jacksonian Democrats to sacrifice what ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... as he had done. The consequent quarrels between town oligarchies and town democracies do not, however, justify the common assumption that there had once been an era of municipal democracy which gradually gave way to oligarchy and corruption. Nevertheless, these local bodies were English, and legally their members had been villeins; and their experience in local government prepared them for admittance to that share in national government which the development ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... dictatorship of Caesar, and the usurpation of the Empire by Augustus. The old Rome had had kings. Then the name and the power became odious—the name to all the citizens, no doubt, but the power simply to the nobility, who grudged the supremacy of one man. The kings were abolished, and an oligarchy was established under the name of a Republic, with its annual magistrates—at first its two Consuls, then its Praetors and others, and occasionally a Dictator, as some current event demanded a concentration of temporary power in a single hand for a certain purpose. The Republic was no republic, ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... meetings all the principal men attended and votes were taken with the aid of reeds or sticks, the majority prevailing in all cases. The whole organisation was essentially a democracy, as the chiefs, although an oligarchy in appearance, were controlled by the voices and results of the councils. In this as in other American savage nations, the rule governing the transmission of hereditary honours and possessions was through the ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... oath of allegiance and supremacy was required to be taken by all persons appointed to office, free from the restrictions and neutralising mutilations introduced into the oath of allegiance by the ecclesiastico-political oligarchy of the Massachusetts Bay Colony ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... ambitious and tenacious of the name of a republic, was, in truth, a narrow, a vulgar, and an exceedingly heartless oligarchy. To the former title she had no other claim than her denial of the naked principle already mentioned, while her practice is liable to the reproach of the two latter, in the unmanly and narrow character of its exclusion, in every act of her foreign policy, ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Greece as characteristic of the Aryan development. The early war leader became an absolute king, his power tended to become hereditary, but its abuse roused the more powerful citizens to rebellion, and the kingdom vanished in an oligarchy.[18] This last change occurred in Rome about B.C. 510, and it was attended by such disasters that the city sank back into a condition that was almost barbarous when compared with her opulence under ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... individual consequence more felt under an administration of this kind than when ruled by kings (as sometimes they were with a rod of iron) supported these pageants, whom they governed as they thought fit, and thereby virtually changed the constitution into an aristocracy or oligarchy. The business of the state was managed by twelve orang-kayas, four of whom were superior to the rest, and among these the maharaja, or governor of the kingdom, was considered as the chief. It does not appear, ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... simplicity of their customs, their amenability and their anxiety to oblige; but unsophisticated as they are they wield an extraordinary power in Keonjhar, and when they take it into their heads to use that power, the country may be said to be governed by an oligarchy composed of the sixty chiefs of the Pawri Desh, the Bhuiya Highlands. A knotted string passed from village to village in the name of the sixty chiefs throws the entire country into commotion, and the order verbally communicated in connection with it is as implicitly obeyed as if it emanated ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... in Europe and in other continents colonial possessions; the enlargement of German commerce and wealth, and to these ends the firm establishment of her military supremacy in Europe. These are the ideas on the true greatness of nations which have prevailed in the ruling oligarchy of Germany for at least sixty years, and now seem to have been accepted, or acquiesced in, by the whole German people. In this view, the foundation of national ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... most persistent efforts have been made to confuse the public mind as to its origin and motives, and to drag the people of the loyal States down from the national position they had instinctively taken to the old level of party squabbles and antipathies. The wholly unprovoked rebellion of an oligarchy proclaiming negro slavery the corner-stone of free institutions, and in the first flush of over-hasty confidence venturing to parade the logical sequence of their leading dogma, "that slavery is right in principle, and ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... business to be flaunting and arrogant; but they flaunt unobtrusively, and their attempts at arrogance are depressing. Their chief duty hitherto has been the development of variety, vivacity, and fulness of life; oligarchy was the world's first experiment in liberty. But now they have adopted the opposite ideal of 'good form,' which may be defined as Puritanism without religion. Good form has sent them all into black like the stroke of a ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... between 1820 and 1830 were the most pitiable through which this country has ever passed. The conscience of the North was pledged to the Missouri Compromise, and that Compromise neither slumbered nor slept. In New England, where the old theocratical oligarchy of the colonies had survived the Revolution and kept under its own waterlocks the new flood of trade, the conservatism of politics reinforced the conservatism of religion; and as if these two inquisitions were not enough to stifle the soul of man, the conservatism of business self-interest ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... them, and the three or four millions of poor whites—the ignorant, half-starved, lazy vermin you have just seen. They are the real basis of our Southern oligarchy, as you call it,' ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... nor policy a persecutor; his allies were Spain, Austria and Rome; he had thousands of Catholics in his own army, and he gave his confidence as freely to brave and capable men of one creed as of another. But the oligarchy, calling itself the "Protestant Ascendancy," which had grown so powerful under Cromwell and Charles II., backed as they once again were by all the religious intolerance of England, proved too strong for William's good intentions. He was, ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... traditions and records speak of twenty revolutions within the last twelve years, in which the aforesaid state has repeatedly changed from absolute despotism to republicanism, not forgetting the intermediate stages of oligarchy, limited monarchy, and even gynocracy; for I myself remember Alsatia governed for nearly nine months by an old fish-woman. 'I hen it fell under the dominion of a broken attorney, who was dethroned ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... December, he advises "that nothing be done that can be justly imputed to precipitation; nothing delayed that can be imputed to fear." He adds: "Remember, my noble and generous friend, that to recover monarchy from the inveterate usurpation of oligarchy, is a point too arduous and important to be achieved without much difficulty, and some degree of danger; though none but what attentive moderation and unalterable ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... long ceased to follow the course of general European development. They had been successively the subjects of Greece, Rome, and the Califate, of the German-Roman emperors, and of the republic of Pisa. Their latest ruler was Genoa, which had now degenerated into an untrustworthy oligarchy. United to that state originally by terms which gave the island a "speaker" or advocate in the Genoese senate, and recognized the most cherished habits of a hardy, natural-minded, and primitive people, they ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... said that they were the great gift of England to the world. By this he meant the real principles by which the events of 1688 could be philosophically justified, when purged of all their vulgar and interested associations, raised above their connection with a territorial oligarchy, and based on reasoned and universal ideals. Acton's liberalism was above all things historical, and rested on a consciousness of the past. He knew very well that the roots of modern constitutionalism were mediaeval, and declared ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... development in the crisis of a full understanding, especially "among the quiet and religious citizens of the middle classes," that if Great Britain did engage in war with the United States she would be forced to become the ally of a "slave-holding oligarchy[490]." ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... majority of seven thousand votes; and New England, which had hoped, with the help of a man who was at war with all the powerful families of New York,—Schuylers, Livingstons, and Clintons at the head of them,—to break down the oligarchy of which it had been jealous for nearly a century, deserted the politician promptly. Incidentally, Hamilton had quenched its best hope of secession, for the elected Governor of New York, Judge Lewis, was a member of the Livingston ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... Cameroon has generally enjoyed stability, which has permitted the development of agriculture, roads, and railways, as well as a petroleum industry. Despite movement toward democratic reform, political power remains firmly in the hands of an ethnic oligarchy. ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... our statesmen; but beneath the palpable contradictions of his speeches, there is to be noticed a deeper consistency. Whatever opinion, whatever policy, he may have advocated, he always spoke the sense of what Mr. Sumner used to call the Southern oligarchy. If it changed, he changed. If he appeared sometimes to lead it, it was by leading it in the direction in which it wanted to go. He was doubtless as sincere in this as any great special pleader is in a cause in which all his powers are enlisted. Calhoun's ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... cannot but see, I think, by the southern press, that slave-holders begin to fear and tremble for the safety of their 'peculiar institution.' The death of John Brown is yet to be atoned for, by the slave-holding oligarchy. His undying spirit haunts them by day and by night, and in the midst of their voluptuous enjoyments, the very thought of John Brown chills their souls and poisons their pleasures. Their tarring and feathering of good citizens; their riding ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... under what description to class the present ruling authority in France. It affects to be a pure democracy, though I think it in a direct train of becoming shortly a mischievous and ignoble oligarchy. But for the present I admit it to be a contrivance of the nature and effect of what it pretends to. I reprobate no form of government merely upon abstract principles. There may be situations in which the purely democratic form will become necessary. There may be some (very few, and very particularly ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Dorminster,' he said, 'the chief cause of wars in the past has been suspicion. We look upon espionage as a disgraceful practice. It is the people of Germany with whom we are in touch now, not a military oligarchy, and the people of Germany no more desire war than we do. Besides, there is the League of Nations.' Those were Broadley's views then, and they are his views to-day. ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Political Ideals (1915). And see also the searching study, Political Parties (English translation, 1915), by Robert Michels, who, while accepting democracy as the highest political form, argues that practically it always works out as oligarchy. ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... the principles which are in deadly opposition to Jacobinism and Bolshevism. Under Jacobinism and Bolshevism, as their inventors proclaim, true policy must be made to prevail by force, or fraud, if necessary. Privilege is claimed for the minority. Oligarchy, and a very militant form of oligarchy, thus takes the ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... that of some great legal characters almost as sceptical as himself; vanishes whenever his political partialities interfere. He is a vehement admirer of tyranny and oligarchy, and considers no evidence as feeble which can be brought forward in favour of those forms of government. Democracy he hates with a perfect hatred, a hatred which, in the first volume of his history, appears only in his episodes and reflections, but ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... democrat in the Kremlin itself at an All-Russian Conference of the Communist Party. A workman, Sapronov, turned suddenly aside in a speech on quite another matter, and said with great violence that the present system was in danger of running to seed and turning into oligarchy, if not autocracy. Until the moment when he put his listeners against him by a personal attack on Lenin, there was no doubt that he had with him the sympathies of quite a considerable section of an exclusively ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome
... Constitution, that it contains provisions, and enjoins duties, which make it unlawful for freemen to take the oath of allegiance to it, because they are expressly designed to favor a slaveholding oligarchy, and consequently, to make one portion of the ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... made, Hannibal turned his genius to political toils. He amended the constitution, cut down the power of the ignoble oligarchy, checked corruption, and placed the city's finances on a sounder footing. The enemies whom he made by his reforms denounced him to the Romans, and the Romans demanded that he should be surrendered into their hands. Setting out as a voluntary ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... the stations along our route were melancholy illustrations of the evils of the rule of such an oligarchy. There was no middle class visible anywhere—nothing but the two extremes. A man was either a "gentleman," and wore white shirt and city-made clothes, or he was a loutish hind, clad in mere apologies for garments. We thought we had found in the Georgia "cracker" the lowest substratum ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... A peace agreement, signed in January 2002 between the government and the rebels, provides for the demobilization of the rebels and their reintegration into the political system. Despite movement toward democratic reform, power remains in the hands of a northern ethnic oligarchy. ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... ruled by an oligarchy,—that is, the control of public affairs fell into the hands of a few persons. There was an evident tendency, however, towards the union of all the functions of governmental authority in the person of a single man, whenever one should be found of sufficient strength ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... Parliament had but little influence in the elections, and the court none at all. The nobility selected a few popular deputies, but mainly such as were devoted to the interests of their order, and as much opposed to the third estate as to the oligarchy of the great families of the court. The clergy nominated bishops and abbes attached to privilege, and cures favourable to the popular cause, which was their own; lastly, the third estate selected men enlightened, firm, and unanimous in their wishes. The deputation of the ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... —"oligarchy," repeated the girl quickly, "my breath was just took away. I said to maw, 'Ain't he too sweet for anything!' I did, honest Injin! And when you rolled it all off at the end—never missing a word (you didn't need to mark 'em in a lesson-book, but had 'em all ready on your tongue)—and ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... my Village Virus is simple enough. I was born in an Ohio town about the same size as Gopher Prairie, and much less friendly. It'd had more generations in which to form an oligarchy of respectability. Here, a stranger is taken in if he is correct, if he likes hunting and motoring and God and our Senator. There, we didn't take in even our own till we had contemptuously got used ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... came over Split's faithful ally. She saw the balance of power in the Madigan oligarchy rudely disturbed. She beheld, in a swift, dread vision, the undisputed supremacy of the party of Sissy. Dismay entered her soul and shook her body, for with the brunette of the twins emotion and action were synonymous. "Oh, don't go, Split!" she begged, squirming unhappily ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... instinct, hostile to every grand idea, devoted to the material interests of an oligarchy of princes spoiled by a senseless education, of ministers who had sold their consciences, of speculators who subjected and sacrificed everything to gold, the only aim of such a government was to sow division everywhere. ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... into a river, or into a trench as quickly as possible. His family are left in ignorance as to his fate, and their only conclusion is to assume that he is dead. But Mr. Kruger's methods and his ruthless military oligarchy were disapproved even by his own countrymen, and more especially by his own countrywomen, who now began to mistrust the continual story of Boer victory, and asked pitifully for permission themselves to seek for fathers, sons, and brothers from whom they ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... received no pay for serving the state, only the richest citizens could accept the office; and thus Athens, from a monarchy, or country ruled by a king, became an oligarchy, or state ruled by the rich ...
— The Story of the Greeks • H. A. Guerber
... tell me of our past Union, and for how many years we have been one. We were only one while we were ready to hunt, shoot down, and deliver up the slave, and allow the slave-power to form an oligarchy on the floor of Congress! The moment we say no to this, the Union ceases—the ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... hearths of their own; in many, by the municipal corporation, or by the members of a guild, or even by neighboring landholders. Borough electoral arrangements ran the full gamut from thoroughgoing democracy to the narrowest kind of oligarchy. ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... profoundest peace after a full meal; and that civil broils arise among them when it happens for one great bone to be seized on by some leading dog, who either divides it among the few, and then it falls to an oligarchy, or keeps it to himself, and then it runs up to a tyranny. The same reasoning also holds place among them in those dissensions we behold upon a turgescency in any of their females. For the right of possession lying in common (it being impossible ...
— The Battle of the Books - and Other Short Pieces • Jonathan Swift
... what the steps suggested. Taking the slow step first: it certainly was not the step of the proprietor. Men of his type walk with a rapid waddle, or they sit still. It could not be any servant or messenger waiting for directions. It did not sound like it. The poorer orders (in an oligarchy) sometimes lurch about when they are slightly drunk, but generally, and especially in such gorgeous scenes, they stand or sit in constrained attitudes. No; that heavy yet springy step, with a kind of ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... four or five years admit of our believing the worst that can be suspected of the purposes of the Democratic party. It is not uncharitable to say that the leaders and managers of that party contemplate, in the event of their triumph in November, the surrender of the country to the slaveholding oligarchy; in the event of their defeat by a small majority, the extension of the civil war over the North. Four years ago we could not be made to believe that Secession was a possible thing. We admitted that there were Secessionists at the South, but we could not be made to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... "I think it will be after you and I are dead and buried before this miserable half-republic, half-oligarchy, will be blessed with a solid government like that of ...
— Ahead of the Army • W. O. Stoddard
... Sordid Parsimony, Impurity, Ill-timed Approach, Inept Sedulity, Stupidity, Contumacy, Superstition, Querulousness, Distrust, Dirtiness, Tediousness, Sordid or Frivolous Desire for Praise, Illiberality, Ostentation, Pride, Timidity, Oligarchy, or the vehement desire for honour, without greed for money, Insolence, and Evil Speaking. One of these Characters may serve as an example of their method, and show their place in the ancestry of Characters as they were written in ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... the fleeting instants permitted to such insufferable flights of fancy, our picked men ruling! So despotic an oligarchy as would be there, is not a happy subject of contemplation. It is not too much to say that a domination of the Intellect in England would at once and entirely alter the face of the country. We should be governed ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... to engage in business; I am ready to make a stand against the few plutocrats who now usurp the avenues of human activity; and I believe that we will be able to enlist men in support of the idea that the rights of the majority transcend the aggressions of the oligarchy of American capitalists." ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... hidden features of selfishness; and there is no position in which my opinion is more fixed than in the utility of a firm union of honest men. If the cabals of the day be not speedily arrested, where shall our political bark be anchored? The Sylla of oligarchy, or Charybdis of disorganization must be the portion of our government. Of all tyrannies, oligarchies are the most delusive and dreadful, and anarchy is equally to ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... by the invaders. The fires of the hostile camp were seen from the top of the Stadthouse of Amsterdam. The Republic, thus fiercely assailed from without, was torn at the same time by internal dissensions. The government was in the hands of a close oligarchy of powerful burghers. There were numerous selfelected Town Councils, each of which exercised within its own sphere, many of the rights of sovereignty. These councils sent delegates to the Provincial ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the non-Magyars who suffer. The Magyar working classes and the majority of the Magyar country people themselves are deprived of political rights, for Hungary is ruled by an oligarchy and scarcely 5 per cent. of the ...
— Independent Bohemia • Vladimir Nosek
... half-century Britain was under the rule of the Whig oligarchy, which had no clearly conceived ideas on imperial policy. Under the influence of the mercantile class the Whigs increased the severity of the restrictions on colonial trade, and prohibited the rise of industries likely to compete with those of the mother-country. ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... sprung up that mercantile navy, which now waves its stripes and stars over every sea, and that foreign influence, which has placed the internal peace—we may say the subsistence of millions in every manufacturing country in Europe—within the power of an oligarchy of planters." ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... informers. There were seven holders of the office during the last twenty years of Roman rule, and "he who carried furthest servility and national abnegation received the prize." The high priests thus formed a kind of anti-national oligarchy; they robbed the other priests of their dues, and reduced them to poverty, and were the willing tools of Roman tyranny. Together with the Herodian princes, who indulged every lust and wicked passion, they undermined the strength of the people like some fatal canker, much as the ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... and improvement nothing. As the century drew to a close, and the futility of so many vaunted reforms, the hollowness of so many promises, became apparent to the Italians with the shameful treaty which gave Venice, liberated of her oligarchy, to Austria, all the nobler men of the day, Pindemonti, Botta, Foscolo, and the crowds of nameless patriotic youths who filled the universities, were seized by a terrible soul-sickness; everything seemed to have given way, each course was as bad as the other, and Italy seemed destined to servitude ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... we find that while he regards them as imperfect approximations to the ideal, he also thinks of them as the result of the struggle between classes. Democracy, he explains, is the government not of the many but of the poor; oligarchy a government not of the few but of the rich. And each class is thought of, not as trying to express an ideal, but as struggling to acquire power or maintain its position. If ever the class existed in unredeemed nakedness, it ...
— Politics - A Treatise on Government • Aristotle
... the second number was it revealed that the arch criminals were to be found in the exploiting class, a sinister combination, all-powerful, working to the detriment of the common people; an industrial oligarchy under whose rule the cowed wage slave toiled for his crust of bread. This number unflinchingly indicted the capitalistic ruling class; fearlessly called upon the exploited masses to rise and throw off the yoke put upon them by this nefarious plunderbund. The worker's plight was ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... can tell you that, now, Commodore," Prince Trevannion said as Shatrak blanked the screen. "We have a petrified authoritarianism. Quite likely some sort of an oligarchy; I'd guess that this Convocation thing they talk about consists of all the ruling class, everybody has equal voice, and nobody will take the responsibility for doing anything. And the actual work of government is probably handled by ...
— A Slave is a Slave • Henry Beam Piper
... chief, Lord John Russell. The picture he draws is lively, unflattering, but instructive. 'I am satisfied that the mass of the people are sound—moderate in their demands and attached to British institutions; but they have been oppressed by a miserable little oligarchy on the one hand and excited by a few factious demagogues on the other. I can make a middle reforming party, I am sure, that will put down both.' The record of seventy-five years and of two wars shows the attachment of the Canadians to British institutions, and how justly ...
— The Winning of Popular Government - A Chronicle of the Union of 1841 • Archibald Macmechan
... in every other country in the world, and in every British colony (I believe without exception). Non-payment means deliberate preference for moneyed oligarchy, as only rare exceptions can produce a democratic member under such a system. It excludes all poor men of genius unless they can get themselves paid by parties like the Irish, which makes them slaves. It throws undue power into the hands ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... opposing the duke; they declared that they were actuated by a generous disinclination to see an old county member put from his seat; but the world knew that the battle was to be waged against the great Llama. It was to be a contest between the powers of aristocracy and the powers of oligarchy, as those powers existed in West Barsetshire,—and, it may be added, that democracy would have very little to say to it, on one side or on the other. The lower order of voters, the small farmers and tradesmen, would no doubt range themselves on the side of ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... a few simple propositions,—that self-government is the natural condition of an adult society, as distinguished from the immature state, in which the temporary arrangements of monarchy and oligarchy are tolerated as conveniences; that the end of all social compacts is, or ought to be, to give every child born into the world the fairest chance to make the most and the best of itself that laws can give it; that Liberty, the one of the two claimants ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... information about the period of "reconstruction" in the South. Reviewing in my memory the whole period since the civil war I find a great change in prevalent opinion in the North concerning the events of the reconstruction. It seems to me that the champions of secession, of slavery and the southern oligarchy, have been heard in justification of everything they did and in arraignment of everything that defeated their designs with an unsuspicious confidence that has enabled them to mislead sentiment in the North, especially among the younger people. For example: ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various |
