"Chattel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... you that no chattel of the Church, no bond-slave of pope or bishop can enter my Man-Factory? Didn't I tell you that you couldn't enter unless your religion, whatever it might be, was your own ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Sudan; composed of every tribe, it was a curious mixture, good, bad, and indifferent. Some were slaves who had been given, in free gift, by their owners to the Miri (Government), and men never part with a good "chattel," except for a sufficient cause. As will be seen, many of the names ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... was, naturally and necessarily, the property, the chattel, of the man: marriage was not then a matrimonial syndicate of two: marriage meant that a woman sought a provider, a supporter, a defender; the man a mate for his delight, his comfort, and his solace, a keeper op is cave or hut, a mother and nurse ...
— Hints for Lovers • Arnold Haultain
... some extracts from a diary kept during that period may still have an interest; for there is nothing in human history so momentous as the transit of a race from chattel-slavery to armed freedom; nor can this change be photographed save by the actual contemporaneous words of those who saw it in the process. Perhaps there may also appear an element of dramatic interest in the record, when one considers that here, in the delightful regions of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... now that shone upon Aunt Kizzie and her child. But night came, utterly dark and cheerless night, to both mother and boy. The two were put upon the block together. The boy showed for himself. But the sexagenarian human chattel was mercilessly scrutinized. She was made to sing, dance, and run. Her red turban was torn off, and in spite of the hirsutian manipulations to which she had been subjected, her wool appeared, like Shakspeare's spirits, mixed, ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... with women. If they submit themselves to their husbands they receive praise, but if they desire to rule, they get less credit even than the husbands who submit to their rule. But the husband ought to rule his wife, not as a master does a chattel, but as the soul governs the body, by sympathy and goodwill. As he ought to govern the body by not being a slave to its pleasures and desires, so he ought to rule his ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... that the Visiter did actually advertise "Jayne's Expectorant," and such an expectoration of pious reprehension as this did call forth! The Visiter denied that the advertisement was immoral, and carried the war into Africa—that old man-stealing Africa—and there took the ground that chattel slavery never did exist among the Jews; that what we now charge upon them as such was a system of bonded servitude; that the contract was originally between master and servant; the consideration of the labor paid to the servant; that in all cases of ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... more repugnant to European feelings. In Africa a born chattel is a chattel for ever: the native phrase is, ''Pose man once come up slave, he be slave all time.' There is no such thing as absolute manumission: the unsophisticated libertus himself would not dream of claiming it. We have on board ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... perhaps: my fate is none too soft. Thou speakest as a good man speaks, then be So good as not to speak with me today. I am thy chattel, take me as thy chattel, And let me, like a chattel, keep my thoughts Unspoken, only uttered to myself! [She weeps silently with compressed lips, her face turned toward ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... as we retraced our steps to Tavistock Street, "you are my thing, my chattel, my famulus. No slave of old belonged more completely to a free-born citizen. You ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... dark as himself. He owned nothing, not even himself, yet his dream of riches is the motive of my tale. Regarded as a chattel, for whom a bill of sale would have been made as readily as for a bullock, he proved himself a man and brother by a prompt exhibition of traits too common to human nature when chance and some heroism on his part gave into his hands the ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... and I belonged to a Baptist preacher. Until I was fifteen years old I was taught that I was his own chattel-property, and he could do with me like he wanted to, but he had been taught that way too, and we both believed it. I never did hold nothing against him for being hard on Negroes sometimes, and I don't think ...
— Slave Narratives, Oklahoma - A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From - Interviews with Former Slaves • Various
... instructions to act for me, and even an authorization in writing, if you prefer it. She is already in the habit of coming here; but her visits will give you very little trouble. And, as she is a slave, or, as you call it, I believe, a chattel, she will be already quite accustomed to the treatment which her class are in the habit of receiving from ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... you now belong to me, you are my property, my chattel; I am going to give you my instructions, and they must be ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... of free government. It has commenced and now wages an unholy war against this Union, and thus assails the liberty of our country and of mankind. It has framed a government based on the eternity of chattel slavery, and demands in its name to rule the larger portion of the Union. It seeks to sever the lakes from the gulf, and the mighty Mississippi and its vast arterial tributary system. It asks to be let alone in the commission of all these ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... appeared to you. Pleading for mercy to the unfortunate. We are in your hands as in the hand of God, Helpless. O then accord the unhoped for boon! By what is dear to thee, thy veriest own, I pray thee,—chattel or child, or holier name! Search through the world, thou wilt not find the man Who could resist ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... again, in a kind of bewilderment. In truth she did not yet understand what had happened to her—how it could have happened to her—to her, whose life, soul, and body, to the red ripe of its inmost heart, was all Maxwell's, his possession, his chattel. ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to the world. We are its playthings, as the dust is the plaything of the wind, or the dead leaf of the floods. God at least respects our dignity, but the world rolls us contemptuously along in its merciless waves, in order to make it plain that we are its thing and its chattel. ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... evolution of our housewife. We are apt to think of the home as originating in a sort of cave, where the little unit—the Man, the Woman, and the Children—dwelt in isolation, ever on the watch against marauders, either animal or human. In this cave the woman was the chattel of man; he had seized her by force ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... coin was mine, the chattel his. But now (by virtue of the said exchange And barter) vice versa all the coin, Rer juris operationem, vests I' the boy and his assigns till ding o' doom; In saecula saeculo-o-o-orum; (I think I hear the Abate mouth out that.) To have and hold the same to him ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... happiness, whose only occupation was to think of your pleasures and invent new ones, who was so full of love for you—in her hair, her feet, her ears—your ballerina, in short, whose every look was a benediction; who for six years has thought of nothing but you, who was so entirely your chattel that I have never been anything but an effluence of your soul, as light is that of the sun. However, for lack of money and of honor, I can never be your wife. I have at any rate provided for your future by ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... credit. They don't want Dunn's sending all over creation that they've put chattel-mortgages ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... it better to live and suffer and die in that way, as long as you have art as your goal. A thousand times would I prefer to live that way than to be my husband's servant, the slave of my children, and a household chattel!" exclaimed Janina with ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... price of submission to her tastes and to her desires. How different had it not been with Louise of Stolberg: united to this man twelve years before, a mere child of nineteen, given over to him as his wife, his chattel, his property, to torment and lock up as he might torment and lock up his dog or his horse; losing all influence over him with every day which made her less of a novelty and diminished the chance of an heir; and sickened and alarmed more and more by the ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... sudden fear seized me, and as soon as the housekeeper came up I went to seek Ann in our chamber. There stood all her chattel, so neat as only she could make them; and I learnt from Susan that Ann had gone down, some time since, into Aunt ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the first tidings of her betrothal with Alaric struck him as though he had still fancied himself a favoured lover. He felt as though, in his absence, he had been robbed of a prize which was all his own, as though a chattel had been taken from him to which he had a full right; as though all the Hampton party, Mrs. Woodward included, were in a conspiracy to defraud him the moment his back ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... Constitution essential to the national welfare.' But my view is that whatever they said, and whatever, on the surface of their minds, they thought, the people of the North knew, even if they denied it to themselves, that chattel slavery was impossible in the modern world; and furthermore that the people of the South were justified in that instinct which told them that the institution, fatally menaced, was to be saved only by secession. The kernel of the matter, to my thinking, lay in ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... last Will, I insist on it still, So sneer on and welcome And e'en laugh your fill. I, William Hickington, Poet of Pocklington, Do give and bequeathe, As free as I breathe, To thee, Mary Jaram, The queen of my haram, My cash and cattle, With every chattel, To have and to hold, Come heat or come cold, Sans hindrance or strife, (Tho' thou art not my wife,) As witness my hand, Just here as I stand, This 12th of July, In the ...
— The Mirror, 1828.07.05, Issue No. 321 - The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction • Various
... or kneel with his father in the holiness of prayer. The recollections of his childhood would be crushed out by agonizing experiences of bondage; he would forget his name and the face of his friends, and at last preserve only the horrible consciousness that he was the chattel of his master! ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... who calls attention and with reason to the importance of loans on chattel mortgages. But Berkeley, Querist, No. 265, remarks that a squire with a yearly income of L1000 can, "upon an emergency," do less good or evil than a merchant with ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... at my opportunity. "If you are not merely a chattel and a decoy, if there is any womanhood, any self-respect in you, you will keep faith ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... years old, is natural humanity. The beach which the ocean of knowledge—you may call it science if you like—is flowing over, is theological humanity. Somewhere between the Sermon on the Mount and the teachings of Saint Augustine sin was made a transferable chattel. (I leave the interval wide for others ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... lit. a chattel; and in The Nights a white slave trained to arms. The "Mameluke Beys" of Egypt were locally called the "Ghuzz," I use the convenient word ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... no chattel of mine," said the merchant. "He is the thrall of goodman Reas, over in Rathsdale—a morning's walk from here. If you would deal with him a guide will soon be got to take you over ...
— Olaf the Glorious - A Story of the Viking Age • Robert Leighton
... were subject to the control of a vulgar, narrow-minded, tyrannical master. This same gentleman, having heard of the fame of George's invention, took a ride over to the factory, to see what this intelligent chattel had been about. He was received with great enthusiasm by the employer, who congratulated him on possessing so valuable a slave. He was waited upon over the factory, shewn the machinery by George, who, in high spirits, talked so fluently, held himself ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 453 - Volume 18, New Series, September 4, 1852 • Various
... to this scion of the Sanghurst brood, who will be heir to all his father's ill-gotten wealth. But if I know Mistress Joan, as I think I do, she will scarce permit herself to be given over like a chattel, though she may have a sore fight ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... the Semitic tribes. We must go back to the age of Abraham and Sarah to find a Hebrew woman possessed of the same powers as the Babylonian lady who, in the fifth year of Cambyses, sold a slave for two manehs and five shekels of silver, her husband and mother guaranteeing the value of the chattel that was thus sold. ...
— Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs • Rev. A. H. Sayce
... to her dependent husband would be profoundly modified, in comparison with that of the ordinary captive female, whereas such a captive, seized by the usual process of hostile capture, had been a mere chattel utterly without power; she, as a free agent in her own home, with her will backed by that of her brothers" [why not, I would ask, her sisters and her mother?] "could impose ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... When my fellow-chattel appeared next morning with my coffee, he was embarrassed. With guile he strove to be talkative about matters of no consequence. But this ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... whatever is in their apprehension, menial drudgery; but their activity in fact contributes appreciably to the sustenance of the group. The subsequent stage of quasi-peaceable industry is usually characterised by an established chattel slavery, herds of cattle, and a servile class of herdsmen and shepherds; industry has advanced so far that the community is no longer dependent for its livelihood on the chase or on any other form of activity that can fairly be classed as exploit. From this point ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... comfortably against the wall, fishing his quill toothpick from his waistcoat pocket. The two bankers, Phelps and Elder, sat off in a corner behind the dinner-table, where they could finish their discussion of the new usury law and its effect on chattel security loans. The real estate agent, an old man with a smiling, hypocritical face, soon joined them. The coal and lumber dealer and the cattle shipper sat on opposite sides of the hard coal-burner, their feet on the nickel-work. Steavens took a book ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... North was not as great as had been expected. Such affirmations by respectable Southern gentlemen, who were perfectly sincere, had been heard before. In fact, almost everybody in the South was ready to declare himself likewise, and with equal sincerity, as to the abolition of the old form of chattel slavery. But the question of far superior importance was, what he would put in the place of the old form of chattel slavery. There was the rub, and this had come to be well understood at the North in the light of the reports from the South, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... the king; that every superior tenant should do homage to his lord; that every villein should be the bondman of the free; and that every slave should, without any property however limited and insecure, be the absolute chattel of some master. The whole system was connected with military service. This was the feudal system. There was some resemblance to it in parts of the Saxon organization; but under that organization there was so much of freedom in the allodial or free tenure of land that a great deal of other freedom ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... that, amidst all her trials, Winifred felt the loss of her father's favourite chair as a crowning misery, trivial as was that loss, when hope itself was lost. She had identified that very humble chattel with his figure almost her life long. She almost expected to see the two fair hands (for, truth to tell, the aged steward had never worked hard) on each side, and the venerable kind face projected forwards from its deep concave, arched over that white ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... were clearly defined, but it is certain that they were looked upon as inferior beings. The prevalent customs with regard to the marriage dower show in no uncertain fashion that the wife was considered to a certain extent as the chattel and property of her husband; for a woman could not marry without a dower, but it was paid not by but to her parents, and by her future husband. A marriage of that description may be likened to the sale of a bill of goods. In further proof of this dependent ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... framed as to favor the employer in every instance, and he does not scruple to get all out of the industrial slave that he can; which is, in the main, vastly more than the slave master got, as the latter was at the expense of housing, feeding, clothing and providing medical service for his chattel, while the former is relieved of this expense and trouble. Prof. W.E.B. DuBois, of Atlanta University, who has made a critical study of the rural Negro of the Southern States, sums up the industrial ...
— The Negro Problem • Booker T. Washington, et al.
... made. You know Purse, that keeps the gen'ral store? Wa'al, he come to me some months ago, on the quiet, an' said that he wanted to borro' five hunderd. He didn't want to git no indorser, but he'd show me his books an' give me a statement an' a chattel morgidge fer six months. He didn't want nobody to know 't he was anyway pushed fer money because he wanted to git some extensions, an' so on. I made up my mind it was all right, an' I done it. Wa'al, about ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... cotton-field, was sent to a field farther from the PENDRAGON mansion, and ultimately died. Citizens reminded each other, that when, during the rebellion, a certain PENDRAGON of the celebrated Southern Confederacy met a former religious chattel of his confronting him with a bayonet in the loyal ranks, and immediately afterwards felt a cold, tickling sensation under one of his ribs, he drew a pistol upon the member of the injured race, who subsequently died in Ohio of fever and ague. What wonder ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 23, September 3, 1870 • Various
... most ignorant and worthless white man enjoyed as a birthright. Wherever he moved or wished to move he was met and surrounded by the most galling and degrading social and civil conditions and proscriptions. True he held a bill of sale of his person, had ceased to be the chattel property of an individual, but he still wore chains, which kept him, and which were intended to keep him and such as him, slaves of the community forever, deprived of every civil right which white men, their neighbors, were bound to respect. For instance, ...
— Right on the Scaffold, or The Martyrs of 1822 - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 7 • Archibald H. Grimke
... attentive to business; character and business capacity moderate; it is said doubtful as to honesty; means in business, about $1,000; no real estate; on the $1,000 above listed as his means in business the bank here holds a chattel mortgage of $600; he has a large family, and of late he has not been paying his bills as ...
— A Man of Samples • Wm. H. Maher
... she truly loved, and whose only crime, in the eye of his persecutors, was his affection for her. This beating, and we know not what after treatment, completely subdued the spirit of its victim, for Robert ventured no more to visit Isabella, but like an obedient and faithful chattel, took himself a wife from the house of his master. Robert did not live many years after his last visit to Isabel, but took his departure to that country, where 'they neither marry nor are given in marriage,' and where ...
— The Narrative of Sojourner Truth • Sojourner Truth
... showing the latest style of evening costume and hair-dressing—for the dolls had no wits of their own to begin with, and were not expected to say clever things, as the President's consort was, after she had lost hers in the crush of the aforesaid mob, who eyed her freely as an appendage to their chattel, the man they had bought by their votes, and put in the highest seat in the Republic. No! she was not provided with an escort to the White House. She did not know three people in Washington beside her relatives, ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... all he knew to the contrary, she might have been long ago shipped off to the northern markets, and probably was, even while he talked of her, the inmate of an Arab harem, or at all events a piece of goods—a "chattel"—in the absolute possession of an irresponsible master. Besides the improbability of Kambira ever hearing what had become of his wife, or to what part of the earth she had been transported, there was also the difficulty of devising any definite course ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... turning away, but in another moment bursting forth, "I love my master's daughter, and she is to wed her cousin, who takes her as her father's chattel! I wist not why the world had grown dark to me till I saw a comedy at Ardres, where, as in a mirror, 'twas all set forth—yea, and how love was too strong for him and for her, and how shame and death ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... down an explicit recognition of their humanity: "And whereas natural justice forbids that any person, of what condition soever, should be condemned unheard." So thoroughly, in the whole report, are the ideas of person and chattel intermingled, that when Gov. Bennett petitions for mitigation of sentence in the case of his slave Batteau, and closes, "I ask this, gentlemen, as an individual incurring a severe and distressing loss," it is really impossible ...
— Black Rebellion - Five Slave Revolts • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... of bed and softly slipped the bolt of the door into her husband's dressing room. She did it on a wild impulse. She felt that she could not bear him near her to-night. He should see that she was not his chattel.... But, perhaps, he did not want to come.... Well, so much the better. In any case, she wanted to show him that she did not want him. She wondered if he would venture.... She wondered if he did ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... of political economy itself cease to guide us when they touch moral government. So long as labor is a chattel to be bought and sold, so long, like other commodities, it follows the condition of supply and demand. But if, for his misfortune, an employer considers that he stands in human relations to his workmen; if he ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... is impossible; it can never be; Elaine belongs to me altogether and forever; she is my property, my chattel, my happiness. I adore her, I want her all to myself, even though she be guilty, and I will never leave her again for a moment, I will still stick to her petticoats, I will roll at her feet, and ask her pardon, for I thirst for her ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... acquaintance, and that he too was returning to his office. In one respect he had been much more fortunate than poor Eames, for he had been made happy with the smiles of his lady love. Alexandrina and the countess had fluttered about him softly, treating him as a tame chattel, now belonging to the noble house of de Courcy, and in this way he had been initiated into the inner domesticities of that illustrious family. The two extra men-servants, hired to wait upon Lady Dumbello, had vanished. The champagne had ceased to flow in a perennial stream. Lady ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... to the tithing men and let them all go forth whither God may direct them to their end; let them all do justice on the thief as it was formerly Eadmund's law. And be the ceapgild (i.e., market value) paid to him that owns the chattel; and be the rest divided in two, half to the hundred, half to the lord except men; and let the lord take ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... unspeakable bitterness in the thought of servitude, even under a master so kindly and affectionate as Cicero. One shudders to think what the feelings of such a man must have been when he was the chattel of a Verres, a Clodius, or a Catiline. It is pleasant to turn away from the thought, which is the very darkest perhaps in the repulsive subject of Roman slavery, to observe the sympathy and tenderness ...
— Roman life in the days of Cicero • Alfred J[ohn] Church
... for obedience becomes almost a passion. As the vine must twine or grovel, so the child comes unconsciously to worship idols, and imitates bad patterns and examples in the absence of worthy ones. He obeys as with a deep sense of being our chattel, and, at bottom, admires those who coerce him, if the means be wisely chosen. The authority must, of course, be ascendancy over heart and mind. The more absolute such authority the more the will is saved from caprice and feels the power of steadiness. Such ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... of the force of the Weymouth Bank was Uncle Bushrod. Sixty years had Uncle Bushrod given of faithful service to the house of Weymouth as chattel, servitor, and friend. Of the colour of the mahogany bank furniture was Uncle Bushrod—thus dark was he externally; white as the uninked pages of the bank ledgers was his soul. Eminently pleasing to Uncle Bushrod would the ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... in this direction were reserved for his wife. His distorted idea of his own importance made him view her as a chattel, an inferior being; the more so, I believe, because she brought him little money when he married her. She was too much the woman to pretend to kneel to him, and because she would not be his slave, she had a hard time of it. He began ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Light, Knowledge, and further progress by "Being a Man," and not a chattel, an asset, a pawn, ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... grievance. Virginia, which for eight years had been self-governing, Virginia which had begun to feel that she had a life of her own, a place of her own among the nations, suddenly found herself given away like some worthless chattel to two of the King's favourites -the Earl ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... Like a vile chattel, for a price betrayed, Bartered and bargained for in privy market By one whom he had held his perfect friend, One he had trusted, one he had well loved, One whom by ties of ...
— The Duchess of Padua • Oscar Wilde
... her own strength with such weapons as God had given to her. God had, indeed, given to her many weapons, but she knew but of one. She did know that God had made her very beautiful. But she regarded her beauty after an unfeminine fashion,—as a thing of value, but as a chattel of which she could not bring herself to be proud. Might it be possible that she should win for herself by her beauty some position in the world less burdensome, more joyous than that of a governess, and less dependent than that of a daily recipient ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... dropping the off-hand masterful tone he had hitherto spoken in, and becoming earnest; still holding her arm, however, as if she were his chattel to be taken up or put down at will. 'It is never too late to break off a marriage that's distasteful to you. Now I'll say one thing; and it is truth: I wish you would marry me instead of him, even now, at the last moment, though you have served me ...
— Victorian Short Stories, - Stories Of Successful Marriages • Elizabeth Gaskell, et al.
... preferable, and lead much pleasanter lives. And the men for whom these poor wretched women work, lounge about in cafes all day, smoking and playing dominoes. The barbaric arrangement that a woman should be a man's drudge and chattel is quite satisfactory, I think, to the majority of our sex. It is certainly an odd condition of things that the mothers of men should suffer most from man's cruelty. But it is the work of an all-wise Providence, no doubt; and you, Mr. Leigh, ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... slow, measured sentences the story of her life: married at seventeen at her father's bidding to a man twice her age; surrounded by a court the most dissolute in eastern Europe; forced into a social environment that valued woman only as a chattel, and that ostracized or defamed every wife who, reverencing her womanhood, protested against its excesses. For five years past—ever since her marriage—her husband's career had been one long, unending dissipation. ...
— A Gentleman Vagabond and Some Others • F. Hopkinson Smith
... am no chattel to be bartered, and this miserable title of princess has no charms for me. You can command me, father, to renounce the man I love, but you can never compel me to give my hand to a man I do not love, were ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... price of coal, and, on the other, the confiscation of the labor of the several hundred thousand miners who are compelled to work for the most precarious wages, and in conditions worse, in some respects, than chattel slavery. ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... the anti-slavery feeling in the North, should be brought into contempt before the world. They deliberately resolved to prove to the public opinion of mankind that the negro was fit only to be a chattel, and that in his misery and degradation, sure to follow the iniquitous enactments for the new form of his subjection, it would be proved that he had lost and not gained by the conferment of freedom among a population where it was impossible ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... farm, with nobody to help him but a hired man and a high protective terriff. The farms in our State is mortgaged for over seven hundred million dollars. Ten of our Western States—I see by the papers—has got about three billion and a half mortgages on their farms, and that don't count the chattel mortgages filed with the town clerks on farm machinery, stock, waggins, and even crops, by gosh! that ain't two inches high under the snow. That's what the prospects is for farmers now. The Government is rich, but the men that made it, the men that fought perarie fires and perarie ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... furniture had already been saddled with a chattel mortgage, one of his horses even been mortgaged twice, and for the other, his former charger, he probably would not get more than three hundred marks, and that was nothing but a drop on a hot stone. Of his comrades there was none remaining ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... necessary to the planter to whom he was hired, that he determined to buy him at any cost. His old master held him proportionately high. But by paying one thousand dollars down, and promising to pay another thousand in a certain time, the purchase was made, and this chattel passed over into the hands ...
— Harriet, The Moses of Her People • Sarah H. Bradford
... condition. The transition of the young Quaker girl, afraid of the sound of her own voice, into the reformer, orator and statesman, is no more wonderful than the change in the status of woman, effected so largely through her exertions. At the beginning she was a chattel in the eye of the law; shut out from all advantages of higher education and opportunities in the industrial world; an utter dependent on man; occupying a subordinate position in the church; restrained to the narrowest ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... most touching beauty, innocent as an angel—all these qualities that should disarm the very wolves and crocodiles, are, in the eyes of those to whom I stand indebted, commodities to buy and sell. You are a chattel; a marketable thing; and worth—heavens, that I should say such words!—worth money. Do you begin to see? If I were to give you freedom, I should defraud my creditors; the manumission would be certainly annulled; you would be still a slave, and I ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... attached to it? To answer that question we may examine the sales of slaves and the sales of lands to see if either group has peculiarities, the recurrence of which in a sale of land and slaves might decide. But we soon find that a slave was sold exactly like a piece of land or any chattel. The only exception is that certain guarantees are expected with the slave, which differ from those demanded with a piece of land. On the whole, then, the chief group will be "sales," with subdivisions according to the class of property used. Hence we cannot assume that there was already ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns
... laws of political economy itself cease to guide us when they touch moral government. So long as labour is a chattel to be bought and sold, so long, like other commodities, it follows the condition of supply and demand. But if, for his misfortune, an employer considers that he stands in human relations towards his workmen; if he believes, rightly ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... end? Boston Bay and Bunker Hill would serve things still—things are of the snake. The horseman serves the horse, the neat-herd serves the neat, the merchant serves the purse, the eater serves his meat; 'tis the day of the chattel, web to weave, and corn to grind; things are in ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... which were peculiar to each sex. Even the best of us have a reminiscent sense of proprietorship in our wives, dating from the time when she was obtained by purchase or capture and could be disposed of like any other chattel. Wives, whose prehistoric discipline has disposed them to humility and submission (I am speaking of the European, not the American species, of course), have not yet in the same degree acquired this sense of ownership in their husbands, ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... energetically—"No!" "To whom do you belong then?" "To myself." "And to whom do I belong? do I belong to you?" "No!" "Whose Henny am I?" "Your own!" These amusing answers bear the very impress of the animal's sense of independence: she is loth to be considered a "chattel," like some chair ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... rejoined swiftly. "A slave, a chattel, doubly enthralled! But enough of this, I would have said that if I wed the prince, I can ask Rachel's ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... a Gaspard Chuckle when he checked up the total Get, for now he owned two Brick Buildings and had tasted a little Blood in the way of Chattel Mortgages. ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... were any village wench! Medea marries her Orsini. A marriage, let it be noted, between an old soldier of fifty and a girl of sixteen. Reflect what that means: it means that this imperious woman is soon treated like a chattel, made roughly to understand that her business is to give the Duke an heir, not advice; that she must never ask "wherefore this or that?" that she must courtesy before the Duke's counselors, his captains, his mistresses; that, ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... labor. This is a very modern and highly civilized conception. Singularly enough, it has been brought forward dogmatically to prove that property in land is not reasonable, because man did not make land. A man cannot "make" a chattel or product of any kind whatever without first appropriating land, so as to get the ore, wood, wool, cotton, fur, or other raw material. All that men ever appropriate land for is to get out of it the natural ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner
... turn her from her course than winter could stop the coming of spring. She has long learned with patience, and to-day she knows many things dear to the soul far better than her teachers. In olden times the Jews claimed to be the conservators of the world's morals—they treated woman as a chattel, and said that because she was created after man, she was created solely for man. Too many still are Jews who never called Abraham "Father," while the Jews themselves have long acknowledged woman as man's proper ...
— Pulpit and Press • Mary Baker Eddy
... about heirlooms. Many think that any chattel may be made an heirloom by any owner of it. This is not the case. The law, however, does recognise heirlooms;—as to which the Exors. or Admors. are excluded in favour of the Successor; and when there are such heirlooms they go to the heir by special custom. Any devise of ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... It would be easy for each church to organize within its membership a loan society and use the money supplied by the well-to-do for the accommodation of those temporarily embarrassed. Sometimes the chattel mortgage sharks collect one hundred per cent, or more and the banks, which are established for the purpose of making small short-time loans, usually collect twenty to thirty per cent. Why should a church member be driven to these extremities when ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... work of art, they account for its great circulation and success by the fact of its being a true picture of slavery. They go on to say that the system is one so inherently abominable that, unless slaveholders shall rouse themselves and abolish the principle of chattel ownership, they can no longer sustain themselves under the contempt and indignation of the whole civilized world. What are the slaveholders to do when this is the best their friends and supporters ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... whereby one who has an absolute or a special property in goods seeks to recover from another who is in actual possession and refuses to redeliver them. If the plaintiff succeeds in an action of detinue, the judgment is that he recover the chattel or, if it cannot be had, its value, which is assessed by the judge and jury, and also certain damages for detaining the same. An order for the restitution of the specific goods may be enforced by a special writ of execution, called a writ of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... wealthy enough to lend money to the Federal Government, a State cannot tax his scrip to the amount of one cent. But, if the doctrine contended for by some is sound, then it may take the citizen himself, confiscate the whole of his property, blot out his citizenship, and make a chattel of him, and the Federal Government can afford him no protection! Among all the doctrines that Slavery has originated in this country, there is none ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... strong conviction that our Congress, impelled by generous feeling, and what they regarded as a democratic principle of government, committed a serious error in bestowing the right of suffrage indiscriminately upon the male negro population of the South. A man who had been all his life an ignorant "chattel personal" was suddenly transformed into a sovereign elector. Instead of this precipitate legislation, it would have been wiser to restrict the suffrage to those who acquire a proper education, and perhaps also a certain amount of taxable property. This ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... specially invited to 'meet their Royal Highnesses,' and had so far been held worthy neither to dance nor to eat in the same room with them. But in vain. Rose still felt herself, for all her laughing outward insouciance, a poor, bruised, helpless chattel, trodden under the heel of a world which was intolerably powerful, rich, and self-satisfied, the odious product ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... controlled, all things else would come right of themselves with us. Slavery has not only been controlled, but it has been destroyed, and yet things have not begun to come right with us; but it was in the order of Providence that chattel slavery should cease before industrial slavery, and the infinitely crueler and stupider vanity and luxury bred of it, should be attacked. If there was then any prevision of the struggle now at hand, the seers averted their eyes, and ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... coverlets a like number and of fair sheets, and of doublets thereupon. And he weighed and brought forth talents of gold ten in all, and two shining tripods and four caldrons, and a goblet exceeding fair that men of Thrace had given him when he went thither on an embassy, a chattel of great price, yet not that even did the old man grudge from his halls, for he was exceeding fain at heart to ransom his dear son. Then he drave out all the Trojans from the colonnade, chiding them with words ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... is supposed to be protected against loss by the institution of the crop lien and the chattel mortgage. By one or the other of these the farmer is enabled to mortgage his growing, or even his unplanted crops, his farming implements, his cattle, and horses, if he owns them. If he is a landowner, the land may be included in a mortgage as additional ...
— The New South - A Chronicle Of Social And Industrial Evolution • Holland Thompson
... same effort. It was mere justice. Yet, so small a thing had immense results, for manhood was cultivated in the black. Self-respect infected him. He discovered himself, with proud surprise, to be a man instead of a chattel. ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne
... granted, but still only an animal; that, if I really had reason and sentiments, they must be of a low order; that certainly I had no social nor legal rights which their race were bound to respect; that I was the property of my captor, by right of discovery, and he had absolute rights over me as a chattel; that he might sell me or use me as lawfully as he could sell or use clothing, food, or books; that he might compel me to work for him; and that he even had a right to poison me (as they poisoned troublesome insects) whenever he was tired of the burden of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... he was so fair and equal that when the populace once desired that a certain dancer be set free he would not approve the proposal until the man's master had been persuaded and received the value of his chattel. His intercourse with his companions was like that between private individuals: he helped them when they were sued and joined them in the ceremony of sacrifice; he visited them when they were sick, taking no guard into the room with him; over one of them ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. 4 • Cassius Dio
... words slave and slavery are not used in the sense commonly understood by the abolitionists. With them these terms are contradistinguished from servants and servitude. According to their definition, a slave is merely a "chattel" in a human form; a thing to be bought and sold, and treated worse than a brute; a being without rights, privileges, or duties. Now, if this is a correct definition of the word, we totally object to the term, and deny that we have any such institution as slavery ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... its aspects, is an atrocity which has (God be thanked) no parallel in heathen lands. It is a hideous offshoot of American Republicanism and American Christianity! It seems that Pauline—a young and beautiful girl—attracted the admiration of her master, and being (to use the words of the law) his "chattel personal to all intents and purposes whatsoever," became the victim of his lust. So wretched is the condition of the slave woman, that even the brutal and licentious regard of her master is looked upon as the highest exaltation of which her lot is susceptible. The slave girl ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... "Give, give!" and we gave. But nothing would satisfy your rapacity; you had resolved to quarrel with us. Do you remind me that we did not return your escaped slaves? This is only half the truth. Whenever you came after your chattel, with legal proofs of ownership, we caught and caged him, and sent him back to you, often at our own expense. If you did not think it worth your while to hunt up your runaway, it was none of our concern. Sometimes a man among us, more of a humanitarian ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... it thou wantest?" The Prince answered, "I am a foreigner from a far country, and I have heard of Mubarak thy lord that he is famed for liberality and generosity; so that I come hither purposing to become his guest." Thereupon the chattel went in to his lord and, after reporting the matter to him, came out and said to Zayn al-Asnam, "O my lord, a blessing hath descended upon us by thy footsteps. Do thou enter, for my master Mubarak awaiteth thee." Therewith the Prince passed into a court spacious exceedingly ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... a man is his own and his right to it must be regarded. Since the abolition of chattel slavery this has been ...
— Usury - A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View • Calvin Elliott
... and blouse, dirty and frayed from long usage. Two fingers of his left hand were doubled into a permanent bend, and, to an expert, would have advertised that he was a leper. Although he belonged to Dag Daughtry just as much as if the steward possessed a chattel bill of sale of him, his owner did not know that his anaesthetic twist of ravaged nerves ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... condemned to slavery for life and is to be branded on forehead or back with the letter S; if he runs away thrice, he is to be executed as a felon. The master can sell him, bequeath him, let him out on hire as a slave, just as any other personal chattel or cattle. If the slaves attempt anything against the masters, they are also to be executed. Justices of the peace, on information, are to hunt the rascals down. If it happens that a vagabond has been idling about for three ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... of paper from his pocket and lays it down in front of me. It looked like a chattel mortgage on Mexico, and what paragraphs didn't commence with "to wit," ...
— Kid Scanlan • H. C. Witwer
... of a great civil war. Taking human nature as it is, there appears to be no escape from this cruel ordeal. We of the North claim that we have transcended that type of society whose vital and informing element is chattel slavery. There is natural and irrepressible antagonism between the two forms of society; they cannot subsist in peace and good feeling by the side of each other, and still less under the same Government. Conflict ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... flinching from any logical consequence of his principles, Mr. Calhoun did not rest until through him religion, morality, statesmanship, the Constitution of the United States, the constitution of man, were all bound in black. Chattel slavery, the most nonsensical as well as detestable of oppressions, was, to him, the most beneficent contrivance of human wisdom. He called it an institution: Mr. Emerson has more happily styled it a destitution. At last the chains of his iron logic were heard ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... the hideous wrong of slavery. That, thank goodness, is now gone. 'Twas the vilest of them all—the nakedest assertion of the monopolist platform:—"You live, not for yourself, but wholly and solely for me. I disregard your claims to your own body and soul, and use you as my chattel." That worst form has died. It withered away before the moral indignation even of existing humanity. We have the satisfaction of seeing one dragon slain, of knowing that one monopolist instinct at least is now fairly ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... without fail, the sharp commands of Fritz Braun were now conveyed to the responsible underlings! Sohmer, staggering homeward with his greedy Aspasias from the Waterloo conflicts of the race-track, sullenly assented at last to the chattel mortgages and bills of sale which placed the "Valkyrie" and the whole building under August Meyer's name. Then, taking the downward road, Sohmer tried to drown himself in ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... arrived at Jamestown with a cargo of negroes from Guinea. The blacks were promptly bought at good prices by the planters. From this time forth the problem of labor was considered sufficiently solved. As chattel slavery harmonized well with the necessities of tobacco growing and gain, it was accepted as a just condition and was continued by the planters, whose interests and standards ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... permission to invest it in a mortgage. When he heard Dad was so desperately hard up for cash he let him have the money. He knew Dad would pay it back, but it seems what he did was against the law, even though Dad gave him his note and a chattel mortgage on some cattle which Buck wasn't to record. Now it has been straightened out. That's why Dad couldn't tell where he got the money. Buck would ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... injured slave either obtained his deliverance or a less cruel master." Compare this with the condition of serfs under the Christian feudal system, when, in Mr. Henson's own language, "the serf was tied to the soil, bought and sold with it, the chattel of his master, who could overwork, beat, and even ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... a couple of Heirs can spend Much Money and yet besides if they do not work at anything else. Especially when every Pearl in the Rope represents a Chattel Mortgage and a fancy Weskit is a stand-off for One Month's Rent of a good ...
— Knocking the Neighbors • George Ade
... savage stirred within him, and counseled immediate and complete mastery of her—his woman. But there was the white man of him who said the thought was brutal and unchivalrous, and reminded the savage that one must not look upon a woman as a chattel, to be beaten or caressed, as the humor seized the master. And, last of all, there was the surface of him laughing with the others, jeering at those who fell short of the mark, and striving his utmost to be first of them all ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... enchant. aye, an affirmative vote. bow, a weapon. chose, did choose. bow, part of a ship. chose, a thing; a chattel. chap, a boy. bass, a term in music. chap, the jaw. bass, a fish. gout, a disease. conjure', to implore. ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... in hand. The evening was stormy, and she asked him if they could not remain there till morning. "It would not be right, Ellen," he replied; and with tears in her eyes, they went forth into the darkness and rain. Was that a man to be treated like a chattel? How many white gentlemen are there, who, in circumstances as perilous, would have manifested such nicety of moral perception, such genuine delicacy of feeling? England has kindly received that worthy and persecuted couple. All who set foot on her soil ...
— The Duty of Disobedience to the Fugitive Slave Act - Anti-Slavery Tracts No. 9, An Appeal To The Legislators Of Massachusetts • Lydia Maria Child
... and when the Wazir did his bidding one of the slaves called out from within the entrance, "Who is it rappeth at our gate?" Hereupon said Masrur to him, "O son of my uncle, open to us the door and give us a gugglet of water for that our lord thirsteth." The chattel went in to his master, the young man, Manjab hight, who owned the mansion, and said, "O my lord, verily there be at our door three persons who have rapped for us and who ask for a drink of water." The master asked, "What manner of men may they be?" and the slave answered, "One of them ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... moment they took the responsibility of calling it from the nowhere into the here. This doctrine of the responsibility of the parent to the child is comparatively new and goes neither with marriage nor with the home. The old and current notion is that the child is a chattel. ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... the individual to arrest without lawful cause, punishment without trial, and forced labor as the chattel of the state. It decrees what information he shall receive, what art he shall produce, what leaders he shall follow, and ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... tyrannical and illiberal as our Government is, low as it places us in the scale of existence, degrading as is its denial of our capacity for self-government, still it concedes to us more than any other Government on earth. Woman, over half the globe, is now and always has been but a chattel. Wives are bargained for, bought and sold, as other merchandise, and as a consequence of the annihilation of natural rights, they have no political existence. In Hindustan, the evidence of woman is not received in a court of justice. The Hindu wife, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... Jo, gravely, "I'm agreeable to become a good and chattel for this occasion only, as the playbills say, and hold myself up to the ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... a schism in the church would have meant nothing unless it came to the point of cracking heads; but a schism in governmental policy, which placed the right to govern one's self and own black chattel in the balance, found him taking sides from the first, thundering out from the pulpit, supported by text and verse, the divine right of personal dominion by purchase, and in superb contradiction voicing the constitutional right to self-government. When ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... secretly, by spidery machinations and by wheedling and cajolery and lies. They have purchased your slave judges, they have debauched your slave legislatures, and they have forced to worse horrors than chattel slavery your slave boys and girls. Two million of your children are toiling to-day in this trader-oligarchy of the United States. Ten millions of you slaves are not ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... overcome certain arithmetical prejudices innate in our minds, or dethrone the stubborn eight from its accustomed position in our thoughts. But you might as well ordain that four and four make ten as ordain that a man has no right to himself, but can properly be held as the chattel of another. Yet this arrogant falsehood of property in men has been organized into a colossal institution. The South calls it a "peculiar" institution; and herein perhaps consists its peculiarity, that it is an absurdity which ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... was her own particular possession; he was her chattel, her thing; and he and other people knew that it was no light affair to meddle with the personal property of ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... and public opinion. Such is the influence of slavery in the United States, that the ministers of religion, even in the so-called free states, are the mere echoes, instead of the correctors, of public sentiment. We have thought it advisable to show that the present system of chattel slavery in America undermines the entire social condition of man, so as to prepare the reader for the following narrative of slave life, in that ...
— Clotel; or, The President's Daughter • William Wells Brown
... resistance whatever—allowing themselves to be driven to baptism in flocks like sheep, and believing, as they are commanded to do, that all power comes from one God, who bestows it upon one lord. For the Arian serf is a mere chattel without a will, and will not think for himself until he is educated to do so. This work of education has been a long time in progress; but, as the previous speaker rightly said, the idea of freedom has ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... of the marital tie would be the work of the house or relatives, rather than the act of the wife, who was not "a person" in the case. Indeed, in the olden time a woman was not a person in the eye of the law, but rather a chattel. The case is somewhat different under the new codes,[26] but the looseness of the marriage tie is still a scandal to thinking Japanese. Since the breaking up of the feudal system and the disarrangement of the old social and moral standards, the statistics ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... reality of her choice and she means "family" while a man too often means only possession. This alters the spirit of the family relationships fundamentally. Their form remains just what it was when woman was esteemed a pretty, desirable, and incidentally a child-producing, chattel. Against these time-honoured ideas the new spirit of womanhood struggles in shame, ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... was entered as my patient. His disease which was given me to cure is a chattel which belongs to me, and which I reckon among my possessions. I therefore declare to you that I will not allow him to marry before he has rendered due satisfaction to the faculty, and submitted to the remedies which I have ordered ...
— Monsieur de Pourceaugnac • Moliere
... in his room to watch him. He was white and still, hardly breathing, already the overdue chattel ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... made two mistakes: he should have permitted the white people to leave the country and given a silken cord to the chief eunuch, to apply as directed. There are no written laws among the dark peoples that forbid the disposal of that chattel known as a woman of the harem, or zenana. There are certain customs that even the all powerful British ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... the natural power of youth, wit, and beauty were rendered impotent by a greatness of fortune whose proportions obliterated all else; if one simply argued from the premise that young love was no affair of hers, since she must always be regarded as a gilded chattel, whose cost was writ large in plain figures, what girl, with blood in her veins, could endure it long without wincing? This girl had undue, and, as he regarded such matters, unseemly control over her temper and her nerves, but she had blood enough in her ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett |
