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Chicanery   /ʃɪkˈeɪnəri/   Listen
Chicanery

noun
1.
The use of tricks to deceive someone (usually to extract money from them).  Synonyms: chicane, guile, shenanigan, trickery, wile.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Chicanery" Quotes from Famous Books



... of which he is president to support the Civic Federation, which is an organization specially designed to fool and mislead the wage-earners of America. That is why every investigation of American political or business life that is honestly made by able and fearless men reveals so much chicanery and fraud. ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo

... in every man's make-up, he felt that classic tradition had armed him with all the preparation necessary for heroic achievement. He, Chamberlain, was unexpectedly called upon to act as an agent of justice against chicanery and violence, and it was not in him to shirk the task. His labors, which, for the greater part of his life, had been expended in tracing the evolution of blind fish in inland caves, had not especially fitted him for dealing with the details of such a case ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger

... office at court was held by a creature and toady of the Duke, bribery and corruption of all kinds ruled the State, and there appeared to be no limit to his lust and rapacity, and no barrier against the chicanery ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley

... that the juries were not composed of persons hostile to the government. In the days of Charles and James, the Solicitors of the Treasury had been with too much reason accused of employing all the vilest artifices of chicanery against men obnoxious to the Court. The new government ought to have made a choice which was above all suspicion. Unfortunately Mordaunt and Delamere pitched upon Aaron Smith, an acrimonious and unprincipled politician, who had been the legal adviser of Titus Oates in the days of the Popish Plot, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... more interesting to the gallant and handsome informant than to his brother statesman; and that emphatic and vehement tone with which Lord Aspeden is assuring the minister for —— of some fact, is merely an angry denunciation of the chicanery practised ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... saint I could be; but how can I be one, with all these unfavourable conditions? How can a man keep the purity of his Christian life and the fervour of his Christian communion amidst the tricks and chicanery and small things of Manchester business? How can a woman find time to hold fellowship with God, when all day long she is distracted in her nursery with all these children hanging on her to look after? How can we, in our actual circumstances, reach ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren

... himself, "there must be good in the man. I wish I knew his history. Perhaps he had to fight for every step he has risen in the world. Perhaps he has been baffled and defeated by deception; overcome by chicanery until his faith died within him. My faith would die within me were it not that when I meet a Mayence I encounter also the virtue of a Cologne, and the bluff honesty of a Count Palatine. How marvelous is this world, where the trickery of a Kurzbold and a Gensbein is canceled ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr

... notorious extortioner who had fallen to our unscrupulous but not indictable wiles; and my heart tinkled with the hansom bell. I thought of the good that we had done for once, of the undoubted wrong we had contrived to right by a species of justifiable chicanery. And I forgot all about the youth whose battle we had fought and won, until I found myself ordering his breakfast, and having his cricket-bag taken out ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung

... own merits. I act my part to admiration. 'Tis true the combining circumstances are all favourable. I must be a dunce indeed if in such a school I should want chicanery. Our disputations have been continual; nor have I ever failed to turn them on the most convenient topics. But none of them have equalled the last; managed as it was with dexterity by me, and in the very spirit I wished by my opponents. I speak in the plural; ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft

... form of rancorous rationality and inhuman bigotry? Were they a wild degeneration from a principle originally noble? Or, on the contrary, this life and this death, were they alike the expression of a base mercenary selfishness, caught and baffled in the meshes of its own chicanery? The life, if it could be appreciated in its secret principles, might go far to illustrate the probable character of the death. The death, if its circumstances were recoverable, and could be liberated from the self-contradictory details in the received report, might do something ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey

... "and do not think to frighten me. I know all about my wife, and, if once she was foolish, what of it in a world where none are altogether wise? If you do not wish to visit the police cell, you will do well to leave her alone. As for your tricks of chicanery, I want none of them. What I want is that you take off the spell which you have laid upon this poor boy, as Satan your master has given you the power to do. ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard

... Henry saw with alarm that the thunder, which he had so long feared, was about to burst on his dominions. A plan of adjustment had been arranged between his envoys and Alexander; and to defeat the chicanery of his advisers, it was accompanied with the threat of an interdict if it were not executed within the space of forty days. He consented to see the Archbishop, and awaited his arrival in a spacious meadow near the town ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various

... knowledge of absolute values. Christian theism has interpreted God largely in static, final terms. The craving for the absolute in the human mind, as witnessed by the long course of the history of thought, as pathetically witnessed to in the mixture of chicanery, fanaticism and insight of the modern mystical and occult healing sects, is central and immeasurable. But God, found, if at all, in the terms of a present process, is not static and absolute, but dynamic and relative; indefinite, incomplete, not final. And man's immense difference from Him, ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch

... measures, the casting a vote, which is the result of that study and estimate, certainly have in themselves nothing to degrade the most delicate and refined nature. The violence, the fraud, the crime, the chicanery, which, so far as they have attended masculine struggles for political power, tend to prove, if they prove anything, the unfitness of men for the suffrage, are not the result of the act of voting, but ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various

... distributing the pension offered to himself among six wounded captains under his command, mediating for poor litigants in the mountain, driving off his grounds the wandering attorneys who come to practice their chicanery, "the natural protector of man even against ministers and the king. A party of tobacco inspectors having searched his curate's house, he pursues them so energetically on horseback that they hardly ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine

... what prophetic spirit inspired the lines. The unfortunate couplet was productive of much offence against the husband and lover of madame Favart, for the greater part of the persons present perfectly detested my poor cousin, who was "to clip the wings of chicanery." Favart managed to escape just in time, and the abbe de Voisenon, who was already not in very high favour with his judges, was compelled to endure the full weight of their complaints and reproaches; every voice was against him, and ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon

... of England made a most practical and terrible answer. From the highest noble to the lowest peasant, arose one simultaneous plebiscitum: "We are tired of these seventeen years of chicanery and terror. This woman must die: or the commonweal of England perish!" We all know which of the two ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley

... guarantee to Old Greece her neutrality, her liberty in the management of her internal affairs, and her immunity from aggression on the part of M. Venizelos. Young, eloquent, and refined, the spokesman brought into an environment corrupted by diplomatic chicanery a breath of candour. His manner inspired and evoked confidence. The King readily agreed, besides the reduction which he had already offered, to transfer the remainder of his army to the Peloponnesus, to hand over to the Allies a considerable stock of guns, rifles, and other war material, ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott

... this political chicanery and impudent pretence of popular representation, there sits an autocratic, irresponsible, hereditary legislative body, consisting exclusively of idlers and parasites who reserve to themselves the ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker

... realised, the question still remains, whether they would amount to the abolition or still only to the shifting of the incidence of competition. Socialists tell us that hitherto the labourer has not had his fair share of the produce of industry. The existing system has sanctioned a complicated chicanery, by which one class has been enabled to live as mere bloodsuckers and parasites upon the rest of society. Property is the result of theft, instead of being, as Economists used to assure us, the reward ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen

... of caricature, wit and brilliancy of dialogue, they stand alone in English drama. "Volpone, or the Fox," is, in a sense, a transition play from the dramatic satires of the war of the theatres to the purer comedy represented in the plays named above. Its subject is a struggle of wit applied to chicanery; for among its 'dramatis personae', from the villainous Fox himself, his rascally servant Mosca, Voltore (the vulture), Corbaccio and Corvino (the big and the little raven), to Sir Politic Would-be and the rest, there is scarcely a virtuous ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson

... power, making it theoretically possible for the electorate to take possession of the country. In practice, the franchise has had no such result. Quite the contrary, the masters of American life by a policy of chicanery and misrepresentation, advertise and support first one and then the other of the "Old Parties," both of which are led by the members of the propertied class or by their retainers. The people, deluded by the press, and ignorant of their real interests, ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing

... straw-bail, straw bid [U.S.]; spoof*. delusion, gullery[obs3]; juggling, jugglery[obs3]; slight of hand, legerdemain; prestigiation|, prestidigitation; magic &c 992; conjuring, conjuration; hocus-pocus, escamoterie[obs3], jockeyship[obs3]; trickery, coggery|, chicanery; supercherie[obs3], cozenage[obs3], circumvention, ingannation|, collusion; treachery &c 940; practical joke. trick, cheat, wile, blind, feint, plant, bubble, fetch, catch, chicane, juggle, reach, hocus, bite; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget

... of the passage of the Act of Congress of March 3, 1873,[50] under cover of which the Comstock Society still carries on its campaigns of snouting and suppression, is a classical tale of Puritan impudence and chicanery. Comstock, with Jesup and other rich men backing him financially and politically,[51] managed the business. First, a number of spectacular raids were made on the publishers of such pornographic books as "The Memoirs ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken

... of paring the claws of the Irish Party offers a tempting prospect. Our position in the matter is quite plain: so long as Great Britain insists on maintaining the Act of Union she must do so consistently in the sense that it is a contract, albeit secured by chicanery, to the breach of any term of which the consent of the party which it trammelled at least is necessary. It will be answered that the Disestablishment of the Irish Church made a breach in a clause of as ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell

... claim to be exempt from manifestations of economic slavery, of grinding the faces of the poor, of exploitation of the weak, of unfair distribution of wealth, of unjust monopoly, of unequal laws, of industrial and commercial chicanery, of disgraceful ignorance, of economic fallacies, of public corruption, of interested legislation, of want of public spirit, of vulgar boasting and chauvinism, of snobbery, of class prejudice, of respect of persons, ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead

... would gladly have spoken with me, but I was too late to meet them. Now I must inquire what you are doing, and how you are. Mamma and I hope that you are quite well. I am still in my very happiest humor; my head feels as light as a feather since I got away from that chicanery. I have grown ...
— The Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, V.1. • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

... course, very great among the habitans, as he travelled from parish to parish and from seigniory to seigniory, drawing bills and hypothecations, marriage contracts and last wills and testaments, for the peasantry, who had a genuine Norman predilection for law and chicanery, and a respect amounting to veneration for written documents, red tape, and sealing-wax. Master Pothier's acuteness in picking holes in the actes of a rival notary was only surpassed by the elaborate intricacy of his own, which he boasted, not without reason, would puzzle ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby

... Singh is a suspicious rajah. He suspects me anyway. I screwed better terms out of him than the miller got from Bob White, and now whenever he sees me off the job he suspects me of chicanery. If we fired Chamu he'd think I'd found the gold and was trying to hide it. Say, if I don't find gold ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy

... wide tracts of South Africa, for by law Natives have now less rights than the snakes and scorpions abounding in that country. Can a law be justified which forces the people to live only by means of chicanery; and which, in order to progress, compels one to cheat the law officers of the Crown? This case is but one of many that came under our own observation, and there may be many more of ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje

... into a dozen other forms. We hit slavery through a great civil war. Did we destroy it? No, we only changed it into hatred between sections of the country: in the South, into political corruption and chicanery, the degradation of the blacks through peonage, unjust laws, unfair and cruel treatment; and the degradation of the whites by their resorting to these practices, the paralyzation of the public conscience, ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson

... it. That is the history of this innovation, beginning with books, proposing pitiful reformations in clothes, and cookery, and law chicanery. That would serve to show an ill-used people that there was some care for them stirring, some tribuneship at work already. 'What I say of physic generally, may serve AS AN EXAMPLE OF ALL OTHER SCIENCES,' says this same scribbler, ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon

... the House of Commons rejected parliamentary suffrage for women. Incensed at the repeated chicanery of politicians who alternately made and evaded their promises, a group of suffragettes known as the "militants" resorted to open violence. When arrested for damaging property, they went on a "hunger strike," refusing all nourishment. This ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker

... unpleasantly upon the Virginia lordling's ear, and he echoed it with a suspicion of a frown upon his brow. "I am not an adept in chicanery!" ...
— At Last • Marion Harland

... when the various circumstances are taken into consideration. Usually, in cases of a similar nature, there is left in the mind of the spectator some glimmering of doubt as to the reality of the vision before his eyes; a degree of hope, however feeble, that he is the victim of chicanery, and that the apparition is not actually a visitant from the old world of shadows. It is not too much to say that such remnants of doubt have been at the bottom of almost every such visitation, and that the appalling horror which has sometimes been brought about, is to be attributed, even in the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... plan of honesty, of rectitude—the divine plan. When he perverts his nature by trying to express dishonesty, chicanery, and cunning, of course he ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden

... by which egoism and sensuality try to compass their respective ends. Let us select for consideration one group of these vices,—the important group which fall under the general head of untruthfulness. Insincerity, disingenuousness, shiftiness, trickery, duplicity, chicanery, evasion, intrigue, suppressio veri, suggestio falsi, fraud, mendacity, treachery, hypocrisy, cant,—their name is Legion. That externalism, whether in school or out of school, is the foster-mother of the whole brood, is ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes

... raising a whirlwind of jealousy and opposition. The struggle was long and arduous. Directors of theatres and concert halls, furious to see a part of their public tempted away, raised the cry of immorality against the new-comers, and called to their aid every resource of law and chicanery. At the end of the first year Salis found himself with over eight hundred summonses and lawsuits on his hands. After having made every effort, knocked at every door, in his struggle for existence, he finally conceived the happy thought of appealing directly ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory

... meeting-places of the converts. Many quailed before the prospect of death, and purchased immunity from persecution by again repairing to the altars of idolatry. But, notwithstanding all the arts of intimidation and chicanery, the good cause continued to prosper. In Rome, in Antioch, in Alexandria, and in other great cities, the truth steadily gained ground; and, towards the end of the second century, it had acquired such strength even in Carthage—a place far removed from the scene of its original proclamation—that, ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen

... and brilliancy of dialogue, they stand alone in English drama. "Volpone, or the Fox," is, in a sense, a transition play from the dramatic satires of the war of the theatres to the purer comedy represented in the plays named above. Its subject is a struggle of wit applied to chicanery; for among its dramatis personae, from the villainous Fox himself, his rascally servant Mosca, Voltore (the vulture), Corbaccio and Corvino (the big and the little raven), to Sir Politic Would-be and the rest, there is ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson

... question must then have gone to the courts, which, according to the Governor's judgment when he was appealing to me to be sustained, would require one year for decision. Meantime the State was overflowed, the Levee boards tied up by political chicanery, and nothing done to relieve the poor people, now fed by the charity of the Government and charitable ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan

... they had not glowed in a halo of sanctification. Now, by some chance, this light was gone, and he saw them instead as untutored and unwashed barbarians, filled with animal lusts and ferocities, struggling by violence and foul chicanery to secure a foothold in a country which did not belong to them—all rude tramps and robbers ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic

... there is now, or was but lately, a boarding-house keeper in San Francisco whose Christian or first name had been abolished in favour of "Shanghai." I had the very doubtful honour of knowing him, and could easily believe any stories told of his chicanery and treachery to sailormen. ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts

... politicians and place hunters will control the machine, and when office, and place are made glittering prizes, then comes the inevitable scramble, the selfishness, trampling the weak by the strong, corruption, chicanery, the unspeakable crimes, and finally the Pandora's box is opened, and the swarming evils darken the heavens. Inferior men with greatest cunning and least scruples soon push their way to the front; all sight of good government is eventually lost, ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various

... Procedure.—Necessary as the system which we have laid down is for the purpose of ensuring settlement of all disputes, in applying it, the pacific aim which underlies it must be the only guide. It must not be diverted to other purposes and used as an occasion for chicanery and tendencious proceedings by which the cause of peace would lose ...
— The Geneva Protocol • David Hunter Miller

... during his stay in the valley the Wyoming man could always use that name as an "Open Sesame." It unlocked all tongues. Cunningham and his mysterious death were absorbing topics. The man was hated by scores who had been brought close to ruin by his chicanery. Dry Valley rejoiced openly in the retribution that ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine

... are alone, Woods waits for Hardin to speak. He is silent. There is a gulf between them which never can be bridged. Joseph feels he is no match for Hardin in chicanery, but he has his little surprise in store for the lawyer. It ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage

... the deplorable mismanagement and scandal of our Spanish war, and the British with the investigations after the Egyptian campaign fresh in memory, have nothing to say, except that it was wholly admirable and beyond the breath of suspicion of greed, thievery, or political chicanery. There was no rotten leather, and ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier

... bent, and old before his time; his face is strangely colored, and he has some frightful scars. He has not danced once since Barbara's wedding. The time for mazourkas and cracoviennes is past: they have been replaced by law cases, pleading, chicanery, and all its tiresome accompaniments; his language is so learned that one can ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... absolute openness of their cheat. A more commonplace imposture has never been offered for acceptance, even to the most ignorant of mankind. It appeals neither to reason nor romance. The one is insulted by the very shallowness of its chicanery, while its rank plebbishness disgusts the other. Even the nomenclature, both of its offices and office-bearers, has a vulgar ring that smacks of ignoble origin. The names "twelves," "seventies," "deacons," "wifedoms," "Smiths" (Hiram and Joseph), Pratt, ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid

... practical apostle of external piety and internal intrigue, Wolsey. The latter, too, had a second bitter disappointment in the election of Clement VII. to succeed Adrian, and as this was easily traced to the chicanery of the emperor, who had twice promised the portfolio of pontiff to Wolsey, the latter determined to work up another union between Henry ...
— Comic History of England • Bill Nye

... descended from a family of distinction in Ireland; but as she expressed it, "she had been deprived of her birthright by the chicanery of law." In her former hours of tranquillity she had published some elegant odes, had written a tragedy and comedies—all which remained in MS. In her distress she looked up to her pen as a source of existence; and an elegant genius and a woman of polished manners ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli

... judicature and our Parliament; but there was something as congenial to his mind in its definiteness, its rigidity, its narrow technicalities. He was never wilfully unjust, but he was too often captious in his justice, fond of legal chicanery, prompt to take advantage of the letter of the law. The high conception of royalty which he borrowed from St. Lewis united with this legal turn of mind in the worst acts of his reign. Of rights or liberties unregistered in charter or roll ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green

... the king of England. Whilst Edward was doing his best to bring Scotland into subjection by open war, Philip was doing his best to disturb Edward in his hold upon Aquitaine by secret intrigues and legal chicanery. Ill-feeling increased on both sides. Philip welcomed David Bruce and gave him protection in France, and in 1336 French sailors attacked English shipping and landed plunderers in the Isle of Wight. ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner

... National Executive Committee's action is equivalent to stealing the elections. The party must act sternly to rebuke this official chicanery. ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto

... gathered in the churchyard on the hill of Hadley. Here Henry the Peaceful had been conveyed. And here, also, were Adam Warner and his daughter. The soldiers, hearing from one of the Duchess of Bedford's creatures whose chicanery had been the object of his scorn, that Warner was a wizard, had desired that his services should be utilised. Till the issue was clear, he had been kept a prisoner. When it was beyond doubt, he was hanged. Sybill was found lying dead at ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various

... side, not fused into one, not subject either to the other, but the Romans labouring at the arts of peace, the Goths wielding for their defence the sword of war. Over all was to be the strong hand of the King of Goths and Romans, repressing the violence of the one nation, correcting the chicanery of the other, and from one and all exacting the strict observance of that which was the object of his daily and nightly cares, CIVILITAS. Of this civilitas—which we may sometimes translate 'good order,' sometimes 'civilisation,' sometimes ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)

... this springs the profound truth that the constitutional system is infinitely dearer than the monarchical system. For a nation as for a household, it is the government of the happy balance, of mediocrity, of chicanery. ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Part First • Honore de Balzac

... was long in awaking to the consciousness that driving Lee out of Richmond would not end the Rebellion. It was more than this: it was a casting-out of prejudice, a discarding of political chicanery and a time-serving policy, and a recognition of Justice, Right, and Freedom as the true elements of political economy. There was an increasing desire on the part of the people to root out ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various

... rogues declared they meant to give me up my farm, and would not keep it any longer upon lease. I not unnaturally complained, but they retorted by ostentatiously unfolding the deed; and I found myself without any defense against their chicanery. When it came to this, I told them that Duke and Prince of Florence would not suffer folk to be so infamously massacred in their cities. That menace worked so forcibly upon their minds that they once more despatched Raffaello Schegcia, the ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini

... have led a forlorn hope in Don Lovell's interests. Agitation over the matter was maintained at white heat for several days, as we again angled back towards the Cimarron. Around the camp-fires at night, the chicanery of The Western Supply Company gave place to the best stories at our command. "There ought to be a law," said Runt Pickett, in wrathy indignation, "making it legal to kill some people, same as rattlesnakes. Now, you take a square gambler and I don't think anything ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams

... to all sorts of tricks, chicanery, stratagems, and knavery, by which anything is to be got. Mrs. Peachum, indeed, says, that to succeed at the gaming-table, the candidate should have the education of a nobleman. I do not know how far this example contradicts my theory. I think it is a rule that men in business should ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt

... of a putwarrie's account. Each ryot pretty accurately remembers his own particular indebtedness, but woe to him if he pays the putwarrie the value of a 'red cent' without taking a receipt. Certainly there may be a really honest putwarrie, but I very much doubt it. The name stands for chicanery and robbery. On the one hand the landlord is constantly stirring him up for money, questioning his accounts, and putting him not unfrequently to actual bodily coercion. The ryot on the other hand is constantly inventing excuses, getting up delays, and propounding innumerable ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis

... had been depending several years, it was at last, to the deep regret of all who knew him, by the chicanery of the lawyers of the opposite side, and the remissness of his own, carried against him; and his expenses having been very great in supporting for years his possession, he found himself reduced from an estate of near three thousand pounds a year, ...
— The History of Sir Charles Grandison, Volume 4 (of 7) • Samuel Richardson

... a man can contract a debt for a cow, or his household goods, and laugh at his creditor when he seeks his pay, on the one hand; and on the other, legislators and executives lending themselves to the chicanery of another set, that are striving to deprive a particular class of its rights of property, directly in the face of written contracts! This is straining at the gnat and swallowing the camel, with a vengeance; and all for votes! Does any one really expect ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper

... a moment she felt inclined to doubt the fact itself; truthful people have little suspicion of chicanery or falsehood, and when she came to think, innumerable circumstances confirmed Grime's statement. Yes, it must be true. This, then, was Nathanael's secret. Why had he kept ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)

... market and courts the sponger gives a wide berth they are the haunts of chicanery; there is no satisfaction to be got out of them. But at wrestling-school and gymnasium he is in his element; he is their chief glory. Show me a philosopher or orator who is in the same class with him when he strips ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata

... country ministers, as was customary in that day; but poverty compelled him to leave college after two brief terms. Then he studied law, and for nine or ten years practiced his profession doggedly, unwillingly, with many a protest at the chicanery he was forced to witness even in the sacred courts of justice. Grown weary of it at last, he went to New York, found work in a newspaper office, and after a few years' apprenticeship became editor of The Evening Post, a position which he held for more ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long

... going where she belongs. I wish you to understand that I shall continue this fight to the very last. I—I am not one to be easily beaten. Simpson, you and Thomas come with me. This night's despicable chicanery is only the beginning. This is bad business for you, Cy Whittaker," he snarled, his self-control vanishing, "and"—with a vindictive glance at the schoolmistress—"for those who are with you in it. That appointment was obtained under false pretenses and I can prove it. Your tricks don't scare me. ...
— Cy Whittaker's Place • Joseph C. Lincoln

... ruler of Lalpuri State was the Dewan or Prime Minister, a clever, ambitious, and unscrupulous Bengali Brahmin, endowed with all the talent for intrigue and chicanery of his race and caste as well as with their hatred of the British. He had persuaded himself that the English dominion in India was coming to an end and was ready to do all in his power to hasten the event. For he secretly nourished the design of deposing the Rajah and making ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly

... part of barbarous Africa, and the terrible evil is being abated as fast as the influence of the European governments is extended over new regions. The practice of the arts of fetichism, a kind of chicanery, most injurious in its effects upon the superstitious natives, is now punishable throughout the Congo Free State and British Rhodesia. Arab slave-dealers no longer raid the Congo plains and forests ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord

... Meantime, a horde of unscrupulous machinators would have been installed in the seats of power at Washington, and would have recommenced operations, in the consciousness of the new strength acquired in the field from which they had just retired, with all the chicanery and craft with which heretofore they had blinded the North and secretly controlled the destinies of our Government. Southern men and Southern women would again have been feasted and feted at Northern hotels ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various

... series of words or phrases has its parts separated by commas:— "Lying, trickery, chicanery, perjury, were natural to him." "The brave, daring, faithful soldier died facing the foe." If the series is in pairs, commas separate the pairs: "Rich and poor, learned and unlearned, black and white, Christian and Jew, Mohammedan and Buddhist must ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin

... upon him when he opens the sack." It is to be noted that the cycle as here outlined consists really of two parts,—the "biter biting" and the "biter bit." Cosquin (2 : 209) believes that the last two episodes—the maiden gained by chicanery, and the substitution of an animal for her in the sack—form a separate theme not originally a part of the cumulative motive; and, to prove his belief, he cites a number of Oriental tales containing the former, but lacking the cumulative ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler

... of his end contenting him, he began to scheme a campaign for the day that was simple enough in prospect: a little chicanery with Stanistreet, a personal appeal to Crane to restore the passports of Monsieur Andre Duchemin which must have been found on Ekstrom's body, a berth on some steamer sailing for ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph

... demand for cheap stuff would cease. The dominant motive of the commercial world, would be revolutionized. Among manufacturers and producers, the cry would be, not how cheap, but how excellent, can we make our goods! The long-practiced, skillful chicanery of competitive methods, would be at a discount; they would be worse than useless! Honest men could then engage in business, without violating either honor, or conscience! Cheating and lying, would no longer form a part of the business code! At all times, and under all circumstances, to respect ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson

... other way. Being of a choleric cast, he would at times be warmed into regrettable outbursts of opinion that were reactionary in the extreme. Thus when he discussed with Gideon and Harvey D. the latest number of the magazine—containing the fearless exposure of Washington's chicanery—he spoke in terms most slighting of Emmanuel Schilsky. He meant his words to lap over to Merle Whipple, but as the others were still proud—if in a troubled way—of the boy's new eminence, he did not distinguish him too pointedly. He pretended to take it all out on Emmanuel, whom ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson

... go adrift. The Left has manoeuvred imprudently and the Cabinet wildly. Both sides are responsible. But what madness possesses the Cabinet to mix a police question with a question of liberty and oppose the spirit of chicanery to the spirit of revolution? It is like sending process-servers with stamped paper to serve upon a lion. The quibbles of M. Hebert in presence of a riot! What do ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo

... political methods may occasionally corrupt leaders, the politician labor leader uniformly finds his fellow workmen turning their backs on him. The organized workers not only distrust the politician but detest political chicanery. Such would equally be the case did the wage-workers carry into the political field the direct power they exert in their unions. And in politics this never-failing, incorruptible power of the whole mass of organized ...
— Direct Legislation by the Citizenship through the Initiative and Referendum • James W. Sullivan

... deter them from keeping ever uppermost in their thoughts and attention. Though the provisions made by this charter might, conformably to the genius of the age, be esteemed too concise, and too bare of circumstances, to maintain the execution of its articles, in opposition to the chicanery of lawyers, supported by the violence of power; time gradually ascertained the sense of all the ambiguous expressions; and those generous barons who first extorted this concession still held their swords in their hands, and could turn them ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume

... sensational raider of gambling houses has turned out to be in crooked alliance with the gamblers. And I suggest as a hint that the Commission's recommendations enforced for one year will lay the foundation of an organized system of blackmail and "protection," secrecy and underground chicanery, the like of which Chicago has not yet seen. But the Commission need only have read its own report, have studied its own cases. There is an illuminating chapter on "The Social Evil and the Police." In the summary, the Commission says that "officers on the beat are bold and open ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann

... receive this appellation until some centuries after his death) was soon disgusted and disappointed with the ordinary avocations of the Forum,—its low standard of virtue, and its diversion of what is ennobling in the pure fountains of natural justice into the turbid and polluted channels of deceit, chicanery, and fraud; its abandonment to usurious calculations and tricks of learned and legalized jugglery, by which the end of law itself was baffled and its advocates alone enriched. But what else could be ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord

... and disgust me," said Serviss, profoundly moved. "The girl seems too fine for such chicanery. Who ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland

... imperturbable as a bank cashier may appear to the outside public, he is a man under constant strain during business hours. Each person with whom he is unacquainted that confronts him at his post is a possible robber who at any moment may attempt, either by violence or chicanery, to filch the treasure he guards. The happening of any event outside the usual routine at once arouses a cashier's distrust, and this sudden flight of a stranger with money which did not belong to him quite justified the perturbation of the cashier. ...
— A Rock in the Baltic • Robert Barr

... character had the hardihood of antiquity, his august mind overawed majesty, and one of his sovereigns thought royalty so impaired in his presence that he conspired to remove him, in order to be relieved from his superiority. No state chicanery, no narrow systems of vicious politics, no idle contest for ministerial victories sunk him to the vulgar level of the great; but, overbearing, persuasive, and impracticable, his object was England,—his ambition was fame; without dividing, ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge

... deprive armies of an occupation. It would make statesmanship too simple and naive to have the distinction of craft, which gave one man the right to lead another. Both sides had to act in the old fashion of mutual suspicion and chicanery. ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer

... reflection. This gives us the channel for constant information which you advise me to establish, and I shall have the opportunity to learn if the impostor makes any communication to them, or if there be any news of the brother. If by any trick or chicanery (for I will never believe that there was a marriage) a lawsuit that might be critical or hazardous can be cooked up, I can, I am sure, make such terms with Sidney, through his love for my daughter, as would effectively and permanently secure me from all further ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 4 • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... States-General, but also De Witt was fully aware that the assent of the Estates of Holland to the proposed exclusion article could only be obtained with the greatest difficulty. He was to prove himself a very past master in the art of diplomatic chicanery and intrigue. ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson

... in the cotton fields and workshops of the south? There are to-day as many houseless, homeless, poor, wandering, idle white men here as there are negroes in the same condition, yet no arrangements are made for their working. All the trickery, chicanery and political power possible are being brought to bear on the poor negro, to make him do the hard labor for the whites, as ...
— Report on the Condition of the South • Carl Schurz

... phase, with an energy that inspired without shattering the forms of discipline and law, it dissolved by degrees this coherent whole into an anarchy of individual wills, drawn deeper and deeper, in pursuit of mean and egoistic ends, into political fraud and commercial chicanery, till the tradition of the gentleman and the soldier was choked by the dust of adventurers and swindlers, and the people, whose fathers had fought and prevailed at Marathon and Salamis, fell as they deserved, by treachery from within as much as by force from ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

... are not the experiences which make a pure or perfect woman. There are trials which chasten the heart and elevate the mind; but it is doubtful whether it can be for the welfare of any helpless, childish creature to be familiar with falsehood and chicanery, with debt and dishonour, from the earliest awakening of the intellect; to feel, from the age of six or seven, all the shame of a creature who is always eating food that will not be paid for, and lying on a bed out ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon

... counterfeits of the real article. The classic mythology had a large and varied assortment of deities, from which every man could select a supply to suit himself. Thus the lawyer could place a bust of Mercury, the god of chicanery, in his office, and so secure the patronage of the god and save the expense of a tin sign announcing his profession. The editor could dedicate his paper to the service of Janus, the two-faced deity, and thus pursue his business without perilling ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, Issue 10 • Various

... commercial honesty—which was once our strength, and protected us from, and all but atoned for, our covetousness—is going fast; and leaving us, feared indeed for our power; but suspected for our chicanery; and odious ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley

... different matter. Perhaps he drew it on both; or on men and things in general;—for his indignation knew no bounds. The heavy solid man; yet with a human heart in him after all, and a Hohenzollern abhorrence of chicanery, capable of rising to the transcendent pitch! His wars against the Turks, and his other Hectorships, I will forget; but this, of a face so extensive kindled all into divine fire for poor Philip's sake, shall be ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle

... so mistaken as the supposition that a person is to extricate himself from a difficulty by intrigue, by chicanery, by dissimulation, by ...
— Thomas Jefferson • Edward S. Ellis et. al.

... regard to means. His own people were tortured and executed by the thousand. By this savage policy he stamped out heresy, placed freedom of thought under a ban, and put an end to the intellectual progress of the country. In his dealings with other nations his diplomacy included all the arts of chicanery ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot

... upon—the established order of things destroyed homes broken up the people impoverished, and hordes of unscrupulous adventurers swarmed up from the South and overrun the country in pursuit of schemes of political chicanery and personal ambition, peculation and plunder, as was the South after the close of ...
— History of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, • Edumud G. Ross

... wondered at, with aping and being aped, with patronizing and being patronized, with flattering and being flattered, with fawning and being fawned upon, with deceiving and being deceived, with bluffing and being bluffed, with splurging, with pretending, with every trick and artifice and sham and chicanery that society and ...
— The Cab of the Sleeping Horse • John Reed Scott

... there, and there they intended to remain like blocks of wood. At last Pierre met with a stroke of luck which enabled him to return the ten thousand francs to his son. When, however, he wanted to reckon up accounts with him, Aristide interposed so much chicanery that he had to let the couple go without deducting a copper for their board and lodging. They installed themselves but a short distance off, in a part of the old quarter called the Place Saint-Louis. The ten thousand francs were soon consumed. ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola

... worst legacies which the rebellion bequeathed to the nation. It has been the prime cause of more misgovernment in the South than any other one cause, not even the insatiable rapacity of the carpet-bag adventurers taking precedence of it. It has not only served as a provocation to peculation and chicanery, but it has nerved the courage of the assassin and made merry the midnight ride of armed mobs bent upon righting wrongs by committing crimes before which the atrocities of savage warfare pale. Wholesale ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune

... the country as to the venality and chicanery of the "district sergeants" and other subordinate officials, and petty conflicts which I had with the government in Stettin as deputy of the "Circle" and deputy for the provincial president, increased my aversion to the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke

... and misery, co-ordinate in the fraternal enormities of the Factory and Poorhouse,—the Barracks and Hospital. And the final law in this matter is, that if you require edifices only for the grace and health of mankind, and build them without pretence and without chicanery, they will be sublime on a modest scale, and lovely ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... adjoining walls with the end of his stick, a change of his hat from the horizontal to the less so; a sense of tediousness announced itself in a lowering of the person by spreading the knees to a lozenge-shaped aperture and contorting the arms. Chicanery, subterfuge, had hardly a place in the streets of this honest borough to all appearance; and it was said that the lawyers in the Court House hard by occasionally threw in strong arguments for the other side out of pure generosity (though ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy

... of religious madness, your King and his system—organized selfishness. Chicanery for those dependent upon him, ruin for all more ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer

... land of her own. George Walton, a neighbor, wanted her land, for its situation pleased him, and as the old woman had neither money nor influential friends he charged her with witchcraft, and, whether by legal chicanery or mere force is not recorded, he got ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner

... beggar, your only hope of bread was crime. Adopting the profession of an advocate, your only conception of law was chicanery. Coming to Paris, you took up patriotism as a trade, and turned the trade into an imposture. Trained to dependence, you always hung on some one till he spurned you. You licked the dust before Mirabeau; you betrayed him, and he trampled ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various

... feud. A son of Stoughton and the widow of another son argued vituperously in print, each claiming sole possession of Richard's complicated secret, and each terming the other a scoundrel. The daughter-in-law accused the son of financial chicanery, and the son condemned the daughter-in-law for having run through two husbands and for desperately wanting a third. In the midst of this running battle, a third party entered the lists as maker of the Elixir. She was no Stoughton—though a widow—and ...
— Old English Patent Medicines in America • George B. Griffenhagen

... speak only of the hopes which we may entertain of the goodness of God. To those who have too much confidence, they preach up the terrors of the Lord, and the judgments of a severe God. By this chicanery they contrive to subject or retain under their yoke all those who are weak enough to be led by the contradictory ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach

... minerals by means of the so-called "divining rod." At the time he fully believed that a critical inquiry of this kind would speedily show all the alleged successes of the dowser to be due either to fraud or a sharp eye for the ground. As the inquiry went on, to his surprise he found that neither chicanery, nor clever guessing, nor local knowledge, nor chance coincidence could explain away the accumulated evidence, but that something new to science was really at the root of the matter. This result was so startling ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant

... they realised that they were safer in the immediate neighbourhood of a peaceful settlement than they would have been had they remained a prey to unscrupulous adventurers like Shan O'Neill. A member of the legal profession must feel shame and sorrow in recording the fact that the chicanery of the lawyers added much to the harshness of the politicians. That, however, is only another way of saying that the humane policy of the nineteenth century was unknown in the seventeenth. Had courts been established in Ireland like the native land courts of New Zealand in which ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous

... reflection in the water. New laws and regulations continually came into force for the ostensible purpose of improving the state of the Uitlander—laws which in reality were created to bamboozle him still further. What chicanery failed to accomplish the remissness of officials successfully brought about, and the discomfort of the foreign inhabitants was complete. Beside domestic there were economic grievances. The position in a nutshell is given ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke

... imagine, sir, that I will ever hire myself to chicanery, and be the willing promoter of fraud? If I do, may I live hated, ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft

... After all, what of the law? Douglas could not be patient with the rules that related to a land title while his thoughts were far afield in plans for the territorial greatness of his country. Meantime he had to earn his bread. He had never stooped to dishonor, to chicanery. He had caught at the driftwood of supporting offices in his swimming of the new stream of primitive life. He was poor. He had enemies. His eye was upon an eminence. He had to make the best ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters

... state chicanery', no narrow system of vicious politics', no idle contest for ministerial victories', sank him to the vulgar level ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey

... such lawlessness and outrage and chicanery can exist in America—many of the outrages would disgrace Russia or Turkey—yet every episode related here has ten prototypes in Life, in Fact; not of twenty years ago, or yesterday, or the day before yesterday, but to-day. For instance, the number of sheep destroyed is given as fifteen ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut

... inclination to marriage (of which much more anon), and she enters into competition with men in the general business of the world, the sort of career that she commonly carves out offers additional evidence of her mental peculiarity. In whatever calls for no more than an invariable technic and a feeble chicanery she usually fails; in whatever calls for independent thought and resourcefulness she usually succeeds. Thus she is almost always a failure as a lawyer, for the law requires only an armament of hollow phrases and stereotyped formulae, and a ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken

... name seems to have been lost sight of amid much discussion and some chicanery with regard to the possession of the chateau, was a wise man in his day and instead of attempting to unite the feudal fortress and the hunting seat, as Le Nepveu was doing at Chambord, he was content to make of Azay-le-Rideau a palace of pleasure. Indeed, he seems to have allowed his ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton

... succeeded. What would have followed? Ministers would have gone out: Sir Robert Peel has repeatedly said they would in the event of parliament condemning their Irish policy. This would bring in Lord John, and then would be revealed the distraction of his party, the chicanery of his late motion, and the mere incapacity of moving at all upon Irish questions, either to the right or to the left, for any government which at this moment the Whig-radicals could form. Doubtless, Lord John cherishes hopes of future power; but not at present. "Wait a little," ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various

... the fraternal enormities of the Factory and Poorhouse,—the Barracks and Hospital. And the final law in this matter is that, if you require edifices only for the grace and health of mankind, and build them without pretense and without chicanery, they will be sublime on a modest scale, and lovely ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin

... can't expect everyone to have the same standards of probity, so philosophically I pocketed my loss and gains together. Life is full of ups and downs and take the bad with the good. Gootes was in high spirits after his piece of chicanery and as we went down the street he practiced, quite unsuccessfully, a series ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore

... point of view with the old dynasties and their chicanery, Alexander had not only eschewed the idea of a reconstructed Poland, but had become indifferent to the territorial lines of all ancient Europe, and momentarily dreamed of Napoleon as his twin emperor. To this end he too must likewise be a conqueror. ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane

... to the bar. The practice of the law was not, at that time, in France, nor is it, indeed, now, invested with the high character attaching to it in England. Its codes and rules bore the impress of a barbarous age; and among its practitioners, fraud, artifice, and chicanery were the rule, and honesty the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various

... of '73. The general had furnished the material for most of the article,—though he would not do the writing,—and he held the sheet with the story upon it in his hand. As he read it in the light of that later day, it seemed a sordid story of chicanery and violence—the sort of an episode that one would expect to find following a great war. The general read and reread the old story of the defeat of Minneola, and folded his paper and rolled it into a wand with which he conjured up his spirit of ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White

... the reader assure himself that even the Court of Chancery is not quite so black as it is painted; that the true ground for the delays and ruinous expenses in ninety-nine out of one hundred instances is not legal chicanery, still less the wilful circuitousness and wordiness of law processes, but the great eternal fact that, what through lapse of time, decays of memory, and loss of documents, and what through interested suppressions of truth, and the dispersions of witnesses, and causes by the score beside, ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey

... would not come. His thoughts were of the game, and ere yet the last words of the money-lender had ceased to sound, he was captured. The satanic cunning of the proposal was lost upon his sodden intellect. It was a contemptible, pitiable piece of chicanery with which Lablache sought to trap the old man into giving his consent and assistance. The money-lender had no intention of losing the game. He knew he must win. He was merely resorting to this means because ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum

... reefward, was unwilling to survive the shipwreck, and performed seppuku. The family are supposed to have faked up the accident afterward. I dismiss the whole thing as a rather less than subtle bit of market-manipulation chicanery." ...
— Murder in the Gunroom • Henry Beam Piper

... are the obligations under which the Burra people bend, introducing discord into families, restraining the energies of the fishermen, and tending to a deeply rooted aversion towards the lessees and their service, but producing systems of chicanery and deceit subversive of moral principle and destructive of all efforts in the proper training ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie

... entered. Under careful supervision and proper guidance, with little additional expenditure of money or of time, they produced results wholly unbelievable to the old-time farmer. Yet he saw the crop, husked, and watched it through the sheller. There was no magic and no chicanery. He ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing

... statutes to pay the sum of two thousand seven hundred and forty-three pounds, and was obliged to compound for sixteen hundred and fifteen. This was the first noted case of the kind; but it became a precedent, which prepared the may for many others. The management, indeed, of these arts of chicanery, was the great secret of the king's administration. While he depressed the nobility, he exalted, and honored, and caressed the lawyers; and by that means both bestowed authority on the laws, and was enabled, whenever he pleased, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume

... conditions under which the Church of England now exercises that right of electing her chief pastors which has been from the beginning the heritage of Christendom. It would be difficult to imagine a more dexterous use of chicanery, preserving the semblance but carefully precluding the reality of a free choice. We all know something of Deans and Chapters—the well-endowed inhabitants of cathedral closes—and of those "greater Chapters" which consist of Honorary Canons, longing ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell

... vaguely; that William I emphasized in his cold-blooded, clear-eyed manner of the soldier; that von Sybel fought for; that scores, nay, hundreds and thousands of noble men and women, utterly apart from political chicanery, did indeed long for with all the fervor of their earnest God-fearing German nature; Bismarck stands in the centre, ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel

... it, I believe it is the duty of the Senate of the United States, as it regards its own honor and the future of our country, never the leave this matter in its present condition, to be believed by some and disbelieved by others, to be made the subject of party contest and party chicanery, but let us have a fair, judicial, full investigation into the merits of these accusations. If they are false, stamp them with the brand of ignominy; if they are true, deal with the facts proven as you think ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman

... has, in my opinion, no legal right whatever, yet she will make a hard fight, and with that trickster Hobson to help her with his chicanery, it is liable to take some ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour

... moral and public obligations upon the profession. There are to-day the demands upon the engineers which are the demands upon their positions as leaders of a great industry. In an industry that lends itself so much to speculation and chicanery, there is the duty of every engineer to diminish the opportunity of the vulture so far as is possible. Where he can enter these lists has been suggested in the previous pages. Further than to the "investor" in mines, he has a duty to his brothers in the profession. ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover

... Inquisition be expected to understand a claim for liberty originating in the rights of the common people and not in the gracious benevolence or intelligent policy of the King? The very idea must have been practically inconceivable by them. Accordingly, they strove by every available device of chicanery to wheedle the Netherlanders into accepting their independence as a gift from the King of Spain. But to such a piece of self-stultification the clear-sighted Dutchmen could by no persuasion be brought to consent. Their independence, they argued, was not the King's to give. They had won it from ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske

... prophets, nor even the divine teacher of Nazareth, shall I be able to do them any good? Are not their very creeds pretexts for slaughter and persecution and fraud? Do they not support even their holiest truths, their sincerest beliefs, by organised systems of deceit and chicanery? Chut! I tell you that the very vesture which men compel Truth to wear, is lined and stiffened with lies! The mysteries of life are so terrible, and its sadness so profound, that blatant tongues do not become philosophers. Words ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford

... ethics into its social and political activities. That careful avoidance of the main issue is always observable in These States. Prohibition was saddled upon the country, against the expressed wish of at least two-thirds of the people, by the political chicanery of the same organization, and yet no one, during the long fight, thought to attack it directly; to have done so would have been to violate the taboo described. So when the returning soldiers began to reveal the astounding ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan

... was already in their hands and ready to treat. Alarmed at the great armament coming against him, and cowed by recent reverses, Toolajee had come as a suppliant into the Mahratta camp to try if, by finesse and chicanery, he might escape utter destruction, while, in Gheriah, he had left his brother-in-law with orders to defend it to the last. The Peishwa's officers, on their side, were anxious to get the place into their hands without admitting the English to any share of the booty; a design that ...
— The Pirates of Malabar, and An Englishwoman in India Two Hundred Years Ago • John Biddulph

... of the Virgen del Rosario, more exactly the cases of Richard Haddon v. 10 Doubloons, etc., of Ybanez v. L2409, and of the King v. Thomas Miller and Sampson Simpson, give excellent illustrations of the chicanery with which prize cases could be conducted and of the manner in which through admiralty courts the ends of justice could be defeated. The materials are copious. The history of the capture is sufficiently set forth in docs. no. 187 and no. 188. The legal history ...
— Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period - Illustrative Documents • Various

... the only way. I believe there are cases in which it comes of pure greed, and is of the same kind as any other injustice the capability of exercising which is more generally distributed. Why should a thief be unknown in a class, a proportion of the members of which is capable of wrong, chicanery, oppression, indeed any form ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald

... I had my fears less the son, intimidated by the father, should find himself under the necessity of abandoning the work he had protected. I besides imagined that I perceived this to be the case in the chicanery employed against me relative to the first two volumes, in which alterations were required for reasons of which I could not feel the force; whilst the other two volumes were known to contain things of such a nature as, had the censor objected ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau

... portions of the South is being a Republican. This has added largely to the emigration, and the tide has reached not only Kansas, but the older States of the North. It has entered Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois, and soon will find its way into Wisconsin, Iowa, and Michigan. We find no political chicanery of the North in this universal uprising of the colored people of the South in leaving the home of their birth. But it is the mistaken policy of the South that is driving their laborers northward; that is, compelling them ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland

... relations with Catherine II., and after the Russian invasion the Porte was compelled by the Treaty of Kainardji to grant autonomy to the Principalities, and to diminish its exactions; in 1802, through Russian remonstrances, abuses were suppressed and the evil-doers punished. In 1812 the chicanery of the rulers and the exactions of the Porte had brought the people to the brink of starvation; the Russians interfered, and put a limit to the demands of the Porte; but after their departure, we are told, the current value of agricultural produce again fell so low that ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson

... hundred Volumes of Law-Books. But now to what a sad Condition Things are brought, every one sees, but no Body dares speak out. [Sed omnes dicere mussant.]" Thus far honest Budaeus; a most inveterate Adversary of this Art of Chicanery, ...
— Franco-Gallia • Francis Hotoman

... the niggardly and narrow-minded. The overseer, as Burn complained,[80] was often a petty tyrant: his aim was to depopulate his parish; to prevent the poor from obtaining a settlement; to make the workhouse a terror by placing it under the management of a bully; and by all kinds of chicanery to keep down the rates at whatever cost to the comfort and morality of the poor. This explains the view taken by Arthur Young, and generally accepted at the period, that the poor-law meant depopulation. Workhouses had been started in the seventeenth century[81] with the amiable intention ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen

... alternative of wretched and humiliating imprisonment. An entire change of habit ensues: ease and elegance of manners dwindle into coldness and neglect, liberality to meanness, and good-natured simplicity to chicanery and cunning. In society, too, how changed; once the gay table companion, full of gallantry and wit, now solitary and dejected, with the weeds of discomfort and despair rankling around his heart. If fortune ever enable him to regenerate from such obscurity, perhaps custom may have habituated ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 277, October 13, 1827 • Various

... the confessions of his son, the result of a deep-laid plot for his entrapment and ruin, and could only believe his malady to be the result of a collusion on the part of Miss Williamson and her father, by whose joint wiles and chicanery the young man's peace of mind had been destroyed, and he driven from the land. In the firm belief of this, he wrote to Mr. Williamson, adverting in the strongest terms to the injury he conceived himself to have sustained at his hands, couching ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro

... put it, there was "any amount of chicanery about the whole affair." Some of our pay was "set against" supplying "duds" for Dennis to do dirty work in; Alister was employed as sail-maker, and then, like the carpenter, was cheated of his rest. As to food, we were nearly starved, and should have fared ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing

... arrest yesterday evening, what did I do but hurry away to find the Cointets and try to obtain such concessions as might satisfy you. If you try to keep the discovery to yourselves, you will continue to live a life of shifts and chicanery. You must give in, or else when you are exhausted and at the last gasp, you will end by making a bargain with some capitalist or other, and perhaps to your own detriment, whereas to-day I hope to see you make a good one with MM. Cointet. ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac

... hastily, I apologise. But Santoris is too straightforward a man to be suspected of any dishonesty or chicanery—and certainly no one on board this vessel shall treat his name with anything but respect." Here he turned to me—"Will you come on deck for a little while before bedtime, ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli

... she cried with almost tearful vehemence, "there's only one condition on which I'll even think of giving you back your mine, and that is that Rimrock shall run it. Mr. Jepson must be fired, Mr. Jones must have full charge, and all this chicanery must stop; but if Rimrock goes away without taking his mine I'll—I'll ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge

... financial depression were several. One morning he awoke to find himself deprived, by political chicanery, of the income of a custom-house surveyorship which for some while past had served to support his small family. Now, some men could have gone on writing stories in the intervals between surveying customs, and have thus placed an anchor to windward against the time ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne

... simplest and most rudimentary forms of life. Under the systems which we call patriarchal, the modern distinctions between sins and crimes had no existence. All gross sins were offences against society, as it then was constituted, and, wherever it was possible, were punished as being so; chicanery and those subtle advantages which the acute and unscrupulous can take over the simple, without open breach of enacted statutes, were only possible under the complications of more artificial polities; and the oppression or injury of man by man was open, ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude

... Are we ceasing our discrimination against men because they are black? It is not a question put by North to South. It is a question put to Springfield, Illinois, the old home of Lincoln himself, as directly as to men in Maryland busy with their pitiful disfranchising chicanery." To the still lingering cry of "black men down" this salutary Commemoration rings back, the "all men up," whose echoes after forty years were growing faint in ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various

... discussed taxes, and wrangled, and cursed those in power, and cheated one another, and picked a pocket now and then, and spat upon the marble pavement whereon royal and lordly feet had so often trod in days gone by. It had all become a great nest of dirt and stealing and busy chicanery, where dingy, hawk-eyed men with sodden white faces and disgusting hands lay in wait for the unwary who had business with the city government, to rob them on pretence of facilitating their affairs, to cringe for ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford

... was Zenteno, who, previous to the revolution, had been an attorney at Conception, and was a protege of General San Martin—carrying with him into State Administration the practical cunning of his profession, with more than its usual proportion of chicanery. As he was my bitter opponent, obstructing my plans for the interests of Chili in every possible way, it might ill become me to speak of him as I then felt, and to this day feel. I will therefore adduce the opinion of Mrs. Graham, the first historian of the Republic, as to the estimation ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 1 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald

... chanced to incur the malicious hatred of the great, legalized malefactor, Ames, by opposition to his selfish caprice, and whose utter defeat and discrediting before the public would now place the crown of righteous expediency upon his own chicanery and extortion and ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... uninformed promoter, but, so far as results are concerned, there is not much difference between them for the innocent investor. They both lead him to failure. They are unlike only in this, that the pathway of the one is lined with deception, crookedness and chicanery; of the other, with blasted hopes based upon good intentions but bad information. Both lead to the self-same sepulcher which in the distance looks white and beautiful but when reached is filled with ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Third Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association



Words linked to "Chicanery" :   deception, guile, hoax, fraud, chicane, jugglery, humbug, dissimulation, trickery, fraudulence, deceit, dupery, dissembling, put-on



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