"Destitution" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... number of these mothers, by the birth of their illegitimate children, even if allowance is made for the many instances when the children are legitimatized by their fathers! Suicide by women and infanticide are to a large extent traceable to the destitution and wretchedness in which the women are left when deserted. The trials for child murder cast a dark and instructive picture upon the canvas. To cite just one case, in the fall of 1894, a young girl, who, eight days after her delivery, had been turned ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... not only, nor even chiefly, that she who, on the preceding morning, had awakened to the remembrance of her utter destitution, now felt that all those terrible troubles were over. It was not simply that her great care had been vanquished for her. It was this, that the man who had a second time come to her asking for her love, had now given her all-sufficient evidence that he did so for the sake of her love. He, who ...
— Miss Mackenzie • Anthony Trollope
... year the meat-markets in that section of the country were remarkably bad. It was sometimes difficult for a panther or a wildcat to find enough food to keep her family at all decently, and there were cases of great destitution. In years before there had been plenty of deer, wild turkey, raccoons, and all sorts of good things, but they were very scarce now. This was not the first time that our young Jaguar had gone hungry for a ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... Franchomme, his right hand, and his head too, in business and money matters—and now, of course, more than ever—was at his wits' end. He discussed the disquieting, threatening problem with some friends of Chopin, and through one of them the composer's destitution came to the knowledge of Miss Stirling. She cut the Gordian knot by sending her master 25,000 francs. [FOOTNOTE: M. Charles Gavard says 20,000 francs.] This noble gift, however; did not at once reach the hands of Chopin. When Franchomme, who knew what had been done, visited ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... strange mixture of state and splendor with discomfort and destitution, which prevailed very extensively in royal households in those early times. A part of the privation which Elizabeth seems, from this letter, to have endured, was doubtless owing to the rough manners of the day; but there is no doubt ...
— Queen Elizabeth - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... come at last when my ill-starred life has to reveal its destitution in a long-drawn series of exposures. This penury, all unexpected, has taken its seat in the heart where plenitude seemed to reign. The fees which I paid to delusion for just nine years of my youth have now to be returned with interest to Truth till ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... same rate as pauperism under the age of sixty. The administration of the workhouses has also greatly improved; and the poor-law infirmaries are becoming hospitals which are largely resorted to in time of sickness by many who might easily avoid them. On the whole, old-age destitution is, and must be, a grave question for philanthropists; but there has been great exaggeration about its magnitude ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... purchased them through orders from the Bursar. Our dear old family nurse, Beth, to whom Hugh was as the apple of her eye, used to make him little presents of things that he needed—his wardrobe was always scanty and threadbare—and would at intervals lament his state of destitution. "I can't bear to think of the greedy creatures taking ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... word "homeless" has implications of aimless drifting, of destitution and misery, and of the indifference of a "homeless" man to "his" country. Certain advocates of cosmopolitanism in their agitation against patriotism often take advantage of the importance of home in the relation of a man to his country when they ...
— A Stake in the Land • Peter Alexander Speek
... that elapsed between Lord Derby's second and third administrations an industrial crisis occurred in his native county, which brought out very conspicuously his public spirit and his philanthropy. The destitution in Lancashire caused by the stoppage of the cotton-supply in consequence of the American Civil War, was so great as to threaten to overtax the benevolence of the country. That it did not do so ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... to be punished for your ignorant mutterings. You complain of the well-dressed happy throng. You should be turned out in the streets in August and September, and if the utter destitution does not shortly turn your brains back in the right direction I am afraid your case ...
— Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Girl - Sister of that "Idle Fellow." • Jenny Wren
... all-pervading principle, PRIDE OF BIRTH, implanted within her breast, imperiously restrained her from bestowing the favors of her patrician person upon 'vulgar plebeians;' and, in consequence, she had sunk lower and lower in want, destitution and misery, until driven, on that terrible winter's night, to supplicate for a slight and temporary relief at the door of one whom she had formerly so much despised, but on whom she ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... she had stayed, though she was almost without means of support. She began by trying to sell her jewels, the fifty-pound diamond, among others, which that lord had given her in England: the jeweler handed it back to her, saying that it might be worth eight francs! That meant destitution. And yet hope always returned to her in one way or another. She had even received three blue banknotes, three hundred francs, in an envelope! Her fortnight at the Bijou! No doubt about it, they were paying the artistes' salaries; perhaps the Federation had taken the matter up? Three ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... who had a wife and several children. This man had been an industrious mechanic, but had for two years been pursuing the downward path to ruin, a confirmed victim of the bottle. He had been forced by the destitution thus brought upon himself to abandon a snug abode in a decent street for the squalor of a rickety shell in a mean locality, and was now prostrate on his bed, dying of rapid consumption. By what mysterious providence a new-born babe should thus be sent to such a man's door is beyond my comprehension. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... indicates. A little thought, however, will soon bring the matter home to us. It has been remarked of some great town, that there are as many people living there in courts and cellars, or at least in the state of destitution which that mode of life would represent, as the whole adult male population of London, above the rank of labourers, artisans, and tradesmen. Probably we should form the most inadequate estimate of ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps
... but our stomachs. I know not whether it was piety or economy that swayed her soul, but I never met a person who was so rigid as this lady in the observance of the church calendar, especially whenever a day of abstinence allowed her to deprive us of our beef. Nothing but my destitution compelled me to ship in this craft; still, to say the truth, I had well-nigh given up all idea of returning to the United States, and determined to engage in any adventurous expedition that my profession offered. In 1824, it will be remembered, ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... should be compelled to keep schools and preachers, just as they were compelled to pay taxes for bridges, roads, and other local requirements. In support of this demand, he appealed to the direct command of God, and to the universal state of destitution prevailing. If that duty were neglected, the country would be full of vagrant savages. With regard to the convents and other religious foundations, he stated that, as soon as the Papal yoke had been removed from the land, they would pass over to the prince as the supreme head; and it would ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... removal of the causes which lead to it. These causes are said to be wholly different with the sexes. The acknowledged incentive to this vice on the part of man is his own abnormal passion; while on the part of woman, in the great majority of cases, it is conceded to be destitution—absolute want of the necessaries of life. Lecky, the famous historian of European morals, says: "The statistics of prostitution show that a great proportion of those women who have fallen into it have been impelled by the ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... confirmed cripple, then his reckless improvidence stared him in the face; and poor Jack, a thoughtless, but kind creature, and a most affectionate father, looked at his three motherless children with the acute misery of a parent who has brought those whom he loves best in the world to abject destitution. He found help, where he probably least expected it, in the sense and spirit of his young daughter, a girl of ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... real destitution, for a farmer can always raise enough produce to feed his family, and in a wooded country he can get fuel, even if he has to lift it between the dawn ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... my stepfather returned to Scotland, taking with him my half-brother, and leaving me with my grandfather. And all communication gradually ceased between us. Within this week, however, I have received letters from Edinburgh, informing me of the death of my stepfather, and the perfect destitution of my half-brother, now a lad of twelve years of age. He is at present staying with the clergyman who attended his father in his last illness, and who has written me the letters giving me the information ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... asserts that any man with honesty and determination can make his living at any time; another speaks of the numbers of skilled artisans who cannot get employment. But if some of these latter have the fastidious tastes above mentioned, it will be seen that the destitution is to a certain extent artificial. But reasoning on these subjects speedily merges in the ocean of Free Trade v. Protection, upon which I will not further touch. Sydney is the oldest town in the Colonies, having been founded in 1788. It has quite the air of an old established place—the ...
— Six Letters From the Colonies • Robert Seaton
... covered with a blanket, two little boys lay sleeping in each other's arms. Crouched near the table, her features dimly lighted by a tallow candle, sat a woman advanced in life, clad in faded but cleanly garments, whose hollow cheeks and sunken eye told a painful tale of sorrow and destitution. Those sad eyes were fixed anxiously and imploringly upon the stern, grim face of a hard-featured old man, who, with hat pulled over his shaggy gray eyebrows, was standing, resting on a stout staff, in the centre ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... early familiarity with all the miseries of destitution, aggravated by disease, had increased his natural roughness and irritability, on the other hand it had helped largely to bring out his sterling virtues,—his discriminating charity, his genuine benevolence, his ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... but, why should wives concentrate all their economy on the waist of a dress? When chest protectors are so cheap as they now are. I hate to see people suffer, and there is more real suffering, more privation and more destitution, pervading the Washington scapula and clavicle this winter than ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... and looked around her and at the two small children on the blankets, and we could hear her murmur mucha pobre (very poor.) She could see our ragged clothes and dirty faces and everything told her of our extreme destitution. After seeing our oxen and mule which were so poor she said to herself "flaco, flaco" (so thin.) She then turned to us, Rogers and I, whom she had seen before, and as her lively little youngster clung to her dress, as if in fear of such queer looking people ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... parishioners. This was a family—but you are ignorant of Spain, and even the names of our grandees are hardly known to you; suffice it, then, that they were once great people, and are now fallen to the brink of destitution. Nothing now belongs to them but the residencia, and certain leagues of desert mountain, in the greater part of which not even a goat could support life. But the house is a fine old place, and stands at a great height among the hills, and most salubriously; and I had no sooner ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... pauperism must be given to uphold the royal state of lord bishops, who sit in parliament, and make a heavy incubus on all real progress, obstructing the measures which might uplift into comfort, decency, and intelligence, England's three millions of submerged classes who live in destitution and misery.[12] ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... after I had become more familiar with title-bearing foreigners, Tasistro again crossed my path in Washington, where he was acting as a translator in the State Department; but after a few years, owing to an affection of the eyes, he was obliged to give up this position, and his condition was one of destitution. Through the instrumentality of my husband he obtained an annuity from his son, whom, by the way, he never knew; and for some years, in a spirit of gratitude, taught my children French. His last literary effort was the translation of the first two ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... the mind of him who contemplates the crime. On the one hand, he is about to commit a deed on which there are not two opinions; it is not a crime made such by the laws; it is not even a robbery, for which he may frame excuses out of his destitution, and the harsh distinctions of society; it is murder, which heaven and earth, rich and poor, equally denounce. On the other hand, his guilt will bring him almost immediately before the tribunal of God, as well as the judgment-seat of man. No long interval weakens the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... opponents. His appreciation would be considerably less if the opponent in question was a mere theory. In point of fact, Chesterton is probably a warm admirer of Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb. When they founded (in 1909) their National Committee for the Prevention of Destitution, designed to educate the British public in the ideas of what has been called Webbism, especially those contained in the Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission, one of the first to ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... heard, can soon be known. A certain man of Attica, a long time ago,[94] his ship being wrecked, was cast ashore at Andros, and this woman together with him, who was {then} a little girl; he, in his destitution, by chance first made application to the father ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... villain made his appearance the object of his jeers. By the way, you look a little comical yourself at the present moment, captain, and your colonel would certainly say that you had been getting into mischief. To continue, however, my boy's youth and his destitution—for his pockets were empty—moved the pity of a kind-hearted major, and he advanced him ten Napoleons from his own pocket without security of any kind. Into your hands, Captain Baumgarten, I return these ten gold pieces, since I cannot learn ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... that God would place his image on earth, and willingly leave them to perish from destitution. Many have been known to die of starvation, and the tales of wretchedness and woe with which the public ear is often filled attest the fact. Squalid forms and threadbare garments are seen, alas! too often in this civilised world, ...
— The Trials of the Soldier's Wife - A Tale of the Second American Revolution • Alex St. Clair Abrams
... me, unless you wish to embitter my shame. I'm obliged to you for offering to share your destitution with me. I must try to run my face with the ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... the cheapness of provisions at Gallarate, and of occasional meals taken gratis from the fields, complete destitution seemed to be only a matter of days, and just at this crisis, to add to his embarrassments—though he longed earnestly for the event—Lucia was brought to bed with her first-born living child on May 14, 1534. The child's birth was accompanied by divers omens, one of which the father describes, ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... into his mother's hand. His heart often sank as she received his earnings with smiles and tears. "Poor child," she would say, "your help comes just in time." Thus the bitter thought of poverty and the evidences of destitution were ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... the 2d cavalry brigade had been halted at Lyons to check a threatened rising among the people there, and three batteries had straggled off in some direction—where, no one could say. Then their destitution in the way of stores and supplies was something wonderful; the depots at Belfort, which were to have furnished everything, were empty; not a sign of a tent, no mess-kettles, no flannel belts, no hospital ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... their property, left the plains, and took to the mountains, living by the chase and by plunder. This portion were termed boshmen, or bushmen, and have still retained that appellation: living in extreme destitution, sleeping in caves, constantly in a state of starvation, they soon dwindled down to a very diminutive race, and ...
— The Mission • Frederick Marryat
... this silent hour, her thoughts reverted to her grandfather, and she would wonder how much he remembered of their former life, and whether he was ever really mindful of the change in their condition and of their late helplessness and destitution. When they were wandering about, she seldom thought of this, but now she could not help considering what would become of them if he fell sick, or her own strength were to fail her. He was very patient and willing, happy to execute any little task, ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... very broken English that "Mees Alice" was the pupil of her deceased sister, who had come from France some years before and had undertaken the vocal instruction of haut ton young ladies, in order to save their aged mother from a destitution which threatened her, owing to some heavy reverses which had befallen ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... before the old heathenism, and in 1814 we find the King of Congo, D. Garcia V., complaining to His Most Faithful Majesty that missioners were sadly wanted. Captain Tuckey's "Expedition" (A.D. 1816) well sets forth the spiritual destitution of the land. He tells us that three years before his arrival some missionaries had been murdered by the Sohnese; the only specimen he met was an ignorant half-caste with a diploma from the Capuchins of Loanda, and a wife plus five concubines. In 1863 I found ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... get a broken branch, after all, with nothing on it but three sticks of candy, two squeaking dogs, a red cow, and an ugly bird with one feather in its tail;" and overcome by a sudden sense of destitution, Polly sobbed even more ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... companion. "I know that sort; if they once take to it all's over. They get used to luxury. One does n't part with luxury, after tasting destitution. She tells me she does very nicely; the children are happy; she's able to pay well and see them sometimes. She was a girl of good family, too, who loved her husband, and gave up much for him. What ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... not seen an aged rifted tower, Meet habitation for the Ghost of Time, Where fearful ravage makes decay sublime, And destitution wears the face of power? Yet is the fabric deck'd with many a flower Of fragrance wild, and many-dappled hues, Gold streak'd with iron-brown and nodding blue, Making each ruinous chink a fairy bower. E'en such a thing methinks I fain would be, Should Heaven appoint me to a lengthen'd age; So old ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... deprivation in fame, fortune, and person. She had been imprisoned; she had been scourged, and branded as an impostor; and all on account of her resolute and unmoving fidelity and truth to several of the very worst of men, every one of whom had abandoned her to utter destitution and shame. But this story we cannot enter on at present, as it would perhaps mar the thread of our story, as much as it did the anxious anticipations of Mrs. Logan, who sat pining and longing ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... afterward took prisoner that more than thirty thousand perished on the way in crossing the mountains; some in the battles which were fought in the passes, and a greater number still, probably, from exposure to fatigue and cold, and from falls among the rocks and glaciers, and diseases produced by destitution and misery. The remnant of the army which was left on reaching the plain were emaciated, sickly, ragged, and spiritless; far more inclined to lie down and die, than to go on and undertake the ...
— Hannibal - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... charge of this office, and nearly all my time was occupied in refusing passes outside of our lines. In a majority of instances, the applicants for the privilege of going into the Confederacy—many of them women—told the most sorrowful tales of destitution that could be relieved only by reaching their friends in the enemy's country; others urged, that a husband, a father, or a brother was enjoined by the physician to seek the country as the sole means of securing a return of health; in short, I was plied with every conceivable ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... money-scrivener. He had also to give up, without compensation, some property, valued at 60 l. a year, which he had purchased when the estates of the Chapter of Westminster were sold. In the great fire, 1666, his house in Bread-street was destroyed. Thus, from easy circumstances, he was reduced, if not to destitution, at least to narrow means. He left at his death 1500 l., which Phillips calls a considerable sum. And if he sold his books, one by one, during his lifetime, this was because, knowing their value, he thought he could dispose of them to greater advantage ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... give so spectacularly as our rich do— that is, by handfuls of millions, but then the whole community gives more, I think, than our community does, and when it does not give, the necessary succor is taxed out of its incomes and legacies. I do not mean that there is no destitution, but only that the better off seem to have the worse off more universally and perpetually in mind than with us. All this is believed to be very demoralizing to the poor, and doubtless the certainty of soup and flannel is bad for the ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... still feeling persuaded that I had acted under a delusion in going to her house. How was it possible to associate the charming object of my heart's worship with the miserable story of destitution which I had just heard? I stopped the boy on the first landing, and told him to announce me simply as a doctor, who had been informed of Mrs. Brand's illness, and who ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... considered by spiritual persons as so worthless a thing, that it is not fit to be given to God—a notion which might seem to explain how a really pious and universally respected archbishop, living within a quarter of a mile of one of the worst infernos of destitution, disease, filth, and profligacy—can yet find it in his heart to save L120,000 out of church revenues, and leave it to his family; though it will not explain how Irish bishops can reconcile it ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... he struggled against cold and hunger and destitution, while he contended with faction at home and lukewarmness in the administration of the war, even then, in the midst of these trials, he was devising a new system for the organization and permanence of his forces. Congress meddled with the matter of prisoners and with the ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... are robbing us of all our gold as well as of the necessities of life, using the fair name of trade, but in fact oppressing us as thoroughly as they possibly can. And there has been set over us as ruler a huckster who has made our destitution a kind of business by virtue of the authority of his office. The cause of our revolt, therefore, being of this sort, has justice on its side; but the advantage which you yourselves will gain if you receive the request ...
— History of the Wars, Books I and II (of 8) - The Persian War • Procopius
... but finally reached Carthagena, where a British fleet was lying in the roads, to take off the English merchants, who in consequence of the revolutionary movements going on, sought shelter under their own flag. Here Mr. Seton, reduced to the last stage of destitution and squalor, boldly applied to Captain Bentham, the commander of the squadron, who, finding him to be a gentleman, offered him every needful assistance, gave him a berth in his own cabin, and finally landed him safely on the Island of Jamaica, whence he, too, found his ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America in the years 1811, 1812, 1813, and 1814 or the First American Settlement on the Pacific • Gabriel Franchere
... much as any Socialist to get rid of poverty, misery and destitution, and we believe we have got the true remedy, if only we were allowed to apply it. There would be plenty of the good things of the world for everybody, if we did not constantly interfere with production, and if we did not destroy capital, which would otherwise be ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... There were but few of what are called Gospel sermons, preached in the army anywhere within my reach during my soldier life. As a consequence of the inherently demoralizing effect of war, and this great destitution of conserving influences, vice reigned almost unrestrained in the army. The few good and devout men, and the infrequent prayer-meetings which were held, seemed powerless to restrain the downward tendency of morals. Profanity, ...
— Thirteen Months in the Rebel Army • William G. Stevenson
... peculiarly the savage continent, though it has the oldest civilization in its northeast corner, and the newest British civilization rapidly developing on its southern edge. It is the "dark continent," both in the color of its inhabitants and in its sad destitution and degradation. About a tenth of the world's population is here; with as many missionaries as in civilized India, but unable to reach the people as effectually as there because of the lack of national organization and the absence of great highways ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon
... I must not ask you all (Providence and Destiny and you) why honest Phocion died in utter poverty and destitution, like Aristides before him, while those two unwhipped puppies, Callias and Alcibiades, and the ruffian Midias, and that Aeginetan libertine Charops, who starved his own mother to death, were all rolling in money? nor again ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... the boy implicitly believes and no doubt resolves to rival what he reads. A specimen or two will amply suggest the rest. In one tale the hero is held up to the unqualified admiration of posterity for having starved to death his son, in an extreme case of family destitution, for the sake of providing food enough for his aged father. In another he unhesitatingly divorces his wife for having dared to poke fun, in the shape of bodkins, at some wooden effigies of his parents which he had had set up ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... him; while many of the most respectable families in the districts were ashamed to place on record the suffering and dishonour inflicted on their female members; and still more had been reduced by them to utter destitution, and driven in despair into other districts. To use his own words—"The once flourishing districts of Gonda and Bahraetch, so noted for fertility and beauty, are now, for the greater part, uncultivated; villages completely deserted in the midst of lands devoid of all tillage everywhere ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... communicate with her late husband, by medium or otherwise, on the ground that she found herself naked and shivering with cold, because the garments buried with her had not been burnt, and therefore were of no use to her in the world of shades. So Periander, to put a stop to this sad state of spiritual destitution, requisitioned all the best dresses of the Corinthian ladies, burnt them bodily in a great trench, and received an immediate answer from the gratified shade, who was thenceforth enabled to walk about in the principal promenades of Hades ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... of the Bubble! Silence and destitution are upon thy walls, proud house, for a memorial! Situated as thou art in the very heart of stirring and living commerce, amid the fret and fever of speculation—with the Bank, and the 'Change, and the India House about thee, in the ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... can succeed in being creative rather than possessive in a world which is wholly built on competition, where the great majority would fall into utter destitution if they became careless as to the acquisition of material goods, where honor and power and respect are given to wealth rather than to wisdom, where the law embodies and consecrates the injustice of those who have ...
— Political Ideals • Bertrand Russell
... according to the older drama, as a last resource, goes with Perillus to Cordelia. Instead of the unnatural banishment of Lear during the tempest, and his roaming about the heath, Leir, with Perillus, in the older drama, during their journey to France, very naturally reach the last degree of destitution, sell their clothes in order to pay for their crossing over the sea, and, in the attire of fishermen, exhausted by cold and hunger, approach Cordelia's house. Here, again, instead of the unnatural combined ravings of the fool, Lear, and Edgar, as represented by Shakespeare, ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... hundred dollars between her and destitution might have been two million; she was rich. She could treat the troubled, pale little mother and the two children from the next section to lemonades every afternoon, and when they reached Chicago, hot and sunshiny at last, she and Teddy spent the day loitering through a ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... the country parts, more remote from the public eye, that one sees the destitution wrought by the depression in the linen trade. People there are struggling with all their might to live and keep out of the workhouses. Hand-loom weaving seems doomed to follow hand-spinning and become a thing of the past. Weavers ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... induced the separation of families, caused many thriving establishments to be broken up, and even the ruin of some few individuals, who, although their capital was but small, yet having thrown it all into the common stock, when the community failed, found themselves in a state of complete destitution. These persons, then, forgetting the "doctrine of circumstances," and everything but the result, and the promises of Mr. Owen, censured him in no measured language, and cannot be convinced of the purity of his intentions ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall
... visitors, too, we hear of cases of destitution, truancy, waywardness and moral exposure, of unfit dwellings, and illegal liquor-selling. Such things we report to suitable agencies—the other departments of our Children's Aid Society, the Associated Charities, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, the Board of ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... it is based upon the misconception that Lord Wharncliffe, Lady Mary's greatgrandson, and not Lady Stuart, her granddaughter, was the writer of the foregoing account. But as a set-off to the extreme destitution alleged, Mr. Keightley very justly observes that Mrs. Fielding must for some time have had a maid, since it was a maid who had been devotedly attached to her whom Fielding subsequently married. He also argues that "living in a ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... it argued some divine compensation somewhere that a thing so destitute should remain unaware of its destitution, that a creature so futile and diminutive should be sustained by this conviction of his greatness. For he was certain. Nothing could annihilate the illusion by which Nicky lived. But it was enough to destroy all certainty in anybody else, and there were moments when ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... successions; he thought no pains too great to arrange between a widow and a son who had succeeded his father; he was often harassed and perplexed by tales of hardship; and I find him writing, almost in despair, of their improvident habits and the destitution that awaited their families upon a death. "The house being completely furnished, they come into possession without necessaries, and they go out NAKED. The insurance seems to have failed, and what next is to be tried?" While they lived he wrote behind their backs to arrange for the education of their ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... ubiquitous doves of Elijah—or, my faith! if anything went wrong with the commissariat, helping myself with the best grace in the world from the next peasant! And now I began to feel at the same time the burthen of riches and the fear of destitution. There were ten thousand pounds in the despatch-box, but I reckoned in French money, and had two hundred and fifty thousand agonies; I kept it under my hand all day, I dreamed of it at night. In the inns, ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... investment, yielding a large return of rapture! She could never deny herself the pleasure of giving these little offerings of love with her own hands, and wishing her poor neighbors a "Happy Christmas;" and on this occasion she had learnt the destitution of a poor widow, who struggled hard to support her young family and to maintain a decent appearance, but who was now laid up with sickness, and unable to provide clothing and fuel for herself and her little ones. Mr. Wyndham had immediately ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... limited upper class, living in unexampled luxury, while about one-fourth of the whole population existed in a state of fluctuating penury, often sinking below the margin of poverty. Many thousands were annually drawn into this gulf of destitution, and died from direct starvation and premature exhaustion or from diseases produced by ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... the establishment of his better principles, might qualify him for receiving it for his own distribution. It was difficult to believe that his subjection to opium could much longer resist the stings of his own conscience, and the solicitations of his friends, as well as the pecuniary destitution to which his opium habits had reduced him. The proposed object was named to Mr. C. who ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... of Union is liable are negative. It has not removed (its foes, say that it has not mitigated) great evils; but the mass of ills for which the Union is constantly made chargeable were in existence before the days of Pitt or Cornwallis. Destitution, sectarian animosities, harsh evictions, met by savage outrages, the terror of secret societies, the stern enforcement of law which to the people represented anything but justice, are phenomena of Irish society, which, as they existed before the Volunteers established the Parliamentary ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... were men of noble and ancient lineage, and both had been leading men[9] in the Roman senate and had been consuls. But because they practised philosophy and were mindful of justice in a manner surpassed by no other men, relieving the destitution of both citizens and strangers by generous gifts of money, they attained great fame and thus led men of the basest sort to envy them. Now such persons slandered them to Theoderic, and he, believing their slanders, put these two men to death, on ...
— Procopius - History of the Wars, Books V. and VI. • Procopius
... Constance, gravely, "makes a futile attempt semi-weekly to beat his brains out with a club; and every successive failure encourages him to try again; the only effect being a temporary decapitation of his family; and I believe this is the night on which he periodically turns a frigid eye upon their destitution." ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... they were placed in close custody in another castle in the southern part of England, and all the property, both of the prince and of Lady Cecily, was confiscated. While the mother and the younger children were thus closely shut up and reduced to helpless destitution, the father and the older sons were obliged to fly from the country to save their lives. In less than three months after this time these same exiled and apparently ruined fugitives were marching triumphantly through the country, at the head of victorious troops, carrying all before them. ...
— Richard III - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... said, in conclusion, "we were nearly reduced to a state of destitution, but, before absolute want had been felt by us, God mercifully took my darling father ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... to many serious questions. Many of the workers were near to destitution, and it was said that the organized charities would find it very difficult to give assistance to all who applied for it. They were busy everywhere, to their full capacity. "And I've heard it's nothing here to what it is on the mainland," said Baker Jorgen. "There the unemployed ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... safety of the public liberty, its depository should be subject to be changed with the greatest ease possible, and without suspending or disturbing for a moment the movements of the machine of government. You apprehend that a single executive, with, eminence of talent, and destitution of principle, equal to the object, might, by usurpation, render his powers hereditary. Yet I think history furnishes as many examples of a single usurper arising out of a government by a plurality, as of temporary trusts of power in a single hand rendered permanent by usurpation. I do not ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... sick the malady that now poisoned her own life owed its origin; that to one wretched relative she had been a support and succour in the depths of self-earned degradation, and that it was still her hand which kept him from utter destitution. Miss Helstone stayed the whole evening, omitting to pay her other intended visit; and when she left Miss Mann it was with the determination to try in future to excuse her faults; never again to make light ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... early habit and gave himself up lovingly and devotedly to Bengali literature. Though the meekest of men, he was full of fire which flamed its fiercest in his patriotism, as though to burn to ashes the shortcomings and destitution of his country. The memory of this smile-sweetened fervour-illumined lifelong-youthful saint is one that is worth ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... Venables,—That the subjects of all nations be equally objects of the Institution, as well in war as in peace; that the same rewards be given for their rescue as for British subjects; and that foreigners saved from shipwreck, and being in a state of destitution, be placed under the care of the consuls or other accredited agents of their own nations, or be forwarded ...
— An Appeal to the British Nation on the Humanity and Policy of Forming a National Institution for the Preservation of Lives and Property from Shipwreck (1825) • William Hillary
... week or thereabouts for the year round. Thus circumstanced, the commissioners observed, 'It is impossible for the able-bodied in general to provide against sickness or the temporary absence of employment, or against old age, or the destitution of their widows and children in the contingent event of their own premature decease. A great portion of them are, it is said, insufficiently provided with the commonest necessaries of life. Their habitations are wretched ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... Caesar, in fact, that they would live on the bark of trees rather than abandon his cause. Pompey's soldiers, at one time, coming near to the walls of a town which they occupied, taunted and jeered them on account of their wretched destitution of food. Caesar's soldiers threw loaves of this bread at them in return, by way of symbol that they ...
— History of Julius Caesar • Jacob Abbott
... Street, Blackfriars, by a middle-aged man in a garb of seedy black, who handled his broom like one who played upon a strange instrument, and who, wearing the words pauper et pedester written on a card stuck in his hat-band, told us, in good colloquial Latin, a tale of such horrifying misery and destitution, that we shrink from recording it here. We must pass on to the next ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 437 - Volume 17, New Series, May 15, 1852 • Various
... Poverty.— N. poverty, indigence, penury, pauperism, destitution, want; need, neediness; lack, necessity, privation, distress, difficulties, wolf at the door. bad circumstances, poor circumstances, need circumstances, embarrassed circumstances, reduced circumstances, straightened circumstances; slender means, narrow ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... little as possible, and grumbled at the fortune that made him a laborer. But these halcyon days were few, and soon passed away, to be followed by decreasing allowances of the commonest food, fierce pangs of hunger, and miserable destitution. A bad harvest inflicted untold wretchedness on the poor. Ill lodged, ill fed, and scantily clothed, disease cut them down like grass before the scythe. A deadly pestilence swept over the land in 1348, carrying off about two thirds ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... and was, in fact, Another's. As to how Tin-tun-ling contracted a matrimonial alliance in France, the evidence is a little confusing. It seems certain that after the death of his first employer, Callery, he was in destitution; that M. Theophile Gautier, with his well-known kindness and love of curiosities, took him up, and got him lessons in Chinese, and it seems equally certain that in February, 1872, he married a certain Caroline Julie Liegeois. ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... the Greeks pay, is another subject which deserves attention. The general taxes in Greece are very heavy. Every individual pays, on an average, twelve shillings, which makes the payment of a family of five persons amount to L.3 sterling annually. This is a very large sum, when the poverty and destitution of the people is taken into consideration, and is greater than is paid by any other European nation where the population is so thinly scattered over the surface of the country. Yet as soon as the Greeks became convinced that the general government would contribute nothing towards improving ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... not bear that the sick of the island should be made to suffer. I was amazed by his reply. Terutak', it appeared, had still three or four in reserve against an accident; and his reluctance, and the dread painted at first on every face, was not in the least occasioned by the prospect of medical destitution, but by the immediate divinity of Chench. How much more did I respect the king's command, which had been able to extort in a moment and for nothing a sacrilegious favour that I had in vain solicited with millions! But now I had a difficult task in front of me; it was not ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... would be degrading to faint with hunger on the causeway of a hamlet. Had I nothing about me I could offer in exchange for one of these rolls? I considered. I had a small silk handkerchief tied round my throat; I had my gloves. I could hardly tell how men and women in extremities of destitution proceeded. I did not know whether either of these articles would be accepted: probably they would not; but I ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... course," she coincided eagerly. "Why couldn't he come along? There will be plenty of room if I operate the car. It is a case of destitution of which Uncle Percival has just learned—a widow and three children actually suffering. Surely it can do no harm for Captain ...
— The Case and The Girl • Randall Parrish
... of His own fulness He saw that being without beauty, without form, without life, without name, that being without being which we call non-existence: He heard the cry of worlds which were not, the cry of a measureless destitution calling to a measureless goodness. Eternity was troubled, she said to ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... progress in her studies, and grew hopeful over the fact. If her father would give her the chance she could make a place for herself among skilled workers within a year, and be able, if there were need, to provide for the entire family. Great and prolonged destitution rarely occurs, even in a crowded city, unless there is much sickness or some destructive vice. Wise economy, patient and well-directed effort, as a rule, secure comfort and independence, if not affluence; but continued illness, disaster, and especially sin, ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... thousand souls in the Tenth Ward alone, of New York, only about one-fourth attend any place of worship. These facts and figures are startling, but they are, nevertheless, true. These precious souls, for whom Christ died, must be made the object of our affection. Our knowledge of the spiritual destitution of the down-town masses is strictly based upon our experience and observation. And hence we say that a house to house visitation, systematically arranged, constitutes one of the essential characteristics of Christ-like work. He labored not only in the ...
— Gathering Jewels - The Secret of a Beautiful Life: In Memoriam of Mr. & Mrs. James Knowles. Selected from Their Diaries. • James Knowles and Matilda Darroch Knowles
... upon Lionel, for all the sacrifices of self which he had made to shield him, this was Lionel's return. Were all the world against him he still must have believed Lionel true to him, and in that belief must have been enheartened a little. And now...His sense of loneliness, of utter destitution overwhelmed him. Then slowly of his sorrow resentment was begotten, and being begotten it grew rapidly until it filled his mind and whelmed in its turn all else. He threw back his great head, and his bloodshot, gleaming ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... principal promenades, often eclipsing the wife of the General-in-chief. On his return to Paris, the latter obliged his wife to dismiss the beautiful Louise, who, abandoned by her inconstant lover, fell into great destitution; and I often saw her afterwards at the residence of Josephine begging aid, which was always most kindly granted. This young woman, who had dared to rival Madame Bonaparte in elegance, ended by marrying, I think, an English jockey, led a most ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... he has not the slightest aptitude, and cannot look after his own affairs. He is always dreading poverty and destitution. He believes, however, that he passes among his friends as ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the English mind. We refer to the movement inaugurated by the Wesleys and Whitefield, who were fellow-students in Oxford University. They were appalled at the dissoluteness of the students, the frigid preaching of the day, and the universal religious destitution of the nation. These themes burdened the hearts of the "Holy Club" at Oxford from day to day, and sent them from their cloisters to visit prisons, preach in surrounding towns, and impart religious truth wherever a willing recipient could be found. No sooner had John Wesley ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... less taste for organisation, and more leisure for pastoral intercourse with his flock, might have effected more. The vicar's chief concern indeed seemed to be with the prosperous and healthy members of his parish; if there was a case of destitution, of illness, of sorrow, it was certainly inquired into; some hard-featured lady, with a strong sense of rectitude and usefulness, would be commissioned to go and look into the matter. She generally returned saying cheerfully ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... look of intelligence pervaded the company; for the speaker, one of the most substantial householders in the settlement, was always taken with distressing symptoms of poverty and destitution when any allusion to public or ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... from his hip pocket the carefully folded sheet of foolscap which he had put away when duty called him to Barclay. He paused at the bottom of the stair, backed the paper on the wall, and wrote under the words setting forth the farmer's destitution, "Martin Culpepper—twenty-five dollars." He stood a moment in the stairway looking into the street; the day was fair and beautiful; the grasshoppers were gone, and with them went all the vegetation ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... state of destitution, my new mistress sent for a seamstress, and at once ordered wherewith to ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... McGrath had been present, and therefrom the "Record" went on to deduce that not even Peter Rathbawne, with all his obstinacy, all his blindness to the welfare of his employees, was responsible for their present destitution in the same sense as was the Lieutenant-Governor, who might have avoided the strike by a conciliatory word, and who, instead, had advised Mr. Rathbawne to fight the working-people until the last cent of ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... replied that she had no choice between these long walks and utter destitution for herself and her children; but she said, cheerfully, that it was only since the weather had become so warm that she had found the walk at all beyond her strength, and the hot weather would soon be ...
— The Orphans of Glen Elder • Margaret Murray Robertson
... the fittest. This new conception, in which competition appears as a fundamental process in all life, has been a powerful prop to the laissez faire policy and has led to its continuance regardless of the misery and destitution which, if it did not create, it certainly did not remedy. The works of Herbert Spencer, the greatest expounder of the doctrine of evolution, contain a powerful massing of evidence in favor of laissez faire as a conclusion to be drawn from a scientific study of human ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... a surgeon, by whom he was bled. The poor man was shortly removed to St. George's Hospital, where he died at about eight o'clock on Saturday evening. He left a wife and three infant children in a state of destitution, without even the means of buying ...
— The King's Post • R. C. Tombs
... they all experienced thirst, though no one murmured. So utterly without means of relieving this necessity did each person know them all to be, that no one spoke on the subject at all. In fact, shipwreck never produced a more complete destitution of all the ordinary agents of helping themselves, in any form or manner, than was the case here. So sudden and complete had been the disaster, that not a single article, beyond those on the persons of the sufferers, came even in view. The masts, sails, rigging, spare spars, ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... "The mendicant showed the effects of deprivation." Deprivation refers to the act of depriving, taking away from; privation is the state of destitution, of not having. ...
— Write It Right - A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults • Ambrose Bierce
... buy!) my gloves and shoes, I now had an assured income, as long as my health and faculties were unimpaired, of at least a thousand a year; and the thirty guineas a week at Covent Garden, and much larger remuneration during provincial tours, forever forbade the sense of destitution productive of the ecstasy with which, only a short time before I came out, I had found wedged into the bottom of my money drawer in my desk a sovereign that I had overlooked, and so had sorrowfully concluded myself penniless ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... no better than the priests. The people, designedly chained to the basest superstitions and following the example of their leaders, have cast aside the restraints of chastity and morality. His heart touched with pity at the sight of the religious destitution of the people, his anger, like that of Moses "waxed hot" against those, who should have given them the gospel of their salvation. Encouraged by the example of Wiclif to make known the truth, he affirms the supreme authority of the scriptures, ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... to you before, in anticipation of this change, there had been a very serious neglect, upon the part of this family, of all those duties connected with the poor and ignorant. None of those efforts were here made to assist in softening the evils of destitution, or in forwarding the instruction of the young, which almost every body, nowadays, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... secretary, and then with the ambassador himself. He said that he regretted he could do nothing for me, at least, officially. He looked at my clothes, and laughed a little, and said that of course, in cases of absolute destitution he sometimes felt compelled to come to the help of his fellow-countrymen. I told him that I knew the world, and was willing to undertake work of any sort. He answered that such cases were usually looked ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... hope! that was the message of Vereeniging—a message which struck a chill in every heart. One after another we painted the destitution, the misery of our districts, and each picture was more gloomy than the last. At length the moment of decision came, and what course remained open to us? This only—to resign ourselves to our fate, intolerable though it appeared, to ...
— Three Years' War • Christiaan Rudolf de Wet
... it takes are false, fitful, exaggerated; in broad day it sickens our sense with the dreary persistence of definite measurable reality. The man who looks with ghastly horror on all his property aflame in the dead of night, has not half the sense of destitution he will have in the morning, when he walks over the ruins lying blackened in the pitiless sunshine. That moment of intensest depression was come to Janet, when the daylight which showed her the walls, and chairs, and tables, and all the commonplace reality that surrounded ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... occasional mendicants whose faces were less familiar. One afternoon a most extraordinary Irishman, with a black eye, a bruised hat, and other traces of past enjoyment, waited upon me with a pitiful story of destitution and want, and concluded by requesting the usual trifle. I replied, with some severity, that if I gave him a dime he would probably spend it for drink. "Be Gorra! but you're roight—I wad that!" he answered promptly. ...
— Urban Sketches • Bret Harte
... be regretted," says M. de la Renaudiere, "that worn out with fatigue, scarcely able to drag himself along, in a state of positive destitution, Mollien was unable to cross the lofty mountains separating the basin of the Senegal from that of the Djoliba, and that he was compelled to rely upon native information respecting the most important objects of his expedition. It is on the faith of the assertions ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... wretchedness. But the presence of a Christian in the city could not long be tolerated, and the Foullans threatened to besiege it. The doctor, therefore, left it on the 17th of March, 1854, and fled to the frontier, where he remained for thirty-three days in the most abject destitution. He then managed to get back to Kano in November, thence to Kouka, where he resumed Denham's route after four months' delay. He regained Tripoli toward the close of August, 1855, and arrived in London on the 6th of September, the only ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... notch in his under lip where Sermaise had struck him with the sword, and what wrinkles the reader may imagine. In default of portraits, that is all I have been able to piece together, and perhaps even the baldness should be taken as a figure of his destitution. A sinister dog, in all likelihood, but with a look in his eye, and the loose flexile mouth that goes with wit and an overweening sensual temperament. Certainly the sorriest figure ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... officials. This is like taking the milk and omitting to feed the cow. The consequence is, the people lose their interest in work of any kind, leave off striving for an increase of property which they will not be permitted to enjoy, and resign themselves to utter destitution with a stolid apathy most painful to witness. The land has been brought to such a degree of impoverishment that it is actually no longer capable of producing crops sufficient for a settled population. It is cultivated only in patches along the rivers, where ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... of the Barkly West district who refused to be commandeered were, irrespective of nationality, removed from their homes by the Boers' Landrosts and thrust across the Orange river in a state of absolute destitution.[253] The number of recruits which had accrued to the enemy's commandos by these means was already, by the end of December, considerable; it was assessed at the time by the British authorities as high as ten thousand. But the danger for the moment was not so much the numerical ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... original chapel of the district will serve as a fitting introduction to these memoirs. According to Bell, it must have been simple even to destitution. No smoothly hewn stones, no carved windows, no decoration of any kind distinguished it from the houses of the people. It was a small, low building of rough stone, unplastered, even inside, and roofed by a heather thatch. There was ...
— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett
... have received your letter, and am surprised that you should expect me to help support you. You are my brother's widow, it is true, but your destitution is no fault of mine. My brother was always shiftless and unpractical, and to such men good luck never comes. He might at any rate have insured his life, and so made comfortable provision for you. You cannot expect me to repair his negligence. ...
— Andy Grant's Pluck • Horatio Alger
... small scale, they were carried on with a petty meanness, vindictiveness and treachery that would have disgraced the Hurons themselves. From time to time one party would gain the upper hand, and would drive the other from the Valley in apparently hopeless destitution; but the defeated ones, to whichsoever side they might belong, invariably contrived to re-muster their forces, and return to harass and drive out their opponents in their turn. The only purpose for which they could be induced to temporarily lay aside ...
— Canadian Notabilities, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... to the great industry. As a system it was far from perfect. It contained in itself all kinds of gross injustices, demands that were too great, wages that were too small; in spite of the splendour of the foreground, poverty and destitution hovered behind the scenes. But such as it was, the system worked: and it was the only ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... minister of war—and the archives of the ministry are there for reference—ever received the portfolio under more critical circumstances: civil war within, a foreign enemy at our doors, discouragement rife among our veteran armies, absolute destitution of means to equip new ones. That was what I had to face on the 8th of June, when I entered upon my duties. An active correspondence, dating from the 8th of June, between the civil and military authorities, revived their courage and their hopes. My addresses ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... plane tree. All around were cells that looked like horse boxes, without light or air; those were the classrooms. I speak in the past tense, for doubtless the present day has seen the last of this academic destitution. ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... certain abbe deeply learned in all the mysteries of occult chemistry, an adept of the great Albert, the master of masters in empirical art. Like all sorcerers, and all savants of the eighteenth century, this abbe was represented as being in a state of frightful misery and destitution. He who possessed the secrets of plants and minerals, of fire and light, of the generation of beings, had not the wherewithal to procure himself a decent soutane, nor even a morsel of bread. Though, by the efforts of his magic, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... the rightful owner of the Transome estates. For Esther's real name was Bycliffe and not Lyon, and she was the step-daughter only of the minister. Mr. Lyon had found Esther's mother, a French woman of great beauty, in destitution—her husband, an Englishman, lying in some unknown prison. This Englishman was a Bycliffe—and heir to the Transome property, and on the proof of his death Mr. Lyon, knowing nothing of Bycliffe's family, married his widow, who, however, died while Esther was still a tiny child. Not till the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... remained twenty days in Kansas and had not opportunity to visit Indiana and other States that had received immigrants. But the information we received, with few exceptions, was similar to that of those visited. There had been suffering and destitution in some localities during the past winter; that was to be expected, as many had come wholly unprepared and without that push and ready adaptation to the status of ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... of papers dated 1610-19 shows that an encomienda of Indians was granted to the seminary of Santa Potenciana for its support, in consequence of the destitution suffered ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVIII, 1617-1620 • Various
... with the fact before us, that the cost of the liquor sold annually by retail dealers is equal to nearly $25 for every man, woman and child in our whole population, and we can readily see why so much destitution is to be found among them. Throwing out those who abstain altogether; the children, and a large proportion of women, and those who take a glass only now and then, and it will be seen that for the rest the average of cost must be more than treble. Among working men who drink ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur
... means by which we furnish occupation for the whole city, and if you take it from us, our means of finding that occupation is withdrawn. Besides, those who take it will have difficulty in preserving what is dishonestly acquired, and thus poverty and destitution are brought upon the city. Now, I, and these Signors command, and if it were consistent with propriety, we would entreat that you allow your minds to be calmed; be content, rest satisfied with the provisions that have been made for you; and if you should be found to need anything further, make your ...
— History Of Florence And Of The Affairs Of Italy - From The Earliest Times To The Death Of Lorenzo The Magnificent • Niccolo Machiavelli
... be in Adam's case of destitution,that's one thing!' was Dr. Arthur's comment, as his friend sprang past him into the cabin. Then however, like a wise man, postponing other things to business, Rollo only demanded calmly what the matter was? Hazel had not expected him, and there was a look of ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... keeps pace with the increase of food; and, indeed, such being the power of the generative force, it overpasses the means of subsistence, establishing a constant pressure upon them. Under these circumstances, it necessarily happens that a certain amount of destitution must occur. Individuals have come into existence who must ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... its detection and exposure, had it not been characterized by the lowest attempts at concealment and treachery, falsehood and detraction.—Like Iago in the play, a wretched abandonment of character, a destitution of principle, and a fiend-like thirst for revenge, accompany the author thro' the whole of his progress, and appear to acquire additional force, as he approaches the period of his downfall. That it is a tissue, however, which ...
— A Review and Exposition, of the Falsehoods and Misrepresentations, of a Pamphlet Addressed to the Republicans of the County of Saratoga, Signed, "A Citizen" • An Elector
... mud-covered box, with four bare walls and a narrow doorway facing toward the south. Herein lived and suffered a family of human beings—freedmen and women without the stigma of slavery, but with all the misery of destitution ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... of spectacle at Rome, in its way as significant of cruelty and ruthlessness, the Triumph, each occasion of which signified some nation conquered or army defeated, and thousands slain or plunged into misery and destitution. The victorious general to whom the senate granted the honor of a triumph was not allowed to enter the city in advance, and Lucullus, on his return from victory in Asia, waited outside Rome for three years, until the desired honor ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... superior a force as that of the Creek nation, who would have taken all their slaves from them. As, therefore, the Pawnees would have stolen all their cattle, and the Creeks have taken all their slaves, they considered that utter destitution would be the consequence of the removal as proposed by the American Government. To get over the latter difficulty, the government proposed that the Seminoles should sell their slaves previous to their removing, but this they objected ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... length allayed, Calmly, but not without a natural joy At being thus lifted to an affluent lot, The three discussed their future. Should they travel? Or should they choose some rural site, and build? Paradise Found would furnish a good site! Now they could help how many! Not aloof From scenes of destitution had they kept: What joy to aid the worthy poor! To save This one from beggary! To give the means To that forsaken widow, overworked, With her persistent cough, to make a trip, She and her children, city-pinched and pale, To some good inland farm, and ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent
... rain had run down in gullies. The valleys between, where the autumn greens should have run deep and fresh, where snug homes should have stood, where happy people should now be living, were nothing but blackened hollows of destitution. From Bald Mountain, away up on the east, to far, low-lying Old Forge to the south, nothing but a circle of ashes. Ashes and bitterness in the mouth; dirt and ashes in the eye; misery and the food of hate in ...
— The Shepherd of the North • Richard Aumerle Maher
... of the country, and I knew how I must behave if I wished to be let alone. Although the landlady was a worthy woman, her house was not exactly suitable for me; my stay in England might be protracted, and if I came to destitution I should be wretched indeed; so I resolved to leave the house. I received no visitors, but I could not prevent the inquisitive from hovering round my door, and the more it became known that I saw no one, the more their curiosity increased. The house was not quiet enough. ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... chamber were parted, and through their gap, the nearest human beings who were famishing, and in misery, were borne into the midst of the company—feasting and fancy-free—if, pale with sickness, horrible in destitution, broken by despair, body by body, they were laid upon the soft carpet, one beside the chair of every guest, would only the crumbs of the dainties be cast to them—would only a passing glance, a passing thought be vouchsafed to them? Yet the actual facts, the ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... the brood were not involved in this graceless agitation. The complaints stopped with Guinivere. Harold, Rosemary and Rutherford were too young to realise the state of destitution into which the family had fallen. They were quite happy, contented and, so far, unaware of the gravity of a situation which was more or less apparent to their elders. Frederick, Marie Louise and Wilberforce formed the higher group of malcontents, and their mutterings ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... first she will have to pass through strife and tribulation—perhaps bloodshed. The end surely, love, is not yet. But France is now comparatively free. The dreadful problem is now nearer solution than it ever was. Labor will hereafter be granted to all, together with the adequate reward of labor. Destitution will not be deemed guilt. The death-penalty is abolished. The rich will not with impunity grind the poor into powder beneath their heels. Asylums for the suffering, the distressed, the abandoned of both sexes will be sustained. The efforts which, as individuals, we have some of us made for years ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... translation of the first part of this charming tale appeared; and few books have obtained such deserved popularity. The gradual progress of the family from utter destitution and misery, to happiness and abundance, arising from their own labour, perseverance, and obedience, together with the effect produced on the different characters of the sons by the stirring adventures they met ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss
... parent, so should we regard the whole people as parents of the state, and, so far from depriving them of what the state bestows, we ought, in the absence of such bounty, to find other means to keep them from destitution. If the rich will adopt this principle, I think they will act both justly and wisely; for to deprive any class of a necessary provision, is to unite them in disaffection ...
— The Olynthiacs and the Phillippics of Demosthenes • Demosthenes
... In the letter which you will take to father, I have told him our destitution; and that the money spent for your railway ticket has been obtained by the sacrifice of the diamonds and pearls, that were set around my mother's picture; that cameo, which he had cut in Rome and framed in Paris. Beryl so much depends on the impression you make ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... was the misery of the land that sometimes parents destroyed their children, rather than let them grow up to a life of suffering. This vast system of organized oppression, like all tyranny, "was not so much an institution as a destitution," undermining and impoverishing the country. It lasted until time brought its revenge, and Rome, which had crushed so many nations of barbarians, was in her turn threatened with a like fate, by bands of northern ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery |
