"Inefficiency" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... unlimited powers. Any citizens who worked against the existing administrations, however peacefully, might be charged with intimidation of voters and prosecuted under the new act. Thus these radical governments were made practically self-perpetuating. When their corruption, wastefulness, and inefficiency became evident, many people in the North frankly condemned them and the Federal Government which continued to ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... never stagnation, nor stupidity, nor blundering in the handling of Irish affairs whilst his hand was on the helm. It was only later that the creeping paralysis of inefficiency and incompetence exhibited itself and that a people deprived of his genius for direction and control sank into unimagined depths ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... will all have been driven back into its own country and so will be on its own soil, only requiring to be redistributed to its peace occupations. Our Army will have to be fetched home, firstly, over Continental railways, probably battered into a condition of much inefficiency, and then in ships, of which the supply will be very short. The process will be very slow and very costly. Our Overseas Army will have to be sent back to distant Dominions, and the Army of our American Allies will have to be ferried back over the Atlantic. ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers
... limousines were frequently overturned. Meetings denounced the inaction of the authorities; a gigantic parade bearing placards calling for an end to procrastination marched past the cityhall. Democrats blamed Republicans for inefficiency and Republicans retorted that Miss Francis had done her research during ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... Colonel Malcolm, December 3, 1809, the Duke admits that the spoils of conquest were of a moral rather than of a material kind. "The battle of Talavera was certainly the hardest fought of modern days.... It is lamentable that, owing to the miserable inefficiency of the Spaniards, ... the glory of the action is the only benefit which we have derived from it.... I have in hand a most difficult task.... In such circumstances one may fail, but it would be dishonourable to shrink from the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... his stock printer and failed in the effort. Then he returned to Boston and got up a duplex telegraph—for sending two messages at once over one wire. He tried to demonstrate it between Rochester and New York City. After a week's trial, his test did not work, partly because of the inefficiency of his assistant. ...
— Radio Boys Cronies • Wayne Whipple and S. F. Aaron
... cursing their inefficiency, and regretting that he had not himself made one of the party, he wandered in his restlessness to another part of the woods, and the ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... had had many years' experience in public affairs. Of such qualifications, Grant had very few. He was egotistical, a poor judge of men, without experience in statesmanship, and unwilling to submit to guidance. As a result, his administration was marked by inefficiency and extravagance, and ended in a ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... Byron's biographers, unable to overcome the difficulty of defining so complete a character, or of explaining, by ordinary rules, certain contradictions apparent in his rich nature, think to excuse their own inefficiency and elude the difficulty, by saying that he did not possess one of those striking points, or decided inclinations, that constitute a man's moral physiognomy. They pretend that his qualities of heart and mind, his passions, ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... school board? In the prohibition territory excommunication of such property interests has been followed by outlawry. The saloon in Maine and Kansas exists by the same title as did Robin Hood: the inefficiency of the law. On the road to excommunication is private property in the wretched shacks that shelter the city's poor. Outlawry is not far distant. "These tenements must go." Will they go? Ask of the police, who pick over the wreckage ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... those who cannot own property, as the Indians will have more regard for such. He explains in detail his difficulties regarding the proper disposal of the crown funds by the royal officials, and the heroic treatment made necessary by their inefficiency and mismanagement. The property of Guido de Lavezaris is confiscated, and the goods of other wrong-doers are seized. The city is now surrounded by a palisade and rampart; and the river-bank has been protected against the action of the waves. He has built, or has now in the shipyards, vessels ...
— The Philippine Islands 1493-1898, Vol. 4 of 55 - 1576-1582 • Edited by E. H. Blair and J. A. Robertson
... had lately been promoted. The fever had gone, and Mrs. Crawley was slowly regaining her strength—very slowly, and with frequent caution from the Silverbridge doctor that any attempt at being well too fast might again precipitate her into an abyss of illness and domestic inefficiency. ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... the nature and inefficiency of the Government evoked several modes of relief from these embarrassments were warmly espoused, among them none more prominent than annexation to the United States. It was urged with much force that the great want of the country, immigration and responsible government, would find their fulfillment ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... evidently a possible, though apparently not an essential destiny in form and figure. For the care and dispersal of the spores, achievement must surely be somewhat impaired. Whatever the measure of such inefficiency, among the Stemonitales Amaurochaete shows the acme, as Reticularia among the ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride
... collected in fairs, markets, and sea-ports in Ireland. These tolls and customs had been granted to particular individuals and corporations, and great evils existed in the levying of them, whence the motion for inquiry. It was opposed both on the general merits of the measure, and on the inefficiency of the particular mode of inquiry proposed; but the motion was carried, and ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... nevertheless understood certain words (such as "handchen geben") when only fifty-two weeks old. Inefficient attempts at imitative speaking precede the accurate attempts, and at fourteen months this inefficiency was still very apparent, being in marked contrast with the precision whereby it would imitate syllables which it could already say; the will to imitate all syllables was present, though not the ability. At the beginning of the fourteenth month on being asked: "Wo ist dein Schrank?" the child ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various
... by triennial increments to L172 for men and L140 for women. Two-thirds of the primary school teachers of Ireland have a salary of less than 30s. a week. The average payment to head teachers is in Scotland 75 per cent. and in England 48 per cent. higher than in Ireland. The general state of inefficiency of education in Ireland may be gathered from the fact that the Census of 1901 showed that of persons over five years of age no less than 13.7 per cent. could neither read nor write, the percentage of illiteracy being in the four provinces, 11.3 in Leinster, 12.5 in ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... ignorance of what had really happened did not account to the master for the indifference of her long silence, and albeit conscious of some inefficiency in his present unheroic attitude, he continued sarcastically, "May I ask WHAT you imagined would happen ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... foreign exchange reserves. Yet this increased revenue has not eased economic hardships, which include double-digit unemployment and inflation - inflation climbed to 26% as of June 2008. The economy has seen only moderate growth. Iran's educated population, economic inefficiency and insufficient investment - both foreign and domestic - have prompted an increasing number of Iranians to seek employment overseas, resulting in ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... the degraded state to which the church had sunk, and her inefficiency as the guardian and dispenser of religious truth, we are not left to the vague representations of declaimers, or the heated exaggerations of those by whom everything savouring of Rome is held in abomination. The preambles of the laws which were intended to cure the evils, bear the most direct and ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 2 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... fought in Hanover, where Adolphus Frederick, duke of Cambridge, had, in the name of his brother, William IV., king of England, established a new constitution, which had received many ameliorations notwithstanding the inefficiency of the liberals, Christiani, Luntzel, etc., to counteract the overpowering influence of the monarchical and aristocratic party. William IV., king of England and Hanover, expired in 1837, and was succeeded ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... might have unpleasant practical effects. Yet they are caused often by the presence of those whose disapproval is not of the smallest consequence, those, in fact, whom one is not likely to see again. One must look then for the cause of this, not in the fact that one's awkwardness and inefficiency is likely to be blamed by those of one's own circle, but simply in the terror of the unknown and the unfamiliar. It is probably therefore an old inherited instinct, coming from a time when the sight of a stranger might contain in it a menace of some hostile usage. If one questions ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... from echoing the idle tales which ran whispering in England that the Dardanelles campaign was a cruel blunder, that the blood of the Anzacs' bravest and best had been uselessly spilt, that their splendid young lives had been an empty sacrifice to the demons of Incompetence and Inefficiency. To those in Australia who in their hearts may feel that shreds of truth were woven in the rumours—that the Anzacs were spent on a forlorn hope, were wasted on a task foredoomed to failure—let this simple drawing bring the ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... with the young Russians studying natural science and chemistry, with whom Heidelberg is crowded, and who, astounding the naive German professors at first by the soundness of their views of things, astound the same professors no less in the sequel by their complete inefficiency and absolute idleness. In company with two or three such young chemists, who don't know oxygen from nitrogen, but are filled with scepticism and self-conceit, and, too, with the great Elisyevitch, Sitnikov roams about Petersburg, also getting ready to be great, and in ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... having been bailed out after some difficulty, for the police were frightened and ugly, foreseeing that this swift vengeance upon the notorious gang, meted out by a private hand, would throw a vivid light upon their own inefficiency and complaisance. Happily the District Attorney's office was engaged in one of its periodical feuds with the Police Department over some matter of graft gone astray, and was more inclined to make a cat's-paw than a ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... table before him the statements and accounts of his newly-augmented options. The papers, to his clerical inefficiency, presented a bewildering mass of inexplicable details and accounts. He brought them, with vast difficulty, into a rough order. In the lists of the acreages of timber controlled there were appended none of the names of those from whom his privilege of option had been obtained, no note of ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... posted in front of the British right wing, soon drove it from its ground. While rapidly pursuing the flying enemy, Woodford's brigade,[70] which was on the right of this wing, was arrested by a heavy fire from Chew's house, directed against its right flank. The inefficiency of musketry against troops thus sheltered being instantly perceived, the brigade was drawn off to the left by its commanding officer, and the field-pieces attached to it were ordered up to play on the house, but were too light to be of service. Some time was consumed ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 2 (of 5) • John Marshall
... there have been times, Anna, when your work has startled me. Ill-drawn, without method or sense of proportion, you have put wonderful things on to canvas, have drawn them out of yourself, notwithstanding your mechanical inefficiency. God knows how you did it. You ...
— Anna the Adventuress • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... system; and when once it had been adequately organised, as it first was, in England, it proceeded, they go on to observe, to spread itself with astonishing rapidity, all other methods disappearing before it, through their own comparative inefficiency. But when socialists or their opponents turn from capitalism to socialism, and speak of how socialism has risen and spread likewise, their language, as thus applied, has no meaning whatever unless it is interpreted in a totally new sense. For in the sense in which ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... government which shall diminish the weight of taxation, the city will neither be able to discharge the interest on debts already contracted, nor to meet the demands for current disbursements.... The present condition of the streets and public improvements of the city abundantly attest the total inefficiency of the present system." ...
— The Boss and the Machine • Samuel P. Orth
... determined as never before. They now welcome strong work and strong hands, and if the Republic does not respond to the responsibilities of the hour, they will not as in 1870 burn and destroy, but will set up another government in quick order and wipe out the weakness and inefficiency found to exist when the strain ...
— The Audacious War • Clarence W. Barron
... the most worthless and the most enterprising, had to rub shoulder to shoulder in daily life. Yet the variety was considerable: hardy and danger-loving pioneers fulfilling the requirements of romance; shiftless vagrants curiously combining utter inefficiency with a sort of bastard contempt for hardship; ruffians who could only offset against every brutal vice an ignoble physical courage; intelligent men whose observant eyes ranged over the whole region in a shrewd search after enterprise and profit; a few educated ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... such a shock by an all-night journey on the top of the coach, that I shall have enough to do to nurse it into its natural pace before I go home. I must devote myself to imbecility. I must be gloriously useless while I stay here. How is Mrs. [M.]? will she pardon my inefficiency? The city of Salisbury is full of weeping and wailing. The Bank has stopt payment; and every body in the town kept money at it, or has got some of its notes. Some have lost all they had in the world. It is the next thing to seeing a city with a plague within its walls. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... a long emotional strain the brain is beaten down; if the number of "low-efficiency" cells increases, the driving power of the brain is correspondingly lessened and therefore the various organs of the body may escape through the very inefficiency of the brain to produce in them forced activity. On the other hand, if the brain remains vigorous, the kidneys may take the strain and break down; if the kidneys do not break, the blood-vessels may harden; if the blood-vessels ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... any considerable size had been washed more than three or four miles down the river below their parent-source: considering the singular rapidity of the great body of water in the Santa Cruz, and that no still reaches occur in any part, this example is a most striking one, of the inefficiency of rivers in transporting even ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... standstill: the fact being that she had grown feeble and superfluous. Sarah had taught all she knew to two highly intelligent pupils, and had survived her usefulness. She had no right place on earth. But in her morose inefficiency she had developed into an unconscious tyrant—a tyrant whose power lay in the loyalty of her subjects and not at all in her own soul. She was indeed like a deity, immanent, brooding, and unaware of itself!... Thus, the ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... not live at all, were it not for the fact that their inadequate wages are supplemented, directly, in many cases, by out-relief, and indirectly by numerous forms of charity. In one way or another the community has to make good the inefficiency that sweating produces. In one way or another the community ultimately pays, and it is my firm belief that it pays far more in the long run under the present system than if all workers were self-supporting. If a true account could be kept, it would be found that anything ...
— Constructive Imperialism • Viscount Milner
... made in regard to the inefficiency of the means provided by the Government of New Granada for transporting the United States mail across the Isthmus of Panama, pursuant to our postal convention with that Republic of the 6th of March, 1844. Our charge d'affaires at Bogota ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume - V, Part 1; Presidents Taylor and Fillmore • James D. Richardson
... discipline. Kind things and other kinds of things have been freely said to his detriment; but if every word were true, he is not to blame. The Australian soldier, like any other soldier, is but the product of a system, the standard or inefficiency of which it would not be just to hold him responsible for. The majority frankly admit that soldiering is not in their line. They would never choose it as a profession; yet the man from 'Down Under' has given unmistakable ...
— Over the Top With the Third Australian Division • G. P. Cuttriss
... and whilst you pique Nature against you, you do unwisely to trust to duty. In this futile scheme of polity, the state nurses in its bosom, for the present, a source of weakness, perplexity, counteraction, inefficiency, and decay; and it prepares the means of its final ruin. In short, I see nothing in the executive force (I cannot call it authority) that has even an appearance of vigor, or that has the smallest degree of just correspondence or symmetry or ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... remarkable case of arrested development. Although inexperienced observers might imagine traces of the British colonel, as found in Pall Mall, in the bristling white moustache, swollen neck, and red gills, we find neither public school education nor inefficiency much in evidence anywhere. On the contrary, education is in a rudimentary condition, though with slightly protuberent mathematical and fictional glands. Inefficiency, too, is quite absent, the organ having had but small opportunity to perform its functions. The subject, we may conclude, gentlemen, ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... general proposition of the inefficiency of doctors, and asked my companion if he ...
— The Pension Beaurepas • Henry James
... Report of the Sweating Committee says that "the inefficiency of many of the lower class of workers, early marriages, and the tendency of the residuum of the population in large towns to form a helpless community, together with a low standard of life and the excessive ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, May 24, 1890 • Various
... did not smile. Indeed he looked rather pained; he was remembering General Punnit's story: military inefficiency, even military imperfection, was for him no smiling matter. Beaumaroy did not appear ...
— The Secret of the Tower • Hope, Anthony
... See Sordello.] of the world, here amending a law, here building a settlement house, and so on. Thus the reformer charges the poet. Mrs. Browning, in Aurora Leigh, makes much of the issue, and there the socialist, Romney Leigh, sneers at the poet's inefficiency, telling ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... heroic romance was foredoomed to inefficiency. It was not a genuine kind at all: but a sort of patchwork of imitations of imitations—a mule which, unlike the natural animal, was itself bred, and bred in and in, of mules for generations back. It was true to no time, ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... been carefully filled with tow, up to the space which the loading had occupied! and, the priming of the weapons being left untouched, nothing but actually drawing and examining the charge could have discovered the inefficiency of his arms till the fatal minute arrived when their services were required. Charlie reloaded his pistols with care and accuracy, having now no doubt that he was to be waylaid and assaulted. He was not far ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... fairies' music, thin and strange. With something like remorse, I grant The world has beauty which I want; And if, instead of judging it, I at its Council chance to sit, Or at its gay and order'd Feast, My place seems lower than the least The conscience of the life to be Smiles me with inefficiency, And makes me all unfit to bless With comfortable earthliness The rest-desiring brain of man. Finally, them, I fix my plan To dwell with Him that dwells apart In the highest heaven and lowliest heart; Nor will I, to my utter loss, Look to pluck roses from the Cross. ...
— The Victories of Love - and Other Poems • Coventry Patmore
... listen to their prayers, and coerce the sordid corn- dealers, who had, no doubt, numerous pits yet unopened. The alarm became still greater in the cantonments, where the commanding officer attributed all the evil to the inefficiency of the commissariat and the villany of the corn-dealers; and Major Gregory was in dread of being torn to pieces by the soldiery. Only one day's supply was left in the cantonment bazaars—the troops had become clamorous almost to a state of mutiny—the people of the town began ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... ridicule that would have daunted any but such as Washington and Johnson of Virginia or White and Hazard of Pennsylvania or Morris and Watson of New York. Every imaginable objection to such projects was advanced—from the inefficiency of the science of engineering to the probable destruction of all the fish in the streams. In spite of these discouragements, however, various men set themselves to form in rapid succession the Potomac Company in 1785, the Society for Promoting the Improvement ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... The inefficiency of most works of this kind are well known to all experienced housekeepers, they being generally a mere compilation of receipts, by those who have no practical knowledge of the subject, and are consequently ...
— The American Housewife • Anonymous
... history appeared—H. G. Howitt. In the sequence fortune continued to favour the Brigade. Howitt was a Territorial whose prowess had been proved in the Somme fighting. In place of a long staff training he brought business powers. He was indulgent of everything save fear, laziness, and inefficiency. Stout-hearted himself, he expected stoutness in others; this was the right attitude of a staff officer. Though a business man by training, he did not negotiate with the war; in him everything was better than ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... but a comparison of dates shows that the Duke of Bedford re-entered Paris with strong reinforcements on the very day on which Charles left Rheims three days only after his coronation, so that he scarcely seems so much to blame as appears. But the general delay, inefficiency, and hesitation existing at headquarters, naturally lead to mistakes ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... maintains itself. In the prematurely gray hair, the good-looking face, the abrupt speech, he was very much American. He was neat—neat in his way of dressing, and in his compact phrases, as hard and well-rounded as a pebble. The world to him was a place full of slackers, of lazy good-nature, of inefficiency. Into that softness he had come with a high explosive and an aim. He moved through life as a hunter among a covey of tame partridges—a brief flutter and a tumble of soft flesh. He had the cunning lines about the mouth, the glint in the eye, of the successful man. He had ...
— Young Hilda at the Wars • Arthur Gleason
... been said, as Lord Raglan has been given to understand, in private letters, of the inefficiency of the officers of the Staff, he considers it to be due to your Majesty, and a simple act of justice to those individuals, to assure your Majesty that he has every reason to be satisfied with their exertions, their indefatigable ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria
... the plug or hydrant, and the work begins. The chief engineer is required to attend all fires, and all orders proceed from him. The most rigid discipline is preserved, and the work goes on with a rapidity and precision which are in striking contrast to the inefficiency of the ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... problem till she should have solved it successfully. She might not be born to valiant achievement, like these sturdy folk about her, but she might as well prove to them that an Eastern tenderfoot was not all feebleness and inefficiency. ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... training, a declaration for which they had so eagerly waited. France was in their power, conquered already, they told themselves, for was she not utterly unprepared for war? And as for Russia, Russia the Colossus, the steam-roller, inefficiency reigned in her ranks, and she, too, in her turn, ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton
... the Natives of India consider that the only occupation worthy of an educated man is that of a writership in some office, and especially in a Government office. The village schoolboy goes back to the plow with the greatest reluctance; and the town schoolboy carries the same discontent and inefficiency into his father's workshop. Sometimes these ex-students positively refuse at first to work; and more than once parents have openly expressed their regret that they ever allowed their sons to be inveigled ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... own—then the study of the exact nature and properties of the transmitting medium is equally necessary. Indeed, the whole position can only be finally established of defining experimentally the necessary limitation of the medium, and proving the inefficiency of the lower data to account with ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 822 - Volume XXXII, Number 822. Issue Date October 3, 1891 • Various
... blood, and plants are tissued from green-gold, glistening sap. Substance and solidity were shadows that the morning cast round itself to make itself tangible: as she herself was a shadow, cast by that fragment of sunshine, her soul, over its inefficiency. ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... as a cause of connubial discord is the general inefficiency of a woman at the business of what is called keeping house—a business founded upon a complex of trivial technicalities. As I have argued at length, women are congenitally less fitted for mastering these technicalities than men; the enterprise always costs them ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... I could assure Mrs. Brown of the inefficiency of hair-dye as an internal application, she ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... Wellesley makes no mention of the sufferings which they must have undergone from lack of food and supplies of all kinds. He purposely puts the best face on it, and bears his troubles stoically. But young as he was, he marvelled at the inefficiency and lack of coordination of the high command. Once when a despatch was received by the General during dinner, from their ally, Austria, he tossed it aside unopened with the remark, ...
— Boys' Book of Famous Soldiers • J. Walker McSpadden
... the manageresses, those manageresses who had been obliged to invest little bunches of savings as guarantees and who had to account for every crumb and particle of food stock that came to the branch, and the hunt for cases and inefficiency by the inspectors, who had somehow to justify a salary of two hundred a year, not to mention a percentage ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... to give way!" she reproached herself. "It is what you might have expected of me before—before I had been through all this, with his example to uplift me out of my helplessness and inefficiency. Believe me, Lord Avondale, I am a very different young woman from the shallow, frivolous girl you knew during those ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... with Great Britain. On the 9th of May 1906 a decree appointed Chinese commissioners to control the Imperial Maritime Customs.[63] This was the only department of the government under European (British) control, and the only department also against which no charge of inefficiency or corruption could be brought. The change decreed by China was in accord with the new national sentiment, but by all the foreign powers interested it was felt that it would be a retrograde step if the customs ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... is a matter, the investigation of which should be included in Mr Lloyd George's Land Campaign. There is an obvious connection between the status of the agricultural labourer and the inefficiency of rural schools. [EDITOR.]] ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... be recognized that when an enterprise of this character is extended over more than three thousand counties throughout the nation, there may be occasional instances of inefficiency, bad management, or misuse of funds. When cases of this kind occur, there will be those, of course, who will try to tell you that the exceptional failure is characteristic of the entire endeavor. It should be remembered that in every big job there are some ...
— The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt • Franklin Delano Roosevelt
... estimate the situation more impartially, and from a more elevated point of view, and recognise in the number of trophies taken by the enemy, and their relation to the number of killed and wounded, only too easily and well, the measure of their own weakness and inefficiency. ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... servants, St. Clare found his menage anything but comfortable. His only daughter was exceedingly delicate, and he feared that, with no one to look after her and attend to her, her health and life might yet fall a sacrifice to her mother's inefficiency. He had taken her with him on a tour to Vermont, and had persuaded his cousin, Miss Ophelia St. Clare, to return with him to his southern residence; and they are now returning on this boat, where we have ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... bonnet, checked red and white in a "dam-brod" [draught-board] pattern round the edge, and a blue-buttoned coat with broad pearl buttons. It may be well to explain that there is a latent meaning, apparent only to Galloway folk of the ancient time, in the word "cuif." It conveys at once the ideas of inefficiency and folly, of simplicity and the ignorance of it. The cuif is a feckless person of the male sex, who is a recognized butt for a whole neighbourhood ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... he gave one a sense of power and intensity of purpose. There was a kind of slow-burning fire in him—a hatred of the enemy which was not weakened in him by any mercy, and a consuming rage, as it appeared to me, against inefficiency in high places, injustice of which he may have felt himself to be the victim, and restrictions upon his liberty of command. A bitter irony was often in his laughter when discussing politicians at home, and the wider strategy of war apart from that on his own front. He was intolerant of stupidity, ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... appointed by the Governor, who holds his office during good conduct. He is removable by the Governor for inefficiency or misconduct. It is his duty to make a geological, mineralogical, and physical survey of the State; to make records of the survey; to make a record of the general physical characteristics of the different counties; to locate the deposits of mineral ...
— Elements of Civil Government • Alexander L. Peterman
... war, of raising money and troops, and of providing for the general exigencies and the common interests of the nation. Nevertheless the federal government of these different people has always been as remarkable for its weakness and inefficiency as that of the Union is for its vigorous and enterprising spirit. Again, the first American confederation perished through the excessive weakness of its government; and this weak government was, notwithstanding, in possession of rights even more extensive than those of the federal government ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... work that is really worth while. Progress is always in spirals, and there is always a good time coming. There is nothing so fatal to good work as that flabby spirit under which some weak men try to hide their inefficiency—the spirit of "What's ...
— The Training of a Forester • Gifford Pinchot
... surveillance and protection of society. This will ultimately result in curtailing the reproduction of feeble-mindedness and in the elimination of an enormous amount of crime, pauperism, and industrial inefficiency. It is hardly necessary to emphasize that the high-grade cases, of the type now so frequently overlooked, are precisely the ones whose guardianship it is most important for the ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... easier to diagnose other people's cases than our own—and pleasanter. We know that the people of Germany have been led away by their teachers, philosophers, writers; they worship the god of force; they recognize no sin but weakness and inefficiency. They are good people, only for their own way of thinking; no doubt they say ...
— The Next of Kin - Those who Wait and Wonder • Nellie L. McClung
... until daylight seeped in through the one dingy window. Ford awoke to the acrid smell of scorched bacon, thought at first that Sandy was once more demonstrating his inefficiency as a cook, and when he remembered that Sandy's name was printed smudgily upon that page of his life which he had lately turned down as a blotted, unlearned lesson is pushed behind an unwilling schoolboy, he began to consider seriously his ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... keep her ambitions within bounds; to live and let live; to regard, without jealousy or envy, possessions which are the heritage of others less efficient than herself; and to leave it to time, slowly but surely, to do its work in rewarding merit and punishing inefficiency and sloth. ...
— Right Above Race • Otto Hermann Kahn
... a fleet is no more an incitement to war among reasonable men, than a policeman is an incentive to burglary or homicide. An army is not a contemptuous protest against Christianity; it is a sad commentary on Christianity's failure and inefficiency. An army and a fleet are merely a reasonable precaution which every nation must take, while awaiting the conversion of mankind from the ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... been guilty of tyrannous and despotic conduct, the mayor had ousted him not for pursuing an illegal course in arresting and "mugging" a presumptively innocent man (for illegal it most undoubtedly was), but for inefficiency ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... farmer—a man with honest, sincere views of life. Bereft of his wife, his home is cared for by a succession of domestics of varying degrees of inefficiency until, from a most unpromising source, comes a young woman who not only becomes his wife but commands his respect and eventually wins his love. A bright and delicate romance, revealing on both sides a love that surmounts all difficulties ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... drove away it suddenly occurred to him that on the morrow, instead of coming to the house in his car, he would leave it in the garage and walk. Between the discovery of his inefficiency and his resolution to dispense with a hitherto accustomed luxury there may have been a subtler connection than appears to ...
— The Twenty-Fourth of June • Grace S. Richmond
... depopulated, was reorganised as an imperial province with an elaborate hierarchy of civil and military officials. The change was welcome to the orthodox clergy, the more so because Justinian gave large powers in local administration to their bishops. Of outward pomp there was enough to gild corruption and inefficiency with a deceptive splendour; but in fact the restored Empire was little more civilised, in the true sense of the word, than the barbarian states of the past and future. Upon the Italians the Emperor conferred the boon of his famous Corpus Juris, a compendium ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... multiple responsibility that characterized the old-style army machine with its bureau chiefs competing with each other, with the navy, and with the Allies. Quartermaster Department, Ordnance Department, Signal Corps, and the other bureaus were uncooerdinated, and inevitable waste and inefficiency followed all their operations. It was the crisis that arose from the problem of supplies, in the winter of 1917, that furnished the President with the opportunity to cut red-tape and secure the centralization he desired. That opportunity came with the blanket powers bestowed upon him ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... home as his friend;—and some of them, no doubt, had whispered that this bringing home of Sir Marmaduke was part of the payment made by the Colonel for the smiles of the Governor's daughter. But no one alluded openly to the inefficiency of the evidence given. No one asked why a Governor so incompetent had been sent to them. No one suggested that a job had been done. There are certain things of which opposition members of Parliament complain loudly;—and ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... these is still so limited that their judgment has little weight; and the hostile conductor—in presence of the public who would pitilessly hiss a vocal accident of a good singer—reigns, with all the calm of a bad conscience, in his baseness and inefficiency. Fortunately, I here attack an exception; for the malevolent orchestral conductor—whether capable ...
— The Orchestral Conductor - Theory of His Art • Hector Berlioz
... of Lydiat, Vane, and Sedley, which are brought forward in the poem on the Vanity of Human Wishes, as examples of inefficiency of either learning or beauty, to shield their possessors from distress, have exercised inquiry. The following is the best account of ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... reflect, who could be so feeble and miserable a failure at tennis, could not be good for much in any department of life. She would compare me instinctively with my opponent, and contrast his dash and brilliance with my own inefficiency. Somehow the massacre was beginning to have a bad effect on my character. All my self-respect was ebbing. A little more of this, and I should become crushed,—a mere human jelly. It was my turn to serve. Service is my strong point at tennis. I am inaccurate, but vigorous, ...
— Love Among the Chickens • P. G. Wodehouse
... the bullet. He had ventured to say to McDowell that the Reserves were badly needed in front, and the proud "Regular" had answered the officious "Volunteer," to the effect that he knew his own business. Not the least among the causes of the North's inefficiency will be found this ill feeling between the professional and the civil soldiery. A Regular contemns a Volunteer; a Volunteer hates a Regular. I visited General Augur—badly wounded—in the drawing-room of the hotel, and paused a moment to watch Colonel Donnelly, ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... more talking to Thad," Persis repeated, as Mrs. West looked at her with the instant confidence of inefficiency in one who indicates a readiness to take the helm. "Don't make him feel that he's so awfully important just because he's making a fool of himself. Most boys attract more attention the first time ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... with such a rush that she felt she must throw herself upon that broad white bed and sob herself sick. But she sat still, holding her hands tightly clenched, and choking back the tears. She had work to do and she must be ready for that work. To give way in private meant inefficiency in public to-morrow. School-teaching was a new, untried field of labour for her, and if she went to bed and cried herself to sleep, as she wanted to do, she would have a headache for to-morrow and she would fail. And she must not fail, she told herself desperately; she dared ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... Epic, at all events, are not the result of the weakness of a poet who had to steal his expressions like a schoolboy. They have some other cause than the indolence or inefficiency of a cento—making undergraduate. Indeed, a poet who used the many terms in the Odyssey which do not occur in the Iliad was not constrained to borrow ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... parties have been over and over again expressed on this point and are well known to differ widely. The commission can neither reconcile nor change these variant opinions resting on conviction, nor will it be authorized to decide the difference. Under these impressions of the inefficiency of such a commission was the inquiry made in the letter of the undersigned of 5th March, 1836, as to the manner in which the report of the commission, as proposed to be constituted and instructed by Her Majesty's Government, was expected to lead to an ultimate settlement of ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 3: Martin Van Buren • James D. Richardson
... were moving onward in all directions. She met girls of her own age, who looked at her as if with contempt for her diffidence. She wondered at the magnitude of this life and at the importance of knowing much in order to do anything in it at all. Dread at her own inefficiency crept upon her. She would not know how, she would not be quick enough. Had not all the other places refused her because she did not know something or other? She would be scolded, abused, ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... people in some minor matters, involving, however, infringement of our authority with them, it is feared, besides the breaking of promises already made; the difficulty of getting them promptly and properly paid, and of getting the value of their work fairly estimated; the general inefficiency, ignorance, and indecision of the authorities, wanting a defined system and hampered by prejudice and ignorance and selfishness,—all these things make the aspect of affairs dark enough at times, and one gets discouraged and disheartened ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... were in plenty on the outer worlds, but one other essential was lacking ... oxygen. Coal on Mars, for instance, had to burned under synthetic air pressures, like the old carburetor. The result was inefficiency. A lot of coal burned, ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak
... in a thick wood on the left bank of the Chateauguay River at the distance of two or three leagues above its Fork with English River, where he threw up his works of defence, with the approval of General De Watteville. The plan of the British commanders, owing to the smallness and inefficiency of their forces, was the stern one of burning and destroying all houses and property, and retreating slowly to the St. Lawrence, harassing the enemy in his advance.[18] The position chosen was as strong as the nature ...
— An Account Of The Battle Of Chateauguay - Being A Lecture Delivered At Ormstown, March 8th, 1889 • William D. Lighthall
... com-bativeness and frank hospitality; both are sunk in bigotry and broils; they resemble one another in their love of dirt, disorder and display, in their enthusiastic and adventurous spirit, their versatile brilliance of mind, their incapacity for self-government and general (Keltic) note of inspired inefficiency. And both profess a frenzied allegiance to an obsolete tongue which, were it really cultivated as they wish, would put a barrier of triple brass between themselves and the ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... his protest at us against the inefficiency of the man with only the knowledge-stored brain. He says: We must have men that can will to do, and then do something, not merely men that can think of things "'twere good to do." Our public schools must train men and women to go out and take their ...
— Hand-Loom Weaving - A Manual for School and Home • Mattie Phipps Todd
... pleasantries made to fit the hour. But next day he set up a big canvas in the barn that served him as workroom, and summoned Marshby from his books. He came dressed exactly right, in his every-day clothes that had comfortable wrinkles in them, and easily took his pose. For all his concern over the inefficiency of his life, as a life, he was entirely without self-consciousness in his personal habit. Jerome liked that, and began to like him better as he knew him more. A strange illuminative process went on in his mind toward the man as Mary saw him, and more and more he nursed a fretful sympathy ...
— Different Girls • Various
... believe was Shakespeare's original for the Welsh Captain Fluellen in Henry V.), joined the army at the end of this month, bringing with him six hundred men. In a letter to the Council, upon his departure from England, he writes sarcastically of the number and inefficiency of the captains being made. This letter is so characteristic of the man, and so reminiscent of blunt Fluellen, that I shall ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... Free Dispensary which is to rival that of the Medical Mission; of the asylums for lepers, foundlings, the blind, aged men and aged women, dating from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, originally well conceived and noble institutions, but reduced into inefficiency and degradation by the greed and corruption of generations of officials; of the "Beggars' Square" and beggars' customs; of the trades, and of the shops with their splendors; of the Examination Hall with its streets numbering eleven thousand six hundred and seventy-three cells for the candidates ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... was empty. Individuals were enormously rich and the State was bankrupt. Thousands of families had lost brothers, cousins, or friends in the massacre, and the manifest cause of the disaster was the inefficiency and worthlessness of the ruling classes. In Africa, in Gaul, in Italy, and now in Asia it had been the same story. The interests of the Commonwealth had been sacrificed to fill the purses of the few. Dominion, wealth, honors, all that had been won by the hardy virtues of earlier generations, ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... a stupendous failure. It cost us about four thousand men, mostly, however, captured; and all due to inefficiency on the part of the corps commander and the incompetency of the division commander who was sent to ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... little," she replied, "and I've been a governess and a companion. But I'm really a victim of the English method of educating girls. That's my chief profession—being a monument to its inefficiency," and ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... before Saratoga; although their conduct was on the whole better than that of Stark's men. They were a brave, hardy, warlike band of irregulars, probably better fighters than any similar force on this continent or elsewhere; but occasional brilliant exceptions must not blind us to the general inefficiency of the Revolutionary militia, and their great inferiority to the Continentals of Washington, Greene, and Wayne. ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt
... to survive; because the theories of good men who are enthralled by its delusions are made the excuse of the wicked who would rather plunder than work; because it stops enterprise, promotes laziness, exalts inefficiency, inspires hatred, checks production, assures waste and instills into the souls of the unfortunate and the weak hopes impossible of fruition whose inevitable blasting will add to the bitterness of ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams
... with his work and his boxing to have much leisure for mourning over this latest example of the present inefficiency of the school. The examination for the Gotford was to come off in two days, and the inter-house boxing was fixed for the following Wednesday. In five days, therefore, he would get his chance of retrieving his lost place in the school. He was certain that he could, ...
— The White Feather • P. G. Wodehouse
... attraction, and receive some specie for the Cape of Good Hope and the Mauritius. Being favoured by strong northerly winds, we reached Madeira on December 18th, after a quick, but most uncomfortable passage; during the greater part of which the main and lower decks were partially flooded, owing to the inefficiency of the scuppers, and the leaky state of nearly every port and ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... instance when Colonel Lewis failed of carrying out an enterprise against the Indians. It was a retaliatory raid against the Shawnees and his force was composed of whites and Cherokees; and his lack of success was due largely to the inefficiency of the guides who undertook to pilot him to the mouth of the Sandy. I told the girl of the expedition as it was lacking in horrible details, and with other carefully selected narratives tried to keep ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... arriving at the truth. The primary difficulty, of course, is to reach a classification. The one adopted by Mr. Warner in his book on American charities is: 1. Causes indicating misconduct; 2. Causes indicating misfortune. Under the first head come drink, immorality, laziness, shiftlessness and inefficiency, crime and dishonesty, a roving disposition. Under the second head come lack of normal support, matters of employment, matters of personal capacity, such as sickness or death in family, etc. The trouble with such a classification is that one cause may lie behind another, as drink is ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898 • Various
... all the credit. If it fails, he gets all the blame; and while no agents, however efficient, can compensate by their own efforts for the weakness of a conception that is radically unsound, many a brilliant plan has failed in execution through the inefficiency of the staff. In his selection of such capable men as his assistants must needs have been Jackson gave proof that he possessed one at least of the attributes of a great leader. He was not only a judge of character, ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... had impaired the power of all who were subjected to it; and as in the works of Giotto, so in the rarer works of Duccio, one often finds an effort after truth of expression, which is almost pathetic in its character, from its revealing the inefficiency of the hand to carry out the thought, and the resolute will striving half in vain to overcome the impediments of bad teaching and imperfect knowledge of the materials and limits of painting. It is this groping effort after truth ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... an account for the offence. In reply to the captain's charges, the sergeant, acting as spokesman for the rest, stated the grievances of the men. The result was, that the captain received directions to exercise his company in the colonel's presence; and, complying reluctantly, demonstrated his own inefficiency in a manner which elicited the merriment of spectators, and even provoked the ...
— The Drummer Boy • John Trowbridge
... be named to indicate the treatment which will prevent the pain attacks. At times, the cause being intangible, it may be necessary to change the whole life and metabolism of the patient, as so often necessary in hysteria, neurasthenia, gout, intestinal fermentation and kidney inefficiency. Besides a rearrangement of the diet and measures for causing proper activity of the bowels, massage, exercise and hydrotherapy should lie utilized toward the end of improving the nutrition ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.
... Cilicia, we shall see something in another chapter. There is plenty of other gossip in these letters, and gossip often about unsavoury matters which need not be noticed here. It lets in a flood of light upon the causes of the general incompetence and inefficiency; the life of the ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... fact is, I am. My mood is a severely moral mood. For when I reflect upon the difference between what books have to offer and what even relatively earnest readers take the trouble to accept from them, I am appalled (or should be appalled, did I not know that the world is moving) by the sheer inefficiency, the bland, complacent failure of the earnest reader. I am like yourself, the spectacle of inefficiency ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett
... great friend of hers; she often looked at him this way instead of saying things. Her glance on this occasion, however, struck him as a substitute for a larger volume of diffident utterance than usual, inviting him to observe, among other things, the inefficiency of her father's design—if design it was—for diminishing, in the interest of quiet nerves, their occasions of contact with their foreign relatives. But Acton immediately complimented Mr. Wentworth upon his liberality. "That 's a very nice thing to do," he said, "giving ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... cards, aimlessly about Tommy, and being only recalled by a strong nervous effort. Yet, notwithstanding this incapacity for even honest manipulation, Mr. Johnson covertly turned a knave from the bottom of the pack with such shameless inefficiency and gratuitous unskilfulness, that even Tommy was obliged to cough and look elsewhere to hide his embarrassment. Possibly for this reason the young gentleman was himself constrained, by way of correction, to add a valuable card to his own hand, over ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... resolute defence of Rome against the French army, may surely be regarded as the act of an energetic people. We must be extremely humble, if we admit that a French army was held in check for two months by men wanting in energy. The assassinations which occur in the streets of Rome, prove rather the inefficiency of the police than the effeminacy of the citizens. I find, from an official return, that in 1853 the Roman tribunals punished 609 crimes against property, and 1,344 against the person. These figures do not indicate a faultless people, but they ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... fro from the dining-room to the kitchen Hannah's lamentations continued, grew more and more querulous. Accustomed as Janet was to these frequent arraignments of her father's inefficiency, it was gradually borne in upon her now—despite a preoccupation with her own fate—that the affair thus plaintively voiced by her mother was in effect a family crisis of the first magnitude. She was stirred anew to anger and revolt against a life ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... of his own inefficiency; or perhaps that Mr. Audley had adopted some habit my Lady disapproved, or that the schoolmaster was misbehaving, or that some Christmas dole was to be curtailed, and that he would have to announce it because Mr. Bevan would not. He was not prepared to hear, 'Are you aware that—in ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... six feet, and clear it without an effort; whereon its pursuers, looking blandly around for gate or gap, and finding none, prudently returned to their fellow-officials in scarlet and gold lace—I conclude, to report upon their own inefficiency. In the meantime nobody seemed to be in a hurry; there was, indeed, some slight stir among the equestrians; but there was no throwing away of cigars, no drawing of girths and taking up of curb-chains—none of the ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... forced from himself, in 1848, the last of his short stories, including "The Great Stone Face" and "Ethan Brand." Despite the effort, the stories rank well. In 1849 he was dismissed from office by a change of political administration, not because of inefficiency. He took this dismissal hard because some of his townspeople had been opposed to him. Again he was in money difficulties from which he was released by a donation from his loyal friends. The leisure thus made possible was ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... commercial power in Europe, and in the 14th and 15th centuries made a considerable figure; but at present its commerce is decayed, and its riches consequently decreased; and, far from meddling now with the affairs of the Continent, it owes its security to its neutrality and inefficiency; and that security will last no longer than till one of the great Powers in Europe engrosses the rest of Italy; an event which this century possibly may, but which the next ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... of work. As the result, the females in our country towns are commonly, in mental culture, vastly in advance of the males of the same household; but with this comes a physical delicacy, the result of an exclusive use of the brain and a neglect of the muscular system, with great inefficiency in practical domestic duties. The race of strong, hardy, cheerful girls, that used to grow up in country places, and made the bright, neat, New England kitchens of old times,—the girls that could wash, iron, brew, bake, harness a horse ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... in return for what they consume; they have no understanding of any relation of service to the community, they have never been trained nor their imaginations touched to any social purpose. A great proportion of small shopkeepers, for example, are people who have, through the inefficiency that comes from inadequate training and sheer aimlessness, or improvements in machinery or the drift of trade, been thrown out of employment, and who set up in needless shops as a method of eking ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... "To adjust them so, as shall consist equally with the perspicuity and the grace of the period."—Blair's Rhet., p. 118: Murray's Gram., 8vo, p. 324. "This class exhibits a lamentable want of simplicity and inefficiency."—Gardiner's Music of Nature, p. 481. "Whose style flows always like a limpid stream, where we see to the very bottom."—Blair's Rhet., p. 93. "Whose style flows always like a limpid stream, through which we see to the very bottom."—Murray's Gram., 8vo, p. 293. "We make use of the ellipsis." ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... methods of the city ward; and the philosophic observers, who on all sides think they descry evidence of the corruption of the country by the city, would have glibly explained to the Hon. Seneca Bowers the causes of his inefficiency. He had come to rely more and more on his sprightly deputy, till now, virtual county leader and his party's candidate, Shelby, double-weighted, prepared to wage the battle ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... it. Unpleasantness was in the air, and, living where I did at the time, I thought it best to part with Columbus. I could see what the War Office was driving at, and I did not desire that responsibility for the inefficiency of the British Army should ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... mere boy, began to reign, the whole French administrative body was corrupt, self-seeking, and in the hands of lawyers, a class that dominated almost every phase of government. In general, inefficiency, idleness, and dishonesty had obtained a ruling place in the governing body; the few honest men who had a minor share in the administration either fell into a sort of disheartened acquiescence or lost their fortunes and reputations in ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... Kins or the Khitans, and Hoeitsong consented to address Akouta as the Great Emperor of the Kins. Then Akouta engaged to attack Leaoutung from the north, while the Chinese assailed it on the south, and a war began which promised a speedy termination. But the tardiness and inefficiency of the Chinese army prolonged the struggle, and covered the reputation of Hoeitsong and his troops with ignominy. It was compelled to beat a hasty and disastrous retreat, and the peasants of Leaoutung sang ballads about its ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... days he sat over the fire, with a distaste for everything, while she did her utmost to make him comfortable, and when she failed, thought it her own fault, reproached herself for her inefficiency, and imagined that he was going to be as ill as his brother, and that she should be of no use to him. How hard on him to have such a bad wife! She could not even entertain him while he was kept indoors—for she could not find anything to talk about, so long was it since she had ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... more become a private citizen, clothed only with the right to read such postal cards as may be addressed to me personally, and to curse the inefficiency of the postoffice department. I believe the voting class to be divided into two parties, viz: Those who are in the postal service, and those who are mad because they cannot receive a registered letter every fifteen minutes of each day, ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... highway department to approve contracts for materials or construction entered into by the township or county authorities. The state highway departments can secure the requisite technical experts to determine the merits of materials and equipment and, in spite of some glaring examples of inefficiency or worse, have made a good record for impartiality and integrity as custodians of the funds ...
— American Rural Highways • T. R. Agg
... powers of endurance and of positive action, the finding of its task means concentration of energy instead of dissipations directness of action instead of indecision, conscious increase of power instead of deepened sense of inefficiency, and the happiness which rises like a pure spring from the depths of the soul when the whole nature is poised and harmonised. The torments of uncertainty, the waste and disorder of the period of ferment, give place to clear vision, ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... League in its central office in New York gets a report from the local branch in the town where Smith safety razors are made that the Smith Works are in a chronic state of strikes and sabotage and sustained ugliness and inefficiency. The Central Office, after quietly looking into it, hearing both sides and finding the charge is true, sends through its local branches reports to the ten million men shaving with Smith blades every morning that the workmen ...
— The Ghost in the White House • Gerald Stanley Lee
... Kie Wicks. And as the man turned he recognized the little professor whom he had met at Judge Breckenridge's ranch the previous day. Kie laughed to himself. Here was one man he need never fear. Inefficiency and irresponsibility were stamped upon ever line of the ...
— The Merriweather Girls in Quest of Treasure • Lizette M. Edholm
... poor," she said to Marna, "that I feel like apologizing for my inefficiency. I'm getting something now for my talks at the clubs, and I'm paid for my writing, too. Now that it's begun to be published, I ought to be ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... almost twenty years. Her long pale face, her pensive blue eyes, and her look of anxious sweetness, made a touching picture of feminine incompetence; and yet it was from this pallid warmth, this gentle inefficiency of soul, that the buoyant spirit of Gabriella ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... of the feelings and national aspirations of the peoples to whom they were accredited. Instead of being living ambassadors of the British idea, they have often been concrete examples before foreign eyes of British inefficiency. An example of the language question which came under the author's ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... Also, local overheating of the infusion occurs at the point of application of the heat; and because of the manner in which the water is brought into contact with the coffee, the degree of extraction shows inefficiency. Spraying of the water over the coffee never permits the grounds to be completely covered with water at any one time, and the opportunity offered for channeling is excessive. The principle of thorough extraction demands that, as the substance being extracted becomes ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... division of Lee's Petersburg force. But Meade, at a late hour on the 29th, changed the entire plan of assault, which Burnside had carefully arranged, and to lead which a fresh division had been specially drilled. Then there was lamentable inefficiency or cowardice on the part of several subordinate officers. The troops charged into the great, cellar-like crater, twenty-five feet deep, where, for lack of orders, they remained huddled together instead of pushing on. The ...
— History of the United States, Volume 4 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... British manufacture. The opposition found a leader in Randolph, who now broke once and for all with the Administration. "Never in the course of my life," he exclaimed, "have I witnessed such a scene of indignity and inefficiency as this measure holds forth to the world. What is it? A milk-and-water bill! A dose of chicken-broth to be taken nine months hence!... It is too contemptible to be the object of consideration, or to excite the feelings of the pettiest state in Europe." The Administration ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... each area is divided into halves by a narrow white line. This is to emphasize the fact that the first halves of areas below the X-Y line are really reactions from the extravagance, inefficiency and corruption which existed during the latter half of the preceding "prosperity" area. Contrariwise, the first halves of areas above the X-Y line are really reactions from the economy, industry and righteousness developed during the hard times just preceding. The high points ...
— Fundamentals of Prosperity - What They Are and Whence They Come • Roger W. Babson |
