"Oligarchy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... this the proper time to urge emancipation? Divested of all deceitful and evasive turns, the question reduces itself to this,—are we to definitely conquer the enemy once and for all, the great enemy Oligarchy, by taking out its very heart? or are we to keep up this strife with slaveholders forever? It is a great and hard thing to do, this crushing the difficulty, but we must either do it or be done for. In a few months 'the tax-gatherer will be around.' If anybody has ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... brutes!" "rapacious harpies!" "relentless demons!" "plunderers of the people!" "merciless footpads!" "murderers!" "swindlers!" "insatiable!" "insolent!" "flesh-mongering!" "scoundrel!" "law-making landlords!" "a bread-taxing oligarchy!"[29] Need we say that the authors of these very choice and elegant expressions were treated with utter contempt by both landlords and tenants—always making the few allowances above referred to? Was it very likely that the landlord or the farmer ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... tiring the hair they adopted certain refinements, specially a series of curls which the men arranged in the form of an aigrette above their foreheads. This motley collection of races was ruled over by an oligarchy of merchants and shipowners, whose functions were hereditary, and who usually paid homage to a single king, the representative of the tutelary god, and absolute master ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... circle," woman has, through her reproductive ability, founded and perpetuated the tyrannies of the Earth. Whether it was the tyranny of a monarchy, an oligarchy or a republic, the one indispensable factor of its existence was, as it is now, hordes of human beings—human beings so plentiful as to be cheap, and so cheap that ignorance was their natural lot. Upon the rock of ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... establishment of some kind of standard for the degree of Master of Arts. Through all the changes of more than thirty years, I have always said, when I have had a chance of saying anything, Give us neither a resident oligarchy nor a non-resident mob. Keep Convocation with its ancient powers, but let Convocation be what it was meant to be. Let the great assembly of masters and doctors go untouched; but let none be made masters or doctors who do not show some fitness to bear those titles. Every degree was meant to ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... men received no pay for serving the state, only the richest citizens could accept the office; and thus Athens, from a monarchy, or country ruled by a king, became an oligarchy, or state ruled by the rich and ...
— The Story of the Greeks • H. A. Guerber
... United States. This selection was a very significant one in several ways; Lincoln was a very strong opponent of slavery, and his candidature showed the southern slaveowners that if the Republicans were successful in the contest, a vigorous move against the slave-holding oligarchy would at once be made. But it was also significant in the fact that Lincoln was a western man; it was a sign that the farmers and grangers of the agricultural west were beginning to wake up politically and throw ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... determination not only to terminate, but to extend, strengthen and perpetuate it. He was a nullifier because a slave-holder in principle. The one grew out of, and was a part of the other. The maintenance of an oligarchy was the ultimate end, that rested on slavery, and so "state rights" so called, and the divine right of slavery went ...
— The Future of the Colored Race in America • William Aikman
... connected with the secession movement is the hot haste with which the most important questions connected with the interests of the people are hurried through. The ordinance of secession is not fairly submitted to the people, but a mere oligarchy of desperate men themselves assume to declare war, and exercise all the prerogatives of an independent and sovereign government. And yet the terms submitted in the Crittenden Resolutions as a peace-offering to ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... his fellow-creatures. I had long been disgusted with the interference of those selfish Squirearchs. Your departure decided me. I have concluded negotiations with a London firm of spirit and capital and extended views of philanthropy. On Saturday last I retired from the service of the oligarchy. ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... from time to time, and executing those laws by officers of their own appointing; and then the form of the government is a perfect democracy: or else may put the power of making laws into the hands of a few select men, and their heirs or successors; and then it is an oligarchy: or else into the hands of one man, and then it is a monarchy: if to him and his heirs, it is an hereditary monarchy: if to him only for life, but upon his death the power only of nominating a successor to return to them; an ...
— Two Treatises of Government • John Locke
... that is an unfortunate concession of yours: for the ascendency of the most cultivated minds would be a terrible oligarchy!" ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... loudly while clinging to their chartered rights with jealous tenacity. Those rights, however, were eminently exclusive and selfish in their character. The chartered towns were ruled in all cases by an oligarchy. [Footnote: Stubbs, "Constitutional History," vol. i. Section 131.] The increase in the population brought wealth to a class, the class of privileged traders, associated into guilds, who kept their several ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... political. It faces a multitude of censorships, all of them very potent. It is censored by the Postoffice, by the Jewish advertisers, by the Catholic Church, by the Methodists, by the Prohibitionists, by the banking oligarchy of its town, and often by even more astounding authorities, including the Sinn Fein. Now and then a newspaper makes a valiant gesture of revolt, but it is only a gesture. There is not a single daily in the United States that ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... from Zante, in 1793, he witnessed the downfall of a system which Venetians do not yet know whether to lament or execrate; and he was young and generous enough to believe that Bonaparte really meant to build up a democratic republic on the ruins of the fallen oligarchy. Foscolo had been one of the popular innovators before the Republic perished, and he became the secretary of the provisional government, and was greatly beloved by the people. It is related that they were so used to his voice, and so fond of hearing it, that ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... throughout 2000. A peace agreement, signed in January 2002 between the government and the rebels, provides for the demobilization of the rebels and their reintegration into the political system. Despite movement toward democratic reform, power remains in the hands of a northern ethnic oligarchy. ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... defence of the Commonwealth against the renewed danger of a Royalist outburst at home and inburst from abroad to take advantage of the political crash, the Wallingford-House chiefs would probably have thought it sufficient to constitute themselves into a military Oligarchy for maintaining and carrying on Richard's Protectorate. Fleetwood, Desborough, and Lambert would have been a Triumvirate in Richard's name, and the only deliberative apparatus would have been the general council of officers continued, or a more select Council of their number associated ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... glimpse of the high-class criminal world of Chicago. The city, which was owned by an oligarchy of businessmen, being nominally ruled by the people, a huge army of graft was necessary for the purpose of effecting the transfer of power. Twice a year, in the spring and fall elections, millions of dollars were furnished by the businessmen and expended by this army; meetings were held and ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... to adopt the Democratic creed. The oligarchy of New England, and the rich proprietors and landholders of the Middle States, turned with alarm and horror from the levelling doctrines urged upon them by the "liberty and equality" propagandists of the South. The ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... a respite. But the Church still dominated the civil courts, and a transfer of the case meant that the Church would throw the onus of executing sentence on those lay figures who were the puppets of a Pharisaical oligarchy. ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... they had long ceased to follow the course of general European development. They had been successively the subjects of Greece, Rome, and the Califate, of the German-Roman emperors, and of the republic of Pisa. Their latest ruler was Genoa, which had now degenerated into an untrustworthy oligarchy. United to that state originally by terms which gave the island a "speaker" or advocate in the Genoese senate, and recognized the most cherished habits of a hardy, natural-minded, and primitive people, they ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... to be elected if this organization exert its influence against him. How to persuade the parties and the individual men to risk defeat until they succeed in the enfranchisement of women, which alone will destroy the absolute domination of this oligarchy, is a problem yet to be solved. That the women of New York dared attempt it, showed courage and determination of the ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... that is proper and peculiar to you, mixing Lycurgus with Socrates, as much as Dicaearchus thought he did Pythagoras. For Lycurgus, I suppose you know, banished out of Sparta all arithmetical proportion, as being democratical and favoring the crowd; but introduced the geometrical, as agreeable to an oligarchy and kingly government that rules by law; for the former gives an equal share to every one according to number, but the other gives according to the proportion of the deserts. It doth not huddle all things together, but in it there is a fair discretion of good and ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... mixed the several powers of the state, yet his successors, seeing that the powers of the oligarchy were unimpaired, and that it was, as Plato calls it, full of life and vigour, placed as a curb to it the power of the Ephors. The first Ephors, of whom Elatus was one, were elected about a hundred and thirty ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... nineteenth century have destroyed entirely their one solitary utility. It is their business to be flaunting and arrogant; but they flaunt unobtrusively, and their attempts at arrogance are depressing. Their chief duty hitherto has been the development of variety, vivacity, and fulness of life; oligarchy was the world's first experiment in liberty. But now they have adopted the opposite ideal of 'good form,' which may be defined as Puritanism without religion. Good form has sent them all into black like the stroke ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... those who were thus debased; but the result was—and in this respect the analogy with England still holds good—that a very efficient and energetic government was created. The government of an oligarchy makes sometimes a very rich and powerful state, but a ...
— Hannibal - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... infringement alike of the privileges of the crown and of the rights of the subject, opposed the bill in Parliament, and started in March, 1719, a paper called the 'Plebeian', in which he argued against a measure tending, he said, to the formation of an oligarchy. Addison replied in the 'Old Whig', and this, which occurred within a year of the close of Addison's life, was the main subject of political difference between them. The bill, strongly opposed, was dropped for that session, and reintroduced (after Addison's ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... the "sets" and petty distinctions, giving a humorous relation of the collapse of her well-meaning efforts, in conjunction with friends at the sous-prefecture, to do away with some of these caste prejudices, of the horror and indignation created in the oligarchy of La Chatre by the apparition of an inoffensive music-master and his wife at the sous-prefet's reception, horror so great that on the next occasion, the salon of the official was unfurnished with guests, except for the said music-master and the Dudevants themselves. She wrote a poetical skit ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... judgment in this case may be justified, but coming at the time it did, nearly every Negro in the United States believed that the "high blood pressure" that retired Colonel Young was in the prejudiced heads of the Southern oligarchy who were determined that no American Negro should ever wear the ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... or five years admit of our believing the worst that can be suspected of the purposes of the Democratic party. It is not uncharitable to say that the leaders and managers of that party contemplate, in the event of their triumph in November, the surrender of the country to the slaveholding oligarchy; in the event of their defeat by a small majority, the extension of the civil war over the North. Four years ago we could not be made to believe that Secession was a possible thing. We admitted that there were Secessionists at the South, but we could not be made to believe in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... which was by far the nearest of the national garrisons. It was betrayed to them. When they were within the gates they received a message from the wealthier citizens of London (who were in practice one with the Feudal Oligarchy), begging them to ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc
... party tried to drive the others out. The "optimates" were getting the best of it, when Cicero thought it as well to run off lest he should be hurt in the tumult.[10] What hope could there be for an oligarchy when such things occurred in the Senate? Cicero in this letter speaks complacently of resisting force by force in the city. Even Cato, the law-abiding, precise Cato, thought it necessary to fall into the fashion and go about Rome with an armed following. He bought a company of gladiators ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... to say that we now have to deal with an oligarchy of wealth, and that the Government must develop power sufficient enough to enable it ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... before the downfall of the monarchy and the general desolation of the kingdom. The pomps of the religion, the pageantries of the court, and the munificence of the nobility, were never before characterised by so much grandeur and profusion. The church, the sovereign, and the oligarchy, were ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... alloweth no Church authority or rule (properly so called) to the Brethren but reserveth that wholly to the Elders; and yet preventeth tyrannee, and oligarchy, and exorbitancy of the Elders by the large and firm establishment of the liberties of the Brethren."—J. Cotton, The Keys of the Kingdom ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... Hawaii was of great interest to her, and she at once asked for the enfranchisement of the women of these newly won island possessions. She regarded it as an outrage for the most democratic nation in the world to foist upon them an exclusively masculine government, a "male oligarchy," as she called it. "I really believe I shall explode," she wrote Clara Colby, "if some of you young women don't wake up and raise your voice in protest.... I wonder if when I am under the sod—or cremated and floating in the air—I ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... resignation of the Marechal-Duc and the election of M. Grevy the Government of France, ten years ago, became what it now is—a parliamentary oligarchy, with absolutely no practical check upon its will except the recurrence every four years of the legislative elections. And as these elections are carried out under the direct control, through the prefects and the ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... and more unfriendly to our cause; but the people,' he adds, 'everywhere sympathize with us, for they know that our cause is that of free institutions,—that our struggle is that of the people against an oligarchy.' These are the words of the Minister to Austria, whose generous sympathies with popular liberty no homage paid to his genius by the class whose admiring welcome is most seductive to scholars has ever spoiled; our fellow-citizen, the historian of a great Republic which infused a portion ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Britain was under the rule of the Whig oligarchy, which had no clearly conceived ideas on imperial policy. Under the influence of the mercantile class the Whigs increased the severity of the restrictions on colonial trade, and prohibited the rise of industries likely to compete with those of the mother-country. But under the influence ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... modern reader of "Tom Brown's Schooldays" searches in vain for any reference to compulsory games, house colours, or cricket averages. In those days, when boys played games they played them for pleasure; but in those days the prefectorial system— the system which hands over the life of a school to an oligarchy of a dozen youths of seventeen— was still in its infancy, and had not yet borne ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... presented to the Dooty or chief man, who is here called Mansa, which usually signifies king. Nevertheless, it appeared to me that the government of Manding was a sort of republic, or rather an oligarchy, every town having a particular Mansa, and the chief power of the state, in the last resort, being lodged in the assembly of the whole body. I related to the Mansa the circumstances of my having been robbed of my horse and apparel, and my story was ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... was in the form of a novel and told how the rich in America worshiped gold and lust instead of God and brotherly love, and how they drove their carriages over the working man's children and left them crushed and bleeding in the street. America had ceased to be a republic and was an oligarchy of wealth all owned by a dozen great families while the millions were starving. The end of the book described a great revolution in which the people arose, led by an Italian communist named Caesar Spadoni. The mob took all the fine houses and killed the rich people. Caesar took the bodies and, ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... provincial magistrates were generally members, though not always. As to the number of temporal lords, it was almost invariably more than twelve, sometimes double as many. From the very first, this self-appointed oligarchy saw that in unity was strength; and while the different members of the royal family were squabbling among themselves, the Cabinet seized the opportunity to increase its power. Though not entitled to a definite salary, it was regularly understood that Cabinet lords ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... up that mercantile navy, which now waves its stripes and stars over every sea, and that foreign influence, which has placed the internal peace—we may say the subsistence of millions in every manufacturing country in Europe—within the power of an oligarchy of planters." ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... cast into a river, or into a trench as quickly as possible. His family are left in ignorance as to his fate, and their only conclusion is to assume that he is dead. But Mr. Kruger's methods and his ruthless military oligarchy were disapproved even by his own countrymen, and more especially by his own countrywomen, who now began to mistrust the continual story of Boer victory, and asked pitifully for permission themselves to seek for fathers, sons, and brothers ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... Iroquois. At council meetings all the principal men attended and votes were taken with the aid of reeds or sticks, the majority prevailing in all cases. The whole organisation was essentially a democracy, as the chiefs, although an oligarchy in appearance, were controlled by the voices and results of the councils. In this as in other American savage nations, the rule governing the transmission of hereditary honours and possessions was through the ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... and Cecil Chesterton had their own line. Their general thesis was that not only did the people of England not govern, Parliament did not govern either. The Cabinet governed and it was chosen by the real rulers of the party. For each party was run by an oligarchy, and run roughly on the same lines. Lists were given of families whose brothers-in-law and cousins (though not yet their sisters and their aunts) found place in the Ministry of one or other political party. Moreover, the governing families on both sides were in many cases connected by birth ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... It had become absolutely necessary that the classification of the citizens should be revised. On that classification depended the distribution of political power. Party spirit ran high; and the republic seemed to be in danger of falling under the dominion either of a narrow oligarchy or of an ignorant and headstrong rabble. Under such circumstances, the most illustrious patrician and the most illustrious plebeian of the age were entrusted with the office of arbitrating between the angry factions; ...
— Lays of Ancient Rome • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... great principles exist in their powers and plenitude there is the republic, even though it be known as monarchy. Wherever, on the other hand, they are betrayed, hindered, or oppressed, the actual state is a monarchy or an oligarchy, even though it goes under the name of a republic. In the latter case we see the monstrous phenomenon of a government betrayed by its proper guardians, and it is this phenomenon that makes the stoutest hearts begin to be doubtful of revolutions. For revolutions are vast, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... done the best which He can for a state; not so well if He has given them two legislators instead of one, and less and less well if He has given them a great many. An orderly tyranny most easily passes into the perfect state; in the second degree, a monarchy; in the third degree, a democracy; an oligarchy is worst of all. 'I do not understand.' I suppose that you have never seen a city which is subject to a tyranny? 'I have no desire to see one.' You would have seen what I am describing, if you ever had. The tyrant can speedily change the manners of a state, and affix the stamp of praise or blame ...
— Laws • Plato
... economic development of the South. By 1822 the large-plantation slave system had gained footing; in 1838-1839 it was able to show its power in the cotton "corner;" by the end of the next decade it had not only gained a solid economic foundation, but it had built a closed oligarchy with a political policy. The changes in price during the next few years drove out of competition many survivors of the small-farming free-labor system, and put the slave regime in position to dictate ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois
... office the government be practically as independent of the popular will as that of Russia, yet every fourth year the people are called upon to pronounce upon the conduct of their affairs. Theoretically, at least, to give democracy any standing-ground for an argument with despotism or oligarchy, a majority of the men composing it should be statesmen and thinkers. It is a proverb, that to turn a radical into a conservative there needs only to put him into office, because then the license of speculation or sentiment is limited by a sense of responsibility; then for the first ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... ruled by an oligarchy,—that is, the control of public affairs fell into the hands of a few persons. There was an evident tendency, however, towards the union of all the functions of governmental authority in the person of a single man, whenever one should be found of sufficient strength ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... to the same result, for the leading men of the colony were possessed of extraordinary influence and power. Many of the prominent families of the 17th century were related to each other and they formed a compact little oligarchy that at times controlled the affairs of ...
— Patrician and Plebeian - Or The Origin and Development of the Social Classes of the Old Dominion • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... Cameroon merged in 1961 to form the present country. Cameroon has generally enjoyed stability, which has permitted the development of agriculture, roads, and railways, as well as a petroleum industry. Despite movement toward democratic reform, political power remains firmly in the hands of an ethnic oligarchy. ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Flamininus, sat among the senators at the games in defiance of Cato's sentence. Yet Cato remained by far the most powerful member of the senate. Titus Flamininus, his only important rival, quickly passed out of notice. So far as there was any democratic opposition to the senatorial oligarchy, Cato was the leader of that opposition for the remainder of his life. But at that period no great political movements agitated the state within; nearly the whole interest of the time was centred in the foreign ...
— Cato Maior de Senectute • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... to Ganganelli. His views upon the subjects of politics and religion were enlarged; but his leaning was rather to the power of a single magistrate than to the authority of a democracy or even of an oligarchy. The other friend, whom I shall call Onuphrio, was a man of a very different character. Belonging to the English aristocracy, he had some of the prejudices usually attached to birth and rank; but ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... government came a pure democracy, social and political—it came of individual interest and neighborly love and of no abstract philosophical theory or of protest against oligarchy; it came from the application, voluntary for the most part, of "older institutions and ideas to the transforming influence of land," free land; and such has been the result, says Professor Turner, [Footnote: See his "Significance of the Frontier in American ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... constitution of savage society, it tended to place the control of affairs in the hands of the ablest man: it shifted the balance of power from the many to the one: it substituted a monarchy for a democracy, or rather for an oligarchy of old men; for in general the savage community is ruled, not by the whole body of adult males, but by a council of elders. The change, by whatever causes produced, and whatever the character of the early rulers, was on the whole very beneficial. ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... ought rather to meet the danger with law and justice on my side, than through fear of imprisonment or death, to take part with you in your unjust designs. And this happened while the city was governed by a democracy. But when it became an oligarchy, the Thirty, having sent for me with four others to the Tholus, ordered us to bring Leon the Salaminian from Salamis, that he might be put to death; and they gave many similar orders to many others, wishing ...
— Apology, Crito, and Phaedo of Socrates • Plato
... seemed a waste of all that was best in human life. Politics were from an early period repulsive to me, and, after my first sight of Washington in its shabby, sleazy, dirty, unkempt condition under the old slave oligarchy, political life became absolutely repugnant to my tastes and desires. At times a longing came over me to settle down in the country, to make an honest living from a farm—a longing which took its origin in a visit which I had ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... stand and listen to the speaker. This Rostra is specially interesting because it was constructed in the year of Caesar's death, and was intended to mark the design of the great triumvir to destroy the memory of the old oligarchy by separating the rostra or "hustings" from their former connection with the senate and comitia, and make them entirely popular institutions. The front of it was afterwards adorned by Augustus with the beaks of ships taken at Actium. The small Herooen or Temple of Caesar behind the ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... saying that though the designs of traitors had been thwarted, there were yet to be secured legislative triumphs and the complete ascendancy of the true principles of popular government, equal liberty, education and elevation of the workmen, and the overthrow at the ballot box of the old oligarchy of political leaders. After prayer by the chaplain, the room was darkened, alcohol on salt flared up with a ghastly light as the "fire of liberty," and the members joined hands in a circle around the candidate, who was made to place one hand on the flag and, with the other raised, ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming
... possibility of failure he never dreamed. His star was in the heavens and Destiny had spoken. Just as the cork plunged to the bottom of the pail must inevitably rise to the top, so he must rise. He was of the oligarchy of the great, of the chosen of the gods, and now the voices of Destiny were calling him to the undertaking of his mission. Tonight the question must be thrashed out, yet when he arrived at the house he went quietly about the round of monotonous chores and after that sat through the evening meal ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... What was an oligarchy permeated by a fine spirit of liberty and adorned by the sacred principle of personal freedom, has been superseded by a socialistic democracy under which personal freedom suffers frequent curtailments, and liberty is severely abridged by the mandates ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... The first interval of repose was ever employed in devising means for giving stability to their acquisitions, and a constitutional form to the society in which they were to be vested. Among the Teutons, such a task was never referred to the wisdom of any one leader, however successful,—any oligarchy of chiefs, however eminent. From time immemorial, the provisions from which their laws were derived, and on which their societies were based, were the emanations of free public opinion. Their armies were triumphant, because the soldier ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... unjust toward special groups of its citizens, is to exist, to be a going concern, to maintain upon the whole a stable and peaceful administration of affairs. If a democracy cannot provide such stability, then the people go back to some form of oligarchy. Having secured a fair measure of stability, a democracy proceeds with caution toward the extension of the suffrage to more and more people—trying foreigners, ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... they have become a great people. There may be persons in England who are jealous of those States. There may be men who dislike democracy, and who hate a republic; there may be those whose sympathies warm only toward an oligarchy or a monarchy. But of this I am certain, that only misrepresentation the most gross, or calumny the most wicked, can sever the tie which unites the great mass of the people of this country with their friends and ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... debated since the Rebellion of 1896. A quarter of a century ago the necessary 500 or 600 Filipinos, half-caste in the majority, could have been found with all the requisite qualifications for the formation of an intelligent oligarchy. The Constitution drawn up by Apolinario Mabini, and proclaimed by the Malolos Insurgent Government (January 22, 1899), was a fair proof of intellectual achievement. But that is not sufficient; the working of it would probably ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... Mr. Bagehot's, contribution to this subject. But it may be doubted whether he has pointed out the full reason for the difficulty of breaking the "cake of custom" or manifested the real root of progress. To attain progress in the full sense, not merely of an oligarchy or a caste, but of the whole people, there must not only be government by discussion, but the responsibilities of the government must be snared more or less ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... circumstances, in conjunction with the energy of its inhabitants, placed it at the head of the Phoenician colonies. In Carthage, there was no middle class. There were the rich landholders and merchants, and the common people. The government was practically an oligarchy. There were two kings or judges (Shofetes), with little power, and a council or senate; possibly a second council also. But the senate and magistrates were subordinate to an aristocratic body, the hundred judges. The bulk of the citizens had little more than a nominal influence ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... protectorship; caliphate, pashalic[obs3], electorate; presidency, presidentship[obs3]; administration; proconsul, consulship; prefecture; seneschalship; magistrature[obs3], magistracy. monarchy; kinghood[obs3], kingship; royalty, regality; aristarchy[obs3], aristocracy; oligarchy, democracy, theocracy, demagogy; commonwealth; dominion; heteronomy; republic, republicanism; socialism; collectivism; mob law, mobocracy[obs3], ochlocracy[obs3]; vox populi, imperium in imperio[Lat]; bureaucracy; beadledom[obs3], bumbledom[obs3]; stratocracy; military power, military ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... went on,—this politicians' conspiracy, this slaveholders' rebellion, as it was variously called by those who sought its source, now in the disappointed ambition of the Southern leaders, now in the desperate determination of a slaveholding oligarchy to perpetuate their power, and to secure forever their proprietorship in their "human chattels." On this theory the mass of Southern people were but puppets in the hands of political wirepullers, or blind followers of hectoring "patricians." To those who know the Southern people ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... when first his mind began to open, a fatherless and motherless child, the chief of a great but depressed and disheartened party, and the heir to vast and indefinite pretensions, which excited the dread and aversion of the oligarchy then supreme in the United Provinces. The common people, fondly attached during a century to his house, indicated, whenever they saw him, in a manner not to be mistaken, that they regarded him as their rightful head. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Russian Bolsheviks and their sympathisers and would-be imitators elsewhere is the "dictatorship of the proletariat." Let us consider what that means. Dictatorship means despotism, and whether it is that of a Tsar or a Kaiser, an oligarchy or a Bolshevik administration, it is despotism—nothing more and nothing less. Impatience with the slowness of the mass of the people is only to be expected in all who see what human existence could be made on this planet, how enjoyable and pleasurable life might be made by light and pleasant ...
— Bolshevism: A Curse & Danger to the Workers • Henry William Lee
... imagined as a practicable project in his own day, but then it is only a second-best. The ideal state of which Aristotle sketched an outline (Politics, iv. v.) is not set either in time or in place.] and exhibits its gradual deterioration, through the successive stages of timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and despotism. He explains this deterioration as primarily caused by a degeneration of the race, due to laxity and errors in the State regulation of marriages, and the consequent birth of biologically ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... second number was it revealed that the arch criminals were to be found in the exploiting class, a sinister combination, all-powerful, working to the detriment of the common people; an industrial oligarchy under whose rule the cowed wage slave toiled for his crust of bread. This number unflinchingly indicted the capitalistic ruling class; fearlessly called upon the exploited masses to rise and throw off the yoke put upon ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... need of everything, deprived of my country on the most disgraceful charges, although I have been engaged in many sea-fights and many battles, and have conducted myself in an orderly manner both under the Democracy and under the Oligarchy. ...
— The Orations of Lysias • Lysias
... seeing how shamelessly they sought to hide from him the real state of the country. It was to be expected, from the early habits and character of the Regent, that he would anxiously pursue the interests of the nation, if, instead of being in the hands of an odious oligarchy, he could act for himself. This, at any rate, Lord Cochrane maintained should be urged upon him, for if something were not quickly done for the relief of the nation, trade and commerce would soon be utterly ruined, and the whole community would share the ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, G.C.B., Admiral of the Red, Rear-Admiral of the Fleet, Etc., Etc. • Thomas Cochrane, Earl of Dundonald
... struggles. But the story has a pleasanter ending. The charter of James—for the town had passed into the King's hands as the abbot's successor—gave all that it had ever contended for, and crowned the gift by the creation of a mayor. Modern reform has long since swept away the municipal oligarchy which owed its origin to the Stuart king. But the essence of his work remains; and in its mayor, with his fourfold glory of maces borne before him, Bury sees the strange close of the battle waged through so ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... the lives of its population. This group, intrenched in power in the city's business and also in its government, were facing the opposition of a new and rapidly rising power, that of organized labor, determined to break the oligarchy of business and take over its powers. The struggle of these two groups was coming to its culmination. They were like two mighty wrestlers, locked in a grip of death; two giants in combat, who tear up trees by the roots and break off fragments of cliffs from the mountains to smash in each other's ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... supported by the social facts of the United States. When we have made allowance for the absence of a number of picturesque phenomena which are due to temporal and physical conditions, and would be equally lacking if the country were an autocracy or oligarchy, there remains in the United States greater room for the development of idiosyncrasy than, perhaps, in any other country. It has been paradoxically argued by an English writer that individualism could not reach its highest point except in a socialistic community; ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... —"oligarchy," repeated the girl quickly, "my breath was just took away. I said to maw, 'Ain't he too sweet for anything!' I did, honest Injin! And when you rolled it all off at the end—never missing a word (you didn't need ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... Virus is simple enough. I was born in an Ohio town about the same size as Gopher Prairie, and much less friendly. It'd had more generations in which to form an oligarchy of respectability. Here, a stranger is taken in if he is correct, if he likes hunting and motoring and God and our Senator. There, we didn't take in even our own till we had contemptuously got used to them. It was a red-brick ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... of embarrassing the subject in the outset with the numerous subdivisions under which different forms of government have been classed, such as aristocracy, democracy, oligarchy, monarchy, &c. the better method will be to begin with what may be called primary divisions, or those under which all the several subdivisions will ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... for, when some of us fought hard — and often against British diplomacy — to extend the sphere of British influence, it never occurred to us that the spread of British dominion in South Africa would culminate in consigning us to our present intolerable position, namely, a helotage under a Boer oligarchy. But when an official Commission asks Parliament to herd us into concentration camps, with the additional recommendation that besides breeding slaves for our masters, we should be made to pay for the upkeep of the camps: in other words, that we should turn ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... are other reasons for objecting to class stratification of income which have heaped themselves up since the time of Jesus. In politics it defeats every form of government except that of a necessarily corrupt oligarchy. Democracy in the most democratic modern republics: Prance and the United States for example, is an imposture and a delusion. It reduces justice and law to a farce: law becomes merely an instrument for keeping the poor in subjection; and accused workmen are tried, not by a jury of their ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... around the Cape had effected. The nations of the Baltic and of farthest Ind now exchanged their products on a more extensive scale and with a wider sweep across the earth than when the mistress of the Adriatic alone held the keys of Asiatic commerce. The haughty but intelligent oligarchy of shopkeepers, which had grown so rich and attained so eminent a political position from its magnificent monopoly, already saw the sources of its grandeur drying up before its eyes, now that the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... usually conceived as an oligarchy: She was so during a period less than the half of her existence, and that including the days of her decline; and it is one of the first questions needing severe examination, whether that decline was owing in any wise to the ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... not tell me of our past Union, and for how many years we have been one. We were only one while we were ready to hunt, shoot down, and deliver up the slave, and allow the slave-power to form an oligarchy on the floor of Congress! The moment we say no to this, the ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... "signifer" seems to favour the reading I have preferred; and Dean Merivale and Hosius adopted it. (27) For the character and career of Curio, see Merivale's "History of the Roman Empire", chapter xvi. He was of profligate character, but a friend and pupil of Cicero; at first a rabid partisan of the oligarchy, he had, about the period of his tribuneship (B.C. 50-49), become a supporter of Caesar. How far Gaulish gold was the cause of this conversion we cannot tell. It is in allusion to this change that he was termed the prime mover of the civil war. His arrival in Caesar's camp is described in Book ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... every quarter and struck terror into the aristocrats, most of whom were now rather inclined to yield and impeded by their indecision the measures of the more spirited party. In Basel, Ochs deposed the oligarchy; in Zurich, the government was induced, by intimidation, to restore Bodmer and his fellow-prisoners to liberty. In Freiburg, Lucerne, Schaffhausen, and St. Gall the oligarchies resigned their authority; Constance asserted ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... book by C. Delisle Burns, Political Ideals (1915). And see also the searching study, Political Parties (English translation, 1915), by Robert Michels, who, while accepting democracy as the highest political form, argues that practically it always works out as oligarchy. ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... most persistent efforts have been made to confuse the public mind as to its origin and motives, and to drag the people of the loyal States down from the national position they had instinctively taken to the old level of party squabbles and antipathies. The wholly unprovoked rebellion of an oligarchy proclaiming negro slavery the corner-stone of free institutions, and in the first flush of over-hasty confidence venturing to parade the logical sequence of their leading dogma, "that slavery is right in principle, and has nothing to do with difference of complexion," ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... mistrusted a city jury in this instance—even a packed city jury—and without any notice to the traversers, sent the indictments before the county grand jury, so that they might be tried by a jury picked and packed from the anti-Irish oligarchy of the Pale. It was an act of gross illegality, hardship, and oppression. The illegality of such a course had been ruled and decided in the case of Mr. Gavan Duffy in 1848. But the point was raised vainly now. When Mr. Pigott, of the Irishman, was called to plead, his counsel ...
— The Wearing of the Green • A.M. Sullivan
... very shortly and decisively exploded the simple belief that "all men are born free and equal." Political power was superseded by economic and industrial power. To sustain their supremacy in the political field, governments and politicians allied themselves to the new industrial oligarchy. Old political theories and practices were totally inadequate to control the new situation or to meet the complex problems ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... I think, for their adopted country; but in any case it is no good for the particular problem of their own country. Palestine cannot have a population of Prime Ministers and Chief Justices; and if those they rule and judge are not Jews, then we have not established a commonwealth but only an oligarchy. It is said again that the ancient Jews turned their enemies into hewers of wood and drawers of water. The modern Jews have to turn themselves into hewers of wood and drawers of water. If they cannot do that, they cannot turn themselves into ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... "requested" to keep off it, and not forbidden in the harsh imperatives of our brief authorities. It is again the difference between the social and the public, which is perhaps the main difference between an oligarchy and a democracy. The sensibilities are more spared in the one and the self-respect in the other, though this is saying it too loosely, and may not be saying it truly; it is only a conjecture with which I am ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... wealthy men who controlled the economic outfit; the official groups who held what political power was left to the Jews; and the lawyers, theologians, priests, and zealots who dominated the religious life of a very religious people. These classes overlapped; together they constituted the oligarchy of his nation. Both sides soon realized that there were fundamental antagonisms between them. The conflict grew acute, until it headed up in the great duel of the last days at Jerusalem. His experiences in this conflict with hostile ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... to Boston, and persisted in their plan for a settlement at Saybrook. The Massachusetts system had thus become not a constitutional government fashioned after the best liberal thought in England of that day, but a narrow oligarchy in which the political order was determined according to a rigid interpretation of theology. This excessive theocratic concentration of power resulted in driving from the colony many of its ...
— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews
... done. The consequent quarrels between town oligarchies and town democracies do not, however, justify the common assumption that there had once been an era of municipal democracy which gradually gave way to oligarchy and corruption. Nevertheless, these local bodies were English, and legally their members had been villeins; and their experience in local government prepared them for admittance to that share in national government which the development of taxation ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... in Greece as characteristic of the Aryan development. The early war leader became an absolute king, his power tended to become hereditary, but its abuse roused the more powerful citizens to rebellion, and the kingdom vanished in an oligarchy.[18] This last change occurred in Rome about B.C. 510, and it was attended by such disasters that the city sank back into a condition that was almost barbarous when compared with her opulence under ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... gives to the humble student the all-acknowledged licence to admonish tyrants, and approach, with haughty prayers, even the Father of the Church;—yes, that same Power, which, working silently throughout Italy, murmurs under the solid base of the Venetian oligarchy; (It was about eight years afterwards that the long-smothered hate of the Venetian people to that wisest and most vigilant of all oligarchies, the Sparta of Italy, broke out in the conspiracy under Marino Faliero.) which, beyond the ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... inquiry, troubled by obstinate feuds and still more obstinate problems. Militarism, nationalism, socialism and communism were well known, the preachers of some of these doctrines being loud, ignorant and popular. The defence of a maritime empire against a military oligarchy was twice attempted by the most quick-witted people in history, who failed to save themselves on both occasions. Antecedently then we might expect to find some lessons of value in the record of a people whose experiences were like ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... Persia favorable to them. So these men offered the largest sacrifices on these accounts, and used great magnificence in the worship of God, and dwelt in Jerusalem, and made use of a form of government that was aristocratical, but mixed with an oligarchy, for the high priests were at the head of their affairs, until the posterity of the Asamoneans set up kingly government; for before their captivity, and the dissolution of their polity, they at first had kingly ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... ruin, until men learn by misfortune, and so order and power again arise. History is a continual rising and falling, a circle of order and disorder. Governmental forms, even, enjoy no stability; monarchy, when it has run out into tyranny, is followed by aristocracy, which gradually passes over into oligarchy; this in turn is replaced by democracy, until, finally, anarchy becomes unendurable, and a prince again attains power. No state, however, is so powerful as to escape succumbing to a rival before it completes the circuit. Protection against the corruption of the state is possible only ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... of Nations planned by Mr. Wilson there was little that appealed to one who was opposed to the employment of force in compelling the observance of international obligations and to the establishment of an international oligarchy of the Great Powers to direct and control world affairs. The basic principle of the plan was that the strong should, as a matter of right recognized by treaty, possess a dominant voice in international councils. Obviously the principle of the ...
— The Peace Negotiations • Robert Lansing
... has, therefore, shewn that, for the benefit of all classes, and the maintenance of order, the wisest plan was to make it hereditary. It is not to be denied that despotism, when it falls into good hands, has rendered a nation flourishing and happy, that an oligarchy has occasionally, but more rarely, governed with mildness and a regard to justice; but there never yet was a case of a people having seized upon the power, but the result has been one of rapacity and violence, ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... Government, in the Histories, and books of Policy; as Tyranny, and Oligarchy: But they are not the names of other Formes of Government, but of the same Formes misliked. For they that are discontented under Monarchy, call it Tyranny; and they that are displeased with Aristocracy, called it Oligarchy: so also, they which find themselves grieved ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... equal, in having none. And women lose by democracy precisely that which men gain. Therefore I say this disfranchisement of woman, as woman, is a novelty. It is a now aristocracy; for, as De Tocqueville says, wherever one class has peculiar powers, as such, there is aristocracy and oligarchy. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... agitators appealing to all the baser elements of the popular nature; by moneyed corporations; by those enriched by the depreciation of government securities or paper; by small attorneys, schemers, money-jobbers, speculators and adventurers—an ignoble oligarchy, enriched by the distresses of the State, and fattened on the miseries of the people. Then all the deceitful visions of equality and the rights of man end; and the wronged and plundered State can regain a real liberty only by passing through "great varieties ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... public transactions a character and colour in every respect dissimilar with their natural form and hue. In this mighty mystery all thoughts and things have assumed an aspect and title contrary to their real quality and style: Oligarchy has been called Liberty; an exclusive Priesthood has been christened a National Church; Sovereignty has been the title of something that has had no dominion, while absolute power has been wielded by those who profess themselves ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... unity may, no doubt, be achieved under any form of government. It may be achieved under a republic, as it was during the wars of the French Revolution. It may be achieved under an aristocracy, as in the case of Great Britain, which is a monarchy only in name, which, in reality, is a Parliamentary oligarchy, and which is always waging some guerilla in some outlying post of empire. But the fact remains that unity can be best achieved under a monarchic form of government, which concentrates all powers into the hands of the responsible ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... most grave and stern and just assembly that the world had seen—was now, with but a few superb exceptions, a timid, faithless, and licentious oligarchy; while—name whilome so majestical and mighty!—the people, the great Roman people, was but a mob! a vile colluvion of the offscourings of all climes and regions—Greeks, Syrians, Africans, Barbarians from the chilly north, and eunuchs from the vanquished ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... America stand? What are the truths that have gone into her blood and made her strong and beautiful and dominant? The divineness of human rights, the claims of men superior to the claims of property; popular government—not an oligarchy; popular government—not a dictatorship; the sacredness of the home, the holiness of the sanctuary, faith in humanity, faith in God. These have made America, and without these there can be no America. And because they are attacked, gentlemen, the need of the hour is a patriotism that ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... the Athenian republic. "The inhabitants of Attica were divided among themselves as to the form of government. Those who lived on the mountains (the poor) preferred the popular form; those of the plain (the middle class), the oligarchs; those by the sea coast, a mixture of oligarchy and democracy. Other dissensions were arising from the inequality of fortunes. The mutual antagonism of the rich and poor had become so violent, that the one-man power seemed the only safe-guard against the revolution with which the republic was ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... then, should ye suppress all this flowery crop of knowledge and new light sprung up and yet springing daily in this city? Should ye set an oligarchy of twenty engrossers [censors] over it, to bring a famine upon our minds again, when we shall know nothing but what is measured us by their bushel? ... That our hearts are now more capacious, our thoughts more erected to the search and expectation of greatest and exactest ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... rising against a masculine oligarchy ceases when the cause is removed, and the cause is simple. Similarly, the revolts of nationalism against Imperial power, though the motives are more complicated, usually cease at the concession of self-government. But even if these political and fairly simple motives to rebellion ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... the American Constitution, that it contains provisions, and enjoins duties, which make it unlawful for freemen to take the oath of allegiance to it, because they are expressly designed to favor a slaveholding oligarchy, and consequently, to make one portion of the people a prey ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... with the additional force of his common sense. Thus, on the eve of giving the ignorant man a power equal to that of the intelligent one, and of handing over the supreme decision in the vital concerns of a country to unsafeguarded majorities less qualified for the task than ancient oligarchy or autocracy. But he had nothing of worth to suggest, no alternative save the return to abuses of the grossest kind which experience had proved to ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... first to Holland, which had been in Queen Elizabeth's time the battle-ground of civil and religious liberty. Before he left England he used to say he knew of monarchy, anarchy, aristocracy, democracy, oligarchy, only as hard words to be looked for in a dictionary. But his interest in problems of government began to be awakened while he was among the Dutch. He served in the regiment of Lord Craven, and afterward ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... to show the ills resulting to Greece from the separation and conflict of the spirits or elements of democracy and oligarchy. The object of Tacitus was to demonstrate the desperate consequences of the loss of liberty on the minds and hearts ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... borne in mind that abstention from active political life had been in no sense required, or even thought desirable, in members of the Royal House. George III. himself had waged a life-long struggle with the Whig party, that powerful oligarchy that since the accession of the House of Hanover had virtually ruled the country; but he did not carry on the conflict so much by encouraging the opponents of the Whigs, as by placing himself at the head of ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... delegation took place; which was a removal (the first, we have seen, had not been so) of the power from the People. But, when a common centre became absolutely necessary, the power ought to have passed from the provincial Assemblies into the hands of the Cortes; and into none else. A pernicious Oligarchy crept into the place of this comprehensive—this constitutional—this saving and majestic Assembly. Far be it from me to speak of the Supreme Junta with ill-advised condemnation: every man must feel for the distressful trials to which that Body has been exposed. ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... distinction has no meaning at all. For the laws passed by a Democratic Parliament are coercive and compulsory in precisely the same manner and degree as are the laws of a despotic monarchy or a close oligarchy. There is, indeed, a "tyranny of the majority" which can be quite as oppressive to the individual as the tyranny of the one or the few, and much less easy to evade. From the point of view of the enfranchised community, however, the term "free" ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... The old Rome had had kings. Then the name and the power became odious—the name to all the citizens, no doubt, but the power simply to the nobility, who grudged the supremacy of one man. The kings were abolished, and an oligarchy was established under the name of a Republic, with its annual magistrates—at first its two Consuls, then its Praetors and others, and occasionally a Dictator, as some current event demanded a concentration of temporary power ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... in this scheme, which is an effect seemingly collateral, but direct, I have no doubt, in the minds of those who conduct this business, that is, its effect in producing an OLIGARCHY in every one of the republics. A paper circulation, not founded on any real money deposited or engaged for, amounting already to four-and-forty millions of English money, and this currency by force substituted in the ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... that for generations everything that affected the commerce of Venice was held up in the light of expression as free and candid as it was possible for opinion to be in this highly organized oligarchy; and here as elsewhere, Venice, like a faithful mother, watched over the welfare of her sons, though they were grown to man's estate; and since her commerce was, in fact, the mainspring of her wealth and prestige—a very vital part of her—she kept before their eyes on the exterior of this ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... government is according to Desire and offices depend on money, that constitution is called a Timocracy. The contraries are: to Kingdom tyranny, for Kingdom does all things with the guidance of reason and tyranny nothing; to Aristocracy oligarchy, when not the best people but a few of the worst are rulers; to Timocracy democracy, when not the rich but the common folk possess ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... argument a few simple propositions,—that self-government is the natural condition of an adult society, as distinguished from the immature state, in which the temporary arrangements of monarchy and oligarchy are tolerated as conveniences; that the end of all social compacts is, or ought to be, to give every child born into the world the fairest chance to make the most and the best of itself that laws can give it; that Liberty, ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... images; some of them extend over several pages, appearing and reappearing at intervals: such as the bees stinging and stingless (paupers and thieves) in the Eighth Book of the Republic, who are generated in the transition from timocracy to oligarchy: the sun, which is to the visible world what the idea of good is to the intellectual, in the Sixth Book of the Republic: the composite animal, having the form of a man, but containing under a human skin a lion and a many-headed monster (Republic): the great beast, i.e. the ...
— Gorgias • Plato
... slaves by slaves, Machiavelli considers the best method of subjugating Free Cities. Here again is eminent the terrible composure and the exact truth of his politics. A conquered Free City you may of course rule in person, or you may construct an oligarchy to govern for you, but the only safe way is to destroy it utterly, since 'that name of Liberty, those ancient usages of Freedom,' are things 'which no length of years and no benefits can extinguish in the nation's mind, things which no pains or forethought can uproot unless the citizens ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... democracy to the hereditary monarchy. Many of these governments passed in their history through all stages of government to be conceived of—the monarchy, absolute and constitutional, the aristocracy, the oligarchy, the tyranny, the democracy, and the polity. All phases of politics had their representation in the development ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... life-and-death struggle between the two principles of liberty and slavery, that it is the cause of the common people the world over. We believe that every struggling nationality on the globe will be stronger if we conquer this odious oligarchy of slavery and that every oppressed people in the world will be weaker if we fail. The sober American regards the war as part of that awful yet glorious struggle which has been going on for hundreds of years in every nation between right and wrong, between virtue and vice, between liberty and despotism, ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... no career for Irishmen in Ireland. Both Catholics and Dissenters were excluded from all civil and military offices; the highest posts were generally given to Englishmen born and bred, and the country, Episcopalian only to a fractional extent, was ruled by a narrow Episcopalian oligarchy of wealthy landowners and prelates, who bartered Irish freedom for the place and power of their own families and dependents. The conditions of this sordid exchange were the ground of the first important Anglo-Irish political struggle in the eighteenth century, ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... titles in question was to shake the foundations of society. The popular party pointed to the statute. The monopolists were entitled in justice to less than was offered them. They had no right to a compensation at all. Political passion awoke again after the sleep of a century. The oligarchy had doubtless connived at the accumulations. The suppression of the small holdings favored their supremacy, and placed the elections more completely in their control. Their military successes had given them so long a tenure of power that they had believed it to be theirs in perpetuity; ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... that of some great legal characters almost as sceptical as himself; vanishes whenever his political partialities interfere. He is a vehement admirer of tyranny and oligarchy, and considers no evidence as feeble which can be brought forward in favour of those forms of government. Democracy he hates with a perfect hatred, a hatred which, in the first volume of his history, appears only in his episodes and reflections, but which, in those parts where ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... comparison with the less disciplined and less organised communities which surround it as was, in the third century before Christ, the Roman State in comparison with the disunited multitude of Greek cities, the commercial oligarchy of Carthage, and the half-civilised tribes of Gaul and Spain. Unless the other States of Europe can rouse themselves to a discipline as sound and to an organisation as subtle as those of Prussia and to the perception of a common purpose in the maintenance of their independence, the union of Europe ...
— Britain at Bay • Spenser Wilkinson |
