"Social system" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the percentage still higher. But when you next see a full company of a hundred soldiers, and reflect that ninety of them have been persuaded to kill and die for you simply through fear of starvation under our country's social system—I say, whether you seek peace or admire war, the thought is horrible; it is hardly to ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... posterity might probably have lacked the information that certain monsters of virtue ever had existence. But it is upon a much better and wider scale, let me say it once again—it is in the effect of such institutions upon the great social system, and the peace and happiness of mankind, that I delight to contemplate them; and, in my heart, I am quite certain that long after your institution, and others of the same nature, have crumbled into dust, the noble harvest of the ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... in manufactures as in agriculture, and as indeed through our whole social system, the labour, the discoveries, and the inventions of our ancestors profit chiefly the few, it is none the less certain that mankind in general, aided by the creatures of steel and iron which it already possesses, could already procure an existence of wealth and ease for ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... England bound the owner and the occupier to each other never arose under this state of things, and in their absence did not arise one of the strongest inducements to a landed gentry to live on their estates and to concern themselves in the welfare of their tenants, a social system which, by the interchange of kindly offices wherever in England the proprietors live on their property, does much to make the countryside attractive to the poorer classes and to ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... reason to believe that the government at this time seriously meditated a blow which would have reduced many thousands of families to beggary, and would have disturbed the whole social system of every part of the country. No wine, beer, or coffee could be sold without a license. It was rumoured that every person holding such a license would shortly be required to enter into the same engagements which ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... ease and congruity of metrical arrangement. Had he been born fifty years later, his ripened manhood would have found itself in an England absorbed and angry with the solution of political and religious problems, from which his whole nature was averse, instead of in that Elizabethan social system, ordered and planetary in functions and degrees as the angelic hierarchy of the Areopagite, where his contemplative eye could crowd itself with various and brilliant picture, and whence his impartial ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... "I was already of an affectionate disposition, an affection turned readily to either sex. No boy was the cause of my inclinations, which were quite spontaneous. (No doubt, part of the cause may be found in our social system, by which ladies are rather drawing-room creatures to be treated with distant respect.) When I was 10, at a preparatory school, I first began to form attachments with other boys of my own age, in ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... way, which tries to fix and reproduce the beautiful illusion of either happy or unhappy passion. And if the Japanese reader has learned enough of our world to understand all this, he must yet visualize our social system more clearly perhaps than most of us see it, if he would know why so many of our love poems are addressed to the woman we have not yet met. When we begin to sympathize with him in his efforts to grasp the meaning of our literature, we are at last awakened ourselves to some notion of ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... regions of property by limiting its political power, so that it should never equal that of the Atlantic coast. But more liberal counsels prevailed. In the first debates upon the public lands, also, it was clearly stated that the social system of the nation was involved quite as much as the question of revenue. Eastern fears that cheap lands in abundance would depopulate the Atlantic States and check their industrial growth by a scarcity of labor supply were met by the answer of one ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... Kingdom of God is not identified with any special social theory. It means justice, freedom, fraternity, labor, joy. Let each social system and movement show us what it can contribute and we will weigh its claims. We want the old ideal defined in modern terms, in the terms of modern democracy, of the power machine, of international peace, and of evolutionary science. But we want to embrace it with the old religious faith and ardor, ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... The consequent flood of innovations that has swept through the West and across the planet in the past two generations has made drastic social change a matter of the utmost urgency. The only open questions concern the direction of the changes, their rapidity, and the success of the social system in adapting itself to the shattering effects of newly ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... shall close this chapter and this book with a remark which ought to serve as a basis for the whole social system; it is that instead of destroying natural equality, the fundamental pact, on the contrary, substitutes a moral and lawful equality for the physical inequality which nature imposed upon men, so that, although unequal in strength or intellect, they all become equal by convention ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... that Democratic party meant, and you would find that your triumph in mere politics would lead you back again exactly to the place you started from. You would be Whigs under a different name. Monarchy, House of Lords, pensions, standing army, and the rest of it, are only supports to the present social system—the PRIVILEGE based on the wages and capital system of production—and are worth nothing except as supports to it. If you are determined to support that system, therefore, you had better leave these things alone. The real masters of Society, the real tyrants of the people, ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... you go to sea with men you employ, you must go in a seaworthy vessel. But the pure command is unconditional; it says, whatever you have done or are doing or want to do, you are to do this, as when the social system, working through the base necessities of base parents and bad laws, sends a child of thirteen into a factory. Prohibition takes one definite thing from the indefinite liberty of a man, but it still leaves him an unbounded choice of actions. He remains free, and you have merely taken ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... realize it as the great underlying purpose toward which they have always been more or less obscurely groping, great clearness would be shed over many of their problems; and, as for their influence in the midst of our social system, it would embark upon ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... get quite to the bottom of the anti-English feeling at Washington. God knows, this people have their faults. Their social system and much else here is mediaeval. I could write several volumes in criticism of them. So I could also in criticism of anybody else. But Jefferson's[77] letter is as true to-day as it was when he wrote it. One may ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... for their surplus population; great nations desire territory to extend their trade, and when there are several great powers to divide the spoil they distribute it among themselves and call it "spheres of influence", and all in honor of the god Commerce. In China the fundamentals of our social system are brotherhood and the dignity ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... artist, who has power to bring the form of life from the cold marble, has no right to solve problems in geometry, weigh planets, or calculate eclipses. The proper choice of the business of life may do much to perfect our social system, and it will certainly advance our material prosperity. There is everywhere in our civilization mutual dependence, and there must be mutual support. In no other way can we advance to our destiny as ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... color." While in England she married William E. Rose, and in the spring of 1836, came to the United States, and resided in the city of New York. Soon after her arrival she commenced lecturing on the evils of the existing social system, the formation of human character, slavery, the rights of ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... the case of boys, to intercourse with the men and women of the clan or tribe—they are instructed not to speak to certain persons, and in general they are made acquainted with the somewhat elaborate social system that prevails in many early tribes. These taboos are intended to prepare the boys to understand their position as members of the tribe, responsible for the maintenance of its customs. The taboos relating to food have arisen from conditions whose origins belong to a remote and unrecorded past, ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... noblest and most saintly among clergy and laity alike were often the fiercest persecutors. Church and State were closely intermingled; heresy was a crime as well as a sin; the heretic was a rebel; mild measures only made him bolder; and in fear of the overthrow of the whole social system the rulers of State and Church combined to ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley
... their skies, why are we to insist on uniformity in government, in human feeling, or in those national impulses which shape society? The throne, the constitution, and the laws of England, noble advances as they are to the perfection of the social system, may be unfit for the man sitting under his palm tree within the tropics, the navigator in the summer seas of the Indian Ocean, or even for the rude vigour and roving enterprise of Australia. But we have no fears of the failure of that glorious ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... other passages in history, the period of Charlemagne is rich and novel in its instruction, and almost (we might say) unique in the quality of that instruction. For here only perhaps we see the social system forming itself in the mine, and the very process, as it were, of crystallization going on beneath our eyes. Mr. James, therefore, may be regarded as not less fortunate in the choice of his subject, than meritorious in its treatment; indeed, his work is not so much the best, ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... no attempt," said one[76] who knew them well, "to acquire land from the Indians, to organize a social system, to introduce municipal regulations, or to establish military defences; but cheerfully obeyed the priests and the king's officers, and enjoyed the present without troubling their heads about the future. They seem to have been even careless as to the acquisition ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... have attracted no special attention, and might merely have furnished food to an occasional reader for serious thought upon a subject not exactly agreeable; but coming from a colored man, in a Southern city, it was an indictment of the laws and social system of the South that could not fail of creating a ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt
... legitimate vent, the energy, irritated and aroused, possesses the whole being, and if not wasted on desultory schemes, or if not purified by conscience and principle, becomes a dangerous and destructive element in the social system, through which it wanders in riot and disorder. Hence, in all wise monarchies,—nay, in all well-constituted states,—the peculiar care with which channels are opened for every art and every science; hence the honour paid to their ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... upon a tithe of the unrestrained vituperation which he safely indulged in here? In his visions he now saw General Grant upholding a Congressional usurpation with bayonets. Four years before, he saw in Mr. Lincoln's election "the utter disintegration of our whole political and social system amid bloodshed and anarchy." Mr. Belmont had evidently not proved a true prophet and did not aspire even to be ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... the slaves and endow the whole colored race, whether capable or otherwise, with all the rights and privileges, socially and politically, of the educated and refined white population whom they had previously served, his readiness and avowed intention to overthrow the local State governments and the social system where slavery existed, to subjugate the whites and elevate the blacks, will justify a special notice; for it was one of the first, if not the very first of the radical schemes officially presented to change the character of the Government and the ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... titles. But the crime still lived, and woe to Mark Bower, the financial magnate, if it was brought home to him! He had not risen above his fellows without making enemies. He well knew the weakness and the strength of the British social system, with its strange complacency, its "allowances," its hysterical prudery, its queer amalgam of Puritanism and light hearted forbearance. He might gamble with loaded dice in the City, and people would applaud him as cleverer and shrewder than his opponents. His name might be coupled with that of ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... especially in his Social System, that his views of Progress are to be sought. Man is simply a part of nature; he has no privileged position, and he is born neither good nor bad. Erras, as Seneca said, si existumas vitia nobiscum esse: ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... peculiarity of certain castes is their totemistic aspect. This characteristic has only recently been discovered. "At the bottom of the social system, as understood by the average Hindu, we find, in the Dravidian region of India, a large body of tribes and castes each of which is broken up into a number of totemistic septs. Each sept bears the name of an animal, a tree, a plant, or some material object, natural or artificial, which the members ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... is completed, my edifice achieved, my pediment sculptured, my scaffolding cleared away, my final touches given, it will be proved that I was either right or wrong. But after having been a poet, after having demonstrated an entire social system, I shall revert to science in an Essay on the Human Powers. And around the base of my palatial structure, with boyish glee I shall trace the immense arabesque of my Hundred ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... very sound bit of philosophy: "The worst fact in our past affords the brightest hope for our future. It is the fact that our misfortunes have come because of our own faults. If they had come when we were doing our best, there would be no hope for us." Now the evils of our own social system which result from mistakes or faults are just such a ground of hope. Every such evil which can be cited describes one possible reform, and the longer the list of evils, the greater is the sum total of gain which ...
— Social Justice Without Socialism • John Bates Clark
... Any social system founded on a theory designed for the elevation of one sex alone, regardless of the other, is altogether false and delusive to the expectations built upon it, for the human race is dual and heredity keeps the stock common from which both men and women spring. Since the common stock ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... developed and set in activity (before the change in the conditions of society had begun to be very perceptible) a temporal or spiritual power of an intermediary, bastard, and transitory nature, whose only mission was to bring about the transition from one social system to another." ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... strike remains the revolution of folded arms, if it does not degenerate into a violent insurrection, one cannot see how a cessation of work of fifteen, thirty, or even sixty days could bring into the industrial regime and into the present social system changes great enough to determine their fall."[18] To be sure, the syndicalists do not lay so much emphasis on the abolition of government as do the anarchists, but their plan leads to nothing less than that. If "the capitalist ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... Resentful Employee provides the emotional impulse of the resisting pacifist, whose horizon is bounded by his one passionate desire that the particular social system that has treated him so ill should collapse and give in, and its leaders and rulers be humiliated and destroyed, the intellectual direction of a mischievous pacifism comes from ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... live alone or together, the first want is of houses,—which is another hitch in the social system. In the city a building-lot is an incipient fortune; and the large sum paid for it is the beginning of reasons for the large rent of the building that is put upon it. But then if ground is costly, air is cheap,—land is high, but sky is low; and one need have but very little ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... have considered the organization of the American aborigines in gentes, phratries, and tribes, with the functions of each in their social system. From the importance of this organization to a right understanding of their social and governmental life, a recapitulation of the principal features of each member of the organic series is necessary in this connection. [Footnote: ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... press, supports the same view of the necessity of slavery to the christianization and civilization of a barbarous race. My argument for the benevolence of the relation of master and slave, drawn from the four relations ordained of God for the organization of the social system (the fourth being the servile relation, or the relation of master and slave) leads conclusively to the recognition of some great benevolent design in ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... less than an ex-soldier turned religionist, who, having suffered the whips and privations of our peculiar social system, had concluded that his duty to the God which he conceived lay in aiding his fellow-man. The form of aid which he chose to administer was entirely original with himself. It consisted of securing a bed for all such homeless wayfarers ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... There is a great deal of companionship, however unrecognized, in the cloud of witnesses that encompass us round about, and whose presence is less vividly felt in the gleam and glitter of ceremonial society. The more general assemblages of clubs, teas, and receptions are so incorporated into the social system that no one could cancel these if he would, nor would he if he could. They have their uses. All exchange of human sympathies is good, even if it be somewhat superficial and spectacular. The more exclusive ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... rushing about the world or hiding in Mediterranean villas or in yachts on the Dalmatian coast—are very curious people. The very nature of their mode of existence makes them monsters of selfishness. They are the logical outcome of our predatory social system. They are like the insects which we are told will some day triumph over other forms of life. At least, I think of them as such when I encounter them rushing thither and yon over the face of the earth, crawling up mountains and flying through ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... the old sense of the word, but aren't we trying desperately to sponsor our type of government and social system everywhere? Frankly, I'm neither pro-West nor pro-Soviet. I ...
— Combat • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... worry about the future is futile, and that everything, in the best possible of worlds, is inevitably for the best, I think it clear that within recent years an uneasy suspicion has come into being that the principle of authority has been dangerously impaired, and that the social system, if it is to cohere, must be reorganized. So far as my observation has extended, such intuitions are usually not without an adequate cause, and if there be reason for anxiety anywhere, it surely should be in the United States, with its unwieldy bulk, its heterogeneous population, and its ...
— The Theory of Social Revolutions • Brooks Adams
... candour. "Just the same then! I should say, 'My esteemed Boythorn'—to make you the personification of our imaginary friend—'my esteemed Boythorn, you object to the mighty potentate? Very good. So do I. I take it that my business in the social system is to be agreeable; I take it that everybody's business in the social system is to be agreeable. It's a system of harmony, in short. Therefore if you object, I object. Now, excellent Boythorn, let ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... by the traditions which the settlers had inherited. Neither planter nor servant came to America with utopian ideals of society or government. It was discontent not dissent that drove them out. Dissatisfied with their position in the English social system, they were yet well content with the system itself; a system which they were willing enough to establish in the New World in the hope of obtaining in it a more desirable position for themselves. And so it happened that ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... forming,—the sharply accented difference between theirs and ours lying in the fact that for Greek and Roman and the earlier peoples in the Indies economic life was based upon slavery, accepted then as the foundation stone of the economic social system. ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... very words he had come to cherish. And possibly it was not all her own fault that Carolina Langdon had enlisted her services, subtle and quite overwhelming (owing to Haines' fervent worship of her), against the secretary. Perhaps the social system of which she had become a part in Washington had something to do with the craving to become a leader in that fascinating world whose dazzling variety and infinite diversion seemed to fill her soul with all that it yearned for. Love she had, for she had now promised to wed Congressman Norton. ...
— A Gentleman from Mississippi • Thomas A. Wise
... refusing honest work. Let us be frank in this matter before we go on with our play; so that we may enjoy it without hypocrisy. If we were reasoning, farsighted people, four fifths of us would go straight to the Guardians for relief, and knock the whole social system to pieces with most beneficial reconstructive results. The reason we do got do this is because we work like bees or ants, by instinct or habit, not reasoning about the matter at all. Therefore when a man comes along who can and does reason, ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... whom was the author of our animal frames, the other of society, then indeed we might understand how it comes to pass that labour of mind and body, the useful arts, the duties of a statesman, government, and the like, which are required by the social system, are so destructive of health, enjoyment, and life. That is, in other words, we cannot adequately account for existing and undeniable truths except on the hypothesis of what we ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... spare—to pity—to look aside, but rushes forward for ever, impassive as the marble in the quarry—caring not for whom it destroys, for the how many, or for the results, direct and indirect, whether many or few. The increasing grandeur and magnitude of the social system, the more it multiplies and extends its victims, the more it conceals them; and for the very same reason: just as in the Roman amphitheatres, when they grew to the magnitude of mighty cities, (in some instances accommodating four hundred thousand spectators, ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... those offences for which he was arbitrarily punished. He relaxed the stout jaws, crawled slinkingly to the couch, and leaped upon it. Once there, he whimpered protestingly. One of the few clear beliefs he had about a perplexing social system was that nothing hurtful could befall him once he had gained ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... but as happiness is an accidental state, resulting only from the development of man's faculties and his social system, it is not the immediate and direct object of nature; it is in some measure, a superfluity annexed to the necessary ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... grew without effort, and spreads naturally with the society to which it belongs. I need scarcely add that this calamity is slavery. Christianity suppressed slavery, but the Christians of the sixteenth century re-established it—as an exception, indeed, to their social system, and restricted to one of the races of mankind; but the wound thus inflicted upon humanity, though less extensive, was at the same time rendered far ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... the same time it is to be observed, that the tenants here occupy and enjoy all their houses, while in New York, as I have before observed, the owners of many of the finest residences live almost exclusively in the basements thereof. This more social system at New Orleans, I am inclined to attribute essentially to the French—or Creole—habits with which society is leavened, and into which, it appears to me, the Americans naturally and fortunately drop. On the other hand, the rivalry which too often taints a ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... very different thing from the radical transformation of those relations. If we think of society as an organism we instantly understand that so immense a change as this could not possibly have been effected without the co-operation of the other great parts of the social system, any more than a critical evolution could take place in the nutritive apparatus of an animal, without a change in the whole series of its organs. Thus in order that serfage should be evolved from ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... mid-day bread and cheese, the mother for her half-ounce of tea, the child for its farthing's-worth of sweets. For years I've been leading a useless life; once let me get into my shop, and I become a column of the social system. Faith, it's as ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... ago, that the decline of his race has been entirely due to the loss of the ancient religious faith in the tabu. "For," said he (I quote from an Auckland newspaper), "in the olden-time our tapu ramified the whole social system. The head, the hair, spots where apparitions appeared, places which the tohungas proclaimed as sacred, we have forgotten and disregarded. Who nowadays thinks of the sacredness of the head? See when the kettle boils, the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... provisions of which suppose property to be based upon the fact of first occupancy. If labor, through the appropriation which results from it, alone gives birth to property, the Civil Code lies, the charter is a falsehood, our whole social system is a violation of right. To this conclusion shall we come, at the end of the discussion which is to occupy our attention in this chapter and the following one, both as to the right of labor and the fact of property. We shall see, on the one hand, our legislation ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... sorely tempted to lack of self-control, and to the misuse of their sexual endowment in a variety of ways: and the maintenance of chastity—never an easy ideal—is made doubly difficult by the fact that in the existing social system marriage, except among the poorer classes, is commonly deferred until an age much later than that at which a man becomes physically mature, and also by the widespread prevalence, in masculine society, of a corrupt ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... the social system of those days. Authority bade men marry, but rendered marriage nearly impossible, at once by the excessive misery of most, and the senseless cruelty ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... what exact right do we call people like the Zulus savages? Setting aside the habit of polygamy, which, after all, is common among very highly civilised peoples in the East, they have a social system not unlike our own. They have, or had, their king, their nobles, and their commons. They have an ancient and elaborate law, and a system of morality in some ways as high as our own, and certainly more generally obeyed. They have their priests and their doctors; they are strictly ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard
... power upon which privilege and the mere possession of wealth have rested. But democracy must not be duped by phrases, nor be swayed by any influence which does not lead to a lasting advance for the nation as a whole. Nor should its leaders think that fundamental and enduring changes in our social system can be reached by any short cut to which the great mass of the people have not been converted. Progress will be faster in the future if impatience and folly do ...
— The War and Unity - Being Lectures Delivered At The Local Lectures Summer - Meeting Of The University Of Cambridge, 1918 • Various
... destiny was engraved by a crowd of maladies, which originated in the social system. The result is that the most intense pleasure one can imagine, cannot atone for certain pains, such as the gout, the tooth-ache, etc., acute rheumatisms, strictures, and many other diseases ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... questions have hitherto received and are now receiving, crime still remains one of the most perplexing and obstinate of social problems. It is much more formidable than pauperism, and almost as costly. A social system which has to try hundreds of thousands of offenders annually before the criminal courts is in a very imperfect condition; the causes which lead to this state of things deserve careful consideration from all who take ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... rising sun, with the islands of the West, and the unfathomed depths of the mysterious Scandinavia. He was the universal guardian of the public and private interests which composed the great edifice of the social system as then existing amongst his subjects. Above all, and out of his own private purse, he supported the heraldries of his dominions—the peerage, senatorial or praetorian, and the great gentry or chivalry of the Equites. These were classes who would have been dishonored ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... sharp, wide-awake spirit. They are an element in our politics. Our statesmen, legislators, and high-placed men, generally, are weaned on them. Why, dear me! oysters are a fundamental idea in our social system. The best society circles around 'fried' and 'stewed.' Our 'festive scenes,' you know, depend on them in no small degree for their zest. That isn't all, either. A full third of our population is over 'oysters' every morning at eleven o'clock. Young Smith, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... Actually, however, they exercised in many cases more influence upon American social and political economy than did the official leaders. They were an intrusion, into the traditional economic political and social system, for which no provision had been made. Their special interests, and the necessities of their special tasks, made their manner of life different from that of other American citizens, and their peculiar opportunities enabled them to appropriate an unusually large share ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... children in these tribes take their totems from the father, but we may assume that it is the case. If therefore the statement in question is accurate, it is a pretty clear proof of the break-up of the social system; for under no circumstances does the totem-kinsman, as a rule, violate the sacro-sanctity of his own flesh. It cannot therefore be argued that the fact of removal in the Maryborough tribes is any ...
— Kinship Organisations and Group Marriage in Australia • Northcote W. Thomas
... far-off "nook and corner of the world," crossing a tempestuous and dangerous ocean, and landing on the shores of a wilderness, leaving every thing, however dear and valuable, behind, came to have a country and a social system for themselves and of themselves alone. Their resolve was inexorable not to allow the mother-country, or the whole outside world combined, to interfere with them. And it was equally inexorable not to suffer dissent or any discordant element to get foothold ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... would call the wrath of heaven that visited Hampton, although a sermon on these lines was delivered from more than one of her pulpits on the following Sunday. Let us surmise, rather, that a decrepit social system in a moment of lowered vitality becomes an easy prey to certain diseases which respectable communities are not supposed to have. The germ of a philosophy evolved in decadent Europe flies across the sea ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... civil and political rights. Now, sir, what are civil rights? Rights natural, modified by civil society. Mr. Lieber says: "By civil liberty is meant, not only the absence of individual restraint, but liberty within the social system and political organism—a combination of principles, and laws which acknowledge, protect, and favor the dignity of man * * * civil liberty is the result of man's two fold character as an individual and social being, so soon as both are ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... place in which he has to spend many lives, for, according to what he has done in one life, so must he contend with in the next. If, while possessing physical and mental strength in one body, he assists in upholding a corrupt social system which takes from the weak and gives to the strong, he must expect these same conditions to exist when he returns as a weakling. For as long as hogs are bred and slaughtered, so must he take his chances of being one of them. How much better to help ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson
... The Iroquois were under the observation of our own people two hundred years before the discovery was made in reference to them. "The existence among them of clans, named after animals, was pointed out at an early day, but without suspecting that it was the unit of a social system upon which both the tribe and the confederacy rested." But, being ignorant of this fact, it is not singular that they made serious mistakes in their ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... parrot and the twins had so firmly established themselves in the social system of the place as to become matters of regular conversation. Curly never appeared at the forum of Whiteman's corral without finding himself ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... more liberal than the bourgeois: the bourgeois than the people. The Revolution commenced in the head of the social system; from that it gained the heart, and spread to the extremities. It became a point of honour to be in opposition. It was a mode of shining and acquiring popularity; a fashion which the young seized with avidity. The words Liberty and Representative ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... and poets; but she liked those best who were distinguished for their infidel or licentious speculations. She was the friend of those economists and philosophers who sapped the foundations of the social system. An imperious and insolent hauteur and reckless prodigality were her most marked peculiarities,—just such as were to be expected in an unprincipled woman raised suddenly to high position. In spite of her power, she did not ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... It has been observed that Carlyle's Chartism was "his first practical step in politics"; it is more true to say that it first embodied, with more than his usual precision, the convictions he had for some time held of the dangers of our social system; with an indication of some of the means to ward them off, based on the realisation of the interdependence of all classes in the State. This book is remarkable as containing his last, very partial, concessions to the democratic creed, the last in which he is willing to regard a wide suffrage ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... hardly anything of them in the literature of the time. Not only a want of philanthropic feeling in their betters, but an inherited contempt for all small industry and retail dealing, has helped to hide them away from us: an inherited contempt, because it is in fact a survival from an older social system, when the citizen did not need the work of the artisan and small retailer, but supplied all his own wants within the circle of his household, i.e. his own family and slaves, and produced on his farm the ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... shall be respected, and that justice shall be done. Sirs, they have stood by your Constitution; they have stood by all its requirements, they have performed all its duties unselfishly, uncalculatingly, disinterestedly, until a party sprang up in this country which endangered their social system—a party which they arraign, and which they charge before the American people and all mankind with having made proclamation of outlawry against four thousand millions of their property in the Territories of the United States; with having put ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... but it was Mr. Wells more than anyone else who made us aware of this national life by presenting it in the only possible effective way, the imaginative way. It may almost be said that he gave it to us as an impressionistic account of his own life. He had lived in all this; the social system, or lack of system, had expressed itself in him; and finally he became conscious of all those elements about him and in him which had left their deep impression. Most of us have had an experience in some ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... case there must be something wrong with our social system. You may be sure that the female cat or canary bird is just as efficient in her department as the male in his. Speaking from my own experience among the London poor, I should say that the father is often a mere parasite ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... familiar it is!—and acquaintances and friends fled in mad skedaddle. He would surely be asking favors—would be trying to borrow money. It is no peculiarity of rats to desert a sinking ship; it is simply an inevitable precaution in a social system modeled as yet upon nature's cruel law of the survival of the fittest. A falling man is first of all a warning to all other men high enough up to be able to fall—a warning to them to take care lest they fall also ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... great scientific pretensions, but no one attached much importance to his maunderings. Dreaming of place and honour, he had only obtained a very subordinate situation in the household of a great noble. The Revolution opened up an unhoped-for future. Swollen with hatred of the old social system which had not recognised his merits, he put himself at the head of the most violent section of the people. Having publicly glorified the massacres of September, he founded a journal which denounced everybody and clamoured incessantly ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... ramshackle train that goes to The Ghost and back in an hour and a half. We've all yearned to climb The Ghost, or as much of it as we dared. Now you two, with Mousey and a servant, are to go on the nine-thirty. I'll finish my destruction of the social system and catch the eleven o'clock train. We'll have picnic lunch. They say there's a dreadful cavern at the base of The Ghost that is corking for picnics, and then we'll explore until we ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... no liberty. There are comparative degrees of captivity, and comparative degrees of slavery; but of liberty, our social system knows nothing but the name. That sentry, if you asked him, would tell you that he is free. He pities me, perhaps, for being a prisoner. Yet he is even less free than myself. He is the slave of discipline. He must walk, ...
— Monsieur Maurice • Amelia B. Edwards
... fireside—and thought them a ridiculous pair. Learning that he was a painter they tried to approach him, to show him too that they were the real thing; but he looked at them across the big room, as if they were miles away: they were a compendium of everything he most objected to in the social system of his country. Such people as that, all convention and patent- leather, with ejaculations that stopped conversation, had no business in a studio. A studio was a place to learn to see, and how could you see through a ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... illustrate what might be accomplished by reducing to action the ardor of those youths who so bitterly arraign our present industrial order. While no part of the social system can be changed rapidly, we would all admit that the present industrial arrangements in America might be vastly improved and that we are failing to meet the requirements of our industrial life with courage ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... and with the abolition of this institution they will cease to exist. Murder? Why? No one can enrich himself at the expense of others, and even murder for hatred or revenge is directly or indirectly connected with the social system. Perjury, false testimony, fraud, theft of inheritance, fraudulent failures? There will be no private property against which these crimes could be committed. Arson? Who should find satisfaction in committing ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... there were not many of them left in New Jersey, although there were a few in the State until after the Revolution. Negro slavery, however, continued much longer. It grew and flourished until it became a part of the New Jersey social system; but it must not be supposed that all the people of the State continued to be satisfied with ...
— Stories of New Jersey • Frank Richard Stockton
... for interrupting you, sir,' returned Bitzer; 'but I am sure you know that the whole social system is a question of self-interest. What you must always appeal to, is a person's self-interest. It's your only hold. We are so constituted. I was brought up in that catechism when I was very young, sir, ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... "I did not expect to find here," she wrote, "in the new capital of a new country, with the boundless forests within half a mile of us on almost every side, concentrated as it were, the worst evils of our old and most artificial social system at home, with none of its agremens, and none of its advantages. Toronto is like a fourth or fifth rate provincial town with the ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
... has picked out what we call Morality for survival in the social world. The whole further progress of mankind would seem to hang upon the possibility that we can find a way to limit and, if possible, to terminate wars between nations, for only in that contingency can we hope to develop a social system in which a supreme efficiency with a maximum of individual liberty can be combined ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... is not a great man. The world's reformers have been of another temper and mettle. He is no Mazzini, no Luther. George Eliot's social theories loft no room for such men. They were superfluous in her social system. The man not to be explained by heredity and tradition had no place in her books; and no genius, no great man, can ever be explained ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... attention back to the entertainment, but the coarse words hung in her memory like an evil cloud. They recalled Green's brief condemnation of the previous evening. Evidently his point of view was the same. He regarded the whole social system as evil. Had not the squire told her that he wanted to reform ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... West. Then she would bend to her work again; and the washerwoman's child who took the clothes she washed in his little wagon with the cottonwood log wheels, across the commons into the town, was not made to feel an inferior place in the social system until he was in his early teens. For all the Sycamore Ridge women worked hard in those days. But there were Sundays when the boy and his mother walked over the wide prairies together, and she told ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... to be restful after the revels of his youth. The prolonged seclusion of Queen Victoria, who was then engaged upon that superb work of introspection and self-analysis, More Leaves from the Highlands, had begun to tell upon the social system. Balls and other festivities, both at Court and in the houses of the nobles, were notably fewer. The vogue of the Opera was passing. Even in the top of the season, Rotten Row, I read, was not impenetrably crowded. But in 1880 came the tragic fall of Disraeli and the triumph of ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... despair of salvation, even should the cabinet prospective of farceurs fall to pieces, for there yet remain two species of a genus taking higher rank in the social system; species that really have a root, a name, and pretensions hereditary or legitimately acquired. These each affect philosophy, and represent it too; they of the caste hereditary in grande tenue, they of the new men with much pompous parade of words, and all the Delphic mystics ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... him good advice. "That sort of talk doesn't lead to anything—except trouble. Men who get on don't question the fundamentals of our social system. It doesn't do, you know. Take the constitution. Now I've studied it. A wonderful document. ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... while with Mrs. F——, and had a most interesting conversation with her about the negroes and all the details of their condition. She is a kind-hearted, intelligent woman; but though she seemed to me to acquiesce, as a matter of inevitable necessity, in the social system in the midst of which she was born and lives, she did not appear to me, by several things she said, to be by any means in love with it. She gave me a very sad character of Mr. K——, confirming by her general description of him the impression ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... poor fellow seemed remarkably stupid, and I believe that many of these poor fellows brought from the more distant countries of Soudan become half idiots from continually regretting their beloved country. Alas! what can be done for Africa, when the greater part of its social system is ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 2 • James Richardson
... possible and very interesting for prosperous people interested in Eugenics to create a trust for the offspring of a selected band of beneficiaries, and with increasing resources to admit new members and so build up within the present social system a special strain of chosen people. So far people with eugenic ideas and people with conceptions of associated and consolidated families have been too various and too dispersed for such associations to be practicable, but as such views of life ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... why He is loved with such wide and deep devotion is that men do dimly, but instinctively, perceive that His life presents the only perfect pattern of life as it should be. Life, as it exists, is clearly not ordered on a social system which any wise or good man can approve. Hence the wise and good man is perpetually urged to the enquiry whether Jesus may not after all ...
— The Empire of Love • W. J. Dawson
... is to say, in those of our States which have no common law, of statute. Jurists and communists are alike agreed on this. "Property is robbery," said Proudhon; property is but the creature of law, all English jurists admit. It is, of course, possible to conceive of a social system which recognizes no right of property, or one which makes all property belong to the community, or a middle ground which admits the institution, but holds that every individual holds property subject to the state's, that is, the organized community's, regulation and control. A ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... the people,' The speech, though intended to please an audience of country-gentlemen, represented a genuine belief.[6] The country-gentlemen formed the class to which not only the constitutional laws but the prevailing sentiment of the country gave the lead in politics as in the whole social system. Even reformers proposed to improve the House of Commons chiefly by increasing the number of county-members, and a county-member was almost necessarily a country-gentleman of an exalted kind. Although the country-gentleman was very far ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... primary matter is what sort of children we have to educate. That is the most fundamental of questions. It lies deeper even than the great question of Socialism versus Individualism, and indeed touches a foundation that is common to both. The best organized social system is only a house of cards if it cannot be constructed with sound individuals; and no individualism worth the name is possible unless a sound social organization permits the breeding of individuals ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.
... shows what the miserable magic is that enchants these Southern American citizens into people whose philosophy of society would disgrace the Dark Ages, and whose social system ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... parties therefore offered very little attraction to the young men of the early eighties, who, viewing our social system with the fresh eyes of youth, saw its cruelties and its absurdities and judged them, not as older men, by comparison with the worse cruelties and greater absurdities of earlier days, but by the standard of common fairness and common sense, as set out in the lessons they had learned in their ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... dreading death not half so much as surrender, he reaches the home he left so prosperous and beautiful? He finds his house in ruins, his farm devastated, his slaves free, his stock killed, his barns empty, his trade destroyed, his money worthless, his social system, feudal in its magnificence, swept away; his people without law or legal status; his comrades slain, and the burdens of others heavy on his shoulders. Crushed by defeat, his very traditions are gone. Without money, credit, employment, material, or training; and beside ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... severity of the laws, with jails and punishments; who owned not a single foot of the extensive surface of this planet? No! urged by a variety of motives, here they came. Every thing has tended to regenerate them; new laws, a new mode of living, a new social system; here they are become men: in Europe they were as so many useless plants, wanting vegetative mould, and refreshing showers; they withered, and were mowed down by want, hunger, and war; but now by the power of transplantation, like all other plants they have taken root and ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... barrister, and, moreover, was pleased at the prospect of leaving this island of fogs for the sunny shores of France. The times were exciting; the country, on the verge of proposed electoral reforms. But in France the new social system had sprung into existence and—lamentable fact!—duty towards one's country had assumed an empire superior ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... unity of this social system was the more striking from the fact that it underlay not only such innumerable local customs and liberties, but an almost equal number of philosophic opinions, of religious practices, and of dialects. ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc
... that Dory in his anxiety about her was all but unconscious that they were going through the supposedly solemn marriage rite. Looking back on it afterwards, they could remember little about it—perhaps even less than can the average couple, under our social system which makes a wedding a social function, not a personal rite. They had once in jesting earnest agreed that they would have the word "obey" left out of the vows; but they forgot this, and neither was conscious ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... perfection in that respect, but regarding her mentally as of no account. To such men the admittance of woman as an actual sharer in society, in the body politic, in the family, meant the subversion of the social system. In these days we are so far removed from this theory of primitive people that almost all women, even those who do not desire the fatal emancipation offered by the new sects, will be shocked in merely hearing of it; but it must be owned that Robert d'Hauteserre had the misfortune to ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... burdens which the government and social system of Russia heap upon the peasant-man can best be realized from a description of its effects upon the unhappy creature whom this man, himself a slave in all but name, may treat—nay, almost must treat—as a slave. To pay the quit-rent and taxes the peasant hires himself to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... instead of chibouques, and drink "gaseous lemonade" (champagne), in defiance of the Prophet's prohibition; the women may send from the high harems for French fashions, and "fearfully and wonderfully" array themselves therein; but in other respects the people will stubbornly adhere to their own social system and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... the case with the Egyptians when we first know them. As a matter of fact, we know nothing of their ideas of God before they developed sufficiently to build the monuments which we know they built, and before they possessed the religion, and civilization, and complex social system which their writings have revealed to us. In the remotest prehistoric times it is probable that their views about God and the future life were little better than those of the savage tribes, now living, with whom some have compared ...
— Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life • E. A. Wallis Budge
... live down there alone with your father and he is talking to spooks, and you're talking to yourself; and you've got a kind of ingrown idea of this thing. Give the Lord a little time, and he'll work out this pizen in our social system. I'll help you, and maybe before long Doc'll see the light and help you; but now you need a regulator. You ought to have a wife and about six children to hook you up to the ordinary course of nature! And see here, Grant," Mr. Brotherton dropped a weighty hand ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... The social system is in fact like the constitution of a human being. There are those who have capacity, a vocation, to conceive thoughts, and rule their brethren by intellectual power. Collectively of course they are the mind or brain, the mental element, in the social organism. There are those secondly, ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... toward the negro entirely different from that which prevails anywhere in the United States. There is left then the theory that, with increasing wealth and wider diffusion of education, or even without them, he negro must take his place on equal terms in the American political and social system. This theory, of course, requires an absolute reversal of attitude upon the part of many millions ...
— The New South - A Chronicle Of Social And Industrial Evolution • Holland Thompson
... one may say to me;—"How comes it that millions of men thus allow the Rothschilds and the Mackays to appropriate the fruit of their labour?" Alas, they cannot help themselves under the existing social system! But let us picture to our minds a city all of whose inhabitants find their lodging, clothing, food and occupation secured to them, on condition of producing things useful to the community, and let us suppose a Rothschild to enter this city bringing with him a cask ...
— The Place of Anarchism in Socialistic Evolution - An Address Delivered in Paris • Pierre Kropotkin
... atmosphere of esteem touched by mystery, but not by suspicion; here civilization in its most elastic organization and flexible conventions, had laid its hold upon her, had done in this expansive, loosely knitted social system what could never have been accomplished in a great city—in London, Vienna, Rome, or New York. She had had here the old free life of the road, so full of the scent of deep woods—the song of rivers, the carol ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... in the relation of landlord and tenant, which should excite a prejudice against the landlord; on the contrary, many landlords have been a blessing to the communities in which they lived; but our land system is a conspicuous part of a grandly false social system based on pure selfishness, which makes all men jealous competitors, and ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 - Volume 1, Number 1 • Various
... country who had quitted the stage of life towards the close of last century to reappear in our midst, he could not fail to be struck with the wonderful changes which have taken place in the aspect of things; in the methods of performing the tasks of daily life; and in the character of our social system generally. Nor is it too much to say that he would see himself surrounded by a world full of enchantment, and that his senses of wonder and admiration would rival the feelings excited in youthful minds under the spell of ...
— A Hundred Years by Post - A Jubilee Retrospect • J. Wilson Hyde
... of existence. Leisure for the grand duties which devolve on the lords of mankind. It doesn't seem to strike Xenophon that this rigid system of self-absorption in the higher selfhood of the social system might be destructive of individual life. Of course he would say, "No, it ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... life into compartments and designate an institution as purely recreational or cultural or religious. There is a blending of interests and of functions in such an organization as the grange or the church, as there is in one individual or group a variety of interests and activities. The whole social system is complex, interwoven with a multitude of separate strands of personal desires and prejudices, group clannishness and conservatism, rival institutions developing friction and continually compelled to find new adjustments. Society ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... Human nature is not taken into account, it is excluded, it's not supposed to exist! They don't recognise that humanity, developing by a historical living process, will become at last a normal society, but they believe that a social system that has come out of some mathematical brain is going to organise all humanity at once and make it just and sinless in an instant, quicker than any living process! That's why they instinctively dislike history, 'nothing but ugliness and stupidity in it,' and they explain it ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... acquiescence in any proposition for getting rid of a National Debt, which he certainly never agreed to pay, and which he is told makes sugar and tea so shamefully dear. No. I tell you what does a little counteract those eloquent incentives to break his own head against the strong walls of the Social System,—it is, that he has two eyes in that head which are not always employed in reading. And having been told in print that masters are tyrants, parsons hypocrites or drones in the hive, and landowners vampires and bloodsuckers, he looks out into the little world around him, and, ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... is. It is what it is here, only more so. It is what things will be in a very few years here if you let them go on. As a matter of fact the old countries ought to be wore prosperous than the new ones, but our social system has become so ill-balanced that in the countries where there are most people at work those people are more wretched than where there are comparatively ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... popular election of the governors, which tended to reconcile the up-country people. But the control of taxation, suffrage, and representation remained securely in the hands of the legislative majority of the low-country counties. Slavery and the allied social system were henceforth immune, and the distinctions, forms, and realities of a growing aristocracy made steady encroachments upon the life of the State until the outbreak of ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... a complete social system and has unfolded her life and her art by spiritual convulsions, according as men of strength and action have come bursting forth, today feels herself ruined in her eruptive life, and longs to compete with other countries in their love for the commonplace and well-regulated and ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... new philosophies, of books and places; of the endless struggles of men like himself to be intellectually honest and spiritually free. But oftenest we speak of the people around us, the people on whom the injustices of a selfish social system fall most heavily; and among them, sharing their hardships, understanding their burdens, recognizing their limitations and weaknesses, leading and directing them, he has found life in losing it, and it ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... History, when, the clouds and darkness having passed away, a new morn seemed to break upon the nation. Under the firm but temperate sway of Ferdinand and Isabella, the great changes we have noticed were effected without convulsion in the state. On the contrary, the elements of the social system, which before jarred so discordantly, were brought into harmonious action. The restless spirit of the nobles was turned from civil faction to the honorable career of public service, whether in arms or letters. The people ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott |
