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More "Arbitrary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... speed; in what particular points of this variable course, which varies in velocity, but can never stop till Time itself stops, does revolution begin and end; cease to be ordinary mutation, and again become such? It is a thing that will depend on definition more or less arbitrary. ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... as if Maria Dolores could hear the words. But Winthorpe, calm and smiling, would not be moved. John shook his head, muttered, shrugged his shoulders, threw up his hands, muttered again. "Was ever such pig-headed obstinacy! Was ever such arbitrary, voluntary blindness! I give you up, for a perverse, a triple-pated madman!" And so, John muttering and frowning, Winthorpe serenely smiling, reiterating, they passed round the corner of the Castle buildings, and were lost to Maria ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... reception which the Chilian squadron has met with from you not only shews the generosity of your sentiments, but proves that a people capable of asserting their independence in spite of arbitrary power must always possess noble and exalted feelings. Believe me, that the state of Chili will ever be grateful for your assistance, and more especially the Supreme Director, by whose exertions the squadron was created, and to whom, in fact, South America ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 1 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... the disastrous termination of the six weeks' acquaintance. A troublesome form, and an arbitrary custom, however, prescribe that a story should have a conclusion, in addition to a commencement; we have therefore no alternative. Lieutenant Slaughter brought a message—the captain brought an action. Mr. Joseph ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... smiled to think of man's arbitrary distinction between that which has life and that which has not. Here, quite apart from such recognisable sounds as the scampering of mice, the falling of plaster behind his panelling, and the popping of purses or coffins from his fire, was a ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... held sacred by all true Americans, would be angrily dissolved, and sectional political combinations would be formed with the newly admitted foreign states, unnatural and adverse to the peace and prosperity of the country. The civil government, with all the arbitrary powers it might assume, would be unable to control the storm. The usurper would find himself in his proper element; and, after acting the patriot and the hero for a due season, as the only means ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... reverend pastor exults in this "leading in triumph," because truly Louis the Sixteenth was "an arbitrary monarch"; that is, in other words, neither more nor less than because he was Louis the Sixteenth, and because he had the misfortune to be born King of France, with the prerogatives of which a long line of ancestors, and a long acquiescence ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... concern the mechanism of intelligence. We have said that the function of intelligence is to establish relations. Let us determine more precisely the nature of these relations. On this point we are bound to be either vague or arbitrary so long as we see in the intellect a faculty intended for pure speculation. We are then reduced to taking the general frames of the understanding for something absolute, irreducible and inexplicable. The understanding must have ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... solution was found by requiring that such aids should not be levied except with the consent of the Great Council, which consisted of the lords spiritual and temporal. They tried to set limits to the arbitrary imprisonments that had been hitherto the order of the day, by definite reference to the law of the land and the verdict of sworn men. But these are just the weightiest points on which personal freedom and security of property rest; and how to ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... to whisper in the king's ear, that the principles of loyalty in the Church of England, were wholly inconsistent with the Revolution.[7] Hence began the early practice of caressing the dissenters, reviling the universities, as maintainers of arbitrary power, and reproaching the clergy with the doctrines of divine-right, passive obedience and non-resistance.[8] At the same time, in order to fasten wealthy people to the new government, they proposed those pernicious ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... changed guides at the next native village, fearing that Binhart might have grown too intimate with the old ones. He was swayed by an ever-increasing fear of intrigues. He coerced his flagging will into a feverish watchfulness. He became more arbitrary in his movements and exactions. When the chance came, he purchased a repeating Lee-Enfield rifle, which he packed across his sweating back on the trail and slept with under his arm at night. When a morning came when he was ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... Protestants of Ireland." The other was that the Imperial Legislature should by statute make it impossible for any landlord in Ireland to commit three wrongs,—"first, the wrong of abusing his rights by arbitrary eviction; secondly, by exacting an exorbitant rent; thirdly, by appropriating to his own use the improvements effected by the industry of ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... time of our residence in Brazil, was nothing less than constitutional. This is sufficiently proved by the tumultuary arrest of the above-mentioned three Ministers, by the arbitrary dispersion of the Deputies from the provinces, called together expressly to form a Constitutional Assembly, and by the expression of the Emperor, that he required unconditional submission, even if he should ...
— A New Voyage Round the World in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26. Vol. 1 • Otto von Kotzebue
... and an act was passed directing peremptorily the allowance of an injunction on the prayer of the State grantees, and the seizure of any hostile boat at the commencement of the suit. Litigation was thus effectually arrested in New York, though by an arbitrary and unconstitutional enactment, and the waters of the State remained in the exclusive possession of Fulton and his partner during the lifetime of the former. A similar controversy with Colonel Aaron Ogden, of New Jersey, was compromised by advantageous concessions, which ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... end of my journey I reached Ganhard, which was formerly one of the most prosperous towns in Central India, but is now much decayed and governed by a wealthy, arbitrary, violent, generous, and cruel prince. His name is Rajah Maddan, a true Oriental potentate, delicate and barbarous, affable and sanguinary, combining feminine ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... to whom it is not, they who have arrived at a systematic view of the Universe, and they who behold it only in its elements or only in obscure chaos—all, notwithstanding, should be only one, for one band surrounds them all and they can be totally separated only by a violent and arbitrary force; every specific combination is nothing but an integral part of the whole; its peculiar characteristics are almost evanescent, and are gradually lost in outlines that become more and more indistinct; and at least those who feel themselves ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... the Huk home-world. It seemed insolently to remain there. In a matter of seconds it appeared at another place—a hundred fifty thousand miles out, but off to one side. It seemed arrogantly to remain there, too—in a second place at the same time. Then it appeared, with the arbitrary effect a ship does give when coming out of overdrive, at a third place a hundred seventy-five thousand miles from the planet. At a fourth place barely eighty thousand miles short of collision with the Huk world. At ...
— A Matter of Importance • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... was much more marked than its acerbity. In many places he shows Greek reflections, for he had received a liberal education, duly completed at Athens. But his philosophy did not consist of dreamy theories and arbitrary rules—it was directed to practical ends, to the harmonizing of the feelings, and the elevation of society. As a man of the world, he was not carried away by fancies, nor given to exaggerated views; and as a companion of ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... no hostility to the General Government, and she was driven to the necessity of deciding whether or not her citizens should be used for the subjugation of the Southern States, her people and their representative, the State government, repelled the arbitrary assumption of authority by military force to control ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... nature should be only a mechanism, without expression and without beauty; lest the God who made us should be like us only in this, that he too was selfish and mean and proud; lest his ideas should resemble those that inhabit the brain of a retired money-maker, or of an arbitrary monarch claiming a divine right — instead of towering as the heavens over the earth, above the loftiest moods of highest poet, most generous child, or most devoted mother. I do not mean that these thoughts took these ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... and Lord Clanricarde, his to Miss Gallatin. Here occurred a touch of character that is worthy to be mentioned, as showing of how very little account an American, male or female, is in the estimation of a European, and how very arbitrary are the laws of etiquette among our English cousins. Mr. Canning actually gave way to his son-in-law, leaving the oldest of the two ladies to come after the youngest, because, as a marquis, his son-in-law took precedence of a commoner! This was out of place in America, at least, ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Though there is something arbitrary in this mode of valuation, it is, perhaps, on the whole the best; and its result is extremedy handy for the memory (as somebody has pointed out) ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... baby colony of Georgia. James Oglethorpe, a kind-hearted man, with a wig that fooled more than one poor child of the forest, conceived the idea of founding a refuge for Englishmen who could not pay up. The laws were very arbitrary then, and harsh to a degree. Many were imprisoned then in England for debt, but those who visit London now will notice that they ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... the fact clearly focussed, with its less clearly defined fringe: Bergson's sweeping assumption of the existence of a further vast field of virtual knowledge in order to account for it, does, at first sight, seem arbitrary and unwarranted and in. need of considerable justification before it can be accepted. For him the problem then becomes, not to account for our knowing as much as we do, but to see why it is that we do not know a great deal more: why our actual knowledge does not cover the whole field ...
— The Misuse of Mind • Karin Stephen
... always been engaged in an opposite party to Somerset; and it was not likely that factions which had secretly prevailed even during the arbitrary reign of Henry, should be suppressed in the weak administration that usually attends a minority. The former nobleman, that he might have the greater leisure for attending to public business, had, of himself and from his own authority, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... under sanction of Wordsworth, that harsher opposition of poetry to prose, as savouring in fact of the arbitrary psychology of the last century, and with it the prejudice that there can be but one only beauty of prose style, I propose here to point out certain qualities of all literature as a fine art, which, if they apply to the literature of fact, apply still ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... respects the rights even of brute matter and arbitrary symbols. If he writes the same word twice in succession, by accident, he always erases the one that stands second; has not the first-comer the prior right? This act of abstract justice, which I trust many of my readers, like myself, have often performed, is a curious anti-illustration, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... this evidently point out the origin of "Jim-jam bugs" in No. IX, and the better known modern synonym for brain, "bug-house," but it indicates the arbitrary tendency of all language to create gradations of caste in parts of speech. It is to this mysterious influence by which some words become "elegant" or "poetic," and others "coarse" or "unrefined," that we owe the contempt in which slang is held ...
— The Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum • Wallace Irwin
... I gave, and notwithstanding Colonel Littlefield's good intentions, I blush to tell you that the party returned loaded with plunder. Sir, till now, I never wished for arbitrary power. I could gibbet half a dozen good whigs, with all the venom of an inveterate tory. The party had not been returned an hour, before I had six or seven persons from New-Rochelle and Frog's Neck, with piteous applications for ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... of her, and often infects her, is free from any responsibility. Moreover, the State has no right to act against responsible persons under the pretext that their future sentiments or actions would have dangerous consequences for others; this would lead to arbitrary abuse of power. The insane, and habitual criminals make the only exceptions, for their abnormal and irresponsible cerebral organization is ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... tell you off-hand that this is a father-complex dream. Certain symbols seem to be put into complex catalogues. But it is all too arbitrary. ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... finished the constitutional party and overthrew Redmond's power. We had incurred the very great odium of accepting even temporary partition—and a partition which, owing to this arbitrary extension of area, could not be justified on any ground of principle; we had involved with us many men who voted for that acceptance on the faith of Redmond's assurance that the Government were bound by their written word; and now ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... and a lover: The man is supposed to be the lover, the woman the beloved. Now, in the urge of power, it is the reverse. The woman must submit, but deeply, deeply submit. Not to any foolish fixed authority, not to any foolish and arbitrary will. But to something deep, deeper. To the soul in its dark motion of power and pride. We must reverse the poles. The woman must now submit—but deeply, deeply, and richly! No subservience. None of that. No slavery. A deep, unfathomable ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... perhaps that the English was a good deal better than usual There can therefore be no possible reason for erecting an artificial barrier between him and his readers of to-day, especially as that barrier would be not only artificial but entirely arbitrary. I shall however return to this point in some prefatory remarks ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... the year, was the conscription of a regiment of Christian soldiers by the Persian government. This was made in that arbitrary and oppressive manner, in which Moslems deal with their Christian subjects. The Romanists, also, taking advantage of the edict of toleration, and relying on French protection, became very unscrupulous and troublesome. Mar Shimon, having been recognized by ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume I. • Rufus Anderson
... particular objects. A great deal of the furniture of ancient tyranny is worn to rags; the rest is entirely out of fashion. Besides, there are few statesmen so very clumsy and awkward in their business as to fall into the identical snare which has proved fatal to their predecessors. When an arbitrary imposition is attempted upon the subject, undoubtedly it will not bear on its forehead the name of Ship-money. There is no danger that an extension of the Forest laws should be the chosen mode of oppression in this age. And when we hear any instance of ministerial rapacity ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... his life, and no better life than one written by himself. The old style of criticism, which strove to separate an author's productions from his life, and even from the age in which he lived, to set up an arbitrary canon of taste, and to select one or two great painters or poets as ideals because they seemed to illustrate that canon, has passed away. We are beginning to feel that art is a part of history and of physiology. That is to say, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... Disposition is of a very different Turn: Her Thoughts are wholly bent upon Conquest and arbitrary Power. That she has some Wit and Beauty no Body denies, and therefore has the Esteem of all her Acquaintance as a Woman of an agreeable Person and Conversation; but (whatever her Husband may think of it) that is not sufficient for Honoria: She waves that Title to Respect as a mean Acquisition, ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... couldn't it be done on a voluntary basis?" Bassett demanded. "These arbitrary rulings are bound to result in frustrations. And can you imagine what will happen to the individual family constellations? Take a couple that already has two youngsters, as of now. Suppose the wife submits to the inoculations for her next child and it's born with a size-mutation. ...
— This Crowded Earth • Robert Bloch
... sympathy with the mass of the poor, anxious not merely to rescue them from the oppressions of the rich, but also to create in them habits of self-relying industry; lastly, during his temporary possession of a power altogether arbitrary, not merely an absence of all selfish ambition, but a rare discretion in seizing the mean between conflicting exigencies. In reading his poems we must always recollect that what now appears commonplace was once new, so that to his comparatively unlettered age the social ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... reduction to the absurd, we have not been so unfortunate as to discover it. Mr. Wilson is a man who, to use Carlyle's favorite expression, has "swallowed all formulas." The principles that have generally been held to govern the use of language appear to him mere arbitrary rules, invented by the "sevenfold censorship" and the Spanish Inquisition, for the purpose of preventing the free communication of ideas. All such trammels he rejects; and, accordingly, we have to thank him, so far as mere style ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... as it is on testimony alone (and which so often compels him to renounce to-day what he thought certain yesterday),—may be not unjustly considered as more allied to Faith than Reason. It may be said, perhaps, that the above classification of the truths received by Reason and Faith respectively is arbitrary; that even as to some of their alleged sources, they are not always clearly distinguishable; that the evidence of experience may in some sort be reduced to testimony,—that of sense, and testimony reduced to experience,—that of human veracity under given circumstances; both being founded upon ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... of a lapse of sixty years, the historian who attempts to portray the era of Lincoln is still faced with almost impossible demands and still confronted with arbitrary points of view. It is out of the question, in a book so brief as this must necessarily be, to meet all these demands or to alter these points of view. Interests that are purely local, events that did not with certainty contribute to the final outcome, gossip, as well ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... of Evan's has put up a dozen tasteful, but inexpensive, Colonial cottages, and Evan has planned the grounds that surround them, about an acre being allotted to each house, for lawn and garden of summer vegetables, though no arbitrary boundaries separate the plots. The houses are intended for people of refined taste and moderate means who, only being able to leave town during the school vacation, from middle June to late September, yet desire to have a bit of garden to tend and to have flowers about ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... You ought to direct your whole endeavors to giving the king views tending to peace, and especially to the relief of the people, to moderation, to equity, to mistrust of harsh and violent measures, to horror for acts of arbitrary authority, and finally to love of the Church, and to assiduity in seeking good pastors for it." Neither Fenelon nor Madame de Maintenon had seen in the revocation of the edict of Nantes "an act of arbitrary authority, or a harsh and ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... If these facts, and the actual prosperity of these islands could be generally known throughout the South, it would do more to induce the whites to take hold of the freed-labor system than all the general orders and arbitrary commands that General ...
— Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field • Thomas W. Knox
... which brought the news of his younger brother's death, visibly fretting over it long afterwards. Still, for the most part, in their perfect health, nothing seemed to reach them but their own boyish ordinances, their own arbitrary "form." It was an absolute indifference; most striking when they lifted their well-trained voices to sing in choir, vacant as the sparrows, while the eloquent, far-reaching, aspiring words floated melodiously from them, sometimes, with truly medieval license, singing ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... up to Garry for a decision and as he was the leader his word always went, though he was never arbitrary and generally talked things over before ...
— The Ranger Boys and the Border Smugglers • Claude A. Labelle
... year or two of education, when our best opportunities occur, some insight will be gained into the deeper meaning of all these things. It may then be understood that they are something more than arbitrary rules; there may come the understanding of what is beautiful in human intercourse, of the excellence of self-restraint, the loveliness of perfect service. If this can be seen it will tone down all that is too uncontrolled and make self-restraint acceptable, and will deal with the conventions ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... mistake," said he; "of course that constable was very arbitrary in his manner, but he IS the constable, just the same. I inquired and found that he is. The arrest was perfectly legal. You had much better stay in jail until morning, and submit to a fine which would probably be merely nominal. ...
— The Voyage of the Hoppergrass • Edmund Lester Pearson
... a literary form. This is for others, not for himself; consequently he must, before all things, desire to be intelligible, and to be so he must adapt his expressions to the mental condition of his audience. If he employs arbitrary symbols, such as old words in new and unexpected senses, he may be clear as daylight to himself, but to others, dark as fog. And the difficulty of original writing lies in this, that what is new and individual must find expression in old symbols. This difficulty can only be mastered by a peculiar ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... his triumph at the polls in 1857, Lord Palmerston had been somewhat arbitrary in his demeanour, and had defied public opinion by taking Lord Clanricarde into the Government, after some unpleasant disclosures in the Irish Courts. While walking home on the 18th, after obtaining an immense majority on the India Bill, he was told by Sir Joseph Bethell that he ought, like ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria
... me believe black is white. I know the Advocate sleight-of-hand, and won't be taken in. An example has become necessary here,—those Scoundrels (CANAILLEN) having so enormously misused my name, to practise arbitrary and unheard-of injustices. A Judge that goes upon chicaning is to be punished more severely than a highway Robber. For you have trusted to the one; you are on your guard against ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... the only kind of government under which enterprises against the spirit of the law can be put down. Yes. Arbitrary rule is the salvation of a country when it comes to the support of justice, for the right of mercy is strictly one-sided. The king can pardon a fraudulent bankrupt; he cannot do anything for the victims. The letter of the law ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac
... judge by the descriptions given to us of him. He was a dashing, courageous, scientific genius, gifted with natural instincts, disciplinary wisdom, deplorable sentimentality, and an artificial, revengeful spirit of hatred that probably became real under the arbitrary circumstances of war, but, I should say, was rarely prominent. His roaming attacks on the French were probably used more for effect, and had, we hope, only a superficial meaning. But be that as it may, it detracts from the dignity of an officer occupying, as he ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... was the richest and most intractable old woman in the county of Woldshire. In her dealings with the world in general her manner suggested a blend between a Mistress of the Robes and a Master of Foxhounds, with the vocabulary of both. In her domestic circle she comported herself in the arbitrary style that one attributes, probably without the least justification, to an American political Boss in the bosom of his caucus. The late Theodore Thropplestance had left her, some thirty-five years ago, in absolute possession of a ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... parts—compensation of growth—the position of buds with respect to the axis of the plant—and lastly, analogous variation. These several subjects so graduate into each other that their distinction is often arbitrary. ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... necessitate the perpetual search after manifestations of miraculous power and perpetual "catastrophes." Creation is not a miraculous interference with the laws of nature, but the very institution of those laws. Law and regularity, not arbitrary intervention, was the patristic ideal of creation. With this notion they admitted, without difficulty, the most surprising origin of living creatures, provided it took place by law. They held that when God said, "Let the waters ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... of this architectural splendor is due to the present Emperor, who has wrought a great change in the aspect of the city within a very few years. A traveller, if he looks at the thing selfishly, ought to wish him a long reign and arbitrary power, since he makes it his policy to illustrate his capital with palatial edifices, which are, however, better for a stranger to look at, than for his ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... discipline. York acted without regard to his instructions, and without having received any orders from me to enter into so dangerous a course, and I ought not afterward to approve what one of my generals has done in so reckless and arbitrary a manner. That would be rendering obedience dependent on the whims and inclinations of every officer of my army. Unconditional obedience, entire subordination of the individual will—that is the bond which ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... public policy or public security. 2. The provisions of this Chapter shall be without prejudice to the applicability of restrictions on the right of establishment which are compatible with this Treaty. 3. The measures and procedures referred to in paragraphs 1 and 2 shall not constitute a means of arbitrary discrimination or a disguised restriction on the free movement of capital and payments as defined in Article 73b. ARTICLE 73e By way of derogation from Article 73b, Member States which, on 31 December 1993, enjoy a derogation on the basis of existing ...
— The Treaty of the European Union, Maastricht Treaty, 7th February, 1992 • European Union
... urban, and bade the local justice act as a sort of guardian over the laborers in his district. To relieve poverty poor laws were passed; to prevent the decline of productivity corn laws were passed fixing arbitrary prices for grain. For a time monopolies creating artificial prosperity were granted to individuals and to corporations for the manufacture, sale, or exploitation of certain articles, such as ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... still an extravagant fanatic, and so hard hearted that he became cruel. One of the heaviest accusations against him, which his apologists could not deny or justify, was the famous auto-dae-f[e], in which he proceeded in a most arbitrary and despotic manner. Father Landa destroyed many precious memorials, which to-day might throw a brilliant light over our ancient history, still enveloped in an almost impenetrable chaos until the period of the conquest. Landa saw in books that he could not comprehend, cabalistic signs, and invocations ...
— The Mayas, the Sources of Their History / Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries • Stephen Salisbury, Jr.
... petty and most annoying experiences to which the traveler is subjected is the arbitrary tax of time and money put upon him by the small officials, of every rank, in the employment of the government. By this system of small taxes upon travelers, a considerable revenue is realized. Where this is known, ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... Preparatory to this end, he had during his short rule destroyed the liberty of the press, tolerating that portion of it only which openly advocated the establishment of a monarchy. The better to secure the success of his ultimate designs, he had by an arbitrary decree convoked a Congress, not to be elected by the free voice of the people, but to be chosen in a manner to make them subservient to his will and to give him absolute control over ...
— State of the Union Addresses of James Polk • James Polk
... perhaps anarchical. Nor is a sudden revelation very convincing in modern times. In the space of three minutes, Nora, who has been her husband's sensual toy, and has taken pleasure in being that, and only that, leaves her husband and her children, as has been said, for school-books. A more arbitrary piece of stage craft was never devised; but it was not the stage craft the critics were accustomed to, and the admirers of Ibsen did not dare to admit that he had devised Nora to cry aloud that a woman is more than a domestic animal. It would have ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... at once, whoever you are. You have no right to interfere with people's habits. You have no right to be so arbitrary." ...
— The Adventures of Maya the Bee • Waldemar Bonsels
... involuntarily looked round to see whether Miss Petrie was near. Had she been there nothing would have been said beyond the shortest farewell greeting. But Miss Petrie was afar off, electrifying some Italian by the vehemence of her sentiments, and the audacious volubility of a language in which all arbitrary restrictions were ignored. "Are you ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... forceful and convincing suggestion rather than by a tightly rendered photographic fact. The great pictures are first those of a strong suggestive quality and, secondly, those possessing a certain something the artist calls design - meaning thereby a more or less arbitrary arrangement of form and colour effects which will please the eye. The idea of design has not struck the Portuguese artist as yet; at least it is not apparent in the pictures of that section. The technical ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... within the rigid lines of any literary circle; nor shall I press him into the narrow frame of school or party; nor stamp upon him the distinctive label of any particular ism. He would break such fetters; his free spirit, his great individuality would overflow the arbitrary confines of "the sole Truth," "the only true principle." The waves of his soul would break down all artificial barriers and rush out to join the ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... fulness—ought to have more of this earth than mere common men, and still more than thin-faced people—mere people, not men—in black coats? Did he dimly claim the rights of strength in his mind, and arrogate to himself the prerogatives of arbitrary kings? Who knows what big processes of reasoning, dim and big, passed through his mind in the summer days? Did he conclude he had a right to take what others ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... the young man, indulging in a final, a fairly sinister, study of such a dealer in the arbitrary, made sure of the extent, whatever it was, of his own wrong. "Not one ...
— The Outcry • Henry James
... gradual extinction of light in its passage through space,[109] and sought to confer upon this celebrated hypothesis a definiteness and certainty far beyond the aspirations of its earlier advocates, Cheseaux and Olbers; but arbitrary assumptions vitiated his reasonings on this, as well ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... the inevitable results of the conditions. There would also have been disorder and violence in the North and to a far greater degree, had the results of the war been reversed—an arbitrary and tyrannical system of restoration insisted upon—the established order of things destroyed homes broken up the people impoverished, and hordes of unscrupulous adventurers swarmed up from the South and overrun ...
— History of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, • Edumud G. Ross
... the import of English- dyed cloths), injured the trade of the West Riding manufacturers considerably. Their independence of character, their dislike of authority, and their strong powers of thought, predisposed them to rebellion against the religious dictation of such men as Laud, and the arbitrary rule of the Stuarts; and the injury done by James and Charles to the trade by which they gained their bread, made the great majority of them Commonwealth men. I shall have occasion afterwards to give one or two instances of the warm feelings and extensive knowledge on subjects of both ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... admiration for the thoroughness and ingenuity of Linnaeus's work, repelled by his method. Thus by way of reaction, his thought was brought into its own creative movement: 'As I sought to take in his acute, ingenious analysis, his apt, appropriate, though often arbitrary laws, a cleft was set up in my inner nature: what he sought to hold forcibly apart could not but strive for union according to the inmost need of my ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... Geoffrey Chaucer, "the father of English poetry," was appointed clerk to the works of Saint George's Chapel, at a salary of two shillings per day (a sum equal to 657 pounds per annum of modern money), with the same arbitrary power as had been granted to previous surveyors to impress carpenters and masons. Chaucer did not retain his appointment more than twenty months, and was succeeded ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... are very simple. The father has theoretically absolute power of life and death over his wife, children, and slaves. In practice, however, this power is seldom used to its full extent. An arbitrary exercise of domestic authority over his wife and children would arouse the antagonism of her relatives and lead to a rupture of friendly relations. Hence, in family dealings there are displayed on one side paternal affection and leniency and on the other filial devotion ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... musicians ordered into our presence to play that Sweet Bye and Bye again, which they did. Then I saw that she was right, and gave her permission to hang the whole band. This little relaxation of sternness had a good effect upon the queen. A statesman gains little by the arbitrary exercise of iron-clad authority upon all occasions that offer, for this wounds the just pride of his subordinates, and thus tends to undermine his strength. A little concession, now and then, where it can do no harm, is ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... according to which a basket of cherries, gathered and eaten the next minute, are called wealth, while that title is denied to the acquired skill of those who are acknowledged to be productive labourers, is a purely arbitrary division, and does not conduce to the ends for which classification ...
— Essays on some unsettled Questions of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... there in this vast territory one might come across the occasional trading posts of the wide-reaching Hudson Bay Company, at each of which the resident factor ruled with the arbitrary power ...
— Canoe Mates in Canada - Three Boys Afloat on the Saskatchewan • St. George Rathborne
... expressions. I am quite aware that the difference between the anecdotes belonging to this division and to the last division termed "Wit and Humour" is very indistinct, and must, in fact, in many cases, be quite arbitrary. Much of what we enjoy most in Scottish stories is not on account of wit properly so called, in the speaker, but I should say rather from the odd and unexpected view which is taken of some matter, or from the quaint and original turn of the expression made use of, or from the simple and matter-of-fact ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... readily the one Anarchy, and the other Oligarchy, or the Tyranny Of A Few. And that which offendeth the People, is no other thing, but that they are governed, not as every one of them would himselfe, but as the Publique Representant, be it one Man, or an Assembly of men thinks fit; that is, by an Arbitrary government: for which they give evill names to their Superiors; never knowing (till perhaps a little after a Civill warre) that without such Arbitrary government, such Warre must be perpetuall; and that it is Men, and Arms, not Words, and Promises, that make the Force and ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... constitution was in time restored, and the Church and the Crown were invested with greater powers than they had enjoyed previously to their overthrow. So hateful had been the consequences of Whig rule, that the people were inclined rather to trust the talons of arbitrary power than to take refuge under the wing of these pretended advocates of popular rights. A worthless monarch and a corrupted court availed themselves of the offered opportunity; and when James the Second ascended ...
— Sketches • Benjamin Disraeli
... country's savior. Frontenac had been recalled because he quarreled with the intendant and he quarreled with the Jesuits and he quarreled with the fur traders; but his bitterest enemies did not deny that he could put the fear of the Lord and respect for the French into the Iroquois' heart. Arbitrary he was as a czar, but just always! To be sure he mended his fortunes by personal fur trade, but in doing so he cheated no man; and he worked no injustice, and he wrought in all things for the lasting good of the country. Homage ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... without which events had a knack of not moving; and when the army of Empleados became Cesantes, this work, of course, began all over again. The railway engineers form a separate body, the country being mapped out into arbitrary divisions, each under the charge of one engineer-in-chief, with ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... attempts that have been made to glorify him socially—attempts, it must be remembered, in which he himself and his sons were in after years the leaders—are entirely mistaken. That strange instinct for consistency which makes people desire to see the outward man correspond, in terms of momentary and arbitrary credit, with the inner and hidden man of the heart, has in truth led to more biographical injustice than is fully realised. If Columbus had been the man some of his biographers would like to make him out—the nephew or descendant of a famous French Admiral, educated ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... given prominence in the Declaration of Independence was that the English Crown had "abolished the free system of English laws in a neighbouring province, establishing therein an arbitrary government, and enlarging its boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same arbitrary rule into these colonies." The measure which was in the minds of the signers was the Quebec Act of 1774; and the feature ...
— The Old Northwest - A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond, Volume 19 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Frederic Austin Ogg
... Arabian traveller, that after the year 879 the main sources of revenue in Canton were the duties on salt and tea. Marco Polo records the deposition of a Chinese minister of finance in 1285 for his arbitrary augmentation of the tea-taxes. It was at the period of the great discoveries that the European people began to know more about the extreme Orient. At the end of the sixteenth century the Hollanders brought the news that a pleasant drink was made in the East from the leaves of a bush. ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... further would but add to the instances, without deepening the impression, of the measureless power of the ideal element in war, alike in the history of the great races of the past and of the present. Even the wars which seem most arbitrary and, to the judgment of their contemporaries, purposeless, acquire, upon a deeper scrutiny and in after ages, a profound enough significance. Behind the immediate occasion, trivial or capricious, sordid or grandiose, the destiny of the ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... do anything he chose, it had been used by the Tartar hordes to designate the lower class of their horsemen. From the princes of the House of Rurik these southerly districts passed into the possession of Lithuania, and, later, into those of Poland. Little Russia was another arbitrary name anciently given to a great part of what has been also known as the Ukraine. No fixed geographical limits can be assigned to either of these designations, and especially to the Ukraine of the Poles or the Muscovites; for as the borders or marshes became safe and populated, they were absorbed ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... humble petition will give an idea of the arbitrary power exercised by the "Saltpeter maker" in the days of Good Queen Bess; and of the useful monopoly that functionary contrived to make of his employment, in defiance of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 201, September 3, 1853 • Various
... its antique elements, and also from that of its Christian elements, and we could in the same way present theses which would show its development from the standpoint of the Romance or of the English influence. And yet latterly an exactly contrary attempt has been made—in a spirited, if somewhat arbitrary book by Nadler, which consists in trying to build up the history of German literature entirely upon the peculiarities of the different tribes and provinces. For the essence of the German, nay, even of the Swabian, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... have not the power of voting out their rulers, or of limiting or stopping their supplies; they have therefore the right of rebellion. Rebellion is, in China, the old, often exercised, legitimate, and constitutional means of stopping arbitrary and vicious legislation and administration." Will it be necessary to resort to revolution in order to effect needed reforms? ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... may deem reasonable. If they cannot make them do this by persuasion, fine, or imprisonment, they cause their pits to be opened by their own soldiers or native officers, and the grain to be sold at an arbitrary price. If, in a hundred pits thus opened, they find one in which the corn happens to be damaged by damp, they come to the sage conclusion that the proprietors must be what they have all along supposed them to be, and treated ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... an ingredient in our mental attitude is strongly insisted on by the scientific philosophers of the present day; but by a singularly arbitrary caprice they say that it is only legitimate when used in the interests of one particular proposition,—the proposition, namely, that the course of nature is uniform. That nature will follow to-morrow the same laws that she follows to-day is, they all admit, a truth which no ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... was almost exclusively that of awe; though crossed at times by a not unpleasant sense of liberty, as he could but confess to himself, pondering, in the actual absence of so weighty and continual a restraint, upon the arbitrary power which Roman religion and Roman law gave to the parent over the son. [17] On the part of his mother, on the other hand, entertaining the husband's memory, there was a sustained freshness of regret, together with the recognition, ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... still hurt, for it is very humiliating to be picked up and moved about by an arbitrary, peremptory, unreasonable, omnipotent, invisible Providence, still, when a man has been as kind and generous and thoughtful as you have heretofore been towards me, I suppose he has a right to be an arbitrary, peremptory, unreasonable, invisible Providence if he chooses, and ...
— Daddy-Long-Legs • Jean Webster
... it would be a curious illustration of the history of the Revolution. Upon the lid were engraved some bad verses, the purport of which was as follows: "Stones from those walls, which enclosed the innocent victims of arbitrary power, have been converted into a toy, to be presented to you, Monseigneur, as a mark of the people's love; and ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... was a term of reproach given to those who, in the civil wars, opposed Divine truth, and promoted popery and arbitrary domination. Clarendon calls it 'a term imposed upon those that the puritans wished to ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... "we take into consideration such factors as physical build and muscular development. We don't train undersized boys to be freight handlers. But in general the division is arbitrary. And you'd be amazed how they respond to it. To keep a check on things, we interview our students twice a year to see how ...
— When I Grow Up • Richard E. Lowe
... of mental exertion; having short memories, dense intelligence, feeble reflective powers, they recoiled with repugnance from any occupation that demanded close study or deep thought. Had the abhorred effort been extorted from them by injudicious and arbitrary measures on the part of the Professor, they would have resisted as obstinately, as clamorously, as desperate swine; and though not brave singly, they were ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... choose to call our consistency somewhere, we shall find ourselves with as many names as atoms and possible combinations and permutations of atoms. The lines we draw, the moments we choose for cutting this or that off at this or that place, and thenceforth the dubbing it by another name, are as arbitrary as the moments chosen by a South-Eastern Railway porter for leaving off beating doormats; in each case doubtless there is an approximate equity, but it is of a very rough and ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... declaration from her Imperial Chancellor on August 26, 1915, wherein he endeavored to placate American feeling by declaring that the sinking of the Arabic, if caused by a German submarine, was not a "deliberately unfriendly act," but, if the accepted version of the disaster proved to be true, was "the arbitrary deed of the submarine commander, not only not sanctioned but decidedly condemned by the German Government," and that the latter, being "most anxious to maintain amicable relations with the United States, would express its deep regret and make full reparation." ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... no parasite under the name of priest, nor tribute under the name of victim, nor empire under the name of altar; their dogmas and morality, jumbled together, were only self-preservation; and their religion, an arbitrary idea without influence on the mutual relations existing between men, was but a vain homage paid to the visible powers ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... Disposed the suffering world's oppressed affairs, Had sacred right's eternal rule been left To crafty politicians' partial sway! Then power and pride would stretch the enormous grasp, And call their arbitrary portion, justice: Ambition's arm, by avarice urged, would pluck The core of honesty from virtue's heart, And plant deceit and rancour in its stead: Falsehood would trample then on truth and honour, And envy poison sweet benevolence. ...
— The Earl of Essex • Henry Jones
... the direst confusion by our social state, our war of each against all, necessarily remain confused and foreign to the working-man when mixed with incomprehensible dogmas, and preached in the religious form of an arbitrary and dogmatic commandment. The schools contribute, according to the confession of all authorities, and especially of the Children's Employment Commission, almost nothing to the morality of the working-class. So short-sighted, so stupidly narrow-minded is the ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... Oriental as the scene,—heartless arbitrary insolence on the part of my employers; homelessness, forlornness, helplessness, mortification, indignation, on mine. Fears and misgivings crowded and stunned me. My tears fell thick and fast, and, weary and despairing, I closed my eyes, and tried to shut out ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... can see easily the results of this experiment in huddling for protection. Only ten per cent of the adult population was born in the county, and yet the blacks outnumber the whites four or five to one. There is undoubtedly a security to the blacks in their very numbers,—a personal freedom from arbitrary treatment, which makes hundreds of laborers cling to Dougherty in spite of low wages and economic distress. But a change is coming, and slowly but surely even here the agricultural laborers are drifting to town and leaving the broad acres behind. Why is this? Why do not the Negroes ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... individual characters begin to occupy a comparatively small proportion of that canvas on which armies manoeuvre, and great hills pile themselves upon each other's shoulders. Fielding's characters were always great to the full stature of a perfectly arbitrary will. Already in Scott we begin to have a sense of the subtle influences that moderate and qualify a man's personality; that personality is no longer thrown out in unnatural isolation, but is resumed into its place in the constitution ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... difficult to account for. Accordingly, I visited a great almshouse, and was glad to observe how unexceptionably all the parts of the establishment were carried on, and what an orderly life, full-fed, sufficiently reposeful, and undisturbed by the arbitrary exercise of authority, seemed to be led there. Possibly, indeed, it was that very orderliness, and the cruel necessity of being neat and clean, and even the comfort resulting from these and other Christian-like restraints and regulations, that constituted ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... gloomy grandeur, or of dreadful sublimity, around her; other images, equally gloomy and equally terrible, gleamed on her imagination. She was going she scarcely knew whither, under the dominion of a person, from whose arbitrary disposition she had already suffered so much, to marry, perhaps, a man who possessed neither her affection, or esteem; or to endure, beyond the hope of succour, whatever punishment revenge, and that ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... incident of the spectacles is no fiction. Well would it be for the South American Republics at this day, as well as for the good name of Spain, if the poor aborigines of South America had nothing more serious to complain of than the arbitrary act of the dishonest governor referred to; but it is a melancholy fact that, ever since the conquest of Peru by Pizarro, the Spaniards have treated the Indians with brutal severity, and it is no wonder that revenge of the fiercest nature still lingers in the breasts of the descendants ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... the one who shows the gradual processes of unfoldment and growth in the mind and body, and in all the outworkings of the material world. He who breaks down arbitrary distinctions in every realm of life does the most toward liberating and enlightening the world. We are from infancy so accustomed to petty distinctions which have originated in ignorance, and from long use have been formulated ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... execution. The house was immediately kindled into a flame by this information. The officers and Pauncefort, agent for the regiment, were examined: then it was unanimously resolved that such a practice was arbitrary, illegal, and a violation of the rights and liberties of the subject. Upon further inquiry, Pauncefort and some other agents were committed to the custody of the sergeant, for having neglected to pay the subsistence money they had received for ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... leaving home again, under such distressing circumstances, would make him; she used all the arguments which her reason could suggest, to persuade me that it was my duty to bear with his temper, and to submit to his will, however arbitrary. But, as I was now of age, and as I had laboured incessantly in my father's business for nearly five years, and had scarcely ever left it for a day, I was mortified at his unnecessary severity, in denying me the privilege of a day or two upon such an occasion; ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... which the following article was found:—"I bequeath to John Wilkes, late member of parliament for Aylesbury, five thousand pounds sterling, as a grateful return for the courage with which he defended the liberty of his country, and opposed the dangerous progress of arbitrary power." ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 564, September 1, 1832 • Various
... nature of Life, which have fallen within my knowledge, presuppose the arbitrary division of all that surrounds us into things with life, and things without life—a division grounded on a mere assumption. At the best, it can be regarded only as a hasty deduction from the first superficial notices of the objects that ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... ankles and insteps, which looked like tight-fitting and elegant boots. Their faces were also tattooed, and their breasts were very profusely marked with every imaginable species of device—muskets, dogs, birds, pigs, clubs, and canoes, intermingled with lozenges, squares, circles, and other arbitrary figures. ...
— The Coral Island • R.M. Ballantyne
... the country since Adam's time, as all writers have labored hard to prove, and have succeeded. The streets of Magdala are any where from three to six feet wide, and reeking with uncleanliness. The houses are from five to seven feet high, and all built upon one arbitrary plan—the ungraceful form of a dry-goods box. The sides are daubed with a smooth white plaster, and tastefully frescoed aloft and alow with disks of camel-dung placed there to dry. This gives the edifice the romantic appearance of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... in check, occasionally at least. The Rev. Joshua Moody had been settled in the ministry at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. In the maintenance of the principles of religious liberty he suffered a long imprisonment, and was afterwards exiled by arbitrary power. He was then invited to the First Church in Boston, where he preached from 1684 to 1693, when he returned to Portsmouth. He died in 1697. By his active exertions, Mr. and Mrs. English were enabled to escape from the jail at Boston. The ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... full import we are still only just beginning to understand. And, owing mainly to their efforts also, the spirit of humanity has come to be an abiding influence in the world. It was they who, by their relentless exposure of the abuses of the French judicial system—the scandal of arbitrary imprisonment, the futile barbarism of torture, the medieval abominations of the penal code—finally instilled into public opinion a hatred of cruelty and injustice in all their forms; it was they who denounced the horrors of the slave-trade; it was they who unceasingly lamented ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... with his own reception as a postulant. The distinction between a probationer and a postulant was very slight, really an arbitrary one made by Father Burrowes for his own convenience, and until he had to decide whether he should petition to be clothed as a novice Mark did not feel that he was called upon to take himself too seriously as a monk. For that reason ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... the Aztec confederacy, they had a principal war-chief, elected for life or during good behavior, who was the general commander of the military bands. His powers were those of a general, and necessarily arbitrary when in the field. Behind this war-chief—noticed, it is true, by Spanish writers, but without explaining or even ascertaining its functions—was the council of chiefs, "the great council without whose authority," Acosta ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... is no fiction. Well would it be for the South American Republics at this day, as well as for the good name of Spain, if the poor aborigines of South America had nothing more serious to complain of than the arbitrary act of the dishonest governor referred to; but it is a melancholy fact that, ever since the conquest of Peru by Pizarro, the Spaniards have treated the Indians with brutal severity, and it is no wonder that revenge of the fiercest ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... of Maerchenland. She had read most of it already, and instead of reading any more, she found herself thinking of the contrast between their earlier Kings and Queens and the present occupiers of the throne. The former Sovereigns had had their failings; some of them had been arbitrary and wrong-headed, one or two cruel and tyrannical. But none had ever been vulgar or ridiculous. She could understand poor Mr. Wibberley-Stimpson's being so hopelessly out of his element—but it seemed strange that Queen Selina, who was the daughter of a Maerchenland Prince, should not have inherited ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... arbitrary point where the four territories met, New Reno flung its sprawling, dirty carcass over the muddy soil and roared and hooted endlessly, laughed with the rough boisterousness of miners and spacemen, rang with the brittle, brassy laughter of women following a trade older than New Reno. ...
— Foundling on Venus • John de Courcy
... The use of "&there4" is a rather arbitrary selection. There is no font available in general practice which renders the "therefore" symbol correction (three dots in a triangular formation). This can be done, however, in HTML, so if this document is read in a browser, then ...
— The Game of Logic • Lewis Carroll
... the soldiers might forget that they were also citizens, and might be ready to serve their general against their country? Was it not certain that, on the very first day on which Charles could venture to revoke his concessions, and to punish his opponents, he would establish an arbitrary government, and exact ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... governed by Bermdez, Mario and Pez. These three men had been at times hostile to Bolvar, and, in order to satisfy their ambitions, he had placed them in high commands. Pez was stationed in Caracas, where his arbitrary rule was resented by the people. He intrigued against the vice-president, Santander, executing his commands in such a way as to produce ill-will, especially an order providing for the recruiting of soldiers in Venezuela, which because of the manner of its execution, caused ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... rather be ruled by the personal, arbitrary whims of supremely wise men, or by laws ...
— Ultima Thule • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... for sale at two thousand crowns each. Those who preferred official rank could buy the title of Councillor of State or of Commissioner of Police. New and profitable offices were created and disposed of to the highest bidder,—inspectorships of wood, of hay, of wine, of butter. Arbitrary power, no matter whether we call it sovereign prince or sovereign people, falls instinctively into the same ways in all times and countries. The Demos of a neighboring State, absolute and greedy as any monarch, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... and the application of the great discoveries in hydraulics, of which recent years have been so fruitful, on the other, may, and probably will, spread the vernal bloom of cultivation over wastes, now condemned to prolonged and arbitrary periods ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... was sure to get the worst of it. He did not exactly encourage his son in this ungenerous line of conduct, but his great maxim was to divide and rule; to exact from all who were dependent upon him, the most uncompromising obedience to his arbitrary will; and he laughed at my remonstrances, and turned my ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... who regarded him in fierce silence, he said aloud: "Sire, I pray for pardon; I am not to blame; Cocceji forbade me, in a proud, commanding tone, to look upon the Signora Barbarina. As I did not choose to obey this arbitrary order, he seized me without warning, and dashed me at the feet of the signora." [Footnote: Machler's "History of Frederick the Great."] The public, recovering from their astonishment, began to whisper, laugh merrily, and gaze ironically at ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... Jesus' own case. At the heart of his instinct for fact is his instinct for God. He goes to the permanent and eternal at once in his quest of fact, because his instinct for God is so sure and so compelling. Bishop Phillips Brooks noted in Jesus' conversation "a constant progress from the arbitrary and special to the essential and universal forms of thought," "a true freedom from fastidiousness," "a singular largeness" in his intellectual life. The small question is answered in the larger—"the life ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... had the great pleasure of cooperating with the president of the Typographical Union in giving a reception and dinner to George W. Childs, of Philadelphia. Our relations were not always so friendly. We once resisted arbitrary methods and a strike followed. My men went out regretfully, shaking hands as they left. We won the strike, and then by gradual voluntary action gave them the pay and hours they asked for. When the earthquake fire of 1906 came I was unfortunately situated. I had lately bought ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... and exclude others, admit, however, that if visual and auditive impressions enter directly into the aesthetic fact, those of the other senses also enter into it, but only as associated. But this distinction is altogether arbitrary. Aesthetic expression is a synthesis, in which it is impossible to distinguish direct and indirect. All impressions are by it placed on a level, in so far as they are aestheticised. He who takes into himself the image of a picture or of a poem does ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... fathers, never sought For arbitrary sway, But free within each youthful mind, Bade ...
— Elegies and Other Small Poems • Matilda Betham
... with small-pox; his eyes, blazing with an intelligence that was demoniacal, fixed upon her; the long wound that stretched from his cheek to his forehead. The pleading that had been mingled with the almost tyrannical command of his demeanour had vanished now. He looked ferocious, arbitrary, like a savage of genius full of some frightful message of warning or rebuke. As the camel rose he cried aloud some words in Arabic. Domini heard his voice, but could not understand the words. Laying his hands on the stuff of the palanquin he ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... of it, and ultimately one of the greatest sufferers by it, when the Bubble burst, see Smollett's "History of England," vol. ii; Pope's "Moral Essays," Epist. iii, and notes; and Gibbon's "Memoirs," for the violent and arbitrary proceedings against the Directors, one of whom was his ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... happened to be in the coffee-room at Fairport;a tall, beetle-browed, awkward-built man, who entered upon scientific subjects, as it appeared to my ignorance at least, with more assurance than knowledgewas very arbitrary in laying down and asserting his opinions, and mixed the terms of science with a strange jargon of mysticism. A simple youth whispered me that he was an Illumine', and carried on an ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... to depart from this rule; as, for instance, in certain parts of fig. 864, where you will notice stitches, carried over 7 or 8 threads; also in the borders, fig. 865 and 866, where the stitches are arranged in a rather arbitrary manner, in order to bring out the pattern ...
— Encyclopedia of Needlework • Therese de Dillmont
... rather too severe on French as compared with English drama. Yet, when he comes to his own contemporaries, and sometimes even in reference to earlier writers, we find him slipping into those purely arbitrary severities of condemnation, those capricious stigmatisings of this as improper, and that as vulgar, and the other as unbecoming, which are the characteristics of the pseudo-correct and pseudo-classical ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... signs and symbols of affection, to that consummation which is most devoutly to be wished; and that it neither is necessary that there should be, nor probable that there would be, a single word spoken from first to last between two sympathetic spirits, were it not that the arbitrary institutions of society have raised, at every step of this very simple process, so many complicated impediments and barriers in the shape of settlements and ceremonies, parents and guardians, lawyers, Jew-brokers, and parsons, that many an adventurous ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... stringent restriction of immigration. A few persons believed in stopping immigration entirely for a period of years. Others would limit the number of immigrants that should be permitted to enter every year. But it was felt throughout the country that such arbitrary checks would be merely quantitative, not qualitative, and that undesirable foreigners should be denied admission, no matter what country they hailed from. A notable immigration conference which was called by the National Civic Federation in December, 1905, and which represented all ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... prices and currency exchange rates and expanded the state's right to intervene in the management of private enterprise. In addition to the burdens imposed by high inflation, businesses have been subject to pressure on the part of central and local governments, e.g., arbitrary changes in regulations, numerous rigorous inspections, and retroactive application of new business regulations prohibiting practices that had been legal. Further economic problems are two consecutive bad harvests, ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... opportunity for long excursions in the field of divinity; and therefore they take their religion at second hand from the priest on Sunday. It was not the multitude, but the sacred specialists, who built up the gigantic and elaborate edifice of theology, which is a purely arbitrary construction, deriving all its design and coherence from the instinctive logic of the human mind, that operates alike in a fairy tale and ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... and growers still complain loudly that the imposts upon wines, reckoning from the grape to the vat, are so heavy—amounting to about 35 or 40 per cent.—and their imposition and collection so very arbitrary and unequal, that ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... deliverance of Russia from the Mongols was accomplished by Ivan III, surnamed the Great. This ruler is also regarded as the founder of Russian autocracy, that is, of a personal, absolute, and arbitrary government. With a view to strengthening his claim to be the political heir of the eastern emperors, Ivan married a niece of the last ruler at Constantinople, who in 1453 A.D. had fallen in the defense of his capital ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... command, in the Spanish army, even unto the sentence of death. He had too often been the unwilling spectator, and even at times the innocent agent of scenes that were revolting to his better feelings, which emanated solely from this arbitrary power vested in heartless and incompetent individuals by means of their military rank. Musing thus upon the singular state of his affairs, and the events of the last two days, so important to his feelings, now recalling the bewitching glances of the peerless ...
— The Heart's Secret - The Fortunes of a Soldier, A Story of Love and the Low Latitudes • Maturin Murray
... also exacted in a most rigorous manner, a duty in kind: which, however, had existed long before his time: we allude to the annona, or supply of corn for use of the army and capital. This was a grievous and arbitrary exaction: rendered still more so "by the partial injustice of weights and measures, and the expence and labour of distant carriage." In a time of scarcity, Justinian ordered an extraordinary requisition of corn to be levied on Thrace, Bithynia, ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... back from Paris. Then I think the best that we can do will be to leave them to find a solution of the problem between them. Depend upon it that, whatever solution they do arrive at, it will be more accurate and will stand the test of time better than any arbitrary action which ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... miscellaneous entities; ethnicity, culture, race, religion, and language have divided states into separate political entities as much as history, physical terrain, political fiat, or conquest, resulting in sometimes arbitrary and imposed boundaries; maritime states have claimed limits and have so far established over 130 maritime boundaries and joint development zones to allocate ocean resources and to provide for national ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... seem at all acquainted with its existence. The government of the Sibnowans may be called patriarchal. The authority of the chief appears limited within very narrow bounds; he is the leader in war, and the dispenser of the laws; but possesses no power of arbitrary punishment, and no authority for despotic rule. The distinction between Sejugah and the lowest of his tribe is not great, and rather a difference of riches than of power. A few ornamented spears, presented by the Malays, seem his only insignia of office; ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... not yet ready for the methods of equal co-operation which the West is seeking to substitute for arbitrary power in politics and industry. In Russia, the methods of the Bolsheviks are probably more or less unavoidable; at any rate, I am not prepared to criticize them in their broad lines. But they are not the methods appropriate to more advanced countries, and our Socialists will be unnecessarily retrograde ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... determine in the system thus impaired, the peculiar morbid action of which tubercular matter is the product. The general division of causes into predisposing and exciting, must ever be more or less arbitrary. Individuals subject to predisposing causes may live the natural term of life and finally die of other disease. Indeed, when predisposing causes are known to exist, they should constitute a warning for the avoidance of other causes. Again, among the so-called exciting causes, some may operate ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... he said, in conclusion, "and I don't see that you or I have any call to pass judgment on it, or to lay down arbitrary lines, saying this is righteous, that is unrighteous. We may have our own thoughts about the matter—we must have, but we've no right to lop or stretch other people to fit them. Princess is a pure woman, a noble ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... have what sport he could out of the single poor gazelle that had been run down by his hounds. One who—albeit, of the weaker sex—had been venturesome enough to keep the Passover feast, might make sufficient resistance to his arbitrary will to afford him a little amusement, when none more exciting could be had. The monarch, therefore, after he had enjoyed his noonday siesta, gave command that the Hebrew prisoner should be brought into his presence in ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker
... fellow man. 'All men are born free and equal,' and are 'made of one blood.' Shall we look to wealth as giving one a title to the labor and freedom of another? Wealth is the creature of circumstances, and not an arbitrary law of nature. It takes to itself wings, and flies away; and he who is an opulent tyrant to-day, may on this principle be an impoverished slave to-morrow. Does physical strength make valid this claim? This, too, is evanescent: sickness and age would ultimately degrade the most muscular ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... a peculiar people. The next question will be: If God favours that family, will he do unjust things to help them?—will he let them do unjust things to help themselves? The Bible answers positively, No. God will not be unjust or arbitrary in choosing one man and rejecting another. If he chooses Jacob, it is because Jacob is fit for the work which God wants done. If he rejects Esau, it is because ...
— The Gospel of the Pentateuch • Charles Kingsley
... power as little as any mortal I ever knew; and it is never a question of private will between us, but of absolute right. His conscience is too fine and high to permit him to be arbitrary. His will is strong, but not to govern others. He is so simple, so transparent, so just, so tender, so magnanimous, that my highest instinct could only correspond to his will. I never knew ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... being we have violated it; and now are so confused that we hardly know what "human nature" really is, or of what it is capable. That is why we get such extraordinarily different ideas about morals, and why, as I think, we get such arbitrary judgments ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden
... most laborious of all tasks—that of self-examination, and to establish a tribunal, which may secure it in its well-grounded claims, while it pronounces against all baseless assumptions and pretensions, not in an arbitrary manner, but according to its own eternal and unchangeable laws. This tribunal is nothing less than the critical investigation ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... of his own—in fact, a double policy, one devoted to dealing with the land and its people; one to dealing with his enemies or those who questioned his authority. The one was as arbitrary, the other as cruel, as that of the tyrants ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... wish to distribute his subjects and provinces, and form of them new nations. But your majesty knows well that we cannot with impunity rob a people of their inalienable and noblest rights—of their nationality—give them arbitrary frontiers, and transform them into new states. Nationality is a sentiment inherent in the human heart, and our Prussians have proud hearts. They love ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... the church by its own courts from which they feared so many evils. "I dare confidently say," he affirms, "that, if comparisons be rightly made, presbyterial government is the most limited and the least arbitrary government of any other in the world."[267] And, after entering into details to make good this affirmation in regard to the papal and prelatical forms of government, he proceeds to maintain that Independents "must needs ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... for seeming to be brusk and arbitrary," said the lieutenant smiling, "but I can't permit you to go back. For our own sake, as well as yours. You might precipitate a general engagement, and while we're not running away from anything like that, we are not looking for it just ...
— Ned, Bob and Jerry on the Firing Line - The Motor Boys Fighting for Uncle Sam • Clarence Young
... intimate friend of the Viceroy, gives a darker coloring to his story. He says that, forced to unceasing labor, and chafed by arbitrary rules, some of the soldiers fell under Roberval's displeasure, and six of them, formerly his favorites, were hanged in one day. Others were banished to an island, and there kept in fetters; while, for various light offences, several, ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... know, as we use it, gives no idea of sight or of knowledge or of ability. When we hear it articulated, and we understand that know is the word meant, we then recognize the sense intended to be conveyed. We are able to do this because of our ability to construct and give arbitrary significance to new words, and to transfer the sense of an old word to one newly formed. When any word is used in speech of which the pronunciation does not correspond with the letters with which the word is written, we instinctively image the written or printed word in the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... at the close of the fifteenth century. The politics of the country were necessarily regulated by the temper and views of the leading powers. They were essentially selfish and personal. The ancient republican forms had been gradually effaced during this century, and more arbitrary ones introduced. The name of freedom, indeed, was still inscribed on their banners, but the spirit had disappeared. In almost every state, great or small, some military adventurer, or crafty statesman, had succeeded in raising his own authority ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... country, which marked the period from 1876 to the eighties. It was his influence, largely, which led to the war upon the "crookedness" which marked the early years of professional base ball history, in which pool gambling was the potent factor. It took years of cohesive and even arbitrary legislation to eliminate the poison of the pool rooms from the professional system, but success was finally achieved, and to the late President Hulbert and his able coadjutors in the League does the credit of this success ...
— Spalding's Baseball Guide and Official League Book for 1895 • Edited by Henry Chadwick
... agony, and the sultan ordered them to desist. "I trust, Zara, you are now sufficiently punished for your disobedience." But I heard him not; and when the sultan perceiving that I did not reply, looked at me, his heart melted. He felt how arbitrary, how cruel he had been. The Circassian went to him; he ordered her, in a voice of thunder, to be gone, me to be unbound by the other ladies, laid on the sofa, and restoratives to be procured. When I came to my senses, I found myself alone with the sultan. "Oh Zara," said he, as the tears stood in ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... exceptions,—men educated in philosophy like Epaminondas, or in homely household virtues and citizenship like Washington—but there never was a soldier such as I speak of, who did more for the world than was compatible with his confined and arbitrary breeding. I do not speak, of course, with reference to the unprofessional part of his character. Circumstances, especially the participation of dangers and vicissitude, often conspire with naturally good qualities to render soldiers ...
— Captain Sword and Captain Pen - A Poem • Leigh Hunt
... precision, and so become an expert in the use of that precious instrument which is meant not only to express valuable thought, but to preserve it as well. Further, he will learn to feel respect for the language in which he writes and thus be saved from any attempt to remodel it by arbitrary and capricious treatment. Without this schooling, a man's writing may easily degenerate into ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... of my journey I reached Ganhard, which was formerly one of the most prosperous towns in Central India, but is now much decayed and governed by a wealthy, arbitrary, violent, generous, and cruel prince. His name is Rajah Maddan, a true Oriental potentate, delicate and barbarous, affable and sanguinary, combining feminine grace with ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... Literary Supplement (August 18, 1921), that credibility varies as to classes of witnesses and classes of events, and also as to type of perception. Thus, perceptions of touch, odor, and taste have low evidential value. Our hearing is defective and arbitrary when it judges the source and direction of sound, and in listening to the talk of other people "words which are not heard will be supplied by the witness in all good faith. He will have a theory of the purport of the conversation, and will arrange the ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... sense. The man in whose favor no laws of property exist probably feels himself less bound to respect those made in favor of others. When arguing for ourselves, we lay it down as fundamental, that laws, to be just, must give reciprocation of right,—that, without this, they are mere arbitrary rules of conduct, founded in force, and not in conscience; and it is a problem which I give to the master to solve, whether the religious precepts against the violation of property were not framed for him as well as his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... an essential and intrinsic excellence, and immovable principles common to all languages, founded in the nature of our passions and affections, yet it has its ornaments and modes of address which are merely arbitrary. What is approved in the Eastern nations as grand and majestic, would be considered by the Greeks and Romans as turgid and inflated; and they, in return, would be thought by the Orientals to express themselves in a cold and ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... test for criminal responsibility is admittedly vague and inadequate, affording great opportunity for divergent expert testimony and a readily availed of excuse for the arbitrary and sentimental actions of juries, to which is largely due the distrust prevailing of the claim of insanity when interposed as ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... unpleasantly put before us. I like the girl; it would have been so easy to spoil her with moralising; but the Baron is the magnet, and, as a counterfoil, the diabolical German hotel keeper. There is too much arbitrary handling at the close for my taste. Only in the opening chapters of Victory does Mr. Conrad pursue his oblique method of taletelling; the pomp and circumstance of a lordly narrative style roll to a triumphant conclusion. This Polish writer ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... western posts were indeed to be vacated by June 1, 1796, though without indemnity for the past, but a British right of search and impressment was implicitly recognized, the French West Indian trade not rendered secure, and arbitrary liberty accorded to Great Britain in defining contraband. Opposition to ratification was bitter and nearly universal. The friends of France were jubilant. Jay was burned in effigy, Washington himself attacked. ...
— History of the United States, Volume 2 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... swallow up all the rest. The theory of checks and balances is admirable if the object be to trammel power, and to have as little power in the government as possible; but it is a theory which is born from passions engendered by the struggle against despotism or arbitrary power, not from a calm and philosophical appreciation of government itself. The English have not succeeded in establishing their theory, for, after all, their constitution does not work so well as they pretend. The landed ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... and bent all the resources of her powerful personality to the enlightenment and advancement of the land of her adoption. Her people were not "knouted into civilization," but invited and drawn into it. Her touch was terribly firm—but elastic. She was arbitrary, but tolerant; and if her reign was a despotism, it was a despotism of that broad type which deals with the sources of things, and does not bear heavily upon individuals. The Empress Catherine died suddenly in 1796, and Paul I. was crowned Emperor ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... that any pretended private revelation must necessarily have become a farce. No one, especially, would have held any such secret for months, and then divulged it in the ambiguous mode of a romance, while arbitrary arrests and unexplained imprisonments were making the once free States of the Old Union a second Venice. Suspicious circumstances have been observed, and suspicious persons put under watch; but if anything ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... had no vices to be criticized by the men, who respected him not only for his bravery on the battlefield, but for his good moral character; for even the vicious respect the virtues which they practically contemn. Being neither arbitrary nor tyrannical, he was cheerfully obeyed; and his company never appeared better than when, by the temporary absence of his superior, it was under ...
— The Young Lieutenant - or, The Adventures of an Army Officer • Oliver Optic
... others do not. The distinction seems to be almost arbitrary. It can be largely developed, but only in those with whom original endowment of the faculty makes development possible. No matter how long a direction-blind man frequents the wilderness, he is never sure of himself. Nor is the lack any reflection on the intelligence. I once traveled in the Black ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... impossible to conceive of life without Shakespeare and Burns, without Paradise Lost and the Intimations ode and the immortal pageant of the Canterbury Tales; but (the technical question apart) to imagine it wanting Hugo's lyrics is easy enough. The largesse of which he was so prodigal has but an arbitrary and conventional value. Like the magician's money much has changed, almost in the act of distribution, into withered leaves; and such of it as seems minted of good metal is ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... Dave sat up and assumed an arbitrary attitude. He was growing suspicious of Dad's ideas. "To begin with, how many bears do you reckon on ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... in turn, committed arbitrary acts; there were those who curried favor with him, and worked his will, and became his minions. In that school of misery, where bitter minds dreamed only of vengeance, where the sophistries hatched in such brains were laying up, inevitably, a store of evil ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... President Wilson was inaugurated. The duly-elected President of Mexico, Francisco Madero, had been overthrown by a band of conspirators headed by Huerta. Were the fruits of the hard-won fight of the Mexican masses against the arbitrary rule of the favoured few to be wasted? President Wilson answered this question in his formal statement of March 12, 1913, eight days after his inauguration. With respect to Latin-American affairs, ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... was to obtain redress of past grievances, with a proper regard to the individuals who had suffered; the next, to prevent the recurrence of such grievances by the abolition of tyrannical tribunals acting upon arbitrary maxims in criminal proceedings, and most improperly denominated courts of justice. They then proceeded to establish that fundamental principle of all free government, the preserving of the purse to the ...
— A History of the Early Part of the Reign of James the Second • Charles James Fox
... that is, it distinguishes, individualizes, concretes, numbers, compares, things which, material or immaterial, are thoroughly identical and indistinguishable. Matter, as well as spirit, plays, as we view it, all sorts of parts; and, as there is nothing arbitrary in its metamorphoses, we build upon them these psychologic and atomic theories, true in so far as they faithfully represent, in terms agreed upon, the series of phenomena, but radically false as soon as they pretend to realize their abstractions and ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... all the faults of the system devised by the Puritans, it was a practical system. With all their foibles, with all their teasing, tyrannical, and arbitrary notions, the Pilgrims were lovers of liberty as well as sticklers for authority. . . . Nowhere can a better description of liberty be found than that given by Winthrop, in his defence of himself before the General Court on a charge of arbitrary conduct. 'Nor would I have you mistake ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... filling those numerous vacancies which had fallen in England during an interdict of six years, had proceeded in the most arbitrary manner; and had paid no regard, in conferring dignities, to personal merit, to rank, to the inclination of the electors, or to the customs of the country. The English Church was universally disgusted; and Langton himself, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... the Court Etiquette of the Republic. At the very commencement of the Government under the Constitution the social question became one of great magnitude, and in order to adjust it upon a proper basis, President Washington caused a definite Code to be drawn up; but the rules were too arbitrary and exacting to give satisfaction, and society was not disposed to acknowledge so genuine an equality as the code required among its members. Frequent and bitter quarrels arose in consequence of the clashing of social claims, and at last a ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... companions. The late Mr. Froude offered an explanation of this general rule in a paper read before this Institution in 1878, and gave a curve of efficiency with varying true slip. In Mr. R E. Froude's paper last year there was a form of this curve, with an arbitrary abscissa scale for the slip, devised to illustrate in one diagram the wide conditions covered by his experiments. In the screws now under consideration, the values of the pitch/diameter vary only from 1.2 to 1.34, and ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 598, June 18, 1887 • Various
... the "Lombard incident," Mr. Chamberlain says:—[43] "As an instance of such arbitrary action the recent maltreatment of coloured British subjects by Field Cornet Lombard may be cited. This official entered the houses of various coloured persons without a warrant at night, dragged them from their ...
— A Century of Wrong • F. W. Reitz
... which I am sure is, that the distinction between the organic and inorganic is arbitrary; that it is more coherent with our other ideas, and therefore more acceptable, to start with every molecule as a living thing, and then deduce death as the breaking up of an association or corporation, than to start with inanimate molecules and smuggle life into ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... heaven would fly before the driving soul. In fear of this, the father of the gods Confined their fury to those dark abodes, And locked them safe within, oppressed with mountain loads; Imposed a king with arbitrary sway, To loose their fetters, or their force allay. DRYDEN, ...
— Story of Aeneas • Michael Clarke
... System of English Laws in a neighboring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule ...
— Reading Made Easy for Foreigners - Third Reader • John L. Huelshof
... however, none of these alternatives have been followed, the uniformity must be considered, in this case as in all others, evidence of subordination to some general law—implies what we call natural causation, as distinguished from arbitrary arrangement. ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... The Spanish population was concentrated in cities, and the country divided into great estates granted by the crown to the families of the conquistadores or to favourites at court. The immense areas of Peru, Buenos Ayres and Mexico were submitted to the most unjust and arbitrary regulations, with no object but to stifle growing industry and put them in absolute dependence upon the metropolis. It was forbidden to exercise the trades of dyer, fuller, weaver, shoemaker or hatter, and the natives were compelled ...
— The Buccaneers in the West Indies in the XVII Century • Clarence Henry Haring
... falls ten times per minute through an average height of 3.3 feet is thereby subjected to an influence equal to 22,400 horse-power. In this estimate the unit of the horse-power which has been adopted is Watt's arbitrary standard of "33,000 foot pounds per minute". The work done in raising the vessel referred to is equal to ten horse-power multiplied by the number of pounds in a ton, or, in other ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... was not formed until February 22, 1886, when the Switchmen's Mutual Aid Association was inaugurated. At the first annual session in September, 1886, the grand master declared that the purposes of the organization were "to wage war against discrimination made by arbitrary employers; to organize for benevolent purposes; to amicably adjust labor disputes by arbitration; and for mutual aid to its members."[30] The Association was forced by the defalcations of its treasurer to disband, and a new ...
— Beneficiary Features of American Trade Unions • James B. Kennedy
... authors hereinafter studied are examples: Meredith, Hardy and Stevenson. Hardy alone is now in the land of the living, Meredith having but just passed away. Yet to omit the former, while including the other two, is obviously arbitrary, since his work in fiction is as truly done as if he, like them, rested from his literary labors and the gravestone chronicled his day of death. For reasons best known to himself, Mr. Hardy seems to have chosen verse for the final expression ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... us to cease buying goods abroad, for thereby the money now sent away will be kept in Canada. What right has any government to pass such a law? With the money I get for my wheat may I not buy what I need where I see fit? Such an arbitrary law as he pleads for would undoubtedly help the manufacturer, but would it help me, who am a farmer? The question I ask, is not will the money stay in Canada, but will the money I have justly earned stay ...
— The Narrative of Gordon Sellar Who Emigrated to Canada in 1825 • Gordon Sellar
... derived from the pleasure or pain of their consequences. He has as yet little power of subordinating his lower impulses to an ideal end, and hence is not properly a moral being. Good conduct must, therefore, be secured principally through the exercise of arbitrary authority from without. ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... life. At this period many pious persons acted in this way when they gave their property to the Church. Church goods being unseizable, and exempt from taxation, this was a roundabout way of getting the better of fiscal extortion, whether in the shape of arbitrary confiscations, or eviction by force of arms. In any case, such souls as were tired of the world and longing for repose, found in these bequests an heroic method of saving themselves the trouble of looking after a fortune or a landed estate. ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... for the defendants, made a motion before Judge Tallmadge for an order to prevent the District Attorney from using the preliminary evidence taken at the private examinations. "It was a proceeding," he said, "arbitrary and subversive of the first principles of law and liberty,"—"which would have disgraced the reign of Charles and stained the character of Jeffries." The District Attorney was heard in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... would still be there in some shape, though possibly it might be a shape that would lack something that our thought supplies. That reality is 'independent' means that there is something in every experience that escapes our arbitrary control. If it be a sensible experience it coerces our attention; if a sequence, we cannot invert it; if we compare two terms we can come to only one result. There is a push, an urgency, within our very experience, against which we are on the whole powerless, and which ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... mortification I saw myself on the point of being transported to such a distant and unhealthy climate, destitute of every convenience that could render such a voyage supportable, and under the dominion of an arbitrary tyrant, whose command was almost intolerable; however, as these complaints were common to a great many on board, I resolved to submit patiently to my fate, and contrive to make myself as easy as the nature of the case would allow. We got out ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... of species agreeing in some one character or series of characters; usually considered as arbitrary and opinionative, though some consider it ...
— Explanation of Terms Used in Entomology • John. B. Smith
... said Dudley but instantly checking himself, he added, "Yet she shall not find in me a safe or easy victim of arbitrary vengeance. I have friends—I have allies—I will not, like Norfolk, be dragged to the block as a victim to sacrifice. Fear not, Amy; thou shalt see Dudley bear himself worthy of his name. I must instantly communicate with some of those friends on whom I can best rely; for, ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... David in hand and toyed with him and spanked him, and pelted and petted him, until finally she made him her favorite son. Dame Fortune went about this work in an abrupt and arbitrary manner. ...
— The Boy Scout and Other Stories for Boys • Richard Harding Davis
... mile of rock and mountain land, as well as some fertile valleys, in which reposed a hardy and contented peasantry. The old Count de Hugo de Verole had quitted life early, and had left his only son, the then Count Hugo de Verole, a boy of scarcely ten years, under the guardianship of his mother, an arbitrary ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... to Garry for a decision and as he was the leader his word always went, though he was never arbitrary and generally talked things over before ...
— The Ranger Boys and the Border Smugglers • Claude A. Labelle
... that the use of spies has been given up; and it is also known that the system of underselling is again privately resorted to by many, so that the injury arising from this arbitrary system, pursued by the great booksellers, affects only, or most severely, those whose adherence to an extorted promise most deserves respect. Note to the ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage
... this, we think we have the privilege and power to live and do as we please. Indeed, the more learning and power we have and the more exalted our rank, the greater knaves we are; perpetrating every wicked deed, stirring up strife, discord, war and murder for the sake of executing our own arbitrary designs, where the question is the surrender of a penny in recognition of the hundreds of thousands of dollars daily received ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... of. Still, he had known the young man from childhood, and had seen, and often regretted, that his want of moral courage had rendered him peculiarly liable to all the bad effects arising from his father's severe and arbitrary mode of treatment. Dick would never have had "pluck" enough to be a hardened villain, under any circumstances; but, unless some good influence, some strength, was brought to bear upon him, he might easily sink into the sneaking scoundrel. ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... charged upon the fell Thing who had wrought this their first dissension, and, ah! most terrible thought, interposed between them so effectually, that Sweyn was wilfully blind and deaf on her account, resentful of interference, arbitrary beyond reason. ...
— The Were-Wolf • Clemence Housman
... proceeds step by step, until it has eradicated every laudable principle. It has been remarked, that there is no prince so bad, whose favorites and ministers are not worse. There is hardly any prince without a favorite, by whom he is governed in as arbitrary a manner as he governs the wretches subjected to him. Here the tyranny is doubled. There are two courts, and two interests; both very different from the interests of the people. The favorite knows that the regard of a tyrant is as unconstant and capricious as that of a woman; ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... accordingly, a fleet was sent to take possession of New Amsterdam. Stuyvesant called out his troops and made ready to fight. But the people were tired of the arbitrary rule of the Dutch governors, and petitioned him to yield. At last he answered, "Well, let it be so, but I would rather be ...
— A Brief History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... for what he took to be hypocrisy, he did not see the high, practical wisdom of the race which little by little had built up for itself its grandiose idealism in order to suppress its savage instincts, or to turn them to account. Not arbitrary reasons, not moral and religious codes, not legislators and statesmen, priests and philosophers, transform the souls of peoples and often impose upon them a new nature: but centuries of misfortune and experience, which forge the life of peoples ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... man respects the rights even of brute matter and arbitrary symbols. If he writes the same word twice in succession, by accident, he always erases the one that stands second; has not the first-comer the prior right? This act of abstract justice, which I trust many of my readers, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... in just as I had finished and we went over the matter together. He accepted my ideas with that singular amiability and open- mindedness which form so striking a contrast with the general idea of his brusque and arbitrary character. ...
— Theodore Roosevelt • Edmund Lester Pearson
... allusion to the decline of the Portuguese power in India, which began in the first decade of the sixteenth century, with the conquests of Albuquerque and others (see note 8 ante). The arbitrary and tyrannical rule of the Portuguese exasperated the natives, many of whom revolted. It will be remembered that in 1580 Portugal was subjected to the dominion of Spain—including, of course, its Oriental colonial possessions. The statement in the text ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume VI, 1583-1588 • Emma Helen Blair
... the creative process. But the individual's development as the specializing medium of the Universal Spirit will depend entirely upon his own conception of his relation to it. So long as he only regards it as an arbitrary power, a sort of slave owner, he will find himself in the position of a slave driven by an inscrutable force, he knows not whither or for what purpose. He may worship such a God, but his worship is only the worship of fear and ignorance, and there ...
— The Dore Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... of each of the units that enters into the economic structure must vary with the locality, with the industry, and so on, hence it will prove to be impossible to lay down any arbitrary rules concerning their organization. It is possible, however, to suggest certain characteristics that must be ...
— The Next Step - A Plan for Economic World Federation • Scott Nearing
... and Dutch have escaped this ingulfing process. The former, instead of retreating, seeks in the present to enlarge its circuit; and great are the complaints in Schleswig-Holstein of the arbitrary and despotic imposition of Danish on a State of the German Confederation. The present government of Holland has not remained inactive. Much has been done to encourage men of letters and counteract the Gallic influences which prevailed in the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... had been at perpetual war among themselves or with some neighbour were reduced to quietude. Communities which had been liable to sudden invasion and to all manner of arbitrary changes in their conditions of life, in their burdens of taxation, and even in their personal freedom, now knew exactly where they stood, and, for the most part, perceived that they stood in a much more tolerable and a distinctly more assured position than before. If there ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... an errand that much pleased the doctor, and, characteristically perhaps, he went about it indirectly. He told his wife what Miss Thompson had said to him and asked her to speak to Mrs Davidson. The missionary's attitude seemed rather arbitrary and it could do no harm if the girl were allowed to stay in Pago-Pago another fortnight. But he was not prepared for the result of his diplomacy. The missionary came to ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... his country. In vain he led your victorious fleet: against the boasted Armada of Spain; in vain he defended and established the honour, the liberties, the religion—the Protestant religion—of this country, against the arbitrary cruelties of Popery and the Inquisition, if these more than Popish cruelties and inquisitorial practices are let loose among us—to turn forth into our settlements, among our ancient connexions, friends, and relations, the merciless cannibal, thirsting ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... something arbitrary in this mode of valuation, it is, perhaps, on the whole the best; and its result is extremedy handy for the memory (as somebody has pointed ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... captious with his sisters "whiles," she acknowledged in secret; he was arbitrary with his little brothers when they neglected tasks of his giving; and tried his mother and his grandmother, now and then, as young lads always have, and always will try their mothers and grandmothers, until old heads can be ...
— David Fleming's Forgiveness • Margaret Murray Robertson
... compare these periods with periods of the same name in Western history although, naturally, we find some similarities with the development of society and culture in the West. Every attempt towards periodization is to some degree arbitrary: the beginning and end of the Middle Ages, for instance, cannot be fixed to a year, because development is a continuous process. To some degree any periodization is a matter of convenience, and it should be ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... introduction to each other they had had When on board the Ballyshannon! And it drove them nearly mad To think how very friendly with each other they might get, If it wasn't for the arbitrary rule of etiquette! ...
— More Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... intellectual powers and charms of style with which that feeling may be expressed, are informed and vitalized by the sympathy itself. But whether a man who writes verses has genius,—whether he be a poet according to arbitrary canons,—whether some of his lines resemble the lines of other writers,—and whether he be original, are questions which may be answered in every way of every poet in history. Who is a poet but he whom the heart of man ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... only kind of government under which enterprises against the spirit of the law can be put down. Yes. Arbitrary rule is the salvation of a country when it comes to the support of justice, for the right of mercy is strictly one-sided. The king can pardon a fraudulent bankrupt; he cannot do anything for the victims. The letter of the law is ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac
... alone wherein the ualidity of verdicts and judgments in such cases stands and if a real and apparent murtherer be condemned and executed out of due form of law it is inditable against them that do it for in such case the law is superseded by arbitrary doings. ...
— The Witchcraft Delusion In Colonial Connecticut (1647-1697) • John M. Taylor
... language of the New Testament, which, when studied by the light of unassisted Reason, does not appear to have been fully included, contemplated, intended by the language of the Old:—that the accommodation has not been arbitrary;—say rather, that here at least there has been no ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... as the Great Powers of Europe were using their best endeavours to induce the Sultan's Christian subjects to live peaceably under the Ottoman rule, they could not allow of such arbitrary acts of cruelty as that which had been perpetrated, and which was sufficient to rouse the whole of the Christian population against the Government. He understood, he said, that Sir Stratford Canning had asked for instructions from your Lordship in this matter, and that he trusted that they ...
— Correspondence Relating to Executions in Turkey for Apostacy from Islamism • Various
... Rollo's being alarmed at this, as another man might, it was answered by a certain humourous play of face; a slight significance of lip and air, quite difficult to characterize. It was not arrogant, nor arbitrary; I do not know how to call it masterful; and yet certainly it expressed no dismay and no apprehension. Perhaps it expressed that he intended to be in a different category from other men. Perhaps he thought Mrs. Bywank meant to ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
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