"Autocracy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... parallels in the annals of the world. He was a creature of the Church, as he conceived all in his dominions were creatures to him. Free will and the right to conviction he did not claim for himself and would not consider for others. The world was an autocracy, universal, necessary, the pope as chief tyrant and Philip under-lord—he must obey the pope; the people must obey him. To Philip these conclusions were axiomatic, and therefore not subjects for debate. That all his subjects did not readily concede ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... conviction that ultramontane theories lead to immoral politics prompted his ecclesiastical antipathies. His anger was aroused, not by any feeling that Papal infallibility was a theological error, but by the belief that it enshrined in the Church monarchical autocracy, which could never maintain itself apart from crime committed or condoned. It was not intellectual error but moral obliquity that was to him here, as everywhere, the enemy. He could tolerate unbelief, he could not tolerate sin. Machiavelli represented to him the worst of political ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... theme was executed. Gogol was above all else the artist. He was not a radical, nor even a liberal. He was strictly conservative. While hating the bureaucracy, yet he never found fault with the system itself or with the autocracy. Like most born artists, he was strongly individualistic in temperament, and his satire and ridicule were aimed not at causes, but at effects. Let but the individuals act morally, and the system, which Gogol never questioned, would work beautifully. This conception caused Gogol ...
— The Inspector-General • Nicolay Gogol
... had abandoned their original princely prerogative, should cease to be a court of the last resort. But the strangest contradictions were at this date to be found in the minds of men. The name of Emperor, a remnant of Roman despotism, was still associated with an idea of autocracy, which, though it formed a ridiculous inconsistency with the privileges of the Estates, was nevertheless argued for by jurists, diffused by the partisans of despotism, and ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... unbridled. And although neither the Latin world nor its vassals had will or vision to foresee it, Time, in its inscrutable womb was fashioning that which was to bring about conflict ages-long, between Pagan autocracy and the spiritual essence of ...
— The Coming of the King • Bernie Babcock
... in this book a refuge against violent commotions. My greatest error was that I wished to gather the harvest before sowing the seed." In a way the teachings of these men gave an impetus to Russia that their death could not destroy. Even the Czar, with his passion for military autocracy, made it his first care to take up the work of codifying the Russian laws. Alexis Mikhaielovitch during the next four years turned out his "Complete Code of the Laws of ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... nothing to say in opposition to this; consequently, she had walked away unprotesting, and that act was so contrary to her disposition that it saddened her. If she had supposed that a bad meal would be the result of the bland autocracy she had just encountered, she would have been better satisfied; but, as she knew the case would be quite otherwise, her spirits continued to fall. Even the meat, that morning, had been ordered without consultation ...
— The Girl at Cobhurst • Frank Richard Stockton
... button, the turn of a screw—oh, he was to be master of such power as no monarch ever wielded! Riches—pshaw! Riches were the least of it. He could create them, practically. But they would be superfluous. Power: unlimited, absolute power was his goal. With his end achieved he could establish an autocracy, a dynasty of science: whatever he chose. Oh, it was a rich-hued, golden, glowing dream; a dream such as men's souls don't formulate in these stale days—not our kind of men. The Teutonic mysticism—you understand. And it was all ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... everywhere, it has been made diligent use of by the masters of German intrigue to lead the people of Russia astray and the people of every other country their agents could reach-in order that a premature peace might be brought about before autocracy has been taught its final and convincing lesson and the people of the world put in ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Woodrow Wilson • Woodrow Wilson
... easy to govern nowadays, since there is no real autocracy, and no strong soul likely to create one. But the original idea of sovereignty was grand and wise;—the strongest man and bravest, raised aloft on shields and bucklers with warrior cries of approval from the people who voluntarily ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... the unemployed. Many were middle-aged, with worn, tired faces. Beside the flag of the country at the head of the procession was that of universal radicalism. And his car had to stop to let them pass. For an instant the indignation of military autocracy rose strong within him at sight of the national colors in such company. But he noted how naturally the men kept step; the solidarity of their movement. The stamp of their army service in youth could not be easily removed. He realized the ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... like these the woman's place is at the fire-side. The man's duty should lead him wherever his country calls, or wherever he can be of service to a people defending themselves against the onslaught of armed autocracy." ...
— The Flag • Homer Greene
... had what has been referred to as "a passion for justice." Daily the injustice of campus organization grew on him; he saw democracy held high as an ideal—lip-homage only. Student affairs were run by an autocracy which had nothing to justify it except its supporters' claim of "efficiency." He had little love for that word—it is usually bought at too great a cost. That year, as usual, he had a small seminar of carefully picked students. He got them to open their eyes to conditions as they ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... which does not scruple to use means, fair or foul, in order to gain its end. No craft is above that Government. It resorts to frightfulness, terrorism. It resorts to bribery, in the shape of titles, honour and high offices. It administers opiates in the shape of Reforms. In essence then it is an autocracy double distilled in the guise of democracy. The greatest gift of a crafty cunning man are worthless so long as cunning resides in his heart. It is a Government representing a civilisation which is purely material and godless. I have given to you these qualities of this government ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi
... and modern times to reach a high degree of national efficiency. At a period when the foreign policies of the continental states were exclusively but timidly dynastic, and when their domestic organizations illustrated the disadvantages of a tepid autocracy, Great Britain had entered upon a foreign policy of national colonial expansion and was building up a representative national domestic organization. After several centuries of revolutionary disturbance the English had regained their national balance, without sacrificing any of the time-honored elements ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... whole, there was no denying the fact that the Club flourished under the statesman-like autocracy of Mr. Parker. That was partly because, unlike previous presidents, he was generally on the spot. Some great man once made a remark about the need of "the Master's Eye." He believed in that remark. If you run a place, run it yourself. He was ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... contributed to, the treacherous act. In the light of the horrors that are occurring in Russia at the present time, it is not improbable that there was treachery; and that when it was discovered, suspicion centred on certain persons, who were, in accordance with Muscovite autocracy, dispatched without ceremony, ...
— Looking Seaward Again • Walter Runciman
... nation is not one which makes revolutions. There will be scattered riots in Germany, but no simultaneous rising of the whole people. The officers of the army are all of one class, and of a class devoted to the ideals of autocracy. A revolution of the army is impossible; and at home there are only the boys and old men easily kept in subjection by ...
— My Four Years in Germany • James W. Gerard
... speaking without reference to the new constitution which will be dealt with later on, is an irresponsible autocracy; its institutions are likewise autocratic in form, but democratic in operation. The philosopher, Mencius (372-289 B.C.), placed the people first, the gods second, and the sovereign third, in the scale of national importance; and this classification has sunk deep into the minds of the ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... the contrary of what he should have done. The Hohenzollern dynasty has distinguished itself beyond all other German dynasties by its moral nature and material temperament of pure and undisguised autocracy. The Prussian dynasty has become more absolute than the Catholic and imperial dynasties of Germany. A Catholic king always finds his authority limited by the Church, which depends completely on the Pope, whereas a ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... permanent officials have too much independent and uncontrolled, or imperfectly controlled, authority. On the other hand, we are told that we are suffering from Cabinet dictatorship, or, alternatively, that the Cabinet system is breaking down and being replaced by the autocracy of the Prime Minister. There is a good deal of prima facie justification ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... to note with what an unerring instinct the Pastor Emeritus has thought out and forecast all possible encroachments upon her planned autocracy, and barred the way against them, in the By-laws which she framed and copyrighted—under the guidance ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... that, as a matter of fact, it was so concentrated; but to declare that it was, to make the belief that it was an article of faith— what could be more— it was their favourite expression— more inopportune? In truth, the Gallican spirit still lingered among them. At heart, they hated the autocracy of Rome— the domination of the centralised Italian organisation over the whole vast body of the Church. They secretly hankered, even at this late hour, after some form of constitutional government, and they knew that the ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... I can judge, the American mind is eminently free from any sentimental leaning towards the British. Americans have a traditional hatred of the Hanoverian monarchy, and a democratic disbelief in autocracy. They are far more acutely aware of differences than resemblances. They suspect every Englishman of being a bit of a gentleman and a bit of a flunkey. I have never found in America anything like ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... from the British government that he would be aided against foreign aggression, he was able to establish an absolute military despotism inside his kingdom, by breaking down the power of the warlike tribes which held in check, up to his time, the personal autocracy of the Kabul rulers, and by organizing a regular army well furnished with European rifies and artillery. Taxation of all kinds was heavily increased, and systematically collected. The result was that ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... seemed ready to her hand. A peculiarity of the East, which is democratic in most ways under the veneer of swaggering autocracy, that servants of the very lowest caste may speak, and argue on occasion, with men who would shudder at the prospect of defilement from their touch. There was nothing in the least outrageous in the proposition that the sweeper, waiting in a corner for the procession to emerge again so that he ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... work, provided they have some point of contact with human nature. Hedonism will pass the pragmatic test as well as Stoicism. Up to a certain point every social principle that is not absolutely idiotic works: Autocracy works in Russia and Democracy in America; Atheism works in France, Polytheism in India, Monotheism throughout Islam, and Pragmatism, or No-ism, in England. Paul's fantastic conception of the damned Adam, represented by Bunyan ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... names of the streets were, of course, nearly all intrinsically English. A few of the old Dutch names persisted—Bleecker, Vandam, and so on—but nearly every part of the town was named for the extolling of Britain and British royalty. Away then, said New York, with the sign manuals of crowns and autocracy! ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... new order that I had seen in the making. I heard him speak at a Russian Fair in London. The whole burden of his utterance was the hope that the Slav would achieve discipline and organization. At that time Russia redeemed from autocracy looked to be a bulwark of Allied victory. The night we talked about Russia at Capetown she had become the prey of red terror and the plaything ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... infinitely further from liberty than you royalists are, for you have at your head a prince who has a thoroughly open mind. The form of government, after all, signifies little. The real question is not whether we shall have a monarchy or an empire, an autocracy or a democracy. It is whether we shall ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... of a Parliament. There was and is no room for a Parliament in India, because, so long as British rule remains a reality, the Government of India, as Lord Morley has plainly stated, must be an autocracy—benevolent and full of sympathy with Indian ideas, but still an autocracy. Nor would the Congress have been in any way qualified to discharge the functions of a Parliament had there been room for one. For it represents ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... such monstrous things as well as such nonsense, will no doubt be greatly astonished when I inform him that no foreign reporter, however inexperienced, of any nation great or small, is ignorant of the fact that William II is relentlessly determined to achieve the re-establishment of absolute autocracy as it was conceived by certain Emperors of Rome and Byzantium. His motto is Voluntas Regis Supremo Lex, which, on the occasion of his first visit to Muenich, he wrote there with his own Imperial hand. On the first occasion of the opening ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... temporary "demolition of Democracy" in England. We have only too much reason to believe his prophetic words, for since he wrote we have had a Coalition Government which is predominantly democratic, Liberal and Labour, and yet has been fatally impelled towards reaction and autocracy.[8] That the impulse is really fatal and inevitable we cannot doubt, for we see exactly the same movement in France, and even in Russia, where it might seem that reaction has so few triumphs to achieve. "The blood of the battlefield ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... the heart of the struggle,—to live in his own mind the strain and turmoil of the individual soldier in the desperate conflict which now rages, the decision of which will determine whether democracy or military autocracy shall be the predominating factor in the governments of the peoples ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant
... another part of the coast collecting tribute, had sent a caravel laden with cotton to Isabella, and well-meaning James had her drawn up on the beach. Roldan took the opportunity to represent this innocent action as a sign of the intolerable autocracy of the Columbus family, who did not even wish a vessel to be in a condition to sail for Spain with news of their misdeeds. Insolent Roldan formally asks James to send the caravel to Spain with supplies; poor James refuses and, perhaps being at bottom afraid of Roldan and his insolences, ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... the charge of responsibility for the war and expatiated upon her efficiency and the beneficence of her culture in the same breath that he attacked the commercial greed of Great Britain, the cruel autocracy of Russia, and the imperialistic designs of Japan in the Pacific. Its pamphlets went so far as to excoriate allied methods of warfare and to level accusations of inhumanity against the Belgians. It distributed broadcast throughout the country an appeal signed by ninety-three ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... principles endures in the world at large—the Aristocratic Principle, represented by autocracy, absolutism, prelacy, and slaveholding authority, on the one hand, and the Democratic Principle, represented by republicanism, Protestantism, dead-levelism, with free and destructive competition, on the other. As Slavery and Freedom have been preparing for their local conflict in America during ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... stood the entire council when he mentioned the free-traders, and suggested that they be run to earth. His chiefs of departments almost refused to embark on any project until the factor's daughter should be found. But old Fitzpatrick with the autocracy of thirty years in the Far North, snarled their sentiments down with his own, and forced them to the Company's ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... reign of the second Charles, Maryland had suffered from political unrest somewhat less than Virginia. The autocracy of Maryland was more benevolent and more temperate than that of her southern neighbor. The name of Calvert is a better symbol of wisdom than the name of Berkeley. Cecil Calvert, second Lord Baltimore, dying in 1675, has a fair niche in the temple of human enlightenment. ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston
... returned to England; and then, I cannot remember how, he got on the subject of the Black Republic, and of how, in his opinion, such states ought to be governed. On this matter he was voluble, and voluble with unguarded emphasis. I never heard the accents of instinctive autocracy more clearly than, for some ten minutes, I then heard them in his. I wished I could have seen him at Washington, but I had no unoccupied week during which he would have been able ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... autocracy are evils resulting from an undeveloped civilization, and have no place in a community where selfishness has ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon
... potential inherent in thermo-dynamics and electricity, and the invention of the machines that have changed the world. During the Renaissance and Reformation the old social and economic systems, so laboriously built up on the ruins of Roman tyranny, had been destroyed; autocracy had abolished liberty, licentiousness had wrecked the moral stamina, "freedom of conscience" had obliterated the guiding and restraining power of the old religion. The field was clear ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... time, 1906, had recently won its independence from the autocracy and was preparing for its first general election. Talking with one of the nineteen women returned to Parliament a few months later, I asked: "How did you Finnish women persuade the makers of the new constitution ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... They disregarded the enlightened philanthropy and the awakened conscience which had abolished slavery in every other Republic of America, which had thrown the protection of law over the helpless millions of India, which had moved even the Russian Autocracy to consider the enfranchisement of the serf. They would not realize that the contest they were rashly inviting was not alone with the anti-slavery men of the free States, not alone with the spirit of loyalty to the Republic, but that it carried with ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... his mind, the dread of a rent Christendom and of the wars and bigotry that must come of its rending, united with More's theological convictions to resist any spiritual severance of England from the Papacy. His love for freedom, his revolt against the growing autocracy of the crown, the very height and grandeur of his own spiritual convictions, all bent him to withstand a system which would concentrate in the king the whole power of Church as of State, would leave him without ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... devotion to her proved itself in a thousand ways; week after week he grew, if anything, more kind, more tender; yet in his view of their relations he was unconsciously the most complete despot, a monument of male autocracy. Never had it occurred to Widdowson that a wife remains an individual, with rights and obligations independent of her wifely condition. Everything he said presupposed his own supremacy; he took for granted ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... in France began with Louis XIV and ended with the Revolution. It is the period which bridges the gulf between autocracy and self-government, between Roman Catholicism and toleration, between the classical spirit and the spirit of the Romantic Revival. It is thus of immense importance in the history not only of France, but of the civilized world. And from the point of view of literature it ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... glib usage of words like democracy and make fetiches of them without due understanding. Democracy is inferior to autocracy from the aggressively national point of view; it is not necessarily superior to autocracy as a guarantee of general well-being; it may even turn out to be inferior unless we can improve it. But democracy is the rising tide; it may be dammed ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... for it. "More than a showing up and a getting even, though there is that. It will be no prancing steed and clanking saber picture of the army. More digging of clay than waving of the flag. I see significant things arising from that survival of autocracy in a democracy, an interesting study in the bitter things coming out of the relation of the forms and habits of a vanishing order to the aspirations and tendencies of a forming one. And in that bending of ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... France sent us her tears." The taunt was as foolish as it was unjust. France assuredly had done her part in the war for Liberty. The hour had come for the States of Europe to work out their own salvation, or resign themselves to autocracy, Jesuitism, a gagged Press, the omnipresent spy, the ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... will not in the end be missed, although it may require a considerable time to be fully understood. Officialism is a foe to inventive progress; and whether it exists under a regime of collectivism or under one of autocracy, it must paralyse industrial enterprise to that extent, thus rendering the country which has adopted it liable to be outstripped by ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... and Turkey to-day are patients in a world hospital. It is plain that they are stricken with death. The foul cancer of militarism has fastened itself upon Germany. The cancer of autocracy is eating into the vitals of Austria. The cancer of polygamy is enmeshed in the life of Turkey. Of late the disease has been spreading. Now these surgeons, named Foch, Haig and Pershing, have been anointed by the ointment of war black and sulphurous, and, ...
— The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon • Newell Dwight Hillis
... that we Americans have got to fit our practice to our theories. He says that we shout democracy and practice autocracy. That we don't believe that all men are free and equal, and that, well, in your words, Mary—we let ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... private soldier in the Flash Ranging Service of the American Expeditionary Forces in France. It not only relates his experiences while in France, but also tells of going over and returning. In brief, it is a soldier's story from the time he left America to help crush the autocracy of Germany, until he returned again after fighting ...
— In the Flash Ranging Service - Observations of an American Soldier During His Service - With the A.E.F. in France • Edward Alva Trueblood
... a slave had risen step by step in the favor of his master until he arrived at the giddy eminence which he occupied at the time of his death. It is a somewhat curious commentary on the essentially democratic status of an autocracy that a man could thus rise to a position second only to that of the autocrat himself; and, in all probability, wielding quite ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various
... engaged in a very animated conversation, some of them challenging the proposal of the Emperor to accept the British suggestions, with an outspokenness which would have astonished the outside world, with its notions of Teutonic autocracy. Count Metternich did not like what I suggested, that there should be a conference in Berlin on the subject of the Bagdad Railway between England, ...
— Before the War • Viscount Richard Burton Haldane
... the first two years of the War was the presence of the vast Russian autocratic empire on the side of the allied democracies. For Russia, however, the War was of the people, rather than of the autocracy at the top, and one saw that Russia would emerge from the War changed and purified. What one could not foresee was that, under the awakening of the people, Russia could pass, in a day, through a Revolution as profound in its character and consequences as the great explosion ...
— The Soul of Democracy - The Philosophy Of The World War In Relation To Human Liberty • Edward Howard Griggs
... partiality is exercised against him. His sense of justice then asserts itself, and he resents not getting his share of anything. He even will insist on being punished if he thinks punishment is due him. While revengeful if imposed upon, and bitter under the autocracy of cruelty, he has a great respect for firmness. And the Americans would do well to remember that in governing the Filipino, kindness should be mingled ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... religious phase of its existence, cannibalism attained its most revolting characters. Mexico is a well-known example; and in Fiji, where the king could eat any one of his subjects, we also find a mighty cast of priests, a complicated theology,(38) and a full development of autocracy. Originated by necessity, cannibalism became, at a later period, a religious institution, and in this form it survived long after it had disappeared from among tribes which certainly practised it ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... humility! By their very virtues, and the purity of their lives, many good parents create flatterers for themselves, and so live in the midst of a filial court of parasites—and seldom without a pang of unwillingness, and often not at all, will they consent to forgo their autocracy, and exchange the tribute they have been wont to exact of love and obedience for the willing offering of ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... this subject early recognizes that the man at the physical task should not be unnecessarily distracted by the vexing problems of planning and directing the work. In some way this does not seem to fit a democracy, but rather seems to lead toward autocracy. However, let us keep in mind that specialization is essential, not only at each physical task, but at the tasks at which there may be expended a combination of the mental and physical, and also at those tasks that are wholly mental, and that a division should be made to get the ...
— Industrial Progress and Human Economics • James Hartness
... in 1780 left Joseph II. free to attempt the drastic revolution from above, which had been restrained by the wise statesmanship of his mother. He was himself a strange incarnation at once of doctrinaire liberalism and the old Habsburg autocracy. Of the essential conditions of his empire he was constitutionally unable to form a conception. He was a disciple, not of Machiavelli, but of Rousseau; and his scattered dominions, divided by innumerable ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... longer, the prolongation of his life would have been most disastrous both for Austria and Hungary. I believe after the death of Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo and after a year of war the German Emperor and autocracy were brooding over a plan according to which, on the death of Francis Joseph, the successor should be allowed to rule only as King or Grand-Duke of Austria, the title of Emperor of Austria to disappear and German Princes to be placed upon the thrones of ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... John Ball, a wandering, revolutionary priest, uttering for the first time in England a democratic doctrine. Anselm, Becket, and Langton did their work, as Simon of Montfort, and as Eliot and Hampden worked later, not for the sake of a democracy, but for the restriction of an intolerable autocracy. All along in English history liberties have been gained and enlarged by this process of restriction, and it was only when the powers of the Crown had been made subject to Parliament that it was possible, at the close of the nineteenth century, ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... of the local Progressive movements. He burned with a white-hot enthusiasm for the democratic ideal and the rights of man as embodied in equality of opportunity, freedom of individual development, and protection from the "dark forces" of special privilege, political autocracy and concentrated wealth. He was a brilliant and fiery campaigner ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
... like stubble in the fire. The genius that sways a nation by its arbitrary will seems less august to us than that which multiplies and reinforces itself in the instincts and convictions of an entire people. Autocracy may have something in it more melodramatic than this, but falls far short of it ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... materialism, and grasping greed. These men are fighting, and many of them know that they are fighting, for a new world. Not only military oppression, but industrial oppression, must go. Not only German militarism, and Russian autocracy, and Turkish cruelty must be done away; but American materialism must be purged in the fiery furnace of this war. Its purposes will reach far beyond our ken, and though man's sin alone has caused the war, its issues are in the hands of God. The whole war has been a demonstration ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... "bourgeois" newspaper. Such a man could be in Russia now, for the Communists do not regard war as we regard it. The Germans would hardly have allowed an Allied Commission to come to Berlin a year ago to investigate the nature and working of the Autocracy. The Russians, on the other hand, immediatelya greed to the suggestion of the Berne Conference that they should admit a party of socialists, the majority of whom, as they well knew, had already expressed condemnation of them. Further, ...
— Russia in 1919 • Arthur Ransome
... war in the Netherlands, which began in 1566 and ended with their independence 43 years later, is best explained in terms of general principles rather than specific grievances. "A conflict in which the principle of Catholicism with unlimited royal autocracy as Spain recognized it, was opposed to toleration in the realm of religion, with a national government according to ancient principles and based on ancient privileges,"—so the Dutch historian Blok sums up the issues at stake. The Prince of Orange, just before he was cut down by an assassin, asserted ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... fortress, the walls of which rise sheer from the black waters of Lake Ladoga—that place where the cells of the political prisoners, victims of the thousand and one intrigues of the Russian bureaucracy, consequent upon the autocracy of the Tsar, are deep beneath the lake's surface, so that they can—when it is willed by the Governor or those higher Ministers who express their ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... his seat as member for the Northern division of the Home District. Though warmly espousing the cause of the people in the ever-recurring collisions with the different branches of the Government, and as warmly asserting the rights and privileges of the popular Chamber in its struggles with the autocracy of the Upper House, the young Parliamentarian was equally jealous of the reasonable prerogative of the Crown, and temperate in the language he used when he had occasion to decry its abuse. He was one of the few in the Legislature ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... emperor, should look upon the papal power in a way very different from that in which he had regarded it when a faction leader struggling for the crown. Then the support of the Pope was indispensable. Now the autocracy of the Pope was to be feared. The Hohenstaufen ministeriales, who now surrounded the Guelfic Emperor, raised his ideals and modified his policy. Henry of Kalden, the old minister of Henry VI, was now his closest confidant, and under ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... laugh immoderately, both from his aunt's notion of the universal autocracy of her will, and from her obvious bewilderment at the technical word "Trials," which had betrayed her unconsciously into a pun, which, of all things, she abhorred. However, he wrote back politely—explained what he meant by "Trials"—begged to be excused for a neglect ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... to believe that the recent compliance of the German Government had not been made to us in good faith, and was only temporary, and by the end of 1916 it was plain that our neutral status had again been made unsafe through the ever-increasing aggressiveness of the German autocracy. There was a general agreement here with the statement of our President on October 26, 1916, that this conflict was the last great war involving the world in which we would ...
— World's War Events, Vol. II • Various
... of one hundred years the American nation that was so soon to be should be engaged in a civil contest having for its object, on the part of those who began it, the perpetuation and extension of slavery, while Russia should be threatened with such a contest because her government, an autocracy, had abolished serfdom? Many years earlier, Berkeley had predicted that Time's last and noblest offspring would be the nation that was growing up in North America; and when he died, in 1753, he would not have admitted that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... "A benevolent autocracy is the ideal government, my friend—the ideal of all supreme thinkers—a Machiavelli, a Nietzsche, a Stendhal, a Gobineau. Liberty and equality are terms mutually destructive, they cannot exist together; for, given ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... no more a real democracy in the world today. Democracy in politics has in no country led to democracy in its economic life. We still have autocracy in industry as firmly seated on its throne as theocratic king ruling in the name of a god, or aristocracy ruling by military power; and the forces represented by these twain, superseded by the autocrats of industry, have become the allies of the ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell
... perfect. Here Dickens played the testy old Baron, and took advantage of the excitement against the Czar raging in 1855 to denounce him (in a song) as no other than own cousin to the very Bear that Fortunio had gone forth to subdue. He depicted him, in his desolation of autocracy, as the Robinson Crusoe of absolute state, who had at his court many a show-day and many a high-day, but hadn't in all his dominions a Friday.[178] The bill, which attributed these interpolations to "the Dramatic Poet ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... prejudices, a tendency to decide philosophical questions by putting them to a vote, which contrast curiously with the usual dictatorial tone of philosophic writings.... A thing which simply is true, whether you like it or not, is to him as hateful as a Russian autocracy; he feels that he is escaping from a prison, made not by stone walls but by 'hard facts,' when he has humanised truth, and made it, like the police force in a democracy, the servant of the people instead of their master. The democratic ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... attainment of unity, or the ascent through all intervening labyrinths to the simplicity of a single first cause or principle. Thus in politics, even republican writers have agreed that a benevolent autocracy would insure the best administration, if there were any guarantees for its continuance, or against its gradual abuse of the powers accorded to it. This singular community elected therefore a single supreme magistrate styled Tur; he held his office nominally ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... characterize her history, Russia was for a long time deprived of any relations with civilized Europe. The necessity of concentrating all her strength on fighting the Mongolians laid the corner-stone of a sort of semi-Asiatic political autocracy. Besides, the influence of the Byzantine clergy made the nation hostile to the ideas and science of the Occident, which were represented as heresies incompatible with the orthodox faith. However, when she finally threw off ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... gratifying; but it is far more likely that it had been put to one side and purposely; in order that, since Pike was unquestionably the best man for Indian Territory, all difficulties might be left to adjust themselves, the less said about Hindman's autocracy the better it ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... easy during the war. Democracy-Autocracy; a tableau to look at. Thought had been unnecessary. In fact, the popular intelligence had legislated against it. The tableau was enough—a sublimated symbol of the little papier-mache rigmarole of their daily lives, the immemorial spectacle of Good and Evil ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... enjoyed the real independence, or the free institutions, of the northern provinces; nor had it been Italianised in the same sense as the rest of the peninsula. Despotism, which assumed so many forms in Italy, was here neither the tyranny of a noble house, nor the masked autocracy of a burgher, nor yet the forceful sway of a condottiere. It had a dynastic character, resembling the monarchy of one of the great European nations, but modified by the peculiar conditions of Italian statecraft. Owing to this dynastic ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... demand of the Inter-Allied Conference for a meeting with the German workingmen, convinced that such a meeting will promote the cause of democracy, and will encourage the German people to throw off the military autocracy that now oppresses them. We join our pledge to that of the Inter-Allied Conference that, this done, as far as in our power, we shall not permit the German people to be made the victims of ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... Requests were developed to keep in order his powerful subjects and give poor men protection against them. Their civil law procedure, influenced by Roman imperial maxims, served to enhance the royal power and dignity, and helped to build up the Tudor autocracy. ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... the things that have served to convince us that the Prussian autocracy was not and could never be our friend is that from the very outset of the present war it has filled our unsuspecting communities, and even our offices of government, with spies and set criminal intrigues everywhere afoot against our national unity ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... porter was at the gate, barring my passage until I could exhibit a ticket. I had not taken time to purchase one: the train was fuming and threatening the belated passengers with a series of false starts. Surprised into rudeness, and quite forgetting that my appearance warranted no airs of autocracy, I ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... period—the year of 1882—in which Emma Goldman, then in her 13th year, arrived in St. Petersburg. A struggle for life and death between the autocracy and the Russian intellectuals swept the country. Alexander II had fallen the previous year. Sophia Perovskaia, Zheliabov, Grinevitzky, Rissakov, Kibalchitch, Michailov, the heroic executors of the death sentence upon the tyrant, had then entered the Walhalla of ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... conditions, a formula has now been discovered which it is hoped will serve many a long year. By securing by extra-legal means the return of a "majority" in the House of Representatives the fiction of national support of the autocracy has been re-invigorated, and the doctrine laid down that what is good for every other advanced people in the world is bad for the Japanese, who must be content with what is granted them and never question the superior intelligence of ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... Templars, the pope and the Church set the first great example of the suppression of a religious order to kings, who before long bettered the precedent given them. The sordid story is mainly important to our history as an example of the completeness of the influence of the papal autocracy, and of the submissiveness of clergy and laity to its behests. It was a lurid commentary on the practical working of the ecclesiastical system that the business of condemning an innocent order first brought into England the papal inquisitor and the use of torture. Yet the whole process ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... disagreement between the aristocracy and the democracy was only partially healed by the alliance of the two against an autocracy. Cosimo was bent upon being absolute ruler of Tuscany, and the development of his will raised against him and his Government constant opposition. He meant to keep his hand tight hold of the bridle of his charger "Tyranny," and to spur him on where ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... reasonable enough to know that the United States can keep out of the melee without losing any moral prestige. The only hostile criticism of America that I heard came from doctrinaires who saw the war as a conflict between autocracy and democracy, and if you grant that this point of view is the right one, these thinkers have a right to despise us. But the Frenchman knows that the Allies represent ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... and influence, when he was regarded as the Liberator of Europe, he granted a Constitution to Poland, based on liberal if not democratic principles (June 21, 1815). But after a time he reverted to absolutism. Autocracy at home, a mystical and sentimental alliance with autocrats abroad, were incompatible with the indulgence of liberal proclivities. "After the Congresses of Aix-la-Chapelle and Troppau," writes M. Rambaud (History of Russia, 1888, ii. 384), "he was no ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... gratified. If the lines of party are drawn with an inflexible rigidity; and if the majority insist on the full exercise of their powers, parliamentary government may become a despotism as crushing as the worst autocracy—a despotism which is perhaps even more dangerous as the sense of responsibility is diminished by being divided. If, on the other hand, the latitude conceded to individual opinion is excessive, Parliament inevitably ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... is, as Mill insists, the most formidable, searching, and irresistible of all. Under an autocracy or oligarchy, public opinion is the protector of the injured, and imposes limits on arbitrary power. Assassination is the resort of the victim driven to frenzy by individual oppression, and tempers ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... define a free nation as one where public opinion has no limits,[1] where no one is prevented from the expression of belief about the action of others, and no one is exempted from the pressure of opinion. Conversely an autocracy is one where there is but little room for the public use of praise and but little power to blame, especially in regard to the rulers. But in all societies, whether free or otherwise, people are constantly praising, constantly blaming one another, whether over the teacups or ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... personal dislike of bad manners was the fundamental antagonism between the Italian and the Prussian ideal. The Italians were pledged to Liberty, the Germans to Autocracy, bulwarked by militarism. In their long struggle for independence the Italians had had the sympathy of the best Englishmen, and in Palmerston, and especially in Lord John Russell, they found very powerful political helpers. But never since Bismarck took the helm of Prussia ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... efficiency and the democracy of a community depend upon the extent and the kind of education it affords to its people. Autocratic Germany had a most thorough-going system of education, but a system that made autocracy possible. The common people were trained to be efficient workers, and thus to contribute to the national strength; but they were trained TO SUBMIT to authority, and not to exercise control over it. The kind of education that develops leaders was given only to ...
— Community Civics and Rural Life • Arthur W. Dunn
... endless line of battle, have struck their blow against the common enemy. They have had the added privilege of assisting in the most tragic, and at the same time the most hopeful, upheaval for which the war has been the occasion. Autocracy in Russia is gone. A new democracy is in the struggle of its birth. The graves before us are tangible evidence of the deep and sympathetic concern of the older democracies. These men have given their lives to help Russia. They ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... Presidency, and comes often to be the latter's superior in practical force. Those wise ones who designed the government intended the House of Representatives to be a republic. Through its own groveling abjections, however, it long ago sunk to an autocracy with the Speaker in the role of autocrat. It sold its birthright for no one knows what mess of pottage to pass its slavish days beneath a tyranny of the gavel. The Speaker settles all things. No measure is proposed, no bill passes, no member speaks except ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... some moral support in the presence of his wife, and, later on, of his son and heir. But no link of sympathy and understanding could exist between the haughty and taciturn Spaniard and his genial subjects, between the bigoted incarnation of autocracy and the liberty-loving population of the Netherlands, so that even the personal element contributed to render the ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... France, by this time had dropped medicine. Bolshevism had arisen there in the form of the Commune, and he had fought it so desperately that he had been sentenced to death. He hated kings, and he also hated the autocracy of the ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... of the little country town lost in the immensity of the Texas prairie, Brann saw the world, and saw it with the blazing eye of righteous wrath. He saw the sins of high society in New York and London, the rottenness of autocracy in Russia, the world war boiling beneath the surface in the cauldron of Europe's misery. But he saw also, with mingled humor and anger, the trivial passing events of his own state and nation and the local affairs of his home town. Of all these things, ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... a military organization as complex in character as it is perfect in machinery. Never before has any nation been so elaborately organized for imposing her will upon the other nations of the world; and her vast resources of military strength are wielded by an autocracy which is peculiarly adapted for the conduct of war. It is true that Germany's long preparation has enabled her to utilize her whole resources from the very commencement of the war, while our policy is one of gradually increasing our effective forces. It might be said with truth ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... in fourteen chapters, among other questions, the Territorial Adjustments which seem necessary to the permanent peace of Europe, the problem of German Autocracy and Militarism, and the proposals of Retaliation; and makes, in the spirit of an optimist tempered by experience, practical suggestions for the future organization of peace. A feature of the book is the historical parallelism ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... failed without being reviled. Together, and in company with others, as the astronomer Airy, they saw the black country and the toiling squads, in whom Carlyle, through all his shifts from radical democracy to Platonic autocracy, continued to take a deep interest; on other days they had pleasant excursions to the green fields and old towers of Warwickshire. On occasion of this visit he came in contact with De Quincey's review of Meister, and in recounting ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... resembling Judaea, whose national greeting was "Peace"; whose prophet Ezekiel proclaimed in words of flame and thunder God's judgment upon the great military empires of antiquity; whose mediaeval poet Kalir has left in our New Year liturgy what might be almost a contemporary picture of a brazen autocracy "that planned in secret, performed in daring." And, as a matter of fact, some of these passages are torn from their context. The pictures of Messianic prosperity, for example, are invariably set in an ethical framework: ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill
... took advantage of his august position to advocate Christianity at the end of the war, we frightened the life out of him, and he had to say that he had been "woefully misunderstood." In spite of this, the nation, being cut off from direct communication with foreign autocracy and reaction, is in my view very likely to be less unwise than the Government at the supreme crisis. And even if it isn't, even at the worst, it is and should be the master and not the ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... unhappy, and completely aimless. She and her daughter spent their summers three miles from Grimsby Head, in an estate with a gate-house and a conservatory and a golf course and a house with three towers and other architecture. When America becomes a military autocracy she will be Lady Carter or ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... different Serbia is from all her neighbours was clearly proved just by this war. She is alone in the Near East fighting on the side of the democratic England and France against Prussian militarism and autocracy. That does not happen accidentally, but because of the Serbian democratic spirit. This spirit is very attractive for all the Slavs who are under the Austro-Hungarian rule. Many of them are looking towards powerful ...
— Serbia in Light and Darkness - With Preface by the Archbishop of Canterbury, (1916) • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... a far more capable ruler than they had bargained for, and he not only united all the Bulgars north and south of the Danube into one dominion, but also forcibly repressed the whims of the nobles and re-established the autocracy and the hereditary monarchy. Having finished with his enemies in the north, he turned his attention to the Greeks, with no less success. In 809 he captured from them the important city of Sofia (the Roman Sardica, known to the Slavs as Sredets), which is to-day the capital of Bulgaria. The loss ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... emotion. The fear that had come on the night of her arrival pressed closely on Karen then, but, more closely still, the pain for Tante. Tante's clear dignity was blurred; her image, in its rebuffed and ineffectual autocracy, became hovering, uncertain, piteous. And, in seeing and feeling all these things, as if with a lacerated sensitiveness, Karen was aware that, in this last week of her life, she had grown much older. She felt herself in some ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... democracy "personal liberty" is an empty phrase, bursting with nothingness. Personal liberty is to be enjoyed only under a benevolent autocracy. It is contained wholly in the code of ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... if ridiculous and self-interested "grandstander," as he always said, "always looking out for Teddy, you bet," but good for the country, inspiring it with visions. Rockefeller was wholly admirable as a force driving the country on to autocracy, oligarchy, possibly revolution. Ditto Hanna, ditto Morgan, ditto Harriman, ditto Rogers, unless checked. Peary might have, and again might not have, discovered the North Pole. He refused to judge. Old "Doc" Cook, the pseudo discoverer, who appeared very shortly before he died, only drew forth ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... time was an equally remarkable man, Count Tolstoi, the iron representative of iron Toryism, of perfect honesty, in whom energy and strength were not destroyed by prejudice. He was the most ideal minister of despotism that autocracy has produced, representing the principles of order and authority with more ability than is generally found in leaders of his type. He was intensely hated by the Universities and by most of those, chiefly Liberals, with whom he lived. But although he is said by his terrorism ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... course our own method of agreement of many instances is not a real method. In Continuity, all things must have resemblances with all other things. Anything has any quasi-identity you please. Some time ago conscription was assimilated with either autocracy or democracy with equal facility. Note the need for a dominant to correlate to. Scarcely anybody said simply that we must have conscription: but that we must have conscription, which correlates with democracy, which was taken as a base, or something ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... great advantages. On the other hand, the Prince Regent's aversion to popular education or anything that might savor of democracy and the greed of his followers for place and distinction alienated his colonial subjects. They could not fail to contrast autocracy in Brazil with the liberal ideas that had made headway elsewhere in Spanish America. As a consequence a spirit of unrest arose which boded ill for ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... the Church, by chivalry, by feudal customs. Then came a further phase. After the nations had been molded, their monarchies and dynasties were established. Feudalism passed by slow degrees into various forms of more or less defined autocracy. In Italy and Germany numerous principalities sprang into pre-eminence; and though the nation was not united under one head, the monarchical principle was acknowledged. France and Spain submitted to a despotism, by right of which the king could say, 'L'Etat ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... something greater than admiration. I almost worshiped him. His will was law to me in everything. His slightest wish I regarded as a behest. His talents amazed me. But I thought him not only the cleverest, but the best of men. It seemed to me right that such a man should be autocratic. A beneficent autocracy became my ideal of government. That my rector's will should be law to his wife, his servants, his curates, his organist, his choir, to those attached to his schools, to those who benefited by the charities he organized, seemed to me more than right and proper. ...
— The Dweller on the Threshold • Robert Smythe Hichens |
