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Polity   /pˈɑləti/   Listen
Polity

noun
(pl. polities)
1.
The form of government of a social organization.  Synonym: civil order.
2.
A politically organized unit.
3.
Shrewd or crafty management of public affairs.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Polity" Quotes from Famous Books



... operate with bullets and bayonets, when it had been fondly hoped that the ballot would ever be a sufficiently formidable weapon in the hand of the American citizen, and that he never would have to become the citizen-soldier in a civil contest. Had Hamilton been allowed to shape our national polity, it would have worked as successfully for ages as that financial system which he formed has ever worked, and which has never been departed from without the result being most injurious to the country. At this day, when events ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various

... reactionary commonwealth, this fanatical representative of early Germanic use and wont, is possessed of a clearness of self-consciousness, a hard and positive clearness of understanding, such as is to be found nowhere else in the Middle Ages and very rarely at all in any polity. ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker

... envoy, smiling and bowing to Tito, "to think that her affections must overrule the good of the State, and that nobody is to be beheaded who is anybody's cousin; but such a view is not to be encouraged in the male population. It seems to me your Florentine polity is much ...
— Romola • George Eliot

... example, and an unjust one for women, of taxation without representation, which our fathers declared to be tyranny; and which is contrary to the genius of our republican institutions, and to the general polity of this commonwealth. Women are also governed, while they have no direct voice in the government, and made subject to laws affecting their property, their personal rights and liberty, in whose ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various

... impossible to draw together in common activity and worship the different sects of the same German race and language; the effort to unite in one organization peoples of different language, but of substantially the same doctrine and polity, was equally futile. It seemed as if minute sectarian division and subdivision was to be forced upon American Christianity as a law of its ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon

... divided into different parts civil polity. For in the shield which was made in imitation of the whole world by Hephaestus (that is, spiritual power) he imagined two cities to be contained: one enjoying peace and happiness; the other at war, and ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch

... battles of Sobraon and Chillianwallah. Later, the restless genius of travel had taken hold on him, leading him far eastward into China, and northward across the Himalayan snows. He had dwelt among strange peoples and looked on strange gods. He had hunted strange beasts, moreover, and learnt their polity and their ways. He had seen the bewildering fecundity of nature in the tropic jungle, and her barren and terrible beauty in the out-stretch of the naked desert. And the thought of all this set Dickie's imagination on fire. The ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet

... things. Scientific discipline did nothing for him; he had never undergone it, and he never felt its value. He was an artist in social construction; and if right ideas, or the suggestion of right ideas, sometimes came into his head, about history, about human progress, about a stable polity, such ideas were not the products of trains of ordered reasoning; they were the intuitional glimpses of the poet, and consequently as they professed to be in real matter, even the right ideas were as often as ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 10: Auguste Comte • John Morley

... produces cotton, rice, and sugar, is no reason for her seceding from the Union, but exactly the reverse. These diversified interests, we repeat, create interrelation and dependence, unitizing the commercial and industrial polity; and the political organization should, as far as possible, be coextensive therewith. There are physical necessities which prevent the formation and maintenance of a comprehensive political organization in the earlier ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... decline to be divided into two or more hostile camps by "issues" carefully concocted by political harlequins, then will the combined wisdom, purified of partisan prejudice, evolve the best possible national polity. ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... is so plain, I could send my reader to Bracton, Fortescue, and the author of the Mirrour, and others, writers that cannot be suspected to be ignorant of our government, or enemies to it. But I thought Hooker alone might be enough to satisfy those men, who relying on him for their ecclesiastical polity, are by a strange fate carried to deny those principles upon which he builds it. Whether they are herein made the tools of cunninger workmen, to pull down their own fabric, they were best look. This I am sure, their civil policy is so new, so dangerous, and so destructive ...
— Two Treatises of Government • John Locke

... belong to the county of Cumberland and province of New York, and thereupon proceeding to reorganize the town, agreeably to the laws of that province. This change, however, does not appear to have been followed by any material alteration of their internal polity, or to have been productive of any great civil discord, till about the time of the opening of the American revolution; when the town became the prey of contending factions, of so fierce and lawless a character as to convert this ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson

... living and healthy, in as far as it was in harmony with certain spiritual, unseen, and everlasting laws of God; perhaps, as certain Alexandrian philosophers would have held, in as far as it was a pattern of that ideal constitution and polity after which man was created, the city of God which is eternal in the Heavens. If so, may we not suspect of this Alexandria that it was its own fault if it became a merely physical phenomenon; and that it stooped to become a part of nature, and took its place among ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley

... the hands of the monarchy. England thus reorganised now set itself to contest the political superiority of France in a long and bloody war, which consequently became a struggle between two rival forms of polity; and while the first of these bore sway over the rest of Europe, the other attained to complete realisation in its island-home, and called forth at a later time manifold imitations on the Continent also, when the Continent was torn by civil strife. ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke

... not called on to defend the methods of a generation ago. The study of Greek is no longer an exercise in the study of linguistics or the inspection of specimens of an obsolete literature, but the acquaintance with historic thought, habits, and polity, with a portion of the continuous history of the human mind, which has a vital ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... reason but also by experience, which had discovered and proved how difficult and even impossible was the conservation of those islands, unless the cost were very greatly in excess of the profit—although, in this matter, one should first decide whether [questions of] honor and polity counted for anything. ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 27 of 55) • Various

... of Timaeus, when even men like Xenophon and Plato—the very demi-gods of literature—though they had sat at the feet of Socrates, sometimes forgot themselves in the pursuit of such paltry conceits. The former, in his account of the Spartan Polity, has these words: "Their voice you would no more hear than if they were of marble, their gaze is as immovable as if they were cast in bronze; you would deem them more modest than the very maidens in their eyes."[1] To speak of the ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus

... consequences of his revolt against authority, ought to consider the inevitable results that would flow from the general adoption of the principles which he professes, ought to decide whether or not he really desires to overthrow the polity under which he lives, ought to ask if he and his fellows are able to face with any serious hope of success the colossal task of constructing a new society on the ruins of the old. Now the historic rebels to whom I have referred above by way of example—the ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw

... actually a good deal more powerful than it is in Spain, or even in Austria. Its acts are wholly above public discussion; it makes and breaks public officials; it holds the newspapers in terror; it influences the police and the courts; it is strong enough to destroy and silence any man who objects to its polity. But this is not all. The Catholic Church, at worst, is an organization largely devoted to perfectly legitimate and even laudable purposes, and it is controlled by a class of men who are largely above popular passion, and intelligent enough to see beyond ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan

... which, by Divine revelation, I have ordained for you; that is, in case you withal meditate upon the wisdom that is in them. I am going from you myself, rejoicing in the good things you enjoy; and I recommend you to the wise conduct of your law, to the becoming order of your polity, and to the virtues of your commanders, who will take care of what is for your advantage. And that God, who has been till now your Leader, and by whose goodwill I have myself been useful to you, will not put ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus

... fulfilment of this end they were located in a favored country, separated from other nations by mountains, deserts, and seas, and yet capable by cultivation of sustaining a great population, while they were governed by a polity tending to keep them a distinct, isolated, and peculiar people. To the descendants of Ham and Japhet were given cities, political power, material civilization; but in the tents of Shem religion was to dwell. "From first to last," says Geikie, "the intellect of the Hebrew dwelt ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord

... revivalist out of him. The purified soul takes the Bible for his "credo" and loves God's children of whatever name with a generosity that overtops every inadequate consideration. The sanctified are united by a common cause and a common experience. Opinions may differ as to ecclesiastical polity or the mode of baptism, but the white cord of sanctification is "the bond of perfectness" which makes them one bundle. Yale and Cornell are rivals with their "eights" and "shells" on American Hudson, but men from both colleges join forces to beat the Britishers at Henley. Holiness ...
— The Heart-Cry of Jesus • Byron J. Rees

... of things continued until the war of the Revolution. When the Lenni Lenape formally asserted their independence, and fearlessly declared that they were again men. But, in a government so peculiarly republican as the Indian polity, it was not at all times an easy task to restrain its members within the rules of the nation. Several fierce and renowned warriors of the Mohegans, finding the conflict with the whites to be in ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper

... Book Room), is a brief treatise on the nature of Church Government, defending the right of visible church organization against prevailing latitudinarian and transcendental views on the one hand, and maintaining liberal principles of polity against the high claims of Episcopacy and the assumptions of the clergy on the other. The argument is conducted with candor and moderation, though not without spirit, and may be studied to advantage by all who would understand the points ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various

... sacredness of the principle of right and of liberty is victoriously asserted in such a way as never before was any great principle. The most criminal and ignominious enterprise recorded in history, the attempt to make human bondage the corner-stone of an independent polity, this attempt ending in breaking the corner-stone to atoms, and by the hands of the architects and builders themselves. Satan's revolt was virtuous, when compared with that of the Southern slavers, and Satan's revolt ended ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski

... 'Hail, sacred Polity, by Freedom reared! 'Hail, sacred Freedom, when by Law restrained! 'Without you what were man? A grovelling herd, 'In darkness, wretchedness, and want enchained. 'Sublimed by you, the Greek and ...
— The Minstrel; or the Progress of Genius - with some other poems • James Beattie

... her heart, Then get what knowledge ear and eye Glean chancewise in the life-long mart. And certain others, few and fit, Attach them to the Court, and see The Country's best, its accent hit, And partly sound its polity. ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various

... the equality of the sexes, as regards all the enjoyments as well as the work of life, is the universal rule; and among those of them in which the social instincts have been especially implanted, and whose systems of polity are like the most civilized polities of men, the females of the race are treated with a strange mixture of love, loyalty, ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins

... number of those specialists who are generally listened to, Virchow raises his voice as a leading authority, and brings forward the principles that he proclaimed in his speech at Munich as the surest guarantees for the freedom of science in the modern polity? Article XX. of the Prussian Charter, and Sec. 152 of the Code of the German Empire, say, "Science and its doctrines are free." And Virchow's first step, according to the principles he now declares, must be a motion ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel

... submerged beneath the flood of invasion. Save the material evidence of the footprints of "the masters of the world" in the Roman roads, Roman wall, and some other structures, there is no trace of the Romans in England. Their polity, laws, and language alike vanished, and did not reappear for centuries, when their laws ...
— Landholding In England • Joseph Fisher

... any power, against the precedents of the past, the spirit of our people, the theory of our civil polity and the rights of individual man succeed, and make headway against free speech, and put it in jeopardy, it would convulse the very frame-work of society. There would be no time for a revolution—there would be an eruption, and fragmentary Judges, Courts and their minions would fly upward ...
— Conflict of Northern and Southern Theories of Man and Society - Great Speech, Delivered in New York City • Henry Ward Beecher

... pole, from the rising to the setting sun, from the north and from the south. In them the Most High, Incomprehensible God himself is contained and worshiped. In them the nature of celestial, terrestrial, and infernal beings is laid open. In them the laws by which every polity is governed are decreed, the offices of the celestial hierarchy are distinguished, and tyrannies of such demons are described as the ideas of Plato never surpassed, and the chair ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey

... mentions this Hezekiah a second time, and says, that "as he was possessed of so great a dignity, and was become familiar with us, so did he take certain of those that were with him, and explained to them all the circumstances of their people; for he had all their habitations and polity down in writing." Moreover, Hecateus declares again, "what regard we have for our laws, and that we resolve to endure any thing rather than transgress them, because we think it right for us to do so." Whereupon ...
— Against Apion • Flavius Josephus

... of the Kerikeri library reposed one volume of special interest. This was Marsden's copy of Hooker's "Ecclesiastical Polity," which had been publicly presented to the bishop on his arrival in Sydney. Selwyn already knew his Hooker almost by heart, but the gift stood as a token of the spiritual relationship which united ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas

... are imported from the British colonies, whilst others are apparently the inventions of the unknown and irresponsible Abbe Sieyes, who is the ingenious constitution-maker of the Cabinet. But the new polity as a whole resembles in its essence neither the American Commonwealth nor the Canadian Dominion, nor the Government either of New Zealand or of any other self-governing colony. It is an attempt—its admirers may think an original and ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey

... an effect of M. de Voltaire's Judgment. He contented himself with giving his opinion of them in general Reflexions, the Cast of which is entirely new, and which prove that he had made this Part of the British Polity his particular Study. Besides, how was it possible for a Foreigner to pierce thro' their Politicks, that gloomy Labyrinth, in which such of the English themselves as are best acquainted with it, confess daily that they are bewilder'd ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey

... panta rhei—It is the burden of Hegel on the one hand, to whom nature, and art, and polity, and philosophy, aye, and religion too, each in its long historic series, are but so many conscious movements in the secular process of the eternal mind; and on the other hand of Darwin and Darwinism, for which "type" itself properly is not but is only always becoming. The bold paradox of Heraclitus ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater

... themselves, or by persons chosen by themselves to represent them, was the distinguishing characteristic of British freedom and of the constitution; that the people of that most ancient colony had uninterruptedly enjoyed the right of being thus governed by their own laws respecting their internal polity and taxation; that this right had never been forfeited, nor in any other way given up, but had been constantly recognized by the King and people of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various

... the State on a vast basis, and deeply implanted virtue; and Our subjects, by their unanimity in their great loyalty and filial affection, have in all ages shown these qualities in perfection. Such is the essential beauty of Our national polity, and such, too, is the true spring of Our educational system. You, Our beloved subjects, be filial to your parents, affectionate to your brothers, be loving husbands and wives, and truthful to your friends. Conduct yourselves with modesty, and ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

... accepted as fixed and settled, was, where not actually challenged, silently ignored. Nor did the assertion admit of denial; for, looking back through the vista of threescore years, of the principles of what may be called "public polity" then advanced as indisputable, few to-day meet with general acceptance. To review the record from this point of ...
— 'Tis Sixty Years Since • Charles Francis Adams

... fluctuating. No person understood the Indian usages better than Zeisberger. His biographer has well described the difference which existed in this respect between the Iroquois and their neighbors. "The Algonkins," he writes, "knew nothing of regular government. They had no system of polity; there was no unity of action among them. The affairs even of a single tribe were managed in the loosest manner." After briefly, but accurately, delineating the Iroquois system of councils, he adds: "Thus they became both a political and a military power among the aborigines; the ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale

... John was of God or of man. The Lord's affirmation, "Verily I say unto you, That the publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you," was condemnatory of the corrupt though sanctimonious polity of the hierarchy throughout. It was not wholly without intimation of possible reformation, however. He did not say that the repentant sinners should enter, and the priestly hypocrites stand forever excluded; for the ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage

... attempts at reformation in the Church, large and small, had failed, as had those of the early fifteenth century to reform its government, leaving the Church as thoroughly mediaeval in doctrine and in practical religion as it was in polity. It was the one power, therefore, belonging to the Middle Ages which still stood unaffected by the new forces and opposed to them. In other directions the changes had been many; here nothing had been changed. And its resisting power was very great. Endowed with large wealth, strong in ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY

... political development does not always stop at the Nation-State. Further growth, however, is extra-national in character; it may either take the parasitical form of one nation imposing its will and its "culture" upon other nations, or it may assume the proportions of that highest type of polity yet known to mankind, a commonwealth of nations freely associating together within the confines of a single ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,

... polity what is seemly; justice weighs and decides, polity surveys and orders; justice refers to the individual, ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou

... The letter had come upon the Saint Francois, and it brought My Darling Hope into intimate relations with me, for I uncovered to her that her wandering boy had become a resident of my own country, and revealed some of the mysteries of our polity. ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien

... cut, by the Six Nations.[679] On the northwestern coast of North America slavery was far more developed than east of the Rocky Mountains. In Oregon and Washington slavery was interwoven with the social polity. Slaves were also harshly treated, as property, not within the limits of humanity. For a man to kill a half dozen of his own slaves was a sign of generous magnanimity on his part. One tribe stole captives from its weaker neighbors. Hence the slave trade ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner

... church in the United Netherlands was the Reformed Church. Its polity was that of Geneva or of Presbyterianism. The minister and ruling or lay elders of the local church formed its consistory, corresponding to the Scottish or American kirk session. The next higher power, administrative or judicial, resided in the classis, consisting of all the ministers ...
— Narrative of New Netherland • Various

... even the laws were swayed;—whilst at the same time the singular spectacle was exhibited amidst all this confusion of the flourishing of commerce, and the protection and encouragement of letters and arts. Never was the commercial spirit so well reconciled to the nobler principles of social polity as in Florence. It tended there to union and permanence and elevation,—not as the overbalance of it in England is now doing, to dislocation, change and moral degradation. The intensest patriotism reigned in these communities, but confined and attached exclusively ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge

... high ideal, he is intolerant of the somewhat tedious ways and means by which the ideal is to be reached. With his eye fixed on the Perfect, he makes no allowance for the imperfectness of those who are struggling toward it. There is a pleasant passage in Hooker's "Ecclesiastical Polity" in which I find great comfort: "That which the Gospel of Christ requireth is the perpetuity of virtuous duties, not the perpetuity of exercise or action, but disposition perpetual, and practise as often ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers

... falsehood; whether, on the whole, it had been better or worse for the cause of Christianity, had no such organization ever existed; whether her claims be groundless or well-founded, are questions foreign to our purpose. But that her polity is the most powerful—the best adapted to the ends she has in view—of all that man has hitherto invented, there can be no doubt. Her missionaries have been more numerous and more successful, ay, and more devoted, than those of any other church. They have ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel

... Germany, the interesting activities of the Catholic Church, have perhaps not yet changed, but have at least disturbed the mind of the north, and ours, a northern people's, with it. The unity, the passionate patriotism, the close oligarchic polity, the very silence of the English has arrested the eyes of France. By a law which is universal where bodies are bound in one system, an extreme of separation has wrought its own remedy and the return towards a closer union is ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc

... the unstable element with something restless and even shifty in the lords of the sea. But there was certainly in the genesis, if not in the later generations of our mercantile aristocracy, a thing only too mercantile; something which had also been urged against a yet older example of that polity, something called Punica fides. The great Royalist Strafford, going disillusioned to death, had said, "Put not your trust in princes." The great Royalist Bolingbroke may well be said to have retorted, "And least of all ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton

... philosophical importance, viz., whether the early civilizers of Greece were foreigners or Greeks, and whether the Egyptians more especially assisted to instruct the ancestors of a race that have become the teachers and models of the world, in the elements of religion, of polity, and ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... to conceive and to respect than to foresee or to secure the necessary means to put it into effect. Perhaps the perfect symmetry of the plan, the over-sanguine hopes of the man who framed it, have even proved some hindrance to its rapid spread. It has seemed, like Dante's polity in the De Monarchia, to take its place rather among the utopias than the practical schemes of reform, and when men saw the infinite complexity of the problems and met the living lions in the path, they suffered the comparative depression which we have noticed as a feature ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various

... of the church polity, except the doctrine of polygamy, and what is published over his name is generally the production of some of his counsellors. Section 130 of the "Book of Doctrine and Covenants," headed "Important Items of Instruction, given by Joseph the Prophet, ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn

... countrymen, whate'er is left to us Of ancient heritage— Of manners, speech, of humours, polity, The limited horizon of our stage— Old love, hope, fear, All this I fain would fix upon the page; That so the coming age, Lost in the empire's mass, Yet haply longing for their fathers, here May see, as in a glass, What they held dear— May say, ''Twas ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... his command to ascertain the date, proximately at least, of each particular book; that he may thus connect it with the development of Christianity in the threefold line of doctrine, practice, and polity. ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows

... twilight of human society, every woman (owing to the value attached to her by men, combined with her inferiority in muscular strength) was found in a state of bondage to some man. Laws and systems of polity always begin by recognising the relations they find already existing between individuals. They convert what was a mere physical fact into a legal right, give it the sanction of society, and principally aim at the substitution of public and organized ...
— The Subjection of Women • John Stuart Mill

... conscious of thy promised throne, Intent to grace that destiny sublime; Thou sought'st to make the historic page thine own, And win the treasures of recorded time; The forms of polity, the springs of power, Exploring still with inexhausted zeal; Still, the pole-star which led thy studious hour Through Thought's unfolding tracts—thy Country's weal! While Fancy, radiant with unearthly ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent

... the Old World ever deign to glance at our civil polity, they will learn that taxation is the only sure and certain cure for pauperism, and we may soon look for their political economists to render thanks to the "friends" of the former slave for this discovery of a specific for the most ancient ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee

... doing whatever he pleases; he knows that it does not follow that because a point of morals or of policy is obvious to him it will be obvious to the nation, or even to his own friends; and it is the strength of a democratic polity that there are so many minds to be consulted and brought to agreement, and that nothing can be wisely done for which the thought, and a good deal more than the thought, of the country, its sentiment and its purpose, ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various

... this part of the earth were of the great Algonquin family, and the tribes with which the colonists had now to do were drawn, probably by a polity based on blood ties, into a loose confederation within the larger mass. Newport was "told that the name of the river was Powhatan, the name of the chief Powhatan, and the name of the people Powhatans." But it seemed that the chief Powhatan was not at this village but at another and a larger ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston

... importunate—to find some unity of the spirit in which we can all dwell together in peace. Some have hoped for unity in the sphere of economics, and have thought that international finance and commerce would build the foundations of an international polity. Their hopes have had to sleep, and a year of war has shown that 'a synchronized bank-rate and reacting bourses' imply no further unity. Some again may hope for unity in the field of science, and may trust that the collaboration of the ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various

... women to the franchise. All these things are dear to the antiquary, the historian, and (perhaps we should add) the pedant, as witnessing to the unbroken continuity of our constitutional forms, though the substance of our polity has been altered beyond ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell

... surviving from past ages of intellectual growth are the chief obstacles in the path of progress. Mr. Banerjea's tales contain many references to magic—a pseudo-science which clings to the world's religions and social polity. It is doubtful whether the most civilised of us has quite shaken off the notion that mysterious virtues may be transmitted without the impetus of will-power. Latin races are haunted by dread of the Evil Eye; advertisements ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea

... outset there may be difficulties and opposition, but patience and perseverance will in the end bring their reward. And if the warrior rejoices in the number of his victories, the patriot in the extension of his country's liberties, the statesman in the success of his peculiar polity, and the philanthropist in the mitigation of human woes, how much purer and stronger must be the joy of the man who has been the means of saving the lives of his fellow-creatures? Alexander, Emperor of Russia, ...
— The Hero of the Humber - or the History of the Late Mr. John Ellerthorpe • Henry Woodcock

... circulation. Bacon used both languages, but it is on English editions of his works that his fame chiefly rests. In particular we find that works on religion and theology are now produced not only in Latin, but one hundred years before Hooker would have discoursed on 'ecclesiastical polity' in the learned language, and Pascal would never have thought of using French for discussing the philosophy ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various

... and wide reasonings. Principles he rejoiced in: he worked with them as with his choicest weapons; they were the polished stones for his sling, against the Goliaths of presumption, error, and tyranny in thought or in polity, civil or ecclesiastical; but he somehow divined a principle, or got at it naked and alone, rather than deduced it and brought it to a point from an immensity of particulars, and then rendered it back so as to bind them into one cosmos. One of my young friends now dead, who afterwards went to ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown

... began their political life. The tribes broke up into smaller communities, administering their own affairs under the law they had sworn to observe, but which there was no civil power to enforce. They governed themselves without a central authority, a legislature, or a dominant priesthood; and this polity, which, under the forms of primitive society, realised some aspirations of developed democracy, resisted for above three hundred years the constant peril of anarchy and subjugation. The monarchy itself was limited by the same absence of ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... great movement we know under the name of the Reformation touched the life of the Christian Church in every one of its three great departments—doctrine, discipline, and worship. In Henry's mind, however, the question appears to have been almost exclusively one of discipline or polity. His quarrel was not with the accepted theological errors of his day, for as Defender of the Faith he covered some of the worst of them with his shield. Neither was he ill-disposed toward the methods and usages ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington

... attracted by this problem; and that, in one of her noblest works, she should have very prominently addressed herself to at least a partial solution of it. That the solution she suggests is a noble one, few who carefully consider the subject will, we think, deny. The establishment of a Jewish polity, in the true sense of the word a theocracy, where the Infinite Holiness is supreme, and in its supremacy is included a reign of justice, purity, and love;—the establishment of such a polity locally between the materialistic proclivities of the West and the psychological ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown

... town, and found the figure of it exactly done in painting in a table in their magazine, with the fortifications of it: upon the view of the whole town, it seemed a pleasant and noble city. It is of great antiquity, freedom, privileges, trade, polity, and strength, few in these parts exceeding it; not unhealthful in the situation, beautiful in the buildings, profitable in the commerce, strong in the fortifications, ...
— A Journal of the Swedish Embassy in the Years 1653 and 1654, Vol II. • Bulstrode Whitelocke

... consult experience, the guide that ought always to be followed whenever it can be found. The scheme of representation, as a substitute for a meeting of the citizens in person, being at most but very imperfectly known to ancient polity, it is in more modern times only that we are to expect instructive examples. And even here, in order to avoid a research too vague and diffusive, it will be proper to confine ourselves to the few examples which are best known, and which bear the ...
— The Federalist Papers

... Thus drunkenness, debauchery, indecency, and reckless, prodigal, and filthy habits, are but little regarded, while the slightest approach to the acquisition of a liberal education, or the expression of liberal opinions on any subject connected with public polity, is rigidly prohibited. Most of the English newspapers are excluded from the empire, although if admitted they would have but few general readers among the Russians—certainly not many among the middle or lower classes. No publication on political ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne

... new conditions, the austere standard of morality which led them to look for liberty across the sea. The creed which they professed endowed them with a capacity for self-government, and taught them the arts of administration and the polity of free States. The English colonies, as they throve and extended, were not without their faults. The faith which their founders professed was a gloomy faith, and left its mark in gloom upon the characters ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy

... the states were colonies subordinate to a European nation. They were retarded in their advances by relations and compromises with other nations. The Anglo-Saxon, when translated to the wilds of America, needed only a stopping-place in order to found a peculiar and exclusive polity, which should enable him to march ever onward in his aggressions ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson

... forth. Our services have been subjected to licentious criticism, with the view of superseding some of them and of entirely remodelling others. The very elementary principles of our ritual and discipline have been rudely questioned; our apostolical polity has been ridiculed and denied." The condition of the times made these things more than ordinarily alarming, and the pressing danger was urged as a reason for the formation, by members of the Church in various parts of the kingdom, of an association on a few broad principles of ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church

... were the first-fruits. To the question that naturally rises on one's lips, 'How can one dwell on the art of the seventeenth century?—it has no charm,' Lady Dilke answers that this art presents in its organisation, from the point of view of social polity, problems of the highest intellectual interest. Throughout all its phases—to quote her own words—'the life of France wears, during the seventeenth century, a political aspect. The explanation of all changes in the social system, in letters, in the arts, in fashions even, has ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde

... ye have the inventors and the original of book-licensing ripped up and drawn as lineally as any pedigree. We have it not, that can be heard of, from any ancient state, or polity or church; nor by any statute left us by our ancestors elder or later; nor from the modern custom of any reformed city or church abroad, but from the most anti-christian council and the most tyrannous inquisition that ever ...
— Areopagitica - A Speech For The Liberty Of Unlicensed Printing To The - Parliament Of England • John Milton

... that in which the temple is situated, and must embrace the church as a whole, subjected to Gentile rule. Its being trodden under foot, indicates that the civil polity under which the church would subsist, should, during the period specified, be under the control of those who worship only in the ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss

... vigorous, eager for fresh work, and already, notwithstanding his youth, honourably regarded by naval men as an intrepid and skilful navigator. Lord Spencer, the head of a family eminently distinguished for the great administrators whom it has furnished for the furtherance of British polity, did a far wiser thing than attempting to block French researches, from suspicion, jealousy, or fear of consequences. He entertained the suggestion of Sir Joseph Banks, ordered the fitting out of the Investigator, and placed her under the command of the one man in the Navy who knew ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott

... others to put on its likeness, or else a new national type has arisen which has elements drawn from several of those races. Thus the modern Frenchman may be defined as produced by the union of blood which is mainly Celtic with a speech which is mainly Latin, and with an historical polity which is mainly Teutonic. That is, he is neither Gaul, Roman, nor Frank, but a fourth type which has drawn important elements from all three. Within modern France this new national type has so far assimilated all others as to make every thing else merely exceptional. ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph

... yoke of the South. Under the Romans, Germany, though frequently conquered, had never been subdued. She had invaded the Empire and determined its fall. In the Middle Ages the struggle had continued; not only instincts, but ideas, were in conflict; force and spirit, violence and polity, feudalism and the Catholic hierarchy, hereditary and elective forms, represented the opposition of two races. In the sixteenth century the schism long anticipated took place. The Catholic dogma had ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... their idols, and taught them our holy doctrine, and to us is due the reward and credit of it all, before any other people, even though they be churchmen: for when the beginning is good, the middle and ending is good, which the curious [i.e., attentive] reader may see in the Christian polity and justice which we showed them in ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham

... the venal, of men who are willing to bear the mortification of contiguous tyranny for bread. Thus each very opulent man generally gathers round him a circle of the poorest of the people; and the polity abounding in accumulated wealth, may be compared to a Cartesian system, each orb with a vortex of its own. Those, however, who are willing to move in a great man's vortex, are only such as must be slaves, the rabble of mankind, whose souls and whose education are adapted to servitude, and who ...
— The Vicar of Wakefield • Oliver Goldsmith

... Plutarch long ago saw the connection between the policy of Alexander and the cosmopolitan teaching of Zeno. De Alexandri Magni virtute, i. Sec. 6.] It soon became familiar, popularised by the most popular of the later philosophies of Greece; and just as it had been implied in the imperial aspiration and polity of Alexander, so it was implied, still more clearly, in the imperial theory of Rome. The idea of the Roman Empire, its theoretical justification, might be described as the realisation of the unity of the world by the establishment of a common order, the unification of mankind in a single ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury

... They were social beings, and loved stimulus like the rest of mankind, and had no public amusements. These causes are sufficient to account for the fondness for the weekly lecture; but if to them be superadded the peculiarity of their civil and religious polity, which inculcated an extraordinary affection for each other as God's chosen people destined to communion, not here only, but forever; and the isolation of their situation, cutting them off from ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams

... the art conforms. In the successful practice, for example, of the art of composition, there are manifested the principles of rhetoric; in that of housebuilding, the principles of architecture; and in that of government, the principles of civil polity. In practising any such art, moreover, the worker finds that a knowledge of these scientific principles and methods will guide him in the correct practice of the art,—a knowledge of the science of rhetoric assisting in the art of composition; of the science of architecture, in ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education

... "conscience makes cowards of us all" does human sympathy play ducks and drakes with conscience? Does it blind the eye of reason? Rather, does it not illumine and expose the fallacies of logic and the falsities of the syllogism? Do two and two make four in human polity as in mathematics? Sometimes it would not ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train

... enlightened part of the great European family. Rome, in the meantime, warned by that fearful danger from which the exterminating swords of her crusaders had narrowly saved her, proceeded to revise and to strengthen her whole system of polity. At this period were instituted the Order of Francis, the Order of Dominic, the Tribunal of the Inquisition. The new spiritual police was everywhere. No alley in a great city, no hamlet on a remote mountain, was unvisited ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... published her own narrative of adventure and travel in the steppes of the Caucasus. Great political changes have occurred since Madame de Hell's visit to that region, which have profoundly affected the character of its people and their social polity; so that her account of it, as well as her account of the Crimea, must be read with the necessary allowances. These, however, will not detract from Madame de Hell's unquestioned merit as a close and exact observer, endowed with no ordinary faculty of polished and incisive expression, ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams

... possible for the Magyars, after the restoration of the Hungarian Constitution under the Dual Settlement of 1867, to have built up a strong and elastic Transleithan polity based on the recognition of race individualities and equality of political rights for all. The non-Magyars would have accepted Magyar leadership the more readily in that they had been dragooned and oppressed by Austria during the period of reaction after 1849 as ruthlessly as the Magyars ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... has here been said. The Signor Soranzo was a man of great natural excellence of character, and the charities of his domestic circle had assisted in confirming his original dispositions. Like others of his rank and expectations, he had, from time to time, made the history and polity of the self-styled Republic his study, and the power of collective interests and specious necessities had made him admit sundry theories, which, presented in another form, he would have repulsed with ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper

... possibilities of education, he discusses the subject in a tentative spirit, as if vaguely hoping that more might, through some discovery in method, be accomplished by means of doctrine. But in the "Republic" his permanent persuasion is shown. He there bases his whole scheme of polity, as Goethe in the second part of "Wilhelm Meister" bases his scheme of education, upon a primary inspection of natures, in which it is assumed that culture must begin by humbly accepting the work of Nature, forswearing all attempt to add one jot or tittle to the native ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... speech must, no doubt, be allowed for. But if the whole of the Jewish polity was to terminate at the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus, (as is maintained by Christians,) while the world is still to continue, the magnificent promises made to Abraham, and his posterity, and to the nation, in general, afterwards, have never had any proper accomplishment of all. Because with ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English

... in the history of Spanish adventure in the New World are undoubtedly afforded by the conquests of Mexico and Peru—the two states which combined with the largest extent of empire a refined social polity, and considerable progress in the arts of civilization. Indeed, so prominently do they stand out on the great canvas of history, that the name of the one, notwithstanding the contrast they exhibit in their respective institutions, most naturally suggests that of the other; and when I ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott

... legend Samkarshana, or Bala-bhadra, is the elder brother of Krishna Vasudeva, and it does not entitle us to draw the inference that he ever received equal honour with Vasudeva. Special devotees of Samkarshana are mentioned in the Kautiliya, the famous treatise on polity ascribed to Chanakya, the minister of Chandra-gupta Maurya, who came to the throne about 320 B.C. (Engl. transl. 1st edn., p. 485). I suspect that in its present form the Kautiliya is considerably later than 320 B.C.; but in any case the existence of special votaries of Samkarshana is no proof that ...
— Hindu Gods And Heroes - Studies in the History of the Religion of India • Lionel D. Barnett

... on and upward, the discoveries and improvements are vast and wonderful, and for these physical material blessings we are entirely indebted to Science, toiling, heroic, and truly beneficent Science. In morals, public or private—religion, national or individual—or in civil polity, have we advanced? Has liberty of action kept pace with liberty of opinion? Are Americans as truly free to-day as they certainly were fifty years ago? In aesthetics do we surpass Phidias and Praxiteles, Raphael and Michael Angelo? ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson

... remark, that, conceding that in robust health he would have had it at heart as sincerely as in the recorded hours of his sickness and despondency, it may be admitted, that a struggle which, under every imprudence, seemed long to hang in doubt, with the aid of his energetic and masterly polity might, perhaps, have poised for royalty. But it is not to be concealed that the difficulty of arresting and unmaking were even greater than those of creating and consolidating the revolution. The king's aversion to ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various

... The Polity of Lacedaemon and the Polity of Athens were two of Xenophons short treatises. In the Polity of Lacedaemon the Spartan code of law and social discipline is, as Mr. Mure says in his Critical History of the Language and Literature ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... friendship, and yet never be seen; and wear the form of man, and yet fly in the face of all the laws of human nature:—and all this, in the hope of getting a belly-god burgess through a needle's eye! Oh, let him stick, by all means; and let his polity tumble in the dust; and let his epitaph and all his literature (of which my own works begin to form no inconsiderable part) be abolished even from the history of man! For a fool of this monstrosity ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh

... withal a pleasing idea of all they have done besides, and imagine their great prosperity not to have proceeded from the emulation of particular men, but from the virtue of their popular form of government, not considering the frequent seditions and civil wars produced by the imperfection of their polity." Where, first, the blame he lays to the heathen authors, is in his sense laid to the Scripture; and whereas he holds them to be young men, or men of no antidote that are of like opinions, it should seem that Machiavel, the sole retriever of this ancient prudence, is to his solid reason a beardless ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington

... will be an attack upon Germany or not will be easily deduced from the fact that the attempt on the part of Denmark to incorporate into her polity the Duchy of Schleswig was declared by the Diet in 1846 to be a declaration of war against Germany merely on account of its intimate connection ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria

... got on, he informed me that he intended speedily to leave, having received little or no encouragement, the people, in their Gothic ignorance, preferring to deal with an old-fashioned shopkeeper over the way, who, so far from possessing any acquaintance with the polity and institutions of the Chinese, did not, he believed, know that tea came from China. 'You are come for some more, I suppose?' said he. On receiving an answer in the negative he looked somewhat blank, but when I added that ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow

... polity finds its fellow nowhere in the world. It is a Government responsible neither to King nor people. It is not a democratic Government, nor an autocratic Government, nor even an oligarchical Government. It is a Government hag-ridden by forty-one administrative ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill

... most cordially for the delicacy with which you refer to the "most stedfast adherence to conviction" of one who has long been convinced that no differences in matter of polity or forms of worship ought to violate that "unity of spirit," or sever that "bond of peace," in which we should ever seek to join all those whom we believe sincerely to hold the truth as it is in Jesus.—I am always, with sincere regard, yours truly ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay

... it would have been but for that island in the distant northern sea! These were the tributary fountains, that, as time went on, swelled into the broad confluence of modern time. What was new in 1776 was the transformation of thought into actual polity. ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein

... circumstance of its rise and progress; to arrange the materials he might collect, in a more philosophical order; to interweave with them the general opinions he had formed, or was forming, on many points of polity, and national or individual character; and, if possible, to animate the whole with that warm sympathy, which, in a lover of Freedom, this most glorious of her triumphs naturally ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle

... it is a sacred duty to believe, experience is but like water dropping upon a rock, which wears it away, indeed, at last, but only in thousands of years. This theory was and is the central idea of the Jewish polity, the obstinate toughness of which has been the perplexity of Gentiles and Christians from the first dawn of its existence; it lingers among ourselves in our Liturgy and in the popular belief; and in spite of the emphatic censure of Him after whose name ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude

... any wisdom in man? We all know that perfectly fortuitous circumstances, or what appear to us to be such, produced the Federal Government, and that its strongest and least exceptionable features are precisely those which could not be withstood, much less invented, as parts of the theory of a polity. ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper

... bitterness At points of polity, or shades of faith That different show to different-seeing eyes, To shun perplexing doctrines which th' Allwise Has willed obscure, and imitate HIS life; HIS, the meek Founder of our faith, who sowed HIS earthly ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various



Words linked to "Polity" :   organisation, administration, disposal, order, authorities, organization, regime, civil order, government



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