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Chicanery   Listen
noun
Chicanery  n.  Mean or unfair artifice to perplex a cause and obscure the truth; stratagem; sharp practice; sophistry. "Irritated by perpetual chicanery."
Synonyms: Trickery; sophistry; stratagem.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Chicanery" Quotes from Famous Books



... sir, that I will ever hire myself to chicanery, and be the willing promoter of fraud? If I do, may I live hated, and ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft

... and the other two listened while the whole miserable story of the divorce, in its American aspects, unrolled. At first Roger showed a certain apathy and brevity; he might have been fulfilling a task in which he took but small interest; even the details of chicanery and corruption connected with the trial were told without heat; he said nothing bitter of his wife—avoided naming her, indeed, ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... of this financial depression were several. One morning he awoke to find himself deprived, by political chicanery, of the income of a custom-house surveyorship which for some while past had served to support his small family. Now, some men could have gone on writing stories in the intervals between surveying customs, and have thus placed an anchor to windward against the time when the political storm should ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne

... the meeting-places of the converts. Many quailed before the prospect of death, and purchased immunity from persecution by again repairing to the altars of idolatry. But, notwithstanding all the arts of intimidation and chicanery, the good cause continued to prosper. In Rome, in Antioch, in Alexandria, and in other great cities, the truth steadily gained ground; and, towards the end of the second century, it had acquired such strength even in Carthage—a place far removed from ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen

... not true? A state of society in which a man can contract a debt for a cow, or his household goods, and laugh at his creditor when he seeks his pay, on the one hand; and on the other, legislators and executives lending themselves to the chicanery of another set, that are striving to deprive a particular class of its rights of property, directly in the face of written contracts! This is straining at the gnat and swallowing the camel, with a vengeance; and all for votes! Does any one really ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper

... see that the prisoners were not liberated on insufficient bail, to see that the juries were not composed of persons hostile to the government. In the days of Charles and James, the Solicitors of the Treasury had been with too much reason accused of employing all the vilest artifices of chicanery against men obnoxious to the Court. The new government ought to have made a choice which was above all suspicion. Unfortunately Mordaunt and Delamere pitched upon Aaron Smith, an acrimonious and unprincipled ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... eccentricity, unalloyed with any baser or offensive material. Matthew Temple himself is a great original, pure Somerset, perfectly good-natured, ever ready to oblige, and although for many years the commander-in-chief of the Castle, is yet in all the chicanery of his ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle

... Executive Committee's action is equivalent to stealing the elections. The party must act sternly to rebuke this official chicanery. ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto

... subject either to the other, but the Romans labouring at the arts of peace, the Goths wielding for their defence the sword of war. Over all was to be the strong hand of the King of Goths and Romans, repressing the violence of the one nation, correcting the chicanery of the other, and from one and all exacting the strict observance of that which was the object of his daily and nightly cares, CIVILITAS. Of this civilitas—which we may sometimes translate 'good order,' sometimes 'civilisation,' sometimes ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)

... manifestations of economic slavery, of grinding the faces of the poor, of exploitation of the weak, of unfair distribution of wealth, of unjust monopoly, of unequal laws, of industrial and commercial chicanery, of disgraceful ignorance, of economic fallacies, of public corruption, of interested legislation, of want of public spirit, of vulgar boasting and chauvinism, of snobbery, of class prejudice, of respect of persons, and of a preference of the material over the spiritual. ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly

... vassals, the king of England. Whilst Edward was doing his best to bring Scotland into subjection by open war, Philip was doing his best to disturb Edward in his hold upon Aquitaine by secret intrigues and legal chicanery. Ill-feeling increased on both sides. Philip welcomed David Bruce and gave him protection in France, and in 1336 French sailors attacked English shipping and landed plunderers in the Isle of Wight. In 1337 Edward determined to resist, and the long war roughly known as the Hundred Years' War ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner

... situation of individuals. The man who bore the chief part in effecting this revolution was Philip the Fourth of France, surnamed the Beautiful, a despot by position, a despot by temperament, stern, implacable, and unscrupulous, equally prepared for violence and for chicanery, and surrounded by a devoted band of men of the sword and of men of law. The fiercest and most high-minded of the Roman Pontiffs, while bestowing kingdoms and citing great princes to his judgment-seat, was seized in his palace by armed men, and ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... the integrity of the Pontiff had now failed; and Henry saw with alarm that the thunder, which he had so long feared, was about to burst on his dominions. A plan of adjustment had been arranged between his envoys and Alexander; and to defeat the chicanery of his advisers, it was accompanied with the threat of an interdict if it were not executed within the space of forty days. He consented to see the Archbishop, and awaited his arrival in a spacious meadow near the town of Freitville on the borders of Touraine (July 22d). As soon as Becket ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various

... to the shifting of the incidence of competition. Socialists tell us that hitherto the labourer has not had his fair share of the produce of industry. The existing system has sanctioned a complicated chicanery, by which one class has been enabled to live as mere bloodsuckers and parasites upon the rest of society. Property is the result of theft, instead of being, as Economists used to assure us, the reward of thrift. It is hoped that these evils may be remedied by a reconstruction ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen

... King, sad sooth! in this grim decree Had a motive low and mean;— 'Twas a royal piece of chicanery To harry and spite the Queen; For King though he was, and beyond compare, He had ruled all things save one— Then blamed the Queen that his only heir ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley

... of the real article. The classic mythology had a large and varied assortment of deities, from which every man could select a supply to suit himself. Thus the lawyer could place a bust of Mercury, the god of chicanery, in his office, and so secure the patronage of the god and save the expense of a tin sign announcing his profession. The editor could dedicate his paper to the service of Janus, the two-faced deity, and thus pursue his business without perilling his reputation for religious consistency. ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, Issue 10 • Various

... very often made the pencillers draw long faces. But the case of the Turf Odysseus is not by any means typical; the man stands almost alone, and his like will not be seen again for many a day. The rule is that the backer must come to grief in the long run, for every resource of chicanery, bribery, and resolute keenness is against him. He is there to be plundered; it is his mission in life to lose, or how could the bookmakers maintain their mansions and carriages? It matters little what the backer's capital may be at starting, he will lose it ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman

... disposal of the government. Moreover, there is a manifest disposition, on the part of architects everywhere, to help in this matter all they can. The danger dwells in the possibility that their advice will not be heeded, their services not be fully utilized, but through chicanery, ignorance, or inanition, we will relapse into the tentative, "expensively provisional" methods which have governed the housing of workers hitherto. Even so, architects will doubtless recapture, and ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon

... and Religion, Wesley, like Brown and Hartley, draws up a striking indictment of the manners of the time. He denounces the liberty and effeminacy of the nobility; the widespread immorality; the chicanery of lawyers; the jobbery of charities; the stupid self-satisfaction of Englishmen; the brutality of the Army; the indolence and preferment humbug of the Church—the true cause, as he says, of the ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen

... the part of the French Government. He was assured that his worth and his efforts in behalf of his country's interests were understood and appreciated. He returned to the United States with the firm conviction, which his Republican friends shared, that he had been made the victim of Federalist chicanery. In the following year he published an elaborate defense which served admirably as a popular campaign document in the next ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson

... their promised word, those two rogues declared they meant to give me up my farm, and would not keep it any longer upon lease. I not unnaturally complained, but they retorted by ostentatiously unfolding the deed; and I found myself without any defense against their chicanery. When it came to this, I told them that Duke and Prince of Florence would not suffer folk to be so infamously massacred in their cities. That menace worked so forcibly upon their minds that they once more despatched Raffaello Schegcia, ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini

... of the passage of the Act of Congress of March 3, 1873,[50] under cover of which the Comstock Society still carries on its campaigns of snouting and suppression, is a classical tale of Puritan impudence and chicanery. Comstock, with Jesup and other rich men backing him financially and politically,[51] managed the business. First, a number of spectacular raids were made on the publishers of such pornographic books as "The Memoirs of Fanny Hill" and "Only a Boy." Then the newspapers were filled with inflammatory ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken

... dissimulation could not delude the sagacity of Count Markof, who was, therefore, soon less liked by the Minister than by the First Consul. All kind of low, vulgar, and revolutionary chicanery was made use of to vex or to provoke the Russian Ambassador. Sometimes he was reproached with having emigrants in his service; another time protection was refused to one of his secretaries, under pretence that ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith

... ubiquitously ulterior end of all endeavour, its pursuit not only relieves its votaries from the observance of any minor obligations that run counter to its needs, but it also imposes a moral obligation to make the most of any opportunity for profitable deceit and chicanery that may offer. In short, the dynastic statesman is under the governance of a higher morality, binding him to the service of his nation's ambition—or in point of fact, to the personal service of his dynastic master—to which it is his dutiful privilege loyally to devote all his powers ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen

... "He thought the report," he said, "highly probably, and heartily wished it might be true. Such a match was fitter and far more creditable for a spirited young fellow than a marriage with the daughter of an old Whig lawyer, whose chicanery had ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott

... dodging the operations of justice; and in that romantic chamber that lurks somewhere in every man's make-up, he felt that classic tradition had armed him with all the preparation necessary for heroic achievement. He, Chamberlain, was unexpectedly called upon to act as an agent of justice against chicanery and violence, and it was not in him to shirk the task. His labors, which, for the greater part of his life, had been expended in tracing the evolution of blind fish in inland caves, had not especially fitted him for dealing with the details of such a case as Agatha's; but they ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger

... the singular conditions under which the Church of England now exercises that right of electing her chief pastors which has been from the beginning the heritage of Christendom. It would be difficult to imagine a more dexterous use of chicanery, preserving the semblance but carefully precluding the reality of a free choice. We all know something of Deans and Chapters—the well-endowed inhabitants of cathedral closes—and of those "greater Chapters" which consist of Honorary Canons, longing for more substantial preferment. It would indeed ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell

... wheat—was ruined upon one hand; the working-man—he who consumed it—was ruined upon the other. But between the two, the great operators, who never saw the wheat they traded in, bought and sold the world's food, gambled in the nourishment of entire nations, practised their tricks, their chicanery and oblique shifty "deals," were reconciled in their differences, and went on through their appointed way, jovial, contented, enthroned, ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris

... and chicanery to help you out, young man. I've fixed that. Here are the title deeds of your precious country-place; you can sit in that hand-made hut of yours and make poetry and crazy inventions the rest of your life! The water's good—and I guess you can ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman

... accused and the interpleadings of Mesdames du Lude and de Ventadour were discussed in seven hearings, before three courts convened. The suit proceeded with all the languor and chicanery of ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... for the submission of the nation and as a chain by which he held it captive. Accordingly, he left no expedient untried to evade the persevering importunity of the states, who demanded the withdrawal of these troops; and for this end he exhausted all the resources of chicanery and persuasion. At one time he pretended to dread a sudden invasion by France, although, torn by furious factions, that country could scarce support itself against a domestic enemy; at another time they were, he said, to receive ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... own time. Every one of those Acts was retrospective. Every one of them barred claims arising out of past transactions. Nor was any objection ever raised to what was so evidently just and wise, till bigotry and chicanery formed that disgraceful league against which we are now contending. But, it is said, it is unreasonable to grant a boon to men because they have been many years doing wrong. The length of the time during which they have enjoyed property not ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... his feelings were shocked by the chicanery of Nye, but that the hands held by Ah Sin were unusual. Nye, maddened by the Chinaman's trickery, rushed at him, 24 packs of cards spilling from the tong-man's long sleeves. On his taper nails ...
— Something Else Again • Franklin P. Adams

... ninety-nine out of every thousand of the human race, that the matrimonial compact, which ought to be the most easy, the most free, and the most simple of all engagements, is become the most slavish and complicated,—a mere question of finance,—a system of bargain, and barter, and commerce, and trick, and chicanery, and dissimulation, and fraud. Is there one instance in ten thousand, in which the buds of first affection are not most cruelly and hopelessly blasted, by avarice, or ambition, or arbitrary power? Females, condemned during the whole flower of their youth to a worse than ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock

... enormity of the injustice to our employer, but once the land lay clear, they would gladly have led a forlorn hope in Don Lovell's interests. Agitation over the matter was maintained at white heat for several days, as we again angled back towards the Cimarron. Around the camp-fires at night, the chicanery of The Western Supply Company gave place to the best stories at our command. "There ought to be a law," said Runt Pickett, in wrathy indignation, "making it legal to kill some people, same as rattlesnakes. Now, you take a square gambler and I ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams

... was but lately, a boarding-house keeper in San Francisco whose Christian or first name had been abolished in favour of "Shanghai." I had the very doubtful honour of knowing him, and could easily believe any stories told of his chicanery and ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts

... by a legal fiction a mine that yields a million annually is simply a robbery of the commonwealth. The robbery of the commonwealth and the toiler is our chronic condition. The urban population, strong in capital and skilful in combination and chicanery, has drained the agricultural regions, until agriculture,[4] toil, and poverty, are closely associated, while urban wealth displays its ostentatious ease, and farmers are driven by the million into a desperate political struggle ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various

... started to emerge. A delicate webwork of forgery, bribery, chicanery and falsehood. It could only have been conceived by a mind as brilliantly crooked as my own. I chewed my lip with jealousy. Like all great ideas, this one was ...
— The Misplaced Battleship • Harry Harrison (AKA Henry Maxwell Dempsey)

... the feuilleton. It was, even when not a professed Socialist, a great promoter of Socialism, by the thorough support which it lent to all the slimy, jesuitical corruptions of Guizoism, and all the turpitudes and chicanery of Louis Philippism. When the Presse was not a year old it had 15,000 subscribers, and before it was twelve years old the product of its advertisements amounted to 150,000 francs a-year. Indeed this journal has the rare merit of being the first to teach the French the use, and we must ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various

... into practical shape. So as soon as I heard of his arrest yesterday evening, what did I do but hurry away to find the Cointets and try to obtain such concessions as might satisfy you. If you try to keep the discovery to yourselves, you will continue to live a life of shifts and chicanery. You must give in, or else when you are exhausted and at the last gasp, you will end by making a bargain with some capitalist or other, and perhaps to your own detriment, whereas to-day I hope to see you make a good one with MM. Cointet. In ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac

... arduous. Directors of theatres and concert halls, furious to see a part of their public tempted away, raised the cry of immorality against the new-comers, and called to their aid every resource of law and chicanery. At the end of the first year Salis found himself with over eight hundred summonses and lawsuits on his hands. After having made every effort, knocked at every door, in his struggle for existence, he finally conceived the happy thought of appealing directly to Grévy, then President ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory

... foreign nations; while our old English commercial honesty—which was once our strength, and protected us from, and all but atoned for, our covetousness—is going fast; and leaving us, feared indeed for our power; but suspected for our chicanery; and odious for ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley

... than once I have asked for an increase of salary. But have I ever CABALLED for it? No, you would be wrong in thinking so, my dearest one. HOW could I ever have done so? You yourself have had many opportunities of seeing how incapable I am of deceit or chicanery. ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... Now I must inquire what you are doing, and how you are. Mamma and I hope that you are quite well. I am still in my very happiest humor; my head feels as light as a feather since I got away from that chicanery. ...
— The Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, V.1. • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

... outside the realm of poesie. He as fitted for Williams by country ministers, as was customary in that day; but poverty compelled him to leave college after two brief terms. Then he studied law, and for nine or ten years practiced his profession doggedly, unwillingly, with many a protest at the chicanery he was forced to witness even in the sacred courts of justice. Grown weary of it at last, he went to New York, found work in a newspaper office, and after a few years' apprenticeship became editor of The Evening Post, a position which he held for more than half a century. His worldly affairs ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long

... is obvious on a moment's reflection, but it will be rejected as a flat mis-statement by many whose opinion is entitled to respect, and who regard international finance as a bloated spider which sits in the middle of a web of intrigue and chicanery, enticing hapless mankind into its toils and battening on bloodshed and war. So clear-headed a thinker as Mr. Philip Snowden publicly expressed the view not long ago that "the war was the result of secret diplomacy carried on by diplomatists who had conducted foreign ...
— International Finance • Hartley Withers

... democracy, a disposition to lose faith in it because of its undoubted weakness and inconvenience in a struggle with States autocratically governed; there is even a sort of secret reaction to autocracy. On those lines there is no way out of a future of bitter rivalries, chicanery and wars, and the probable total failure of our civilisation. The only cure which I can see lies in democratising the whole world and removing the present weaknesses and shams of democracy by education of the individual conscience in every country. Good-bye to that chance if Americans and Britons ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy

... rob. It enforced these laws by means of the police, the marshals, the militia and regular army, and the courts. And it was a snap. A superman's chiefest danger was his fellow-superman. The great stupid mass of the people did not count. They were constituted of such inferior clay that the veriest chicanery fooled them. The superman manipulated the strings, and when robbery of the workers became too slow or monotonous, they turned loose ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London

... probity of your heart leads you to truth; because the precision and extent of your legal knowledge enables you to find the right way of doing the right thing; because a thorough knowledge of legal art and legal form is, in your hands, not an instrument of chicanery, but the plainest, easiest and shortest way to the end of strife.... I hope you will weigh these observations, and apply them to the business of the ensuing week, and beyond that, in the common occupations of your profession: ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell

... values. Christian theism has interpreted God largely in static, final terms. The craving for the absolute in the human mind, as witnessed by the long course of the history of thought, as pathetically witnessed to in the mixture of chicanery, fanaticism and insight of the modern mystical and occult healing sects, is central and immeasurable. But God, found, if at all, in the terms of a present process, is not static and absolute, but dynamic and relative; indefinite, incomplete, not final. And man's immense difference ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch

... courts the sponger gives a wide berth they are the haunts of chicanery; there is no satisfaction to be got out of them. But at wrestling-school and gymnasium he is in his element; he is their chief glory. Show me a philosopher or orator who is in the same class with him when he strips in the wrestling- school; look at them in the gymnasium; they shame ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata

... a dollar an hour for the use of his machine-tools, he would "develop" his ideas, as passed upon by the manufacturer who knew no more of construction or the reading of mechanical drawings than he did of the chicanery of the engineer, and in this way roll up the costs against the unfortunate. In the end the engineer might and might not produce a satisfactory working machine. There was nothing in the contract about this—save only as it protected the engineer. What ...
— Opportunities in Engineering • Charles M. Horton

... to himself, "there must be good in the man. I wish I knew his history. Perhaps he had to fight for every step he has risen in the world. Perhaps he has been baffled and defeated by deception; overcome by chicanery until his faith died within him. My faith would die within me were it not that when I meet a Mayence I encounter also the virtue of a Cologne, and the bluff honesty of a Count Palatine. How marvelous is this world, where the trickery of a Kurzbold and a Gensbein is canceled ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr

... in its season, and maybe pleasantly cajoling to a loving woman at all times, save when she is in Dahlia's condition. It will serve even then, or she will pass it forgivingly, as not the food she for a moment requires; but it must be purely simple in its utterance, otherwise she detects the poor chicanery, and resents the meanness of it. She resents it with unutterable sickness of soul, for it is the language of what were to her the holiest hours of her existence, which is thus hypocritically used to blind and rock her in a cradle of deception. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... consented to do, and did as follows: "This, sire," I said gravely, "is an old and brave soldier; who formerly served your Majesty to good purpose in Normandy, but has been cheated out of the recompense which he there earned by the trickery and chicanery of one of your Majesty's counsellors, ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman

... accepting the terms of the lowest bidder, the board of aldermen let him these contracts. It is a wrong system from the start. We ought to have a competitive system and award our contracts to the lowest bidder who will do good work. Instead of that, there seems to have been some sort of chicanery by which McAlister was given all these little contracts,—on every one of which he makes a big profit,—while the other bidders ...
— A Woman for Mayor - A Novel of To-day • Helen M. Winslow

... is not prepared by evolutional process for the exercise of the psychic faculties, it will be found that the same or similar indications will tend to the simulation of such faculties, as by mediumism, conjuring, etc., while they may even result in chicanery ...
— Second Sight - A study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance • Sepharial

... respective ends. Let us select for consideration one group of these vices,—the important group which fall under the general head of untruthfulness. Insincerity, disingenuousness, shiftiness, trickery, duplicity, chicanery, evasion, intrigue, suppressio veri, suggestio falsi, fraud, mendacity, treachery, hypocrisy, cant,—their name is Legion. That externalism, whether in school or out of school, is the foster-mother of the whole brood, is almost too obvious to need demonstration. In school the child lives ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes

... of the Senate of the United States, as it regards its own honor and the future of our country, never the leave this matter in its present condition, to be believed by some and disbelieved by others, to be made the subject of party contest and party chicanery, but let us have a fair, judicial, full investigation into the merits of these accusations. If they are false, stamp them with the brand of ignominy; if they are true, deal with the facts proven as you ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman

... this savage policy he stamped out heresy, placed freedom of thought under a ban, and put an end to the intellectual progress of the country. In his dealings with other nations his diplomacy included all the arts of chicanery and deceit. ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot

... doctrine, that it is unlawful to over-reach any one, that the Jews appear to have long ignored such maxims of morality. But it should be remembered that if they have earned for themselves, by their chicanery in mercantile transactions, an evil reputation, their ancestors in the bad old times were goaded into the practice of over-reaching by cunning those Christian sovereigns and nobles who robbed them of their property by force and cruel tortures. Moreover, ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston

... patient with the rules that related to a land title while his thoughts were far afield in plans for the territorial greatness of his country. Meantime he had to earn his bread. He had never stooped to dishonor, to chicanery. He had caught at the driftwood of supporting offices in his swimming of the new stream of primitive life. He was poor. He had enemies. His eye was upon an eminence. He had to make the best of ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters

... It is the universal expectation of fair dealing that makes business possible and, in fact, it is this universal expectation of good behavior that makes its breach sufficiently novel to be reported in the newspapers. If fraud and chicanery and violence were the order of the day, they would have no value as news. After twenty-nine years of dealing with human nature in a business where it is seen at its extremes—at its best and at its worst—I believe that the great majority ...
— Morals in Trade and Commerce • Frank B. Anderson

... possible pitch: in fact, he always set them down for a set of unprincipled gamblers and swindlers, whose sole design was to benefit themselves at the expense of a starving community, by increasing the price of the necessaries of life, through the means of every possible chicanery, trick, and delusion. He used to say, that one half of them ought to be sent to Botany Bay for swindling, and the other half of them deserved to be whipped at the cart's tail for their folly end vanity. "But," said he to ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 2 • Henry Hunt

... has not been printed from old plates, no chicanery of that kind: it has been printed from new type, and it was brought about by Walter Pater's evocative letter. (It wasn't, but I like to think that it was). Off and on, his letter was sought for during ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore

... of England, is the only alternative of wretched and humiliating imprisonment. An entire change of habit ensues: ease and elegance of manners dwindle into coldness and neglect, liberality to meanness, and good-natured simplicity to chicanery and cunning. In society, too, how changed; once the gay table companion, full of gallantry and wit, now solitary and dejected, with the weeds of discomfort and despair rankling around his heart. If fortune ever enable him to regenerate from such obscurity, perhaps custom ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 277, October 13, 1827 • Various

... inclination for, and little confidence in, the free co-operation of the country in its own affairs, but with wit enough to cheerfully call upon it when there was any pressing necessity, and accepting it then without chicanery or cheating, but safe to go back as soon as possible to that sole dominion, a medley of patriotism and selfishness, which is the very insufficient and very precarious resource of peoples as yet incapable of applying their liberty to the art of their own government. ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... be interesting to outline the procedure as a social document in chicanery, or social surgery, as ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes

... Native and his stock to drink the fresh water and breathe the pure air in the wide tracts of South Africa, for by law Natives have now less rights than the snakes and scorpions abounding in that country. Can a law be justified which forces the people to live only by means of chicanery; and which, in order to progress, compels one to cheat the law officers of the Crown? This case is but one of many that came under our own observation, and there may be many more of ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje

... channel for constant information which you advise me to establish, and I shall have the opportunity to learn if the impostor makes any communication to them, or if there be any news of the brother. If by any trick or chicanery (for I will never believe that there was a marriage) a lawsuit that might be critical or hazardous can be cooked up, I can, I am sure, make such terms with Sidney, through his love for my daughter, as would effectively and permanently secure me from all further trouble and machinations ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 4 • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... salaries in the world for those engaged in directing business operations, but such salaries are not paid because transcendant talents are necessary to conduct the ordinary operations of railway administration, but for the purpose of checkmating the chicanery of corporate competitors. In other words, these exceptionally high salaries are paid for the purpose, and because their recipients are believed to have the ability to hold up their end in unscrupulous corporate warfare where, as one railway president ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various

... Lublin. They say he is doing very well, but he is thin, bent, and old before his time; his face is strangely colored, and he has some frightful scars. He has not danced once since Barbara's wedding. The time for mazourkas and cracoviennes is past: they have been replaced by law cases, pleading, chicanery, and all its tiresome accompaniments; his language is so learned that one can ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... to eat! This anecdote perhaps lacks evidence; but there can be no doubt that the freedmen of 1865 were, as a body, entirely unfitted to exercise the suffrage thrust upon them. A degrading and exasperating struggle was the inevitable result—the whites of the South striving by intimidation and chicanery to nullify the negro vote, the professional politicians from the North battling, with the aid of the United States troops, to render it effectual. Such a state of things was demoralising to both parties, and in process of time the common sense of the North revolted against it. United States ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer

... name, it must now have given up the struggle. But it did not. Though a rational and legal resistance was thenceforth impossible, spiteful opposition still found a wide field of petty expedients, of chicanery and intrigue; and, far from honourable or politically prudent as such resistance was, it was still in a certain sense fruitful of results. It certainly procured at length for the commons concessions which could not easily have been ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... in the MacNair blood," said Jabel Blake; "but you are playing a false part and Arthur a true one. He fought his campaign against the corruptions and chicanery of power, and he will trample you ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend

... proper guidance, with little additional expenditure of money or of time, they produced results wholly unbelievable to the old-time farmer. Yet he saw the crop, husked, and watched it through the sheller. There was no magic and no chicanery. He ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing

... Original and unaccommodating, the features of his character had the hardihood of antiquity. His august mind overawed majesty; and one of his sovereigns thought royalty so impaired in his presence, that he conspired to remove him, in order to be relieved from his superiority. No state chicanery, no narrow system of vicious polities, no idle contest for ministerial victories, sunk him to the vulgar level of the great; but, overbearing, persuasive, and impracticable, his object was England, his ambition ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick

... into consideration. Usually, in cases of a similar nature, there is left in the mind of the spectator some glimmering of doubt as to the reality of the vision before his eyes; a degree of hope, however feeble, that he is the victim of chicanery, and that the apparition is not actually a visitant from the old world of shadows. It is not too much to say that such remnants of doubt have been at the bottom of almost every such visitation, and ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... are concerned, there is not much difference between them for the innocent investor. They both lead him to failure. They are unlike only in this, that the pathway of the one is lined with deception, crookedness and chicanery; of the other, with blasted hopes based upon good intentions but bad information. Both lead to the self-same sepulcher which in the distance looks white and beautiful but when reached is filled with ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Third Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association

... in the beginning, not as a system of persecution, but as masterpieces of the most subtle and refined politics. And to say the truth, these laws, at first view, have rather an appearance of a plan of vexatious litigation and crooked law-chicanery than of a direct and sanguinary attack upon the rights of private conscience: because they did not affect life, at least with regard to the laity; and making the Catholic opinions rather the subject of civil regulations ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... that by a succession of deceptions, tricks and chicanery she cheated Esau out of his blessing, obtained it for Jacob, and deceived and deluded her dying husband, ...
— Fair to Look Upon • Mary Belle Freeley

... very great esteem, in the very height of our great disorders, when there was neither law nor justice, nor magistrate who performed his office, no more than there is now, publish I know not what pitiful reformations about cloths, cookery, and law chicanery. Those are amusements wherewith to feed a people that are ill-used, to show that they are not totally forgotten. Those others do the same, who insist upon prohibiting particular ways of speaking, dances, and games, to a people totally abandoned ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne

... of words or phrases has its parts separated by commas:— "Lying, trickery, chicanery, perjury, were natural to him." "The brave, daring, faithful soldier died facing the foe." If the series is in pairs, commas separate the pairs: "Rich and poor, learned and unlearned, black and white, ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin

... as the supposition that a person is to extricate himself from a difficulty by intrigue, by chicanery, by dissimulation, by trimming, by ...
— Thomas Jefferson • Edward S. Ellis et. al.

... can't expect everyone to have the same standards of probity, so philosophically I pocketed my loss and gains together. Life is full of ups and downs and take the bad with the good. Gootes was in high spirits after his piece of chicanery and as we went down the street he practiced, quite unsuccessfully, a ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore

... his accession to power, what were they all, with the exception of the Civil Code? The legislative reveries of the different men who have from time to time ruled France form an immense labyrinth, in which chicanery bewilders reason and common sense; and they would long since have been buried in oblivion had they not occasionally served to authorise injustice. I cannot, however, pass over unnoticed the happy effect produced ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne

... those who (professionally) live upon their labour. It is indeed astonishing that the awakening has been so long in coming; but surely it cannot be greatly delayed now. Underneath all the ambitions of certain individuals and groups; underneath all the greed and chicanery of others; underneath the widespread ignorance, mother of prejudice, which sunders folk of different race or colour-deep down the human heart beats practically the same in all lands, ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter

... and her rights, and kind and generous as she has been in inviting a Peace Congress to agree upon measures of safety for the Union. The time will come, however, when old Virginia will stand trifling and chicanery no longer. Neither will North Carolina suffer it. None of the slave States will endure it; for they cannot separate one from the other, and they will not. They will go out of this Union and into one of their own; forming a great, homogeneous, and glorious Southern Confederacy. ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden

... motion, had it succeeded. What would have followed? Ministers would have gone out: Sir Robert Peel has repeatedly said they would in the event of parliament condemning their Irish policy. This would bring in Lord John, and then would be revealed the distraction of his party, the chicanery of his late motion, and the mere incapacity of moving at all upon Irish questions, either to the right or to the left, for any government which at this moment the Whig-radicals could form. Doubtless, Lord John cherishes hopes of future power; but not at present. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various

... This continual chicanery upon my most trifling actions, rendered my life odious to me, and I could not divert myself by occupation; for the recollection of the fate of my last work, and the certainty of never being able to publish any ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein

... often a petty tyrant: his aim was to depopulate his parish; to prevent the poor from obtaining a settlement; to make the workhouse a terror by placing it under the management of a bully; and by all kinds of chicanery to keep down the rates at whatever cost to the comfort and morality of the poor. This explains the view taken by Arthur Young, and generally accepted at the period, that the poor-law meant depopulation. Workhouses had been started in the ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen

... a woman who, from some distaste or disability, could never so much as understand the meaning of the word POLITICS, and has given up trying to distinguish Whigs from Tories; but take her on her own politics, ask her about other men or women and the chicanery of everyday existence - the rubs, the tricks, the vanities on which life turns - and you will not find many more shrewd, trenchant, and humorous. Nay, to make plainer what I have in mind, this same woman ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson

... through which Lord Selkirk passed in Sandwich, Toronto, and Montreal, reflected more dishonor on the Canadians than did even the bloody violence of the Bois-Brules. The chicanery employed by the Canadian courts, the procuring of special legislation to adapt the law to Lord Selkirk's case, and the invocation of the highest social and even clerical influence in Upper Canada for the purpose of injuring his Lordship ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce

... temptations, and whose honor scintillates and glitters as purely and perfectly as the diamond—men who are not wholly the slaves of the material occupations and pleasures of life, wholly engrossed in trade, in the breeding of cattle, in the framing and enforcing of revenue regulations, in the chicanery of the law, the objects of political envy, in the base trade of the lower literature, or in the heartless, hollow vanities of an eternal dissipation. Every generation, in every country, will bequeath to ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... the bench. The difficulty which he had felt in adapting himself to other men's views, the contempt for fighting battles by any means except fair arguments upon the substantial merits of the case, were congenial, at least, to high judicial qualities. He despised chicanery of all kinds, and formed independent opinions upon broad grounds instead of being at the mercy of ingenious sophistry. He was free from the foibles of petty vanity upon which a dexterous counsel could play, and had the solid, downright ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen

... tricks once too often, the guild forces him to sell his connection. Desroches, our friend Desroches, understood the full resources of a trade carried on in a beggarly way enough by poor devils; he would buy up causes of men who feared to lose the day; he plunged into chicanery with a fixed determination to make money by it. He was right; he did his business very honestly. He found influence among men in public life by getting them out of awkward complications; there was ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac

... obligations under which the Burra people bend, introducing discord into families, restraining the energies of the fishermen, and tending to a deeply rooted aversion towards the lessees and their service, but producing systems of chicanery and deceit subversive of moral principle and destructive of all efforts in the ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie

... cheerfulness, and a genial welcome for any honest soul, showed the healthfulness of his busy walk. If anything shortened his three-score and ten years, it was the care and anxiety which insufficient appropriation and political indifference or chicanery crowded into his ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett

... sentiments which ennoble our nature. I arrived at Laurvig, and found myself in the midst of a group of lawyers of different descriptions. My head turned round, my heart grew sick, as I regarded visages deformed by vice, and listened to accounts of chicanery that was continually embroiling the ignorant. These locusts will probably diminish as the people become more enlightened. In this period of social life the commonalty are always cunningly attentive to their ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft

... unaccommodating, the features of his character had the hardihood of antiquity, his august mind overawed majesty, and one of his sovereigns thought royalty so impaired in his presence that he conspired to remove him, in order to be relieved from his superiority. No state chicanery, no narrow systems of vicious politics, no idle contest for ministerial victories sunk him to the vulgar level of the great; but, overbearing, persuasive, and impracticable, his object was England,—his ambition was fame; without ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge

... was long in awaking to the consciousness that driving Lee out of Richmond would not end the Rebellion. It was more than this: it was a casting-out of prejudice, a discarding of political chicanery and a time-serving policy, and a recognition of Justice, Right, and Freedom as the true elements of political economy. There was an increasing desire on the part of the people to root out Slavery ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various

... patronized, with flattering and being flattered, with fawning and being fawned upon, with deceiving and being deceived, with bluffing and being bluffed, with splurging, with pretending, with every trick and artifice and sham and chicanery that society and politics know, or ...
— The Cab of the Sleeping Horse • John Reed Scott

... looked about her with a courageous and encouraging eye. "It is embarrassing," she said. "Judge Briscoe, we are contemplating 'a piece of the blackest treachery and chicanery.' We are going to give Mr. Halloway the—the go-by!" The embarrassment fell away, and everybody began to talk ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington

... whiskey," he said neither boastfully nor modestly. "We sold it for an honest price. That's the way we learnt Ben to do. But, hi crackies, what takes my hide and taller is when a son o' mine turns out yaller. I never raised my boy for no chicanery." Old Jorde's voice raised in indignation. However, when he spoke again there was a note of tolerance even ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas

... the poor slave of the benefits of his labors, his character was defamed, his life was sought, and he at last driven from our Republic, as a fugitive. But was Thompson disgraced by all this mean and contemptible and wicked chicanery and malice? No more than was Paul, when in consequence of a vision he had seen at Troas, he went over to Macedonia to help the Christians there, and was beaten and imprisoned, because he cast out a spirit ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... it. They have pretty sharp distinctions of the fluctuating and the permanent. "Lightly come, lightly go," is a proverb, which they can very well afford to leave, when they leave little else, to the losers. They do not always find manors, got by rapine or chicanery, insensibly to melt away, as the poets will have it; or that all gold glides, like thawing snow, from the thief's hand that grasps it. Church land, alienated to lay uses, was formerly denounced to have this slippery ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb

... criminal lawyer in the midst of a heap of dusty papers. Mr. Bordacsi, for that was his name, had an extraordinary faculty for so identifying himself with any complicated case he might take up as to absolutely live and breathe in it. Any attempt at sophistry or chicanery made him downright venomous, and he only recovered himself when, by dint of superior acumen, he had enabled the righteous cause to triumph. He was also far-famed for his incorruptibility. Whoever approached him with ducats was incontinently kicked out-of-doors, and if ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai

... that signs the mortgage pays the shot; so that an Act which is fraught with the best purposes for the protection of the honest, but unfortunate, is in this manner subjected to the grossest chicanery of pettifoggers and pretenders, and the vilest evasions of quirking ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan

... empty name, but policy was a quality to be held in high esteem. Truth was to be used if convenient, but if a lie would serve a better purpose for the moment, it would be brought into service without hesitation or scruple. Fortune was his goddess, if he did deference to any unseen power; tricks and chicanery were to him helps to rapid and boundless wealth. "Let the sharpest win, and may the devil take the hindermost," these were the tenets in his creed, if he ...
— The Evolution of Dodd • William Hawley Smith

... do so in the pages of Mr. Douglas Murray's translation of the minutes of the evidence, and may assist in imagination at the eighteen days' forensic baiting of the hapless child (she was but nineteen years of age), whose lucid simplicity broke through the subtle web of theological chicanery which was spun to entrap her by the most cunning of the ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey

... about 100 men organized into companies, so that in case of an attack here I would have something tangible to lay hold of and make a fight. I have had a great deal of trouble in this matter, as there is no concert of action, every man suspecting his fellow of some chicanery. ...
— The Battle of Atlanta - and Other Campaigns, Addresses, Etc. • Grenville M. Dodge

... tempting prospect. Our position in the matter is quite plain: so long as Great Britain insists on maintaining the Act of Union she must do so consistently in the sense that it is a contract, albeit secured by chicanery, to the breach of any term of which the consent of the party which it trammelled at least is necessary. It will be answered that the Disestablishment of the Irish Church made a breach in a clause of as binding a solemnity ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell

... negative movement of the head. But the movement would not come. His thoughts were of the game, and ere yet the last words of the money-lender had ceased to sound, he was captured. The satanic cunning of the proposal was lost upon his sodden intellect. It was a contemptible, pitiable piece of chicanery with which Lablache sought to trap the old man into giving his consent and assistance. The money-lender had no intention of losing the game. He knew he must win. He was merely resorting to this means ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum

... the prince, "that I am an Arab and not an American. The fortunes of my line, its glories, were not won in the vulgar pursuits of trade, in the chicanery of business, in the shady paths of speculation, in the questionable manipulation of stocks and bonds. It was not thus that the ancient houses of the nobility of Europe and the Orient built up their honorable fortunes. Never did the men of my house parley with their ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis

... a suspicious rajah. He suspects me anyway. I screwed better terms out of him than the miller got from Bob White, and now whenever he sees me off the job he suspects me of chicanery. If we fired Chamu he'd think I'd found the gold and was trying to hide it. Say, if I don't find gold ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy

... my own merits. I act my part to admiration. 'Tis true the combining circumstances are all favourable. I must be a dunce indeed if in such a school I should want chicanery. Our disputations have been continual; nor have I ever failed to turn them on the most convenient topics. But none of them have equalled the last; managed as it was with dexterity by me, and in the very spirit I wished by my opponents. I speak in the ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft

... predestinarian scheme, leading the cogitation upward to dwell upon "the heavenly things before the foundation of the world," opens a vista of contemplation and poetical framework, with which none other in the whole cycle of human thought can compare. Not election and reprobation as set out in the petty chicanery of Calvin's Institutes, but the prescience of absolute wisdom revolving all the possibilities of time, space, and matter. Poetry has been defined as "the suggestion by the image of noble grounds for noble emotions," and, in this respect, none of the world-epics—there are at most five or six ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison

... section and I shall see how long your—your TRICK will prevent the child's going where she belongs. I wish you to understand that I shall continue this fight to the very last. I—I am not one to be easily beaten. Simpson, you and Thomas come with me. This night's despicable chicanery is only the beginning. This is bad business for you, Cy Whittaker," he snarled, his self-control vanishing, "and"—with a vindictive glance at the schoolmistress—"for those who are with you in it. That appointment was obtained under false pretenses and I can prove it. Your tricks ...
— Cy Whittaker's Place • Joseph C. Lincoln

... character of public men or public measures, the casting a vote, which is the result of that study and estimate, certainly have in themselves nothing to degrade the most delicate and refined nature. The violence, the fraud, the crime, the chicanery, which, so far as they have attended masculine struggles for political power, tend to prove, if they prove anything, the unfitness of men for the suffrage, are not the result of the act of voting, but are the expressions of course, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various

... in the King's name his many dismal discoveries and prognostications. For fear of being tedious I shall only tell you in one word that the Cardinal, contrary to his own interest, hurried the Count into a civil war, by such arts of chicanery as those who are fortune's favourites never fail ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz

... distributing the pension offered to himself among six wounded captains under his command, mediating for poor litigants in the mountain, driving off his grounds the wandering attorneys who come to practice their chicanery, "the natural protector of man even against ministers and the king. A party of tobacco inspectors having searched his curate's house, he pursues them so energetically on horseback that they hardly escape him by fording the Durance. Whereupon, "he wrote to ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine

... prime of vigor, had not been in the field, to which his eloquent appeals sent thousands, but preferred the pleasanter occupation of making money at home. He had converted the power of his great place, that of Speaker of the House of Representatives, into lucre, and was exposed. By mingled chicanery and audacity he obtained possession of his own criminating letters, flourished them in the face of the House, and, in the Cambyses vein, called on his people to rally and save the luster of his loyalty from soil at the hands of rebels; and they came. From all the North ready acclaims went up, ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor

... knowledge about the world around him, he has been the credulous victim of countless generations of swindlers, fakers, fortune-tellers, mountebanks, and others experienced in chicanery. Speculators used to consult clairvoyants, crystal gazers, astrologists and card-readers for a forecast of business conditions. To-day, through accurate knowledge based upon statistics relative to fundamental factors in the business situation, ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb

... age when a few white land and cattle "barons" dominated the region, predatory, arrogant, masterful and despotic; the age just ceasing when the elder Weir and Dent arrived; the age of their youth forty years before, the age when railroads and telegraphs and law were remote, and chicanery and force were the common agents, and ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd

... that Agesilaus had no cavalry and that Caria was a region unadapted to that arm, and persuaded in his own mind also that the Spartan could not but cherish wrath against himself personally for his chicanery, felt convinced that he was really intending to invade Caria, and that the satrap's palace was his final goal. Accordingly he transferred the whole of his infantry to that province, and proceeded to lead his cavalry round into the plain ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon

... choleric cast, he would at times be warmed into regrettable outbursts of opinion that were reactionary in the extreme. Thus when he discussed with Gideon and Harvey D. the latest number of the magazine—containing the fearless exposure of Washington's chicanery—he spoke in terms most slighting of Emmanuel Schilsky. He meant his words to lap over to Merle Whipple, but as the others were still proud—if in a troubled way—of the boy's new eminence, he did not distinguish him ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson

... applicable to every English parish was beset with difficulties, and that enclosures, while adding greatly to the food supply of the nation, had for the most part told against the independence of the poorer villagers. But this was largely due to the expense and chicanery consequent on the passing of parochial Acts of Parliament; and what objections were there to facilitating the enclosure of wastes and open fields by parishes where everyone desired it? In such a case it was the bounden duty of Parliament to ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose

... power, making it theoretically possible for the electorate to take possession of the country. In practice, the franchise has had no such result. Quite the contrary, the masters of American life by a policy of chicanery and misrepresentation, advertise and support first one and then the other of the "Old Parties," both of which are led by the members of the propertied class or by their retainers. The people, deluded ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing

... etc., etc., announces himself a candidate for the United States Senate to succeed Roger Q. Mills. The young man's modesty is really monumental. Having succeeded by all manner of petty chicanery in capturing the governorship, I am surprised that he isn't seeking the job of Jehovah. Displacing Mills with Culberson were much like substituting a Chinese joss for the Apollo Belvedere or an itch bacillus for a bull-elephant. ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... value actually entered for that port in 1840. That amount should be accounted as to the credit of foreign export trade, and so Mr Cobden reckoned it, without, however, drawing the distinction, as he should have done. But that would have exposed the miserable chicanery of the double dealing he had in hand; for whilst taking credit for the exports to Gibraltar as part and parcel of foreign trade, he proceeded, by way of doubly weighing the balance, to charge all ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various

... give the Republicans enough Southern States to elect Hayes. This appeared to Bartley the most impudent piece of political effrontery in the whole history of the country, and among those who went about denouncing Republican chicanery at the Democratic club-rooms, no one took a loftier tone of moral indignation than he. The thought that he might lose so much of Halleck's money through the machinations of a parcel of carpet-bagging tricksters filled him with a virtue at which he afterwards smiled when he found ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells

... of magnificent distances, though it is gradually filling in the blanks, and is looked forward to as the coming city of the leisure and pleasure classes, who shall live unpolluted by the rank snobbery of New York fashion, the chicanery of Wall Street, and the genius of the almighty dollar, which rules in other cities—Washington, I regret to find, is no better for the angler than Philadelphia. But you get bass fishing in the historic Potomac, and small trout in the hill country of ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior

... pompous little man. It would deprive armies of an occupation. It would make statesmanship too simple and naive to have the distinction of craft, which gave one man the right to lead another. Both sides had to act in the old fashion of mutual suspicion and chicanery. ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer

... has gained for them immortal honor, and the esteem of all good men. When the Church abolished slavery in any country where it existed, the Popes did not compel masters, by harshness or threats, to manumit their slaves; they did not bring into action the base intrigues, the low chicanery, the canting hypocrisy of modern statesmen; they did not raise armies, and send them into the lands of their masters to burn and to pillage, to lay waste and to destroy; they did not slaughter, by their schemes, over a million of free men and another million of slaves; they did not make widows ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller

... father. The Empire of Africa.... I am to descend from the mountain heights of science, from the contemplation of the unchangeable and ineffable glories, into the foul fields and farmyards of earthly practical life, and become a drudge among political chicanery, and the petty ambitions, and sins, and falsehoods of the earthly herd.... And the price which he offers me—me, the stainless—me, the virgin—me, the un-tamed,—is-his hand! Pallas Athene! dost thou not blush with ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley

... once, he could effectually debar Blount from any share in the accumulating profits. The small payments on past royalties and his five cents a share would be all that Blount would receive; and then he would be left, a spectacle for gods and men—a banker who had been beaten by a boy. It was the chicanery of Blount which had ruined his father and driven Colonel Huff to his death, and what could be better, as poetic justice, than to see him hoist on his own petard. And if the Colonel was not dead—as would appear from Charley's maunderings—if he could be discovered ...
— Shadow Mountain • Dane Coolidge

... ourselves to our situation. If we do, our objects are plain and compassable. Why should we resolve to do nothing, because what I propose to you may not be the exact demand of the petition, when we are far from resolved to comply even with what evidently is so? Does this sort of chicanery become us? The people are the masters. They have only to express their wants at large and in gross. We are the expert artists, we are the skilful workmen, to shape their desires into perfect form, and to fit the utensil to the use. They are the sufferers, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... had invested his surplus in lands, cotton, and naval stores. Now the evil day was not far off, as he knew, and he had little to meet it. Nevertheless he made a brave effort. The ruggedness of the disowned family of Smiths and the chicanery inherited from the gnarly-headed and subtle-minded old judge came to his rescue, and he determined not to fail without a fight. He shingled himself with deeds of trust and sales under fraudulent judgments or friendly liens, to delay if they did not ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee

... for these reasons I examined the two wounded Zulus with considerable anxiety, only to discover another instance of the chicanery which it amused this Ayesha to play off upon me. For what did I find? That they were practically well. Their hurts, which had never been serious, had healed wonderfully in that pure air, as those ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard

... enormities of the Factory and Poorhouse,—the Barracks and Hospital. And the final law in this matter is that, if you require edifices only for the grace and health of mankind, and build them without pretense and without chicanery, they will be sublime on a modest scale, and lovely with ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin

... penal statutes to pay the sum of two thousand seven hundred and forty-three pounds, and was obliged to compound for sixteen hundred and fifteen. This was the first noted case of the kind; but it became a precedent, which prepared the may for many others. The management, indeed, of these arts of chicanery, was the great secret of the king's administration. While he depressed the nobility, he exalted, and honored, and caressed the lawyers; and by that means both bestowed authority on the laws, and was enabled, whenever he pleased, to pervert them to his own advantage. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume

... the story-teller's own graphic terms, "three whales of the sea of fraud and deceit: three dragons of the nature of thunder and the quickness of lightning; three defamers of honour and reputation; namely, three men-deceiving, lascivious women, each of whom had from the chicanery of her cunning issued the diploma of turmoil to a hundred cities and countries, and in the arts of fraud they accounted Satan as an admiring spectator in the theatre of their stratagems.[FN509] One of them was sitting in the court of justice of the kazi's embrace; the second was the precious ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton

... bills.(Ed. Mem.)]—but as the bill did not pass, the Consul will have to take the fee dishonestly until next Congress makes it legitimate. It is a great and good and noble country, and hates all forms of vice and chicanery. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... woman. There are trials which chasten the heart and elevate the mind; but it is doubtful whether it can be for the welfare of any helpless, childish creature to be familiar with falsehood and chicanery, with debt and dishonour, from the earliest awakening of the intellect; to feel, from the age of six or seven, all the shame of a creature who is always eating food that will not be paid for, and lying on a bed out of which she may be turned at any ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon

... guardianship of the same interests for which the State, the county, the township and the individual exercise concern. Government has lost its mystery: even diplomacy has somewhat changed from lying and chicanery to common-sense dealing. The qualities that are required in the government—industry, economy, integrity, knowledge of men and affairs—are precisely those which are of value to every individual citizen, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various

... inhuman bigotry? Were they a wild degeneration from a principle originally noble? Or, on the contrary, this life and this death, were they alike the expression of a base mercenary selfishness, caught and baffled in the meshes of its own chicanery? The life, if it could be appreciated in its secret principles, might go far to illustrate the probable character of the death. The death, if its circumstances were recoverable, and could be liberated from the self-contradictory details in the received report, might do something to indicate retrospectively ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey

... of unpunished homicides, in proportion to the population, which are committed in sundry parts of our own country, and indeed in our country taken as a whole. In no country is the deterrent effect of punishment so vitiated by delay; in no country is so much facility given to chicanery, to futile appeals, and to every possible means of clearing men from the due penalty of high crime, and especially ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White

... described from a scientific point-of-view, nor has any philosophical explanation of them ever been advanced, but there is no question whatever of their existence, and of their being now regarded by the most advanced scientists as beyond the region of chicanery and imposture. Mr. W. J. Jenks, in a recent lecture on "The Protection of Electric Light Stations from Lightning," treats the subject very exhaustively, and shows that where the ability to locate electrical or magnetic attraction is vested in an individual the results are absolutely reliable. ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, Jan-Mar, 1890 • Various

... particular indebtedness, but woe to him if he pays the putwarrie the value of a 'red cent' without taking a receipt. Certainly there may be a really honest putwarrie, but I very much doubt it. The name stands for chicanery and robbery. On the one hand the landlord is constantly stirring him up for money, questioning his accounts, and putting him not unfrequently to actual bodily coercion. The ryot on the other hand is constantly inventing excuses, getting up delays, and propounding ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis

... appealed to me to sustain it, which I would not do. The question must then have gone to the courts, which, according to the Governor's judgment when he was appealing to me to be sustained, would require one year for decision. Meantime the State was overflowed, the Levee boards tied up by political chicanery, and nothing done to relieve the poor people, now fed by the charity of the Government and charitable associations of ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan

... feud. A son of Stoughton and the widow of another son argued vituperously in print, each claiming sole possession of Richard's complicated secret, and each terming the other a scoundrel. The daughter-in-law accused the son of financial chicanery, and the son condemned the daughter-in-law for having run through two husbands and for desperately wanting a third. In the midst of this running battle, a third party entered the lists as maker of the Elixir. She was no Stoughton—though a widow—and her quaint claim ...
— Old English Patent Medicines in America • George B. Griffenhagen

... right to trade with the colony for twenty-five years and the absolute ownership of all mines in it. The sufferings of some of the white emigrants from France—the kidnapping, the revenge, and the chicanery that played so large a part—all make a story complete in itself. As for the Negroes, it was definitely stipulated that these should not come from another French colony without the consent of the governor of that colony. The contract had only begun to be carried out when Law's bubble ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley

... They seem to him on the whole kindly, decent folk. But a nation with which his country is at war views his compatriots through the medium of a quite different set of experiences: as they appear in the ferocity of battle, in the invasion and subjugation of a hostile territory, or in the chicanery of a juggling diplomacy. The men of whom these facts are true are the very same as the men whom their compatriots know as husbands or fathers or friends, but they are judged differently because they are ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell

... the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution as would be necessary to undo the mistake which has been committed. It is true that in some Southern States the majority of the blacks are practically disfranchised now; but it would remove a constant cause of friction and of political chicanery if the fact were recognised frankly that it is not possible to contemplate the possibility of the negro ever becoming the politically dominant race in any community where white people live. There is ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson

... to do them any good? Are not their very creeds pretexts for slaughter and persecution and fraud? Do they not support even their holiest truths, their sincerest beliefs, by organised systems of deceit and chicanery? Chut! I tell you that the very vesture which men compel Truth to wear, is lined and stiffened with lies! The mysteries of life are so terrible, and its sadness so profound, that blatant tongues do not become philosophers. Words only ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford

... at court was held by a creature and toady of the Duke, bribery and corruption of all kinds ruled the State, and there appeared to be no limit to his lust and rapacity, and no barrier against the chicanery of ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley

... fanatics is the absolute openness of their cheat. A more commonplace imposture has never been offered for acceptance, even to the most ignorant of mankind. It appeals neither to reason nor romance. The one is insulted by the very shallowness of its chicanery, while its rank plebbishness disgusts the other. Even the nomenclature, both of its offices and office-bearers, has a vulgar ring that smacks of ignoble origin. The names "twelves," "seventies," "deacons," "wifedoms," "Smiths" (Hiram ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid

... marks and distinguishes the whole; and as an ardent is always a jealous affection, your colonies become suspicious, restive, and untractable whenever they see the least attempt to wrest from them by force, or shuffle from them by chicanery, what they think the only advantage worth living for. This fierce spirit of liberty is stronger in the English colonies probably than in any other people of ...
— Standard Selections • Various

... and began a careful, patient, thorough investigation. As it proceeded, his amazement increased. He found that Bivens had only scratched the surface of the truth. He found that the system of fraud and chicanery had spread from the heads of the big companies until the whole business world ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon

... to himself in his church-building; that von Stein discerned vaguely; that William I emphasized in his cold-blooded, clear-eyed manner of the soldier; that von Sybel fought for; that scores, nay, hundreds and thousands of noble men and women, utterly apart from political chicanery, did indeed long for with all the fervor of their earnest God-fearing German nature; Bismarck stands in the centre, ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel

... Aristide and Angele. They were located there, and there they intended to remain like blocks of wood. At last Pierre met with a stroke of luck which enabled him to return the ten thousand francs to his son. When, however, he wanted to reckon up accounts with him, Aristide interposed so much chicanery that he had to let the couple go without deducting a copper for their board and lodging. They installed themselves but a short distance off, in a part of the old quarter called the Place Saint-Louis. The ten ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola



Words linked to "Chicanery" :   humbug, fraudulence, shenanigan, trickery, fraud, wile, dissembling, chicane, dupery, jugglery, guile, deceit, deception, hoax



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