"Democracy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... if they were unwilling spectators of the revelry. A venerable recline, that may have had a place in the propyla, or served to decorate the halls of Versailles in the days of Napoleon, has here a place beneath the portrait of Jefferson. This humble tribute the old hostess says she pays to democracy. And at each end of the hall are double alcoves, over the arches of which are great spread eagles, holding in their beaks the points of massive maroon-colored drapery that falls over the sides, forming brilliant depressions. In these alcoves are groups of figures and statuettes, and parts of ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... cavaliers of the South have little in common with the mercantile North; the cultivators and hewers of the western forests are wholly dissimilar from the enterprising traders of the eastern coast; republicanism is not always democracy, and democracy is not always locofocoism; a gentleman is not always a loafer, although certainly a loafer is never a gentleman. A cockney, who never went beyond Margate, or a sea-sick trip to Boulogne, ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... animosities and the contending struggles of envious and jealous rivals. These struggles, in fact, usually resulted in the predominance of some one, more energetic or more successful than the rest, the aristocracy or the democracy running thus, of its own accord, to a despotism in the end, showing that there were natural causes always tending to the subjection of nations of men to the control ...
— Darius the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... Each performer as he came in was greeted by the doorman with the gift of a brass check, on which there was stamped a number. This number told the performer in what order he was entitled to rehearse. Vaudeville is a democracy—first come, first rehearsed. ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... saying, that it is easier to govern others, than oneself. And that all men should govern themselves as nations, needs that all men be better, and wiser, than the wisest of one-man rulers. But in no stable democracy do all men govern themselves. Though an army be all volunteers, martial law must prevail. Delegate your power, you leagued mortals must. The hazard you must stand. And though unlike King Bello of Dominora, your great chieftain, sovereign-kings! ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... those who had debauched them, or that it was the artist's business to lead the public, not the public the artist. A numerical religion—the number of the audience, and the sum total of the receipts—dominated the artistic thought of that commercialized democracy. Following the authors, the critics docilely declared that the essential function of a work of art was to please. Success is law: and when success endures, there is nothing to be done but to bow to it. And so they devoted their energies to anticipating the fluctuations of the Exchange of ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... wealth? But this is one, among many other barbarisms, which the existence of slavery in the District of Columbia, by preventing any systematic revision of the laws, has entailed upon the capital of our model democracy. There was, as I have stated, no means by which Sayres and myself could be discharged from prison except by paying our fines (which was totally out of the question), or by obtaining a presidential pardon, which, for a long time, seemed ...
— Personal Memoir Of Daniel Drayton - For Four Years And Four Months A Prisoner (For Charity's Sake) In Washington Jail • Daniel Drayton
... "and the second generation has an ideal of its own, and that ideal is Success. It took us these forty years to come to understand the spirit of America. You were a dreamer who loved America. I'm an American. We've translated democracy and brotherhood and equality into enterprise and opportunity and success—and that's getting Americanised. Now, father," he sought refuge in the tone of every-day things, "you'll get used to it—won't you? I don't expect you to feel very good about it, but ...
— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell
... standing on the bow of an ocean liner, with the salt breeze whizzing into your heart. He is a force of nature, yet he explains nothing: a thorough man of the world; droll, sarcastic, generous and I believe for democracy he is unequaled by any Tammany politician: he knows more policemen, dopes, conductors, beggars, chauffeurs, gangsters, bartenders, jobless actors, painters, preachers, anarchists, and all the rest of New York's flotsam and jetsam than any ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... the traders as identical with the aristocracy in opposition to his "people." The traders are the cursed middlemen, bad friends of the "people," and infernally treacherous to the nobles till money hoists them. It's they who pull down the country. They hold up the nobles to the hatred of the democracy, and the democracy to scare the nobles. One's when they want to swallow a privilege, and the other's when they want to ring-fence their gains. How is it Shrapnel doesn't expose the trick? He must see through it. I like that letter of his. People is one of your Radical big words that burst ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... out at the next station; and he might be seen handing out decrepit paupers, as if they were of royal blood and bore concealed sceptres in their old umbrellas. Exquisitely nice in his personal habits, he had the practical democracy of a good-natured young prince; he had never yet seen a human being who awed him, nor one whom he had the slightest wish to awe. His courtesy, had, therefore, that comprehensiveness which we call republican, though it was really ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... abnegation of domestic comfort, a latent feeling of ambition tempered with resignation, such as becomes a woman, that do you the highest honour.... I think the crisis we are going through in England very alarming ... a frightful system of political immorality is stalking through the land—the Democracy is triumphant, the Aristocracy is making a noble and last effort to hold its own, unfortunately in so bad, so unjust, so selfish, so stupid a cause, that it must fall covered with shame.... The hero of the day, Cobden, is a great man in his way, the type of an honest manufacturer, but ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... fighting against those of an adjoining one. Hence it happened that the children of the higher classes were often pitted against those of the lower, each taking their side according to the residence of their friends. So far as I recollect, however, it was unmingled either with feelings of democracy or aristocracy, or, indeed, with malice or ill-will of any kind towards the opposite party. In fact, it was only a rough mode of play. Such contests were, however, maintained with great vigour with stones and sticks and fisticuffs, when one party dared to charge, ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... consider as the triumph of the cause of freedom in the Peninsula;—having read enough to know, and having seen enough to observe, that of all possible tyrannies—and I cordially hate them all—the most contemptible, corrupt, and cruel is the tyranny of absolute democracy, most especially when resting, as in Spain and Portugal, on that new instrument of freedom, ...
— Memoirs of the Court of George IV. 1820-1830 (Vol 1) - From the Original Family Documents • Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... there is something of the flash of steel; a very sharp-cutting, penetrative, rapid individual, he too; and shaped for action, first of all, though he has to talk so much in the world. Fastidious, proud, no King could be prouder, though his element is that of Free-Senate and Democracy. And he has a beautiful poetic delicacy, withal; great tenderness in him, playfulness, grace; in all ways, an airy as well as a solid loftiness of mind. Not born a King,—alas, no, not officially so, only naturally so; has his kingdom to ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... St. Gall, after having reduced the entire population of what is now two Cantons to serfdom, became more oppressive as their power increased, it was the mountain shepherds who, in the year 1403, struck the first blow for liberty. Once free, they kept their freedom, and established a rude democracy on the heights, similar in form and spirit to the league which the Forest Cantons had founded nearly a century before. An echo from the meadow of Gruetli reached the wild valleys around the Sentis, and Appenzell, by the middle ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... gentlemen naturally observe. If you are a lady of social prominence, studying for the grace and beauty and health that our lessons impart, and not intending to favor the stage with your presence, you are accorded the same treatment that all others receive. This is a pure democracy ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... the election of Jackson [1] was an event of as much political importance as was the election of Jefferson. Men hailed it as another great uprising of the people, as another triumph of democracy. They acted as if the country had been delivered from impending evil, and hurried by thousands to Washington to see the hero inaugurated and the era of ...
— A Brief History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... stockholders—" The word had an import to Miss Mattie; a something, if not regal, at least a kinship to the king. Under her democracy lay a respect for the founded institution; impersonal; an integral part of the law of the State; in fact, a minor sovereignty within ...
— Red Saunders • Henry Wallace Phillips
... thou to an inferior, or equal, and you to a superior. They saw in this custom an infringement of the great law of human brotherhood; and because they would "call no man master," they said thou to every person, without distinction of rank. To the conservatives of their day, this spiritual democracy seemed like deliberate contempt of authority; and as such, deserving of severe punishment. More strenuously than all other things, they denied the right of any set of men to prescribe a creed for others. The only authority ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... make a crusade more just than this of ours. We were patient, too long patient, perhaps, with challenges. We seek no conquest. We fight to protect the freedom of our citizens. On America's standard is written democracy, on that of Germany autocracy. Without reservation women can give their all to ...
— Mobilizing Woman-Power • Harriot Stanton Blatch
... other, motion; one, power; the other, distribution; one, strength; the other, pleasure; one, consciousness; the other, definition; one, genius; the other, talent, one, earnestness; the other, knowledge; one, possession; the other, trade; one, caste; the other, culture; one king; the other, democracy; and, if we dare carry these generalizations a step higher, and name the last tendency of both, we might say, that the end of the one is escape from organization,—pure science; and the end of the other is ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... I would much rather write for the National Review if I am admissible.... I value forms of government in proportion as they develop moral results in individual man; and if I now am democratic for Europe, it is not from any abstract and exclusive zeal for democracy, all the weaknesses of which I keenly feel, but because the dynasties, having first corrupted or destroyed the aristocracies, and next become hateful, hated, and incurable themselves, have left no government possible which shall have stability and morality ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... caliphate, pashalic[obs3], electorate; presidency, presidentship[obs3]; administration; proconsul, consulship; prefecture; seneschalship; magistrature[obs3], magistracy. monarchy; kinghood[obs3], kingship; royalty, regality; aristarchy[obs3], aristocracy; oligarchy, democracy, theocracy, demagogy; commonwealth; dominion; heteronomy; republic, republicanism; socialism; collectivism; mob law, mobocracy[obs3], ochlocracy[obs3]; vox populi, imperium in imperio[Lat]; bureaucracy; beadledom[obs3], bumbledom[obs3]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... to adopt and support whichever ensured for the moment the greatest benefit to the souls of their fellow-men. They were dishonest in all sincerity. Thus Labitte, in the introduction to a book[61] in which he exposes the hypocritical democracy of the Catholics under the League, steps aside for a moment to stigmatise the hypocritical democracy of the Protestants. And nowhere was this expediency in political questions more apparent than about the question of female sovereignty. So much was this the case that one James Thomasius, of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... power over the individual, and differing theories of the relations of church and State. The East having accepted caste as the basis of its society naturally adopted the policy of government by a favorite minority, the West inclined more and more toward democracy. The latter considered representatives only those who had been elected as such by a majority of the people of the district in which they lived; the former believed in a more restricted electorate, and the representation of districts and interests, rather than that of numbers.[13] ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... some who therefore imagine monarchy to be more grievous than democracy, because there is less liberty in that than in this. If by liberty they mean an exemption from that subjection which is due to the laws, that is, the commands of the people; neither in democracy nor in any other state of government whatsoever ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... to challenge the almost solid cohorts of pro-slavery Democracy in California was David C. Broderick, United States Senator from 1857 until his untimely death in 1859. Broderick was the son of a stone cutter and in early life followed his father's trade. Born ...
— Starr King in California • William Day Simonds
... apparent that ultra-democracy in France was not favored by the majority of Frenchmen. The Socialists and Anarchists, finding that they could not form a tyrant majority in the Assembly, began to conspire against it. While a debate was going on ten days after it assembled, an alarm was raised that a fierce ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... intention of the President to confer this rank, and consequently the command of the army, upon Thomas H. Benton, then a Senator from Missouri. This was a great shock to General Scott, and he attributed it to political motives. He reasoned this way: "Scott is a Whig; therefore the Democracy is not bound to observe good faith with him. His successes may be turned to the prejudice of the Democratic party. We must, however, profit by his military experience, and if successful, by force of patronage and other helps, ...
— General Scott • General Marcus J. Wright
... which seems to be the perpetual inheritance of our race. They may amuse an idle hour. But the ambition I shall associate with them is, that in some measure, however small, they may stimulate that growing interest which the Imperial Democracy of England is beginning to take, in their great estates that ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... happy mixture of two extreme political systems, despotism and democracy, suggests by the necessity of blending also the two principles of marriage, which so far clash together in France. The liberty which we boldly claim for young people is the only remedy for the host of evils whose source we have pointed out, by exposing ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... majority of the settlers. Stanton was removed from office for opposing the scheme, and Walker resigned in disgust. This change of policy was doubtless the result of timidity rather than of a desire to secure re-election by gaining the favour of the Southern Democracy. Under the influence of Howell Cobb of Georgia, secretary of the treasury, and Jacob Thompson of Mississippi, secretary of the interior, the president was convinced that it was the only way to avoid civil war. Federal patronage was freely used to advance the Lecompton ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... travellers turned aside from the frescoes of Giorgione to study the aristocratic polity of Venice, and Jesuits borrowed from the schoolmen of the Middle Ages a doctrine of popular rights which still forms the theory of modern democracy. On the other hand the nation was learning to rely on itself, to believe in its own strength and vigour, to crave for a share in the guidance of its own life. His conflict with the two great spiritual and temporal powers ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... was never a democracy in the modern sense of the term. At first in 1630, control was assumed by the governor and his assistants, leaving but little power in the hands of the freeman; but such usurpation of power could not last, and in 1634 the ...
— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews
... freemen, and like men of noble breed; And when the battle fell away at night By hasty and contemptuous hands were thrust Obscurely in a common grave with him The fair-haired keeper of their love and trust. Now limb doth mingle with dissolved limb In nature's busy old democracy To flush the mountain laurel when she blows Sweet by the southern sea, And heart with crumbled heart climbs in the rose:— The untaught hearts with the high heart that knew This mountain fortress for no earthly hold Of temporal quarrel, but the bastion old Of spiritual wrong, Built by an ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody
... perhaps it's the decent thing to do? Oh, well; don't say anything about it. I haven't made up my mind—this is an awful place!" he said, with a shiver, looking across at Shantytown and remembering what was hidden under the glamor of the moon. "The smell of it! Democracy is well enough, Nancy—until you ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... tender in a practical way to those below her and coldly scrutinizing to any one who tapped at her door claiming to be an equal. Being bred to her finger-tips, she was as ill-at-ease as her husband in the jostling democracy of the moment. ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... this miraculous transformation, we ourselves remain small, hard, and narrow, without great thoughts or great loves or immortal hopes. We are a crowd where the highest and the best lose individuality, and are swept along as though democracy were a tyranny of the average man under which superiority of whatever kind is criminal. Our population increases, our cities grow, our roads are lengthened, our machinery is made more perfect, the number ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... himself equally to all—as fitted for action as for thought, he passed from one to the other with facility, according to the phases of his destiny. There was in him the flexibility of the Greek mind in the stirring periods of the democracy in Athens. His deep study early directed his mind to history, that poem of men of action. Plutarch nourished him with his manly diet. He moulded on the antique figures drawn from life by the historian ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... approbation, we do not wish to commit you to any thing. I am well aware that this whole scheme is a bold and daring one, that can but surprise you at first, as it did me, and for this reason I beg to state a few facts for your consideration. In the rise and progress of democracy in America, we have seen its highest attainment. In the very outset it was based on high religious principles, and adopted as a refuge from despotism. In the North, Puritanism molded it, and went so far as to leave out the natural ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... stare. Never more than when among his cattle and poultry was he moved to draw contrasts between the security of his possessions in the country and the insecurity of his possessions in town. "What I am thinking of is the city tax-payer. Urban democracy, working on a large scale, has declared itself finally, and what we have is the organization of the careless, the ignorant, the envious, brought about by the criminal and the semi-criminal, for the spoliation of ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... willing to make the effort. She was really charming to everybody. The consciousness that she was successfully adapting herself to their primitive provincial scope, and her very gracious condescension to all types, filled her with respect for her democracy and breadth ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... the "armed apostle of democracy" that Napoleon went forth conquering and to conquer. He declared at St. Helena that he "had always marched supported by the opinions ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... ferment. Here there was neither poverty nor discontent nor muttered menace of any upheaval: Mrs Lucas, busy and serene, worked harder than any of her subjects, and exercised an autocratic control over a nominal democracy. ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... defended the King's refusal of the imperial crown, because "all the real gold in it would be gotten by melting up the Prussian crown"; and he compared the pact which the King, by accepting the Frankfort constitution, would make with the democracy, to the pact between the huntsman and the devil in the 'Freischuetz': sooner or later, he declared, the people would come to the Emperor, and pointing to the Imperial arms, would say, "Do you fancy this eagle ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... "if our politics ever fall into the hands of a stock-jobbing democracy, we shall be the hugest force for evil the poor old world ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... of unity, and of civic life, which I had already discovered in all these Swiss towns; for though men talk of finding the Middle Ages here or there, I for my part never find it, save where there has been democracy to preserve it. Thus I have seen the Middle Ages especially alive in the small towns of Northern France, and I have seen the Middle Ages in the University of Paris. Here also in Switzerland. As I ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... around the throne, she was aroused to a more vehement desire for the social and intellectual elevation of those with whom she had cast in her lot. The conflict with the nobles was of short continuance. The energy of rising democracy soon vanquished them. Violence took the place of law. And now the conflict for power arose between those of the Republicans who were more and those who were less radical in their plans of reform. The most moderate party, ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... the full of the moon it was usually convoked. The nobles and the popular delegates arrived at irregular intervals, for it was an inconvenience arising from their liberty, that two or three days were often lost in waiting for the delinquents. All state affairs were in the hands of this fierce democracy. The elected chieftains had rather authority to persuade than power ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... too great naivete. The Boers may have created a democracy among themselves; with regard to natives and Uitlanders ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot
... officials and others, attacking, approving and bringing new suggestions. Larin, Semashko, Pyatakov, Bucharin all took a hand in the discussion. Larin saw in the proposals the beginning of the end of the revolution, being convinced that authority would pass from the democracy of the workers into the hands of the specialists. Rykov fell upon them with sturdy blows on behalf of the Trades Unions. All, however, agreed on the one point—that something of the sort was necessary. On December 27th a Commission for studying the question of industrial conscription ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome
... address, Lowndes. The man was making a speech to his constituents, and he piled it on. Here's a sample: "And I assert unhesitatingly that the Civil Service in India is the preserve —the pet preserve—of the aristocracy of England. What does the democracy—what do the masses—get from that country, which we have step by step fraudulently annexed? I answer, nothing whatever. It is farmed with a single eye to their own interests by the scions of the aristocracy. They take good care to maintain their lavish scale of incomes, ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... of democracy incomprehensible after this? Ambitious and continually thwarted, he could not reproach himself. He had once already tried his fortune by inventing a purgative pill, something like Morrison's, and intrusted the business operations to an ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... between aristocracy and democracy, the ranks of the former had been joined by one of its most determined enemies. Bernadotte being thrown almost singly among the ancient courts and nobility, did every thing to merit his adoption by them, and succeeded. ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... of commercial principles in the old regime of France allied with political despotism, was, however, ruthlessly condemned to the guillotine, along with the head of the Capets, never to be replaced by the ferocious spirit of democracy, revelling in the realization of all other visionary abstractions of perfect liberty, equality, levelling of distinctions and monopolies. With the reign of the rights of man was established, in the body politic, that of prohibition and restriction over the body ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... have never had the need for such supernatural restraints exercised by a privileged body, and secondly, that they are absolutely without any feeling of class or caste—prince and pauper meeting on terms of frank and humorous equality—the race thus being the only pure and untinctured democracy the world has ever known.] The chain which bound provincial China to the metropolitan government was therefore in the last analysis finance and nothing but finance; and if the system broke down in 1911 it was because financial reform—to discount the ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... and hay! You've got a hay mind, that's the trouble with you! You've got so you think that hay and bread and pork and beans are all men live and die for! They don't, Mister Reporter, they die for ideals—freedom, democracy, human rights—which are in 'em so deep that when a big writer sees 'em there and brings 'em out and holds 'em up and says, 'Here! This is you, this is what you want, this is what you believe in!'—your crowd says, 'Sure! Why didn't we see it long ago?' And then they do things that go into headlines! ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... involved in misfortunes, becomes timid and weak through its inability to endure plain speaking at a time when it especially needs it, as otherwise its mistakes cannot be repaired. For this reason the position of a statesman in a democracy must always be full of peril; for if he tries merely to please the people he will share their ruin, while if he thwarts them he ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... I mean to tell you that it is you who are suffering from the emasculating ravages of that same microbe. As for me, I am an inveterate opponent of socialism just as I am an inveterate opponent of your own mongrel democracy that is nothing else than pseudo- socialism masquerading under a garb of words that will not stand ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... time, too, that Carl got into difficulties with the intrenched powers on the campus. He had what has been referred to as "a passion for justice." Daily the injustice of campus organization grew on him; he saw democracy held high as an ideal—lip-homage only. Student affairs were run by an autocracy which had nothing to justify it except its supporters' claim of "efficiency." He had little love for that word—it is ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... his society, my intimacy with Long Ghost was of great service to me in other respects. His disgrace in the cabin only confirmed the good-will of the democracy in the forecastle; and they not only treated him in the most friendly manner, but looked up to him with the utmost deference, besides laughing heartily at all his jokes. As his chosen associate, this feeling for him extended to me, and gradually we ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... the origin of our tales. Yet who cares for origins nowadays? We are all democrats now, and a tale, like a man, is welcomed for its merits and not for its pedigree. Yet even democracy must own, that pedigree often leaves its trace in style and manner, and certainly the tales before us owe some of their charm to their lineage. "Out of Byzantium by Old France" is a good strain by ...
— Old French Romances • William Morris
... weapons of war and nutrition. Its nearest relative, the cricket of the sea, a dull and heavy animal, was sulking in the corners covered with mire and with sea weed, in an immovability that made it easily confounded with the stones. Around these giants, like a democracy accustomed to endure from time to time the attack of the strong, crayfish and shrimps were swimming in shoals. Their movements were free and graceful, and their sensitiveness so acute that the slightest agitation made ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... a time as this, and in such circumstances, that John Quincy Adams surveyed, from a new position, the colossal structure of British power, and the workings of its combined systems of conservative aristocracy, and progressive democracy. It was here that he imbibed new veneration for Russell, Sidney, Hampden, and Milton, its republican patriots; for Shakspeare, Dryden, and Pope, its immortal poets; and for Addison and Johnson, its moralists; ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... was, and he said that if I would write a pamphlet he would pay for the printing of 1,000 copies, to be sent to all the members of Parliament and other leading people in city and country. I called my pamphlet "A Plea for Pure Democracy," and when writing it I felt the democratic strength of the position as I had not felt it in reading Hare's own book. It cost my brother 15 pounds, ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... of the people to discuss political matters. We must look to it, gentlemen, or we shall find that we have ridded ourselves of a king only to fall into the hands of a democracy, which I take it ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... the gas mask and how to go without food; how to shoulder arms and how to march. But the schools all along the line did help to give them ideals, did train them in team-play; did instil into them the principles of democracy and the love of country, so that when the need came they arose as one man to repel the foe. And the study of arithmetic, geography, and grammar; of chemistry, physics, and medicine; of Latin, Greek, and history has, in each case, made its contribution to the preparation of home workers, soldiers, ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... my undertaking," Doctor Denziger assures us. "I shall accept every risk and responsibility," says Doctor Leverson. "If it is necessary, I shall go so far as to provoke a revolution in my own country," repeats Mr. Udell. "It is necessary to save the Republic and democracy from the abyss of imperialism and save the worthy Filipinos from oppression and extermination" is cried by all, and the sound of this cry is ever rising louder and ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... Pure democracy is an utter and unattainable impossibility; nature has effectually barred against it. The only thing in the course of a life of more than half a century that has ever puzzled me about it is, that the Catholic clergy should, in so many parts of the world, have lent ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... an argument for woman suffrage. No careful observer of the modern trend of human affairs, doubts that "governments of the people" are destined to replace the monarchies of the world. No listener will fail to hear the rumble of the rising tide of democracy. No watcher of events will deny that the women of all civilized lands will be enfranchised eventually as part of the people entitled to give consent and no American possessed of political foresight doubts woman suffrage in our land as a ...
— Woman Suffrage By Federal Constitutional Amendment • Various
... mere cant or hypocrisy in their case, but a profound belief in the teachings of the Scripture in which they truly believe is to be found the most powerful bulwark of the throne against the ever rising tide of democracy, and the fundamental basis of the entire monarchical system. Save for this, their manifestations of Christianity may be ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... Not that he wish'd his greatness to create, For politicians neither love nor hate: But, for he knew his title not allow'd, Would keep him still depending on the crowd: That kingly power, thus ebbing out, might be Drawn to the dregs of a democracy. Him he attempts with studied arts to please, And sheds his venom in such words ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... Western antipathy. The unthinking sons of the sage-brush ill tolerate a thing which stands for discipline, good order, and obedience, and the man who lets another command him they despise. I can think of no threat more evil for our democracy, for it is a fine thing diseased ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... and October, when your Wide-Awakes on the one hand, and your conservative Democracy on the other, were parading the streets with banners and music, as they or their predecessors had done in so many previous contests, and believing that nothing worse could be involved than a possible ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... study the agent Kaiser was already there. In the democracy of the lodge men came and went almost at will. But Karl, big with plans for the future, would have been alone, and eyed the agent ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Sara's life was full and gay; she had interests in which he had no share; her social world was utterly apart from his; she was of the hill and its traditions, he was of the valley and its people. The democracy of childhood past, there was no common ground on which they might meet. Only one thing Jeffrey had found it impossible to contemplate calmly. Some day Sara would marry—a man who was her equal, who sat at her father's table as a guest. In spite of himself, Jeffrey's heart filled ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... of value. It also records what is perhaps the greatest of all governmental efforts—with the possible exception of Diocletian's—to enact and enforce a legal limit of commodity prices. Every fetter that could hinder the will or thwart the wisdom of democracy had been shattered, and in consequence every device and expedient that untrammelled power and unrepressed optimism could conceive were brought to bear. But the attempts failed. They left behind them a legacy of moral and material desolation ...
— Fiat Money Inflation in France - How It Came, What It Brought, and How It Ended • Andrew Dickson White
... Virginia responded, declaring that his State intended, in the interest of fair play, to cling to the Democracy of the South. "If we are to be constrained to silence," he vociferated, "I beg gentlemen to consider the silence of Virginia ominous. If we are not gentlemen—if we are such knaves that we cannot trust one another—we had better scatter at once, and cease to make any effort to bind each ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... governed either the East End or the West. For the East End formed a Federation of the smaller synagogues to oppose the dominance of the United Synagogue, importing a minister of superior orthodoxy from the Continent, and the Flag had powerful leaders on the great struggle between plutocracy and democracy, and the voice of Mr. Henry Goldsmith was heard on behalf of Whitechapel. And the West, in so far as it had spiritual aspirations, fed them on non-Jewish literature and the higher thought of the ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... discussion of the theory of free exchange and made a passionate plea, florid and declamatory, which gave Fergusson, a cool, pointed, scholarly Norwegian, an excellent chance to raise a laugh. He called the attention of the house to the "copperhead Democracy," which the gentleman of the opposition was preaching. He asked what the practical application would mean. Plainly it meant ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... morality;" declaring that Paine's doctrine annihilated the security of every man for his inalienable rights, and would lead in practice to a hideous despotism, concealed under the parti-colored garments of democracy. The truth of the views in these essays was soon made manifest by the destruction of the French constitution, so lauded by Paine and Jefferson, the succeeding anarchy, the murder of the French monarch, and the establishment ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... as it has exercised our patriotism and submission to order, has planted and invigorated among us arts of urgent necessity, has manifested the strong and the weak parts of our republican institutions, and the excellence of a representative democracy compared with the misrule of Kings, has rallied the opinions of mankind to the natural rights of expatriation, and of a common property in the ocean, and raised us to that grade in the scale of nations which the bravery and liberality of our citizen ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... my old convictions about the feasibility of immediate emancipation, and that is the experiment of emancipated labor on the Mississippi and about Port Royal. But the severest trial of emancipation, as of democracy,—that is, of freeing black men as of freeing white men,—may not be found at ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... remained clear and even to the end, in spite of the fact that he wrote all his books, articles, and letters with his own hand until the last few years, when he occasionally had assistance with his correspondence; but his last two books, "Social Environment" and "The Revolt of Democracy," written when he was 90 years of age, were penned by himself, and the MSS. are perfectly legible ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... she said, withdrawing her head, displaying cheeks more than usually crimson, and placing a jam-pot emphatically upon the table. But, for the moment, she was unable to launch herself upon one of those enthusiastic, but inconsequent, tirades upon liberty, democracy, the rights of the people, and the iniquities of the Government, in which she delighted. Some memory from her own past or from the past of her sex rose to her mind and kept her abashed. She glanced furtively at Mary, who still sat by the window with ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... the whim of a great dead composer is worthy to be the law of any living composer. These Blue Laws of music are constantly assailed surreptitiously and in detail; and yet they are too little attacked as a whole. But music should be a democracy and not an aristocracy, or, still less, ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... Yankee with his freaky humour, and the sedentary gold dust twins from Kansas, and a great boat-load of others like them in their striking differences of ideals and notions, all hurrying across the world to help in the great fight for democracy which, in its essence, is only the right to live in the world, each man, each cult, each race, each blood and each nation after its own kind. And about all the war involves is the right to live, and to love one's own kind of women, one's own kind of music, one's own kind of humour, one's own ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... mayor would presumably have made proclamations, had there ever been anything in Panama to proclaim about. Staring loafers in front of the Girard House. To Una there was no romance in the sick mansion, no kindly democracy in the village street, no bare freedom in the hills beyond. She was not much to blame; she was a creature of action to whom this constricted town had denied all ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... Liberty and loyalty and law are no longer brave words merely: they are things, and things of tremendous power; and some men slink away from them. But we need to remember that liberty does not mean license. The political liberty of our time, testing the truth of our representative democracy, is constitutional liberty. It presupposes an organic law, giving force and effect to it: and without this organic law, liberty is a delusion and a dream—a vague unsubstantiality. Liberty is like the lightning. To be made an agent of man's political salvation, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... seldom yielded so willingly to a request for my written views as I do in this instance, when my valued friend, the master journalist, Melville E. Stone, has asked me, on behalf of the Book Committee, to write an introduction for "The Defenders of Democracy." Needless to say, I comply all the more readily in view of the fact that the book in which these words will appear is planned by the ladies of the Militia of Mercy as a means of increasing the Fund the Society is raising for the benefit of the families of "their ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... of this old aristocratic society stands the rude form of the most ignorant democracy that mankind ever saw, invested with the functions of government. It is the dregs of the population habilitated in the robes of their intelligent predecessors, and asserting over them the rule of ignorance and corruption.... It is barbarism overwhelming civilization by physical force. ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming
... to Princeton democracy; cost a lot; draw social lines, take time; the regular line you get sometimes from disappointed sophomores. Woodrow thought they should be abolished ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... toward universal Democracy which lay behind all these extravagances was upon the whole a movement borne along by calm conviction, not by burning hatreds or ecstatic devotions. A profound sense of the inevitable trend of the world's evolution seemed to have taken possession ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... The Social Leader, for instance. She tried to turn our little democracy into a monarchy, with herself the sovereign. She was very near-sighted, and it was a mystery how she managed to know all about everything until we discovered she kept a pair of powerful field-glasses trained on the scene most of the time. The poor lady had a mania ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... Henry VII., which had gradually shifted the weight of affairs from the King and Lords to the Commons. But all could be put right by adopting a true model. It must not be an arbitrary monarchy, or a mixed monarchy, or a mere democracy as vulgarly understood, or any other of the make-shift constitutions of the past, but something worthy of being called a Free and Equal Commonwealth, and yet conserving what was genuine and natural ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... top of the tree, are desirous of giving to all an opportunity of raising themselves in the scale of human beings. I dislike universal suffrage; I dislike votes by ballot; I dislike above all things the tyranny of democracy. But I do like the political feeling—for it is a political feeling—which induces every educated American to lend a hand to the education of his fellow-citizens. It shows, if nothing else does so, a germ of truth in that doctrine of equality. It is a doctrine to be ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... of my Democratic friends, one other observation. Is not this Proposal the very essence of whatever truth there is in "Democracy;" this, that the able man be chosen, in whatever rank be is found? That he be searched for as hidden treasure is; be trained, supervised, set to the work which he alone is fit for. All Democracy ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... modern democracy may succeed, I am not prepared to say," replied Mr. Campbell; "but this I do know, that in ancient times, their duration was generally very short, and continually changing to oligarchy and tyranny. One thing is certain, that there is no form of government under which ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat
... events have been engendered under the shadow of these hills. The Suffolk Resolves, which were the prelude of the Declaration of Independence, were adopted at the Vose House, which still stands, square and unadorned, easy of access from the sidewalk, as is suitable for a home of democracy. The first piano ever made in this country received its conception and was brought to fulfillment in the Crehore house, which, although still sagging a bit, is by no means out of commission. And Wilde's ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... was that democracy Wayne had been talking about. Perhaps this democracy was a thing not contented with any one section of a man's life. Perhaps once it had him—it had its way with him. Katie thought of the last thirty days—of paths leading out from other paths. ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... discovery of some method of cooperation between them. Parliamentary government in China and Japan has had its effect in India, and Britain will soon be compelled to admit her Indian populations to a larger share in municipal and provincial administration. But democracy can be successful, only when conflicting classes find some basis for harmony. English missionary and educational institutions are doing much to reconcile Hindus and Mohammedans to one another, and this may prepare the way, not simply for free government, ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong
... city was that it contained more vital democracy than any city I had ever been in. It takes an Old World proletarian a long time to outgrow a sense of subserviency. As a missionary and almoner of the rich in New York, this sense was very strong in me. In the West I felt this vital democracy so keenly and saw the vision ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... great provinces by standing costly contested elections; of those professionally pursuing the career of arms in the naval or land service; and then, collating all this activity with the very limited extent of our peerage taken even with their families, not the very bigotry of democracy will deny that the characteristic energy of our nation is faithfully reflected from its ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... her than if—in the words of a splenetic contemporary—"she had been a dead she-goat." Paris howled with rage when it learned the murders of Blois, and the sixteen quarters became more furious than ever against the Valois. Some wild talk there was of democracy and republicanism after the manner of Switzerland, and of dividing France into cantons—and there was an earnest desire on the part of every grandee, every general, every soldier of fortune, to carve out a portion of French territory with his sword, and to appropriate ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... that neither the poet's optimism nor his acumen has justified in the minds of men. It is a return to the unbridled freedom of nature advocated by Whitman and Rousseau; an extreme assertion of the value of the individual man, and of unregulated democracy; an outgrowth, it may be, of the robustness and originality of Browning's nature, and interesting—not as a clew to his life, which conformed to that of organized society—but as a clew to his independence of classical and conventional forms in the ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... should have votes. And, of course, the old party divisions have more or less crumbled away. The Liberals naturally are under the blackest of clouds, for having steered the country to disaster, though to do them justice it was no more their fault than the fault of any other party. In a democracy such as ours was the Government of the day must more or less reflect the ideas and temperament of the nation in all vital matters, and the British nation in those days could not have been persuaded ...
— When William Came • Saki
... Northern United States," "Science Sketches," "Fishes of North and Middle America" (4 vols.); "Footnotes to Evolution," "Matka and Kotik," "Care and Culture of Men," "The Innumerable Company," "Imperial Democracy," "Animal Life," "Animal Forms," "The Strength of Being Clean," "Standeth God within the Shadow," also numerous papers on Ichthyology, in procedures of various societies and ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... Do we fully realize the dangers as well as the glorious possibilities of unfettered action? Do we sufficiently feel the weight of the responsibility we have undertaken? In reality we have declared to the world the fitness of the Australian democracy to work a Constitution from which the most advanced of the other nations would shrink! We do not hesitate to avow our firm belief that there is only one thing that can save the situation. Unless Australia is to show to the world a warning instead of an example, ...
— Proportional Representation Applied To Party Government • T. R. Ashworth and H. P. C. Ashworth |
