"Fitness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... smallest, but He at the same time foresaw and foredoomed everything. All that was to happen in this universe did God foresee and foredoom, and lo! it cometh to pass. He appointed me for them and for their sins, that for them I might make prayer and exhortation. Not for my fitness or my strength was I chosen, but only through the grace of His mercy and His long-suffering. For I assure thee, Joshua, not on account of the excellence of this people wilt thou destroy the heathens; all the fastnesses of heaven and the foundations of the universe were created ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... which had a fit proposer in a distinguished representative of the north, was seconded by one [himself] who had no other fitness for the office than that he was altogether of the south, and had been taught by a long study of our literature to believe that north and south had a like interest in the promotion of a right study ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1, November 1875 • Various
... mean instant freedom from his present bondage, and to Schubert that implied almost everything. It is evident, however, that those who recommended him for the post were by no means convinced of his fitness for governing, for their letters were but half-hearted, and the selection fell upon another man who, it turned out, was also recommended by one ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... penetrates the whole earth. The rich forests shrink slowly into thin tracts of scrubby, poverty-stricken vegetation. The loss of food and the bleak and exacting conditions of the new earth annihilate thousands of species of the older organisms, and the more progressive types are moulded into fitness for the new environment. It is a colossal application of natural selection, and amongst its results ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... trees beneath whose branches grow quantities of Impatiens fulva, the spotted touch-me-not,—named from the sudden bursting of the pod when touched. The plant in question I had not seen for some time and the fitness of the symbolism to the bodily state was too close to be accidental. After a walk in the spring when the ground was white with the cotton-tufted seeds of the poplar and I thought if all germinated ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... of public funds is avoided when appointments to office, instead of being the rewards of partisan activity, are awarded to those whose efficiency promises a fair return of work for the compensation paid to them. To secure the fitness and competency of appointees to office and remove from political action the demoralizing madness for spoils, civil-service reform has found a place in our public policy and laws. The benefits already gained ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Volume 8, Section 2 (of 2): Grover Cleveland • Grover Cleveland
... nicest people you could possibly meet, Jack," Tamara said. "And don't imagine because they skylark like this, and sit up all night, that they aren't most dignified when they have to be. That is their charm, this sense of the fitness of things. They have not got to have any pretence like some of us have. Not one of them has a scrap of pose. They are nice to you because they like you, or they leave you entirely alone if they do not. And some days when they are all together they will whisper and titter and have jokes ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn
... That, as a mere fact, might happen to anybody; but I am a bachelor uncle by internal fitness. I am one essentially, just as I am an individual of the Caucasian division of the human race; and if, through untoward circumstances—which Heaven forbid—I should lose my present position, I shouldn't be surprised if you saw me out in the "Herald" under "Situations ...
— A Brace Of Boys - 1867, From "Little Brother" • Fitz Hugh Ludlow
... judgment of the party shall assign me a different position. If the Republicans of the great State of Pennsylvania shall present Mr. Cameron as their candidate for the Presidency, such an indorsement of his fitness for the place could scarcely be deemed insufficient. Still, as I would not like the public to know, so I would not like myself to know, I had entered a combination with any man to the prejudice of all others whose friends respectively may ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... non-voting citizens, is often a person who is unfit for any public duty or trust. In a town government, having a small area of jurisdiction, where the voice of the majority of qualified voters is conclusive, the fitness of the person who is to exercise that high representative privilege can be determined by his neighbors and acquaintances, and, in the great majority of cases, it will be decided honestly and for the good of the country. In such meetings, ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... should destroy his own identity. It is not what you are, or what by study you may become, but how few obstacles you present to the getting of yourself up as somebody else, that settles the question of your fitness for the stage. Smoothness of face, mobility of feature, compass of voice—these things, but the toys of other trades, are the tools of ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... Nombre de Dios. Drake had a mind to look into Venta Cruz to surprise some of the treasure on its way. He, therefore, sent away his brother, with two pinnaces and a steady man named Ellis Hixom, to examine the Chagres River, and to bring back a report of its fitness for boats such as theirs. Having seen them stand to the west, Drake ordered his men aboard early in the morning of the 31st July. The sweeps were shipped and the sails hoisted, and the pinnaces made off with their captured wine ship to rejoin Captain Rause at the Isles of Pines, or Port Plenty. ...
— On the Spanish Main - Or, Some English forays on the Isthmus of Darien. • John Masefield
... the less pleased as he was in the wrong," said Lydia. "Intolerant refusal to listen to an opponent is a species of violence that has no business in such a representative nineteenth-century drawing-room as yours, Mrs. Hoskyn. There was a fitness in rebuking it by skilled physical violence. Consider the prodigious tact of it, too! One gentleman knocks another half-way across a crowded room, and yet no ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... the man who offers the bribe is acting still more immorally than the man who accepts it. He is not only causing others to act immorally, but, as no man can be a proper judge of his own competency, he is attempting to thrust himself into an office of trust without any regard to his fitness to fill it. Intimidation, on the part of the man who practises it, is on the same ethical level as bribery, with respect to the two points just mentioned; but, as it appeals to the fears of men instead ...
— Progressive Morality - An Essay in Ethics • Thomas Fowler
... are materially less than four inches in length, the product is classed as a short-staple or "carding" wool. By far the greater part of the wool of the United States, Canada, and Europe is of this class. It is disposed of according to its fineness or fitness for special purposes, the greater part being made into cloths for the medium ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... truly! Cromwell could see nothing in Winstanley's demands save that they tended "to make the Tenant as liberal a fortune as the Land-lord,"[165:1] which did not conform to his sense of the eternal fitness of ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... advocate for that religious and moral aristocracy which, in his day, was called republicanism, and which, even more than royalism itself, is the direct antipode of modern jacobinism. Taylor, as more and more sceptical concerning the fitness of 375 men in general for power, became more and more attached to the prerogatives of monarchy. From Calvinism, with a still decreasing respect for Fathers, Councils, and for Church-antiquity in general, Milton seems to have ended ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... letters from a host of friends who had known her so well and so long. This pleased her, and after her death her husband wrote me urging me to edit such a composite picture, but knowing his superior fitness for the work, I thanked him for the compliment, but declined. What a delightful result was accomplished by his good judgment, literary skill, and the biographical notes gladly given by her intimate friends. I will give a few quotations from ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... be well to remember, that the Deity is not bound to act according to our notions of fitness; and that though it may not always be easiest, yet it is certainly most modest to form our theories from a survey of his works, rather than the nursery of our own prejudices. The following observations may be of utility to some readers. The motion of the earth about its axis ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... life by violence, or whether mere distaste of life and the loathing he had for mankind brought Timon to his conclusion, was not clear, yet all men admired the fitness of his epitaph, and the consistency of his end; dying, as he had lived, a hater of mankind: and some there were who fancied a conceit in the very choice which he had made of the sea-beach for his place of burial, ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb
... preference is very often mistaken for aptitude or natural fitness, a lyric artist is not always the best judge as to which of the roles in his repertoire are really fitted to display his abilities to the best advantage. The singer combines in himself both instrument and performer; therefore he rarely, if ever, hears himself ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... back of them, that is, fitness, quality, responsibility, were forgotten. The old instinct for ornament broke loose. Its tyranny was strengthened by the eternal desire of the individual to prove himself superior to his fellows. Wealth is the generally accepted standard of measurement of value in this country to-day, and ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... them, and a large crucifix flanked by candles stood on a little altar by the further door. There was no more furniture than that, with the exception of a writing-desk between the windows, on which stood a typewriter. That jarred somehow on his sense of fitness, and he wondered ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... sacrificed nothing of his convictions, had not worked for his own elevation, or smirched his hands. And, unproved though he was as to administrative power and seamanship in a cyclone, there was yet a singular and intrinsic fitness in his candidacy. His recognized quality was that which is basal and dear to the common people, honesty; honesty in thought, word and act. In his convictions, he was near to the great mass of the party of freedom as it actually was; frankly opposed to slavery, but reverent and tenacious of ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... and the opinions of the day, ordinarily exacted of divines. He had even volunteered to read the prayers for the sick, as soon as he perceived that the patient's recollection had returned; but this kind offer had been declined by Sir Wycherly, under the clearer views of fitness, that the near approach of death is apt to give, and which views left a certain consciousness that the party assembled was not in the best possible condition for that sacred office. Sir Wycherly revived so much, at last, ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Grant," and, in case of his nomination, to vote, we suppose, for any Democratic nominee but Tilden—certainly for Mr. Bayard. It may be safely admitted that no possible candidate for the Presidency enjoys a higher reputation for probity and general fitness for the place than Mr. Bayard—one reason, unhappily, why he is not likely to be called upon to fill it. But, supposing him to be raised to it, what is one of the first uses he may be expected to make of it if not to turn ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... wincing and an occasional outcry, when the scalpel has been held by a more than usually unskilful hand—demonstrations of sensibility which have occasioned apparently as much disapprobation as surprise in the anatomists. We flatter ourselves that there is peculiar fitness in the metaphor just used, for the outer form only of American life has been touched by these various writers. Its spirit, that which gives to it its peculiar organization, has evaded them as completely as the soul ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh
... place in history as the prize iconoclast. He sent a cold shiver down the spine of the literati by declaring that a man's fitness for office should not depend upon his ability to write a poem, or upon the elegance of his penmanship. This was too much. The literati argued that at the rate at which the Emperor was going, it might be expected that he would do away with chop-sticks ...
— Court Life in China • Isaac Taylor Headland
... each other. In cases of good and innocent Egos, moreover, the latter gravitates irresistibly toward the sixth and seventh, and thus either slumbers surrounded by happy dreams, or sleeps a dreamless profound sleep until the hour strikes. With a little reflection and an eye to the eternal justice and fitness of things, you will see why. The victim, whether good or bad, is irresponsible for his death. Even if his death were due to some action in a previous life or an antecedent birth, was an act, in short, of the Law of Retribution, still ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant
... inheritance of the saints in light,' about being 'ripe for glory,' and the like. One thing at any rate is very certain, it is not the discipline that fits. That which fits goes before the discipline, and the discipline only develops the fitness. 'God hath made us meet for the inheritance of the saints in light,' says the Apostle. That is a past act. The preparedness for heaven comes at the moment—if it be a momentary act—when a man turns to Christ. You may take the lowest and most abandoned form of human character, and in ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... him, until she herself put him at his ease by a frank, comradely manner that offended Sheldon's sense of the fitness of things feminine. News from the world Young had not, but he was filled with news of the Solomons. Fifteen boys had stolen rifles and run away into the bush from Lunga plantation, which was farther east ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... a laugh on my side, and our second with one on yours. I accept the fact as a good omen. Your friend seemed in trouble; allow me to atone for my past misdemeanors by offering my services now. But first let me introduce myself; and as I believe in the fitness of things, let me present you with an appropriate card"; and, stooping, the young man wrote "Frank Evan" on the ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... classmates for an important mission, to be undertaken at once to an out-of-the-way part of the world? He must be a young man of good morals, able to keep his business affairs to himself, not afraid of hard work, and willing as well as physically able to endure hardships. His intelligence and mental fitness will, of course, be guaranteed by the Institute's diploma. Our company is in immediate need of such a person, and will engage him at a good salary for a year, with certain prospects of advancement, if he gives satisfaction. Think it over and let me know in the morning if you have hit upon one ...
— Under the Great Bear • Kirk Munroe
... who have carried its name far and wide, is still largely unspoiled. It must be said for painters that they do not spoil a place as other visitors so often do; in fact, all change—modernising, restoring, destroying—is opposed to their sense of fitness; they are champions of the picturesque and sworn foes of the jerry-builder. Newlyn remains quaint and fishy, though it has its little Art Gallery and its Rue des Beaux Arts. There are artistic industries ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... was pleased to hear of any bond of sympathy likely to draw the aunt and niece together, for much as she respected Miss Mildmay, she had had strong doubts of her fitness for the charge of the girls, and considerable misgivings as to their happiness with her. And Miss Scarlett was old-fashioned, and but for her native kindliness of heart she might almost have been prejudiced and narrow-minded. She scarcely belonged to the present generation. ...
— Robin Redbreast - A Story for Girls • Mary Louisa Molesworth
... of organisation, provided on the whole it happens to have some slight advantage over its rivals. Progression, therefore, is not a necessary accompaniment of variation and natural selection, though when a higher organisation happens to be coincident with superior fitness to new conditions, the new species will have greater power and a greater chance of permanently maintaining and extending its ground. One of the principal claims of Mr. Darwin's theory to acceptance ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... exaggerated leg-crookedness than many careless negroes born with straight limbs display. This must have been when she was about eight or nine. Hobbling on a broomstick, with, no doubt, the same weird, wizened face as now, an innate sense of the fitness of things must have suggested the kerchief tied around her big head, and the burlaps rag of an apron in front of her linsey-woolsey rag of a gown, and the bit of broken pipe-stem in the corner of her mouth, where the pipe should have been, and where it was in after years. That is ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King
... his magical eloquence the majority of the Assembly, and when his edicts were registered by that body with less opposition than that of the Grand Monarque himself from his subservient parliaments." Had he shown any fitness for military life, Patrick Henry would doubtless have been intrusted with an important command; but, like Jefferson, his talents were confined to civic affairs alone. Moreover, it is said that he was lazy and fond of leisure, and that it was ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord
... the fitness of the river La Plata and its tributaries for navigation by steam, the United States steamer Water Witch was sent thither for that purpose in 1853. This enterprise was successfully carried on until ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 5: James Buchanan • James D. Richardson
... of power, too, is elsewhere conceded by the multitude to their rulers generally for some especial fitness, real or imaginary, for the office they have assumed. Some services of their own or of their ancestors to the state, some superiority, natural or acquired, of parts or skill, at least some specialty ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... British Magazine, and in the same year he came to Oxford in the summer term, in order to beat up for writers for his publication; on that occasion I became known to him through Mr. Palmer. His reputation and position came in aid of his obvious fitness, in point of character and intellect, to become the centre of an ecclesiastical movement, if such a movement were to depend on the action of a party. His delicate health, his premature death, would have frustrated the expectation, even though the new school of opinion had been more exactly ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... most powerful impulse? And did not poetic justice, which was never so needed as in these evil days, ordain that the chartered destroyer who had first seen the light of day in that hall should also be destroyed there? Was this not in accordance with the eternal fitness of things? Whereupon the matter-of-fact Anglo-Saxon mind, unable to withstand the force of this argument and accustomed to give way on secondary matters, assented, and Paris ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... is manifestly destined to become. Its splendid potentialities do some wrong to its eminently spacious and seemly actuality. But to the mind's eye, to the ideal sense, it has the imperishable beauty of absolute fitness. Omniscient Baedeker informs us that when it was founded there was some thought of calling it "Federal City." How much finer, in its heroic and yet human associations, is the name it bears! Since Alfred the Great, the Anglo-Saxon race has produced no loftier or purer personality than George ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... the main text, the abstract question of the fitness of Episcopacy unapproached, not feeling any call to speak of it at length at present; all that I feel necessary to be said is, that bishops being granted, it is clear that we have too few to do their work. ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... dark with his wrath accumulating until it finally focused itself, not on the Director or on Sara or on the farmers, but on himself! He reviewed the years mercilessly. He saw how he had refused again and again to shoulder the responsibilities that belonged to him—belonged, because of his fitness to carry them. Charlie Tuck and Iron Skull both had done what they could to make him see, but wrapped in his futile dreams he had refused to look, and, he told himself, long before he had left Exham, his father had tried to set him ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... Gammit strode homeward through the hot, silent woods with the gun—still carrying it as if it were a broom—she had no misgivings as to her fitness to confront and master the most redoubtable of all the forest kindreds. She believed in herself—and not only her native Burd Settlement, but the backwoods generally held that she had cause to. A busy woman always, she had somehow never found time to indulge in the luxury of a husband; but the honorary ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... have felt better satisfied though it had cost him a larger area of ground. The white man's mode of running lines and of measuring land, he did not comprehend or appreciate. But when the line was made by a creek, river, or mountain, he understood it, and it harmonized better with his views of fitness, in dividing up the surface of this great earth. He was utterly unschooled in the art of computing by acres and roods. But the water's edge he had traversed with his light canoe, and with every point and islet on the lakes he was familiar. He had followed the rivers to where they ...
— An account of Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha - Red Jacket and his people, 1750-1830 • John Niles Hubbard
... began to be a little bolder, and to think there was really nothing in it but my own imagination. But I could not persuade myself fully of this till I should go down to the shore again, and see this print of a foot, and measure it by my own, and see if there was any similitude or fitness, that I might be assured it was my own foot. But when I came to the place, first, it appeared evidently to me that when I laid up my boat, I could not possibly be on shore anywhere thereabout; secondly, ...
— The Children's Hour, v 5. Stories From Seven Old Favorites • Eva March Tappan
... and Abel was beginning to share a general confidence in his fitness for the mission, when his wife spoke up, "'Deed and 'deed, I can tell you he ain't agoun' to do no such a thing, not if we stay here all night, murricle or no murricle. I ain't agoun' to have him ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... and unprotestingly into the current which clawed and gnawed at his feet. He had been tried too long; the test, from the first, had been too crucial. He might, in time, even find some solacing thought in the fitness between the act and its environment—here he could fling himself into an obliterating Niagara, not of falling waters, but of falling men and women. Yes, it was a stage all prepared and set for the mean and sordid and ever recurring tragedy of which he ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... is the most important tattoo of the Igorot, since it marks its wearer as a taker of at least one human head. It therefore stands for a successful issue in the most crucial test of the fitness of a person to contribute to the strength of the group of which he is a unit. It no doubt gives its wearer a certain advantage in combat — a confidence and conceit in his own ability, and, likely, it tends to unnerve ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... Miss Tippit expressing her newly-formed wish. Miss Tippit, with some doubts as to her friend's fitness for the duty, promised to do what she could; and at last, after complete recovery, Miriam was allowed to begin a kind of apprenticeship to the art of nursing in a small hospital, recommended by Miss Tippit's friend, the doctor. One morning, ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford
... character, and could he have heard her modest eulogium upon himself, an emotional chord would have vibrated to the musical tones of her soft and well-modulated voice. But our young friend was not to be thus gratified. It is contrary to the laws which govern the order of the universe that an eternal fitness should adapt itself ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... graces of the Palais Royal will rejoice! There is a peculiar fitness in this appointment; for is not his Lordship son-in-law to old Goldsmid, whilom editor of the Anti-Galliean, and for many years an honoured and withal notorious resident of Paris! Of course BEN D'ISRAELI, his Lordship's friend, will get a slice of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... on this point, once and for ever, Eveena. To me this seems matter of right, not of favour or fitness. But favour and fitness here go with right. I could no more endure to place another before or beside you than I could break the special bond between us, and deny the hope of which the Serpent" (laying my hand on her shoulder-clasp, which, by mere accident, was shaped ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... nothing for Turl to do but bow to this temporary dismissal, and Larcher saw the fitness of going at the same time. With few and rather embarrassed words of departure, the young men left Florence to the company of Edna Hill, in whom astonishment had produced for once the ...
— The Mystery of Murray Davenport - A Story of New York at the Present Day • Robert Neilson Stephens
... understand, marriages are arranged. Antoinette really has beauty, she is the daughter of a man of importance in the colony, her strength of character saves her from being listless. I found a girl with originality of expression, with a sense of the fitness of things, devoted to charitable works, who had not taken the veil. That was on her father's account. As you know, they are inseparable. Monsieur Philippe de St. Gre is a remarkable man, with certain vigorous ideas not in accordance with the customs of his neighbors. It was he who first confided ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... 'Varsity match, or a full fortnight after his mysterious disappearance. The telegram was from Carlsbad, of all places for Raffles of all men! Of course there was only one thing that could possibly have taken so rare a specimen of physical fitness to any such pernicious spot. But to my horror he emerged from the train, on the Wednesday evening, a cadaverous caricature of the splendid person ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... gentlemen, that I'm having some difficulties with the college administration about this," he told them. "President Whitburn has even gone so far as to challenge my fitness to ...
— The Edge of the Knife • Henry Beam Piper
... Sister Clarice's lover had asked her to sing, as Willan Blaycke just now asked me, that she did make this song," thought Victorine. "It hath a marvellous fitness, surely." And she repeated the last ...
— Between Whiles • Helen Hunt Jackson
... effort to discredit honest and intelligent work, and every form of disguised advertising designed to give an engineer a greater prominence than he has earned by successful and creditable work, or is entitled to claim by virtue of fitness for more than ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 530, February 27, 1886 • Various
... the destined chronicler was Kinglake, and all men hailed the selection; yet the sceptic who in looking back to-day decries the greatness of the campaign may perhaps no less hesitate to approve the fitness of its chosen annalist. His fame was due to the perfection of a single book; he ranked as a potentate in STYLE. But literary perfection, whether in prose or poetry, is a fragile quality, an afflatus irregular, independent, unamenable to orders; the official ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... blind. In its pathological form, it may indicate a want, and even develop an unconscious appetency, but it can not, itself, reveal an object, any more than the feeling of hunger can reveal the actual presence, or determine the character and fitness, of any food. An undefinable fear, a mysterious presentiment, an instinctive yearning, a hunger of the soul, these are all irrational emotions which can never rise to the dignity of knowledge. An object must be conjured by the imagination, or conceived ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... participation in the splendour and renown of its wisdom, prosperity, and happiness. The District of Columbia, then, being the common property of the nation, the nation has an indubitable right, and it is consistent with the fitness of things, to have the institutions and the laws of the District, conformably to the aggregate sentiment of the whole people. The clearly expressed public opinion is against the continuance of slavery—and, by every rule of right, slavery should cease, as soon as practicable, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... as back to Charlemont. We shall lose sight of William Hinkley, henceforth Calvert, for some time; and here, par parenthese, let us say to our readers that this story being drawn from veritable life, will lack some of that compactness and close fitness of parts which make our novels too much resemble the course of a common law case. Instead of having our characters always at hand, at the proper moment, to do the business of the artist, like so many puppets, each working on a convenient wire, and waiting to be whistled in upon ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... the end of the session was that the people of the state were fortunate in faring no worse. The many had little fitness; a few had large responsibility. Doubtful and useless measures predominate, but they are mostly quietly smothered. The country members are watchful and discriminating and a few leaders exercise great power. To me it was a fine experience, and I made good friends. I was interested in proposed ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... popular eye, must not reveal too clearly the secret methods and cunningly devised arrangements by which an effective minority control is maintained over the nomination of candidates and the framing of party platforms. The test of fitness for office is not fidelity to the rank and file of the people who vote the party ticket, but subserviency to those interests which dominate the party machine. The choice of candidates is largely made in the secret councils of the ruling minority and the party conventions under color of making ...
— The Spirit of American Government - A Study Of The Constitution: Its Origin, Influence And - Relation To Democracy • J. Allen Smith
... were closed, and the church-bells tolled dolefully; but whether prayer was offered in sincerity and truth, and in calm devotion, demands a doubt; for when men's passions are inflamed, there can be no fitness for acts of piety. In the mean time the assembly of Massachusets Bay met at Boston, on the 25th of May, for the last time. On that day, General Gage laid before them some common business of the province, and then announced ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... descend to his children, the house must be so built as to endure accordingly. It is the material expression of the status of the family,—such people in such a place. Hence the two-fold requirement of fitness for its use and of harmony with its surroundings. A log-house is the appropriate dwelling of the lumberer in the woods; but transplant it to a suburban lawn and it becomes an absurdity, and a double absurdity. It is not in harmony with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... immensely, she loves children so much. She and Clyde hired the "Tackler"—so called because he will tackle any kind of a job, whether he knows anything about it or not—to paper the room. He thinks he is a great judge of the fitness of things and of beauty. The paper has a stripe of roses, so Tackler reversed every other strip so that some of my roses are standing on their heads. Roses don't all grow one way, he claims, and so his method "makes 'em look more ...
— Letters of a Woman Homesteader • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... entitle the possessor to sit, (2) the admission to membership of a considerable number of persons representative of the whole body of peers, and (3) the introduction of a goodly quota of life peers, appointed by reason of legal attainments, governmental experience, and other qualities of fitness and eminence.[163] ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... abasement; all are alike tools of the one solitary Force which employs them to crush or to benefit, to truth or to error, to honor or shame, to happiness, or misery, quite independently of their individual fitness, deserts, or advantage, and simply because he wills it, and ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... meaning, the guidance. They have no longer a civilization, but only some derelict habits left from that which has gone. And it is no wonder if some of those habits seem now stupid, ignorant, objectionable; for the fitness has departed from them, and left them naked. They were acquired under a different set of circumstances—a set of circumstances whose disappearance dates from, and was caused by, the ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... selected by the committee not alone for its artistic beauty, but because of its peculiar fitness. The main body of the arch is to be built of white marble, and with its fountains, its polished monolithic columns of pigeon-blood marble, its mosaic and gold inlaying, and the bas-relief work and surmounting group ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... matter adapted to their circumstances, to their capacities, and their various turns of fancy; matter accessible to them by its conciseness and perspicuity, attractive by its variety and lightness, and useful by its easy adaptation to the familiar intercourse of life, and its fitness to enter into the conversation of rational society. Men whose time and labour are chiefly engrossed by the common occupations of life, have little leisure to read, none for what is called study. In books they do not search for deep learning, ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... of Attila, under all its manifold variations, is never without a certain natural fitness for ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... to Lord Lytton: 'It is a thousand pities that J. F. Stephen is a judge; he might have done anything and everything as leader of the future Conservative party.' Lord Beaconsfield was an incomparably better judge than I can pretend to be of a man's fitness for such a position. The opinion, too, which he thus expressed was shared by some of Fitzjames's friends, who thought that his masculine force of mind and downrightness of character would have qualified him to lead a party effectively. ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... own party, from the free State of Pennsylvania. He had neither prominent reputation nor conspicuous ability, though under trying circumstances he afterwards showed diligence, judgment, integrity, and more than ordinary firmness and independence. It is to be presumed that his fitness in a partisan light had been thoroughly scrutinized by both President and Senate. Upon the vital point the investigation was deemed conclusive. "He was appointed," the "Washington Union" naively stated when the matter was first called in question, "under the ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... 'Barnburners,' in allusion to the story of an old Dutchman, who relieved himself of rats by burning his barns, which they infested—just like exterminating all banks and corporations to root out the abuses connected therewith. The fitness or unfitness of these family terms of endearment is none of ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... dear," answered the Baroness meekly, and when she thought of her last interview with the dowager Princess, she was obliged to admit the fitness ...
— The Heart of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... in the Governor as a judge of character reenforced Archie's own opinion of the leader's fitness to command. That he should have been received into the strange brotherhood of the road, which the Governor controlled with so little friction, never ceased to puzzle him. He was amused to find himself feeling very humble beside Leary, a poor, ignorant, ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... life calls for another; there is a fitness in events and places. The sight of a pleasant arbour puts it in our mind to sit there. One place suggests work, another idleness, a third early rising and long rambles in the dew. The effect of ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... hard sort of punishment at all," laughed Nealie; "because, you see, if he had no eye for beauty or artistic fitness the ugliness would not trouble him, he might even take a great deal of satisfaction in thinking how nicely he had ...
— The Adventurous Seven - Their Hazardous Undertaking • Bessie Marchant
... keenest blow that slavery ever received in this country. When Maria Mitchell studied astronomy with her father she could not tell that a professorship at Vassar College awaited her, and that her thorough fitness for it would prove a tower of strength to the cause of higher education for women throughout the country. Keep the sword bright, keen, and well tempered, and opportunity will come to use it in defense of ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... would think so to hear you talk. No, Hannah! I think there is just about the same difference in our ages now as there was years ago; and besides, if you were young and handsome, Hannah, I would never do such a wrong as to ask you to be the wife of a poor old man like me! It is the fitness of our ages and circumstances, as well as our long attachment, that gives me the courage to ask you even at this late day, old friend, to come and cheer my lonely home. ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... and the whole of it is in bronze, except that the oaken sarcophagus is encased in silver plates. This rests beneath a fret-work canopy supported on slender pillars. There is an abundance of ornament everywhere, but the close examination of its detail shows beauty and fitness in every part. For example, if we compare the statue of the saint, of which we have spoken, which stands at the end of the shrine most exposed, with the statue of Vischer himself, which is at the opposite end, we shall see how the saint, with his symbols and his flowing drapery, is an ideal work, ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... "The fitness of the kangaroo-skin for upper leathers will no doubt obtain preference over most of the imported leather, as it is in general lighter and ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... Robbias worked for the open air—as in the facade of the Children's Hospital, or at the Certosa, or in the Loggia di San Paolo, opposite S. Maria Novella, where one may see the beautiful meeting of S. Francis and S. Dominic, by Andrea—they seem, in Italy, to have fitness enough; but it would not do to transplant any of these reliefs to an English facade. There was once, I might add, in Florence a Via della Robbia, but it is now the Via Nazionale. I suppose this injustice to the great potters came about in the eighteen-sixties, when popular ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... less she did it. For instance, she reminded herself that she had mentally assented promptly to the suggestion of inviting the doctor to this room to talk this strange scheme over; she had recognized the fitness of the act. But suppose Professor Ellis should call, would it not be simply absurd to think of explaining to him the uses of this unique room? Who would for a moment think of suggesting ...
— Ester Ried Yet Speaking • Isabella Alden
... me. I have found Mr. Piesse of great value, from his regular and cautious issue of the stores and provisions; and Mr. Stewart extremely useful as draftsman. Amongst my men, I have to particularise Robert Flood, my stockman, whose attention to the horses and cattle has mainly insured their fitness for service and good condition; and I have every reason to feel satisfied with the manner in which the men ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... he can become a minister, which will not be for some years yet. He has often talked of going out to join you in Canada, and his heart is, I am sure, set on so doing. He has his doubts as to his fitness for the ministry, and says that head-learning and book-learning are not sufficient, and that he is conscious of being destitute of all other qualifications. He declares he should sink down with nervousness ...
— Janet McLaren - The Faithful Nurse • W.H.G. Kingston
... compulsory check upon his son's artist proclivities; but the soft, persuasive voice of the gentle, refined, clear-sighted mother interposed. She had made the most loving study of her child's character, and had faith in his fitness for the vocation he desired to adopt. She pleaded that his obvious gift might be tested, and proved spurious or genuine, before it was trampled under foot as unworthy of recognition; and her ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... that Washington hated ceremony as much as the Democrats, and yielded to it only from his sense of fitness and the opinions of those about him. Jefferson and Madison both relate how such unnecessary form was used at the first levee by the master of ceremonies as to make it ridiculous, and Washington, appreciating this, is quoted as saying to ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... something very amusing in the idea of what may be called the "fitness of things," in regard to snuff-taking, which occurred to an honest Highlander, a genuine lover of sneeshin. At the door of the Blair-Athole Hotel he observed standing a magnificent man in full tartans, and noticed with much admiration the wide dimensions of his ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... sign of the cross, the use of red letters on the title page, the illuminations representing saints, or the diagrams and circles of a mathematical nature, were at all times deemed sufficient evidence of their popish origin and fitness ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... the best judge of your fitness,—but you must judge for yourself also. I am certain of your father's and mother's acquiescence, so I do not mention them. But do not hurry; take time, consult your own heart; consider the whole matter. I will not press for your decision. I will wait days, weeks. I will go down to Otter in ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... the matter of his cabinet has left free course to speculation and conjecture as to its composition. That he fully comprehends the importance of the subject, and that he will carefully weigh the claims of the possible candidates on the score of patriotic services, ability, and fitness for specific duties, no one who has studied his character, and witnessed his discretion, clear insight, and wise adaptation of means to ends, under the mighty responsibilities of his past career, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... natural that the existing members of the 'university' or guild should be consulted as to the admission of new members; their consent was one element in the degree giving. The means by which the fitness of applicants for the degree was tested will be spoken of later, and also the methods by which the existing Masters expressed their willingness to admit ...
— The Oxford Degree Ceremony • Joseph Wells
... life had hardly yet offered a duty to fulfill or transgress; the terrible gloom of this Puritan horizon, on which no light showed me promise of better things, only to be hoped for through a process of repentance and atonement for the sins of Adam, the fitness and method of which process were far beyond my capacity to comprehend, as beyond that of any child,—all these things made my intellectual life so sombre that I can but regard the long interval ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... landing at Lexington when twenty years old. He requested a license to practise law, but the Bar Association, which consisted of about a dozen members, decided that no more lawyers were needed at Lexington. Clay demanded that he should be examined as to fitness, and the blackberry-bush Blackstones sat upon him, as a coroner would say, with intent to give him so stiff an examination that he would be glad to ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... took the lead, neither Helen nor Mrs. Markham disputing her fitness for the place, too apparent to all to be denied; it was she who never flinched, who, if she spoke at all, spoke words of cheer, whose strength and ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... of that great mosaic, from the Fillmore-street hill, at once creates a nerve-soothing impression most uncommon in international expositions, and for that matter, in any architectural aggregate. One is at once struck with the fitness of the location and of the scheme of architecture. Personally, I am greatly impressed with the architectural scheme and the consistency of its application to the whole. I fear that the two men, Mr. Willis Polk and Mr. Edward ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... and the two young men greeted each other with a half-embarrassed exuberance. They were both about twenty-four, Yale graduates of the year before the war; but there the resemblance stopped abruptly. Dean was blond, ruddy, and rugged under his thin pajamas. Everything about him radiated fitness and bodily comfort. He smiled frequently, showing ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... calculated to inspire the true poet's genius. Once, indeed, he ventured to refer to "the meal in the firkin, the milk in the pan," but he chiefly restricted himself to subjects such as a fastidious conventionalism would approve as having a certain fitness for poetical treatment. He was not always so careful as he might have been in the rhythm and rhyme of his verse, but in the main he recognized the old established laws which have been accepted as regulating both. In short, with all his originality, he worked in Old World ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... wasting his time driving a carrier's cart, came in, and sitting down opposite the board—two lairds and a farmer—looked straight before him without making any application. It was felt by all in an instant that only one course was open, in the eternal fitness of things. Experience was well enough, but special creation was better, and Peter was immediately appointed, his name being asked by the chairman afterwards as a formality. From the beginning he took up a masterful ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... of not having a habit, or his contemporary disciple, George Moore, who says that one should be ashamed of nothing except of being ashamed. There are admirable features in the schooling-made-easy system. It recognizes the fitness of different minds for different work; that the process of education need not and should not be forbidding; that natural science has been subordinated overmuch to the humanities; that the imagination and ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... soon as all legal restrictions are removed. And believing that character is the best safeguard of national liberty, we pledge ourselves to make the personal purity and integrity of candidates for public office the first test of fitness. And lastly, believing in God, as the Supreme Author of the American Declaration of Independence, we pledge ourselves in the spirit of that memorable Act, to work hand in hand with our fathers, husbands, and sons, for the maintenance of those equal rights on which our Republic was originally ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... child at the age of puberty is capable of the most sensitive, affectional and serene appreciation of what sex means and can absorb the teachings if properly given without any shock to his sense of the fitness of things. Indeed whenever these subjects are taught to the child correctly they induce a feeling of reverence for the mother that could not otherwise be obtained. A little child when told that she grew in a nest in mother's body right underneath mother's heart at once ...
— Herself - Talks with Women Concerning Themselves • E. B. Lowry
... accustomed to being served. He had dismissed his valet in Edinburgh, when he determined to go to Pittenloch, but he watched his father's servant brushing his dinner suit, and preparing his bath and toilet, without one dissenting feeling as to the absolute fitness of the attention. The lofty rooms, the splendor and repose, the unobtrusive but perfect service, were the very antipodes of the life he had just left. He smiled to himself as he lazily made contrasts of them. But Fife and the ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... of the character which lauded itself, indeed he was never introspective nor thought of himself at all. He was just strong and living and breathing, his actions governed by an inherited sense of the fitness of things for a gentleman's code, which, unless it was swamped, as on one occasion it had been by violent passion, ...
— The Man and the Moment • Elinor Glyn
... considered the subject for a couple of hours he went back to one of his first points, relating to the fitness and capacity of Corny to accomplish the task he had undertaken. It was evident enough on the face of it that his cousin, even if he had been a veteran naval officer, could not carry out the plan alone. He must have confederates, in the double sense, on board of the Vernon. In the early stages of ...
— Stand By The Union - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... Emperor, and also from the desperate state of affairs. How dangerous was it to entrust the fate of the monarchy to a youth, who was himself in need of counsel and support! How hazardous to oppose to the greatest general of his age, a tyro, whose fitness for so important a post had never yet been tested by experience; whose name, as yet unknown to fame, was far too powerless to inspire a dispirited army with the assurance of future victory! What a new burden on the country, to support the state a royal leader was required ...
— The History of the Thirty Years' War • Friedrich Schiller, Translated by Rev. A. J. W. Morrison, M.A.
... Master privately believed the first suggestion came from him. Dick was sure he had begun by begging for the privilege. Betty cherished the idea that her gift was unsought and quite spontaneous. At all events, once the thing was decided, nobody concerned doubted for a moment the fitness of it. Betty's own arrangements may have had something to do with it. For the Master and the Mistress had set their hearts upon Betty having a season in London and a month or two on the Continent, in part with her Nuthill friends, and, for a portion of the time, with another relative. ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... creature such as he, might have been an undertaker, or a mute, or a sexton, or a policeman, or a horse-guardsman, or even a lawyer; but it was the height of impropriety to have made him a toy-shopman, and whoever did it had no notion whatever of the fitness of things. One could not resist the idea that his clumsy legs would certainly upset the slender wooden toys with which the floor and counters were covered, and his fingers seemed made to break things. The figure of Punch which hung from the ceiling appeared inclined to hit him as he passed to and ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... bulk, the hat was not definitively a gentleman's hat, and the baldness which had shone against the light was not exactly what you would have called a gentleman's baldness. Clearly, however, the only thing to do was to treat the event as one of entire fitness till it proved itself otherwise, and Louise returned to the parlor with an air of lady-*like inquiry, expressed in her look and movement; if this effect was not wholly unmixed with patronage, it still ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... so-called confidences alleged which it will be only right to state have really no authority. And first let me say what unquestionable evidence these characters give of the unimpaired freshness, richness, variety, and fitness of Dickens's invention at this time. Glorious Captain Cuttle, laying his head to the wind and fighting through everything; his friend Jack Bunsby,[141] with a head too ponderous to lay-to, and so falling victim to the inveterate MacStinger; good-hearted, ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... these 'representatives of the people' were well-to-do or retired tradesmen. In the opinion of the inhabitants of Mugsborough, the fact that a man had succeeded in accumulating money in business was a clear demonstration of his fitness to be entrusted with the ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... as careful for their moral state as for their physical fitness, and labored to exalt their imaginations as well as to harden their bodies. In that camp, and amidst those toils in which he kept them strictly engaged, frequent sacrifices, and scrupulous care in consulting the oracles, kept ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... dollars a quart, and canned oyster stew at fifteen dollars. Daylight indulged in no such luxuries. He did not mind treating a bar-room of men to whiskey at fifty cents a drink, but there was somewhere in his own extravagant nature a sense of fitness and arithmetic that revolted against paying fifteen dollars for the contents of an oyster can. On the other hand, he possibly spent more money in relieving hard-luck cases than did the wildest of the new millionaires on insane debauchery. Father Judge, of the hospital, could have ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... his usual rule of answering evasively, and replied: "No; that was not it either. I wanted nothing for myself personally, or at most only to prove my fitness ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... respectable as it is now—whatever that says to you. It was, of course, a great change from Home, and its crude pleasures and crude companions gave him somewhat of a shock. For he was of decent stock, with a certain sense of the fitness of things, and the beach-combers, adventurers, rough traders and general riff-raff of the China Coast, gathered in Shanghai, did not offer him the society he desired. He was often obliged to associate with them, however, more or less, in a business way, ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte
... stand upon the earth in this latter day. I had neither foreseen the new world nor toiled for it, as many about me had done regardless of the scorn of fools or the misconstruction of the good. Surely it would have been more in accordance with the fitness of things had one of those prophetic and strenuous souls been enabled to see the travail of his soul and be satisfied; he, for example, a thousand times rather than I, who, having beheld in a vision the world I looked on, sang of ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... the capital of the country after many incredible adventures, I was promptly arrested by the police and taken before the Jumjum. He was an exceedingly affable person, and held office by appointment, "for life or fitness," as their laws express it. With one necessary exception all offices are appointive and the tenure of all except that is the same. The Panjandrum, or, as we should call him, King, is elected for a term of ten years, at the expiration ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... fit order of an attack, the best arrangement of the forces at her command. This I honestly avow is to me the most incredible point in the story. I am not disturbed by the apparition of the saints; there is in them an ineffable appropriateness and fitness against which the imagination, at least, has not a word to say. The wonder is not, to the natural mind, that such interpositions of heaven come, but that they come so seldom. But that Jacques d'Arc's daughter, the little girl over her sewing, whose only fault was that she went to church too ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... gift of eternal life, and Christ-shared joy is conditioned by their faithfulness and diligence here. Do not let the Gospel that says 'The gift of God is eternal life' make you forget the completing truths, that the measure in which a man possesses that eternal life depends on his fitness for it, and that fitness depends on his faithfulness of service and ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... bodily health would have been improved by transporting the refuse ore of a mine from one pit to another, instead of coining the ingots which lay heaped before my eyes. Still, however, my time was squandered. There was a constant want of fitness and concentration of my energies. My dreams of education were boundless, brilliant, indefinite; but alas! they were only dreams. There was nothing accurate and defined in my future course of life. I was ambitious and conceited, but my aspirations were vague and ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Goldsmith's friends entertained similar ideas with respect to his fitness for the task, and they were apt now and then to banter him on the subject, and to amuse themselves with his easy credulity. The custom among the natives of Otaheite of eating dogs being once mentioned in company, Goldsmith observed that a ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... schools; at the other with continuation schools and some scheme for technical education. A perfect scheme would provide what he first called a ladder from the gutter to the university, whereby children of exceptional capacity might reach the places for which nature had fitted them. His sense of fitness would have welcomed even more warmly some system whereby the incompetent born into the higher strata of the social organism should be automatically graded down to the positions more appropriate to their wits ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... too; she thought the slippers were beautiful, and her foot thrilled with a mysterious prescience of its fitness for them. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... second Will. My object was to avoid certain inevitable confusions and repetitions which now disfigured the original document, and which, to own the truth, grated sadly on my professional sense of the fitness ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... convention, Congress had on the 3d of March, 1871, appended a section to an appropriation bill, authorizing the President "to prescribe such regulations for the admission of persons into the civil service of the United States as may best promote efficiency therein and ascertain the fitness of each candidate in respect to age, health, character, knowledge, and ability for the branch of service in which he seeks to enter; and for this purpose he may employ suitable persons to conduct such inquiries, prescribe their ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... replacing them by outsiders? Now it will be evident that the unskilled or low-skilled workers cannot depend upon the methods which are adopted by Unions of skilled workers, to limit the number of competitors for work. A test of physical fitness, such as was recently proposed as a qualification for admission to the Dock-labourers Union, will not, unless raised far above the average fitness of present members, limit the number of applicants to anything like the same extent as the test of workmanship in skilled ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... progress of the worship, shall such a one be called up to lead the devotions, and such a one to follow? In a word, shall the service be mapped out in advance and manipulated according to the dictates of propriety and fitness as it goes on? One, after many years of experience, can bear emphatic testimony to the value of another way—that of magnifying the office of the Holy Spirit as the conductor of the service, and of so withholding the pressure of human hands in the assembly that the Spirit shall have the utmost ...
— The Ministry of the Spirit • A. J. Gordon
... on the Greeks. The Bible, in his eyes, asserts that all forms of art and wisdom are from God. The wise in mind have no doubt some peculiar endowment of nature, but when they have offered themselves for their work, they receive a spirit of perception from the Highest Wisdom, giving them a new fitness for it. All severe study, all cultivation of sympathy, are exercises of this spiritual endowment. The whole intellectual discipline of the Greeks, with their philosophy, came down from God to men. Philosophy, ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... which we ourselves gain in studying these gifts and preparing the exercises with them. In concentration of thought; careful, distinct, precise, and expressive language; logical arrangement of ideas; new love of order, beauty, symmetry, fitness, and proportion; added ingenuity in adapting material to various uses, aesthetic and practical,—in all these ways every practical student of Froebel must constantly feel ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... actors came and went. Hart appeared in Oriental robes as Almanzor—a dress which mayhap had served its purposes for Othello, and mayhap had not; for cast-off court-dresses, without regard to fitness, were the players' favourite costumes in those days, the richness more than the ...
— Mistress Nell - A Merry Tale of a Merry Time • George C. Hazelton, Jr.
... hardly knew how to take this—how it would fit into his new philosophy. But surely it was all right for him to take a job. Yes, he had earned it. Even if some one else had to be turned out—even so, he had proven his fitness. He had won in the struggle. He had a place among the successful, and he could help Sophie and ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair
... street among fair and spacious dwellings, set in amaranthine gardens, and adorned with an infinitely varied beauty of divine simplicity. The mansions differed in size, in shape, in charm: each one seemed to have its own personal look of loveliness; yet all were alike in fitness to their place, in harmony with one another, in the addition which each made to the singular and ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... almost into a mania. Guests bidden to a banquet were furnished with writing materials and invited to spend hours composing versicles on themes set by their hosts. But skill in writing verse was not merely a social gift; it came near to being a test of fitness for office. ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... was Brutus chosen as the leader of the conspiracy? In what events of the play does he show his fitness as a leader? In what events does he show ...
— Teachers' Outlines for Studies in English - Based on the Requirements for Admission to College • Gilbert Sykes Blakely
... of murder was moved for trial after the defendant's lawyer had urged him in vain to offer a plea of murder in the second degree. A jury was summoned and, as is the usual custom in such cases, examined separately on the "voir dire" as to their fitness to serve. The defendant was a German, and the prosecutor succeeded in keeping all Germans off the jury until the eleventh seat was to be filled, when he found his peremptory challenges exhausted. Then the lawyer for the prisoner managed to slip in a stout ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... nothing, she talking of David all the time. You would have thought that he was the whole army and navy of these United States. I was at first quite frightened that she would ask me your opinion of his fitness. But not at all; that was quite settled in her mind. She talked about his deciding to go, and how he made her see that it was the best thing for him and for the country—and there is a story to that, because it was her husband that insisted on ...
— At Plattsburg • Allen French
... suffered, how he must still be suffering—not only in his heart, but in his mind! His sense of pride, his self-respect, his passion for complete independence, his meticulous consciousness of the fitness of things, of what could be and what was impossible—all must by lying in the dust. She could almost have wept for ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... later in the same autumn that the Ohio company brought their plans into operation, and despatched an agent to explore the lands upon the Ohio and its branches as low as the Great Falls, take note of their fitness for cultivation, of the passes of the mountains, the courses and bearings of the rivers, and the strength and disposition of the native tribes. The man chosen for the purpose was Christopher Gist, a hardy pioneer, experienced in woodcraft and Indian life, who had his home on the banks ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving
... in great part upon the peculiar forms of the language in which they are first clothed; and by a strictly literal translation the scope of the thought is narrowed, its finer lines obscured, and that which is of more importance than all else, the fitness of the expression, is altogether lost. The utmost strictness of literal translation is a poor compensation for the resultant poverty of language and dilution of thought; and by as much as the original is more impressive in its rich ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... had been a little stimulated to this display by a desire to show his sable friend from Georgia all the decencies of a New York funeral; and the ebullition of his zeal went off very well, producing no other result than a mild lecture from Miss Peyton at his return, on the fitness of things. The attendance of the black was thought well enough in itself; but the napkin was deemed a superfluous exhibition of ceremony, at the funeral of a man who had performed all the menial offices in his ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... place of the dead. Barnum had bought the eighty acres of land for this cemetery a few years before from several farmers. He had been in the habit of tramping over it, gunning, and while thus engaged, had observed its admirable fitness for the purposes of a cemetery. After the title deeds for the property were secured, it was offered for a cemetery, and at a meeting of citizens, several lots were subscribed for. enough. indeed, to cover the amount of the purchase money. Thus was begun ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... stairs, where Phoebe—not so much assuming the office as attracting it to herself, by the magnetism of innate fitness—took the most active part in preparing breakfast. The mistress of the house, meanwhile, as is usual with persons of her stiff and unmalleable cast, stood mostly aside; willing to lend her aid, yet conscious that her natural ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... partners, keeping his real object strictly in the background and enlarging upon his great regard for Ralph and Elsie, and their obvious fitness for each other. Captain Perez liked the scheme well enough, provided it could be carried out. Captain Eri seemed to think it better to let events take their own course. However, they both agreed to help ...
— Cap'n Eri • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... the edges of its pinnae crisped and ruffled. The name Christmas fern, due to John Robinson, of Salem, Mass., suggests its fitness for winter decoration. Its deep green and glossy fronds insure it a welcome at Christmas time. "Its mission is to cheer the winter months and enhance the beauty of the other ferns by contrast." In transplanting, a generous mass of earth should be included and its roots should ...
— The Fern Lover's Companion - A Guide for the Northeastern States and Canada • George Henry Tilton
... is a large class who would scarcely be much moved by stronger and abler words than, I suppose, we heard to-day—spoken as they were spoken. These preachers won't study the fitness of things; that's the worst of it. I have known a garrison chaplain deliver a discourse that, I am convinced, was composed for a visitation. It seems absurd to hear a man warning us against a particular sin, ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... were completed, as it happened, on the very day of our arrival; and Captain Stopford very generously offered me the command of her, asserting that my conduct with regard to the Indiaman had conclusively demonstrated my entire fitness for the post, and that if I chose to accept it he should have no anxiety whatever, either on the score of my courage or my discretion. Ryan, poor fellow, was, contrary to expectation, still alive, and hopes were now entertained that ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... machines, forgetting that those wheels of steel were not the only working powers under the factory roof. A tremendous effort was devoted to the study and improvement of the industrial apparatus and of the raw material, while the mental fitness and the mental method of the army of workingmen was dealt with unscientifically and high-handedly. But within the last few years the attention of the industrial world has been seriously turned to the matter-of-course fact that the workman's mind is more important than the machine and the ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... an outcome of her nature, assisted by her surroundings. Left a good deal to herself in her infancy, she made playfellows of animated nature around her, without much reference to selection or fitness, but always with a fearlessness that was the result of her own observation, and unhampered by tradition or other children's timidity. She had no superstition regarding the venom of toads, the poison of spiders, or the ear-penetrating capacity of earwigs. She ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... confidence in the fitness of things and a just belief in the charity of Major March, the detachment marched out into the hills, the ward of the company trudging bravely beside the tall and envied Mr. Bansemer—who, by the way, aside from being ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon |
