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Manual labour   Listen
noun
manual labour, manual labor  n.  Labor done with the hands.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Manual labour" Quotes from Famous Books



... perfect mechanical contrivance hitherto brought out was tried in Manila by its Spanish inventor, Don Abelardo Cuesta; it worked to the satisfaction of those who saw it, but the saving of manual labour was so inconsiderable that the greater bulk of hemp shipped is still extracted by the ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman

... and residence; he soundly rated them for the scandalous laxity of their conduct, and having reminded them of all the obligations of their office, he informed them of his new regulations, the nature of which made them tremble. He proposed nothing less than to condemn them to daily manual labour, the tillage of the soil, the performance of menial household duties; and to this he added the practices of immoderate fasting, perpetual silence, downcast glances, veiled countenances, the renouncement of all social ties, and all instructive ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan

... from work. Manual labour is servitude. A day of idleness is a holy day. For those whose means do not permit to live in idleness the school is the only refuge; but they must prove their quality. This is the goal which drives many Scotch boys to the University, scorning delights and willing ...
— In Flanders Fields and Other Poems - With an Essay in Character, by Sir Andrew Macphail • John McCrae

... science, has become essential. Such a party, to be in harmony with our traditions and our creed, to arrest in our democracy the process of class stratification which threatens to destroy it, must not draw its members from the ranks of manual labour alone, but from all elements of our population. It should contain all the liberal professions, and clerks and shopkeepers, as well as manual workers; administrators, and even those employers who have become convinced that our present ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... often lie in such intricacies among the craggs, that there is no room for the action of a team and plow. The soil is then turned up by manual labour, with an instrument called a crooked spade, of a form and weight which to me appeared very incommodious, and would perhaps be soon improved in a country where workmen could be easily found and easily paid. It has a narrow blade of iron fixed to a ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson

... so absurd as the expectation of a foreign purchaser, and particularly of a gentleman, that he will be able to transfer the improved system of cultivation of his own country into a kingdom at least a century behind the former. As far us his own manual labour goes, as far as he will take the plough, the harrow, and the broadcast himself, so far may he procure the execution of his own ideas. But it is in vain to endeavour to infuse this knowledge or this practice into French labourers; you might as ...
— Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence and Languedoc in the Years 1807 and 1808 • Lt-Col. Pinkney

... heart to thy fascination— here am I, even I, Dominie Dobbs, suing at the feet of a maiden who had barely ripened into womanhood, who knoweth not to read or write, and whose father earns his bread by manual labour. I feel it all—I feel that I am too old—that thou art too young—that I am departing from the ways of wisdom, and am regardless of my worldly prospects. Still, omnia vincit amor, and I bow to the all-powerful ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat

... Manual labour on the canal has been done mostly by Jamaica negroes. As said before, they are immune to yellow fever; and, speaking of the negro, it may be said here that his susceptibility to pain, compared to that of the white man, is as one to three, but the effect of a fair education is to increase ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson

... that Solomon set seventy thousand men to carry burdens on their shoulders, and eighty thousand to hew stones in the mountains, and three thousand six hundred to be overseers of the work of the people. (2 Par. ii. 18.) The history is manifest. Strength and Direction build the Temple: Strength, or Manual Labour, represented by the hodmen and quarrymen, and the rest of the "hands:" Direction, or Mental Labour, represented by the overseers. Yet not by them alone: surely we must count in as doers of mental labour the designer of the ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.

... left from the underbrushing, and which caught in the axletree every few score yards. Now came the handspikes into action, which provident Sam had cut, and laid into the waggon when the road was fair and smooth; for the wheels had to be lifted high enough to slip over the obstacles. In the pauses of manual labour came the chilling thought, 'All this difficulty between ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe

... told by whom or for whom they were constructed. This was to avoid the hostility of the pressmen, who, having heard of the new invention, were up in arms against it, as likely to deprive them of their employment. And yet, as stated by Johnson in his 'Typographia,' the manual labour of the men who worked at the hand press, was so severe and exhausting, "that the stoutest constitutions fell a sacrifice to it in a few years." The number of sheets that could be thrown off was ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles

... for accounts implied a strenuous intellectual effort. He would have left them to Vessons, but Vessons always had to notch sticks when he did them, and the manual labour ensuing on any accounts running into pounds would have seriously interfered with his other work. The cheese fair accounts usually took a long time. He could be heard saying in a stupendous voice, 'One and one ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb

... are cut off in this manner from their natural supplies, they are told by their benefactors to work and earn their support by the sweat of their brows! But to no fine gentleman born to hereditary opulence, does this manual labour come more unkindly than to the luxurious Indian when thus robbed of the bounty of heaven. Habituated to a life of indolence, he cannot and will not exert himself; and want, disease, and vice, all evils of foreign growth, soon terminate his ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville

... experience. Totally unfitted for any station in life, many of them leave school full of self-confidence in the belief that their superior education will secure them a good opening. Despising all manual labour, they seek situations as clerks, shop-assistants, and such-like. The result is, of course, an over-supply of candidates for employment of this kind. In consequence, the girls have to fall back upon domestic service; while the boys swell the ranks of unskilled labourers and unemployed loafers, ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst

... daggers. Music, I hear, is not much better. But painting, on the contrary, is often highly sedative; because so much of the labour, after your picture is once begun, is almost entirely manual, and of that skilled sort of manual labour which offers a continual series of successes, and so tickles a man, through his vanity, into good humour. Alas! in letters there is nothing of this sort. You may write as beautiful a hand as you will, you have always something else to think of, and cannot pause to notice ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... or adherent to this Covenant agree that they will themselves seek to establish and maintain fair hours and humane conditions of labour for all those within their several jurisdictions who are engaged in manual labour and that they will exert their influence in favour of the adoption and maintenance of a similar policy and like safeguards wherever their industrial and commercial ...
— The Peace Negotiations • Robert Lansing

... Brahmans. "They wear the sacred thread, [194] know the Gayatri Mantra, and to the present day abstain from meat and liquor, subsisting entirely on grain and vegetables. They always had a sufficiency of Charans and servants (Jangar) in their villages to perform all necessary manual labour, and would not themselves work for a remuneration otherwise than by carrying grain, which was and still is their legitimate occupation; but it was not considered undignified to cut wood and grass for the household. ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell

... abbe?" His speech showed he was French. He wore his cassock with the ease of long habit: he was young. His hand was the delicate hand of a Churchman—not coarsened by manual labour. Fandor, plunged in reflections, lost all ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre

... Poor Clares, which is a large brick building, covering, with its grounds, 13/4 acres, and which was built for the convent purposes in 1859, having been founded by Cardinal (then Father) Manning. The nuns, numbering about thirty, are vowed to the contemplative life of prayer and manual labour in the service of God, but do no teaching or nursing, and there are no lay sisters. The next opening on the south side of Cornwall Road is Kensington Park Road, in which stands a Presbyterian church, built of light brick. On the north side of Cornwall ...
— The Kensington District - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton

... extent,—it could not have competed in price with France and Germany. In the old process of bleaching, every piece must be exposed to the air and light during several weeks in the summer, and kept continually moist by manual labour. For this purpose, meadow land, eligibly situated, was essential. Now a single establishment near Glasgow bleaches 1400 pieces of cotton daily, throughout the year. What an enormous capital would be required to purchase land for this purpose! ...
— Familiar Letters of Chemistry • Justus Liebig

... the House to imagine that all steam engines, and all applications of mechanical power, were banished from this country; that we were utterly dependent upon mere manual labour. What would you think if the Chancellor of the Exchequer, under such circumstances, endeavoured to levy the same taxation which is now borne by the country? From one end of India to the other, with very ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright

... they had also another reason. In order to be true to the practice of the early Christian Church, they laid down the strict rule that all ministers should earn their living by manual labour; and the result was that even if a minister wished to study he could not find time to do so. For his work as a minister he never received a penny. If a man among the Brethren entered the ministry, he did so for the pure love of the work. He had no ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton

... comforted by a kindly priest and by a friend who wishes that his own wife were as the merchant's (the simple mediaeval contrast common in Vicente). Meanwhile Don Rosvel, Prince of Huxonia, has fallen in love with both the daughters of the merchant, whom he agrees to serve in all kinds of manual labour as Juan de las Brozas. His brother, Don Gilberto, arrives in search of him and a quaintly charming and technically skilful play ends with a double wedding (the Crown Prince of Portugal, present at the acting of this play, had to decide for Don Rosvel which ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente

... state of trade, numbers of stocking-weavers had lost work. The discontent thus produced was increased by the introduction of a wide frame for the manufacture of gaiters and stockings, which, it was supposed, would further diminish the demand for manual labour. In November, 1811, organized bands of men began to break into houses and destroy machinery. For several days no serious effort was made to check the riots, which extended to a considerable distance round Nottingham. But on November 14 the soldiers were called out. Between ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron

... slightly increased in volume. Mr. Chalk, pausing merely to wipe his brow, which had suddenly become very damp, bent to his work with renewed vigour. It is an old idea that whistling aids manual labour; Mr. Chalk, moistening his lips with a tongue grown all too feverish for the task, began to whistle a ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs

... his work. He felt that manual labour was almost below his dignity now. What! he, an inventor—a benefactor of mankind—the probable millionaire of years to come—he, who would soon be looked upon as the foremost man of the island, pointed at and envied by everyone—watering ...
— The Silver Lining - A Guernsey Story • John Roussel

... New England, though many of the more prominent transcendentalists took no direct part in it. The project was originated by George Ripley, who also virtually directed it throughout. In his words it was intended "to insure a more natural union between intellectual and manual labour than now exists; to combine the thinker and the worker, as far as possible, in the same individual; to guarantee the highest mental freedom by providing all with labour adapted to their tastes and talents, and securing ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various

... work a self-expression, were it not better to get one's living by the labour of one's hands,—by digging in the wonder of the ground? A stone-crusher, as long as one works one's will with it, makes it say something, is nearer to nature than a college. "I would rather do manual labour with my hands than manual labour with my soul," the true artist is saying to-day, and a great many thousand teachers are saying it, and thousands more who would like to teach. The moment that teaching ceases to be a trade and becomes ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee

... Jarvis mentions another in his first report from Edmonton when he says, "Sergt.-Major Steele has been undeviating in his efforts to assist me, and he has also done the manual labour of ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth

... which had already been run to the beach, and the two shore ends, one for Misamis and one for Cagayan, Mindanao, were laid with but little trouble. As Iligan's insurrectionary population was too aristocratic to demean itself by manual labour for any monetary consideration, the soldiers of the infantry company stationed at Iligan were detailed to dig the trench. But, being Americans, they worked with a right good will, completing the ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel

... I might touch upon perils distinct from Unionism, which threaten industry, especially that growing dislike of manual labour which prevails to an alarming extent in the United States, and which some eminent economists are inclined to attribute to errors in the system of education in the common schools. I might speak of the duties of government ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith

... in England—vast tracts of cultivated land deteriorating into waste, agricultural wages lowered to nine shillings a week, vagrancy on the increase in consequence of the general migration to the towns, the sons of country squires enlisting in the ranks, or betaking themselves to manual labour in the Colonies—aghast, I say, at these signs of the times among ourselves, she could but feel some surprise at her French experiences. The entire absence of mendicants in the departments we had lately traversed—these ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... enthusiastically, "open air all the time. Nothing to worry about, no work to do, only manual labour. Why, it's going to be one long holiday. Hang it! I've laid drain-pipes on ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux

... that we had entered the most thickly-populated district of Australia that I had yet observed, and moreover one which must have been inhabited for a long series of years, for more had here been done to secure a provision from the ground by hard manual labour than I could have believed it in the power of uncivilised man to accomplish. After crossing a low limestone range we came down upon another equally fertile warran ground, bounded eastward by a high ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey

... presented it to their beloved 'Tusitala' as an abiding remembrance of their grateful regard. It was a noble tribute to a noble nature, and one the value of which can only be fully appreciated by those who realise what the personal manual labour meant to these proud island chiefs so wholly unaccustomed to exertion of any kind, and so imbued with the idea that all labour was derogatory to their dignity. Their loving service touched Mr Stevenson ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black

... labouring for daily wages capable of taking a creditable part in political, literary, and scientific discussion; but at the same time the followers of George Sand, and French preachers of proletarian perfection will not find their notions of the ennobling effects of manual labour realised. ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney

... unlettered, and unmannered boors, and in silence and solitude made progress in studies, which, mere matters of amusement to me, would have been hailed by many youths as tasks more severe than daily manual labour. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 530, January 21, 1832 • Various

... they will give way in the matter of Monkeys. To be a physician, a solicitor, an engineer, or a Commissioner for Oaths is denied them as effectually as though they did not exist. Indeed, no occupation is left them save that of manual labour, and on this I would say a word. It is fashionable to jeer at the Monkey's disinclination to sustained physical effort and to concentrated toil; but it is remarkable that those who affect such a contempt for the Monkey's powers are the first to deny him access ...
— On Something • H. Belloc

... Thoresen, in Hero, and here he picked up the elements of Latin. Gradually, and by dint of infinite patience and concentration, the young peasant became master of many languages, and began the scientific study of their structure. About 1841 he had freed himself from all the burden of manual labour, and could occupy his thoughts with the dialect of his native district, the Sondmore; his first publication was a small collection of folk-songs in the Sondmore language (1843) . His remarkable abilities now attracted general attention, and he was helped ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... these figures, a Fabian writer says: "Considering that comparatively few of these are children, it is probable that one in every three London adults will be driven into one of these refuges to die, and the proportion in the case of the manual labour class must ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London

... slavery operates like a restricted franchise, attaches power to property, and hinders Socialism, the infirmity that attends mature democracies. The most intelligent of Greek tyrants, Periander, discouraged the employment of slaves; and Pericles designates the freedom from manual labour as the distinguishing prerogative of Athens. At Rome a tax on manumissions immediately followed the establishment of political equality by Licinius. An impeachment of England for having imposed slavery on America was carefully expunged from the Declaration ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... apart; their noses broad, and their mouth large. Their fingers I observed were in many cases extremely long and thin; only the rich (of both sexes) allow their nails to grow to an extraordinary length, as a proof that they are not obliged, like their poorer brethren, to gain their livelihood by manual labour. These aristocratic nails are generally half an inch long, though I saw one man whose nails were quite an inch in length, but only on his left hand. With this hand it was impossible for him to raise any flat object, except by laying ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer

... vocation; that, not only in their private interest, but again in the interest of the public, not merely through prudence, but also through equity, all should not be indistinguishably restricted to the same mechanical pursuit, to the same manual labour, to the same indefinite servitude of soul ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee

... stride of an athlete, tempered by the slight roundness of those same shoulders, the non-expansiveness of chest, and the heavy tread of the large man whose strength and physique have been acquired at manual labour instead of in athletics. A figure more common east of the ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco

... with a glimpse of his beloved, it was only to add to his misery, for she withdrew hastily from his sight. A rumour of the intended marriage of his perjured mistress reached his ears, and, struck to the soul, he endeavoured, by manual labour, to exhaust his strength and banish the recollection of his misery. He toiled all day in feverish desperation; and now that there was no more to be done, sat down to ponder over his altered prospects. The bailiff possessed the ear of his master, and it was useless to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 268, August 11, 1827 • Various

... prescribed by the doctor. Every night before compline the brethren meet to hear some pious lecture read, not to confess their thoughts to the superior. Instead of one meal a day, as stated by our correspondent, the lay-brethren, who are employed chiefly in manual labour, have at least two meals every day during the whole year, excepting fast-days; and the choir-brethren two meals a day during the summer, and one during the winter. To the latter, when they are of a weakly constitution, a collation is allowed in addition. The greatest ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various

... seller of its produce and a common buyer of the raw materials, and its members were merchants and manual workers at the same time. Therefore, the predominance taken by the old craft guilds from the very beginnings of the free city life guaranteed to manual labour the high position which it afterwards occupied in the city.(4) In fact, in a medieval city manual labour was no token of inferiority; it bore, on the contrary, traces of the high respect it had been kept in in ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin

... of a noble Scottish family at Tullich, Aberdeenshire. From his youth he was distinguished for great piety, and spent {11} much of his time in manual labour in the fields as a voluntary mortification and a means of subduing the passions. Many miracles are related of him. It is said that having given away all his corn in time of famine, he caused the fields to be sown with sand for lack of grain, and was rewarded by a ...
— A Calendar of Scottish Saints • Michael Barrett

... defeat in no wise pained him personally. Like John Jay he had the habits of seclusion. Manual labour on the farm, his correspondence, and the preparation of an address to be delivered at the State Agricultural Fair in September, occupied his leisure during the spring and summer of 1847.[366] "If I were to attempt to tell you how happy we make ourselves ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander

... correspond with the months of December, January, and February. It is in these months that all outdoor occupations come to a comparative standstill; it is then that the poorest section of the population—the men without a trade, the men who live by mere manual labour—are reduced to the greatest straits. In the winter months some of these men have to pass through a period of real hardship; the state of the weather often puts an absolute stop to all outdoor occupations, and when this is the case, ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison

... accompanied Mr. Stinson to render him what assistance I could, in examining Manual Labour Schools, with a view to establishing one for the benefit of our Indian youth—an object of the very greatest importance, both to the religious and civil interests of our aboriginal fellow countrymen. Also to get from the New York Missionary Board a sum of money for the Indian ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson

... English farmers, or even the settlers of America. They are rather a conquering race, who established themselves among the Hottentots and Basutos, in the same manner that the Normans, in the XIth Century, established themselves among the Anglo-Saxons. Abstaining from all manual labour, they devote themselves to their properties, sometimes as much as 5,000 to 6,000 acres in extent, and to the breeding of cattle and horses. Beyond this, their object in life is hunting lion and big game. The Boer is essentially a man ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot

... is exemplified in the hands of Messrs. Joseph Arch and John Burns. Both of these belong to self-made men, accustomed to hard manual labour from childhood. Their powerful ruggedness is admirably set off by the exquisite symmetry and feminine proportions of the hand of John Jackson a Royal Academician and great painter of his time. For symmetry, combined with grace, this hand is ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... fustian and manual labour a mark of inferiority, it will appear amazing to them to see an author setting up his own book in type, for has he not a gymnasium or games by way of diversion? But when the opprobrium connected with manual labor has disappeared, ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin

... advocating nationalization as a cure for all social ills; or again The Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at Fontainebleau, led by Gurdjieff and Uspenski which combines esoteric meditation with an extremely meagre diet and strenuous manual labour. It is interesting, by the way, to notice that the art of movement known as Eurhythmy—not to be confounded with the system of M. Dalcroze which is known in England only as Eurhythmics—forms an important part of the curriculum of the last society, as also of Herr Steiner's Order, of ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster

... shabbiness too,—shabbiness in black. There was humour in the corners of his lip; and his hands, though they did not seem very clean—indeed his occupation was not friendly to such niceties—were those of a man who had not known manual labour. His face was pale and puffed, but the tip of the nose was red. He did not seem as if the watery element was as familiar to himself as to his Delilah, ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... fell into a regular groove of guard and picket duty. We longed to have a fight with the enemy, and still were doomed to remain in a state of masterly inactivity. At the fort the work was most trying, and resolved itself into a course of manual labour. There it was ordered that under the ammunition sheds deep pits were to be dug in the ground. This duty was performed entirely by the English soldiers, and continued for a fortnight in the hottest ...
— A Narrative Of The Siege Of Delhi - With An Account Of The Mutiny At Ferozepore In 1857 • Charles John Griffiths

... the tutor tried to separate them during a fight at lessons, they had turned simultaneously and attacked him, they made it the text of some recommendations. He expressed a strong objection to having manual labour imposed upon him as well as his other work: but they maintained that if only he had called the affray "a struggle for daily bread" or "a fight for a livelihood," he would quite have enjoyed it; and they further suggested that such ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand

... are unjust and cruel!" I exclaimed. "You do not understand one at all. I never thought I could do strokes. I cannot help being constituted so that grimy manual labour is hateful to me, for it is hateful to me, and I hate it more and more every day, and you can preach and preach till you go black in the face, and still I'll hate it more than ever. If I have to do it all my life, and if I'm cursed with a long life, I'll hate it ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin

... water by chance—though chance took us to more than one dry hole—but found it only by systematic and patient work, involving many scores of miles of tracking, the capture of the wild aboriginals, and endless hours of manual labour. Without having resorted to these expedients I have no hesitation in saying that neither we nor the camels would be living today, for though without having done so, other parties have crossed as great an extent of arid country, it must be remembered that our journey ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie

... course these girls help cheerfully in the household, in the dairy, and so forth? No. Some are forced by necessity to assist in the household with unwilling hands: but few, indeed, enter the dairy. All dislike the idea of manual labour, though never so slight. Therefore they acquire a smattering of knowledge, and go out as governesses. They earn but a small stipend in that profession, because they have rarely gone through a sufficiently strict course of study ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies

... case with all other African races, the women of the Wa Kikuyu do the manual labour of the village and carry the heavy loads for their lords and masters, the bundles being held in position on their back by a strap passing ...
— The Man-eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures • J. H. Patterson

... own. He replied to my remarks with readiness, and in well-chosen words. Had he much to do there? Yes; that was to say, he had enough responsibility to bear; but exactness and watchfulness were what was required of him, and of actual work— manual labour—he had next to none. To change that signal, to trim those lights, and to turn this iron handle now and then, was all he had to do under that head. Regarding those many long and lonely hours of which I seemed to make so much, he could only say ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens

... With so much manual labour to be done, the difficulties in the way of education were continually becoming intensified. Soon it became impossible to continue in attendance at the day school, and he had to be content with attending an evening class after completing the day's toil. Under the most favourable ...
— From Slave to College President - Being the Life Story of Booker T. Washington • Godfrey Holden Pike

... purified. Fallows, so common in France, almost universally disappear; and in their place, numerous crops of beans, pease, potatoes, carrots and endive, are to be met with. In the cultivation of these crops manual labour is universally employed; and the mode of cultivation is precisely that which is carried on in garden husbandry. The crops are uniformly laid out in small patches of an acre or thereby to each species ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison

... under the mental power, and so effects a concentrated cerebral exhaustion, without being able to afford compensating nutrition or repair. ....There is the same common fallacy here as in the case of manual labour. The stimulus is felt—to do good. 'I could not do my work without it.' But at what cost are you doing your work? Premature and permanent exhaustion of the muscles is bad enough; but premature and permanent exhaustion of brain is infinitely worse. ...
— Study and Stimulants • A. Arthur Reade

... prompted him to repair his indiscretions by running into an opposite extreme. He secluded himself entirely from the world; he framed a cell so small, that he could neither stand erect in it nor stretch out his limbs during his repose; and he here employed himself perpetually either in devotion or in manual labour [i]. It is probable, that his brain became gradually crazed by these solitary occupations, and that his head was filled with chimeras, which, being believed by himself and his stupid votaries, procured him the general character of sanctity among the people. He fancied that ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume

... manual labour carrying a cane. And it would be a moral impossibility for one of servile state—a butler, for instance, or a ticket-chopper—to present himself in the role of his occupation ornamented with a cane. One held ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday

... got over that now. They have developed into sufficiently old soldiers to have acquired the correct military attitude towards manual labour. Trench-digging is a "fatigue," to be classed with, coal-carrying, floor-scrubbing, and other civilian pursuits. The word "fatigue" is a shibboleth with, the British private. Persuade him that a task is part of his duty as a soldier, and he will perform it with tolerable cheerfulness; but once ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay

... friends and followers; for Musso rapidly became, like ancient Rome, an asylum for the ruffians and outlaws of neighbouring provinces. It is even said that his sisters, Clarina and Margherita, rendered efficient aid with manual labour. The mention of Clarina's name justifies a parenthetical side-glance at Il Medeghino's pedigree, which will serve to illustrate the exceptional conditions of Italian society during this age. She was married to the Count Giberto Borromeo, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds

... tree to tree. In England we should be obliged to cut them all down for fear of depriving the crops of heat and sunshine, but here they have no such fears. The style of husbandry is exquisitely neat, and in general performed by manual labour. The only plough I saw would have excited the amusement and amazement of an English farmer: I should think it was exactly similar to the ploughs of Virgil's time: it was drawn by an ox and an ass yoked together, ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson

... occupied the witness's chair, admitted, in reply to the questions of Sir Gladney Jebb, that, since his student days, he had seldom been engaged in manual labour on any instrument for more than two hours a day. It was not necessary for a conductor. But he knew of pianists who practised for six or even eight hours ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 21, 1919. • Various

... new station I saw there were two men to deal with. The bidder's face was keen and intellectual; his hands refined, lady-like, clean and white, showing they were long divorced from manual labour, if indeed they had ever done any useful work. Coolness and imperturbability were his beyond a doubt. The companion who sat at his right was of an entirely different stamp. His hands were hairy and sun-tanned; ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr

... the reform of municipal morals and the plain ten commandments. New worlds for old. Union of all, jew, moslem and gentile. Three acres and a cow for all children of nature. Saloon motor hearses. Compulsory manual labour for all. All parks open to the public day and night. Electric dishscrubbers. Tuberculosis, lunacy, war and mendicancy must now cease. General amnesty, weekly carnival with masked licence, bonuses for all, esperanto the universal language with universal brotherhood. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... little else except art is moral." I have now farther to tell you, that little else, except art, is wise; that all knowledge, unaccompanied by a habit of useful action, is too likely to become deceitful, and that every habit of useful action must resolve itself into some elementary practice of manual labour. And I would, in all sober and direct earnestness advise you, whatever may be the aim, predilection, or necessity of your lives, to resolve upon this one thing at least, that you will enable yourselves daily to do actually ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... in order even the small part of the gigantic building which she and her mother inhabited, cultivating as best she could the plot of ground in the castle yard which was all the land left to her, the last of her name, and, in the midst of all this manual labour, in maintaining that prescribed amount of appearance, from which she had never been allowed to deviate since she had been a little child. A spotless perfection of neatness was indeed the only luxury left within reach of the two ladies, and for that one available ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford

... and as he was so intent on going, I gave the desired permission. Though, like the others, he was nude except for a loin-cloth, Raja Besar was a gentleman at heart, but he did not know how to work, especially in a prahu. On account of his exalted position he had never been accustomed to manual labour, but always to command. He naturally selected a place in my prahu and seated himself at one side, which kept the boat tilted; however, it was out of the question for any of the men to correct him. When the prahu moved away the first thing ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz

... liable to take place in the pan (and thus affect the yield), the temperature may be 165 deg.-170 deg. F. (74 deg.-77 deg. C.). This latter class of soap is generally run direct to the frames and crutched by hand, or, to save manual labour, it may be run into a power-driven crutching pan (neutralising material being added if necessary) and stirred a few times ...
— The Handbook of Soap Manufacture • W. H. Simmons

... injunctions, "not slothful in business,"—"fervent in spirit,"—"serving the Lord." "In consequence of this vacancy," they continue, "and the age of two others of us, who are fast approaching their seventieth year, we are not able to do any great things by manual labour; however, we contrive to perform what is absolutely requisite, and intend, with the Lord's blessing, to prepare for the building of a new church, as the present is much too small, and gone to decay, We thank you for your readiness to assist us with ...
— The Moravians in Labrador • Anonymous

... absence of large game, hunting does not hold the usual place of honour in their scheme of life. The Icelandic community in the time of the Sagas also affords a fair instance. In such a community there is a rigorous distinction between classes and between the occupations peculiar to each class. Manual labour, industry, whatever has to do directly with the everyday work of getting a livelihood, is the exclusive occupation of the inferior class. This inferior class includes slaves and other dependents, and ordinarily also all the women. If there are several ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen

... German and Dutch pilots who navigate them, in spite of the abrupt turnings, the eddies, the currents, rocks and shoals that oppose their progress, must indeed be of a very peculiar kind, and can be possessed but by few. It requires besides a vast deal of manual labour. The whole complement of rowers and workmen, together with their wives and children, on board one of the first-rates, amounts to the astonishing number of nine hundred or a thousand; a little village, containing from forty to sixty wooden houses, is erected upon each, which also is furnished with ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 264, July 14, 1827 • Various

... scent, nor seemed much to have practised horsemanship, as an exercise; and though in their works there is mention of aucupium and piscatio, they seemed no more to have been considered as diversions, than agriculture, or any other manual labour. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson

... the nights broken by prayers; probably the time was dull enough, but passed quickly, like all lives full of monotonous engagements. They were not particularly ascetic, these Benedictines, and insisted much on manual labour in the open air. Probably at first the monks did their farm-work as well; but as they grew richer, they employed labourers, and themselves fell back on simpler and easier garden-work. Perhaps some few were truly devotional spirits, with a fire of prayer and aspiration ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson

... to a mild appeal for creature and medical comforts, and it had two objects—to open the soul to compassion, and bar all considerations of manual labour. ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson

... tattered state of his dress, that a number of persons subscribed a sum sufficient to have him put in a state fit to appear in the poll-room. The exhibition of his machine in a town where so many workpeople lived by the exercise of manual labour proved a dangerous experiment; ominous growlings were heard outside the school-room from time to time, and Arkwright,—remembering the fate of Kay, who was mobbed and compelled to fly from Lancashire because ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles

... to begin life anew as the master, except in the matter of book-learning and ownership of property. The slave owner and his sons had mastered no special industry. They unconsciously had imbibed the feeling that manual labour was not the proper thing for them. On the other hand, the slaves, in many cases, had mastered some handicraft, and none were ashamed, ...
— Up From Slavery: An Autobiography • Booker T. Washington

... made and parties scouring the country for timber the young engineer bent his mind to the task of inventing some better mode of getting rid of the water than by manual labour—the mine being sadly deficient in a lot of necessary gear, besides steam-power, as Ernest Wilton had quickly perceived, although he had refrained from commenting on ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson

... have once won their regard they will go through fire and water for you; but they despise any one who 'does nothing,' for, like most manual workers, they do not understand that brain-work is as hard as manual labour. ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough

... physical body, as my dreams are so intensely real and vivid. They are so real that I am frequently able to remember, almost verbatim, long conversations I have had in them, and I awake repeating broken-off sentences. Often, after I have taken active exercise, such as running, or done manual labour, such as digging or lifting heavy weights in the land of my dreams, my muscles have ached ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell

... an image familiar to orientals. When the wheat is reaped, it is bound in sheaves and carted to the threshing-floor, which is generally a circular spot of hard ground from fifty to one hundred feet in diameter. On this the wheat is threshed from the chaff by manual labour, but the two lie intermingled till the evening, when the grain is caught up in broad shovels or fans, and thrown against the evening breeze, as it passes swiftly over the fevered land; thus the light chaff is borne away, while the wheat falls heavily to the earth. ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer

... satisfied with the lazy independence procured for them by the produce and rents of the land, of which they are the sole proprietors. The Christians, on the other hand, are invariably the tenants, as it is beneath the dignity of a Mussulman to turn his hand to any kind of manual labour, i.e. so long as he can find a ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot

... machine tools was admirable. Mr. Fawcett, who accompanied me, was full in his praises of my master, whom he regarded as the greatest pioneer in the substitution of the unerring accuracy of machine tools for the often untrustworthy results of mere manual labour. ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth

... their revels. This Tomas did, and night after night was spent pleasantly by him in the company of his merry newly-made friends. True to their word, he nightly parted company with them, laden with money, and thus he had no need to spend his days as heretofore, in manual labour. This went on as long as Tomas Moris kept his word, but alas, one day, he divulged to a neighbour the secret of his riches. That night, as usual, he went to Hafod Bryn Mullt, but his generous friends were not there, and he noticed that in the place where they ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen

... convent, but that those who preferred to adhere to the monastic life should remain there in voluntary but strict subordination to their superiors and to the established rules; some of them should be employed in preaching the Word of God, others should contribute by manual labour to the support of the institution. Outside, however, among the people of Wittenberg, Carlstadt, who had shortly before restrained even his own partisans in regard to the question of the mass, and who was neither a regular preacher in the town nor in the possession of any other office, now ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin

... del Dia' (Fops of the Period). The subject of the play is of local interest, with a moral exposing in farcical colours the foibles of the Cuban 'Pollo,' or dandy, whose taste for pleasure and idleness is only exceeded by his aversion for manual labour and for early matrimony. ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman

... exhortations of the leaders to those who worked under them. Abbot John of Trittenham thus admonished the workers in the Scriptorium in 1486: "I have diminished your labours out of the monastery lest by working badly you should only add to your sins, and have enjoined on you the manual labour of writing and binding books. There is in my opinion no labour more becoming a monk than the writing of ecclesiastical books.... You will recall that the library of this monastery... had been dissipated, sold, or made way with ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison

... appointment as engineer at the Killingworth Pit, George Stephenson was in a measure relieved from the daily routine of manual labour, having, as we have seen, advanced himself to the grade of a higher class workman. But he had not ceased to be a worker, though he employed his industry in a different way. It might, indeed, be inferred ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles

... Lubber Fiend—owns a department of legend and ballad scarcely less important than that possessed by his relatives, the Elfin folk and the Trolds; a shy and clumsy monster, but harmless and good-natured, and with a turn for hard manual labour that can be turned to useful account. Good and ill fortune, in the ballads, ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie

... social ethics in vogue among this class was such as might have been expected from persons who had been reared to regard themselves as the objects of a special dispensation of fortune. They looked upon manual labour as degrading. Any person, no matter what his abilities, who earned a livelihood by the sweat of his brow, or even by honest trade, was considered as no fit company for the brood of parasites who hung on to the heels of the Compact, ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent

... involved a large amount of manual labour in stretcher work, clearing up wards, and so on, but all this was done for us by our brancardiers, or stretcher-bearers. These were Belgians who for one reason or another could not serve with the army, and ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar

... over the United States I achieved a new concept. As a tramp, I was behind the scenes of society—aye, and down in the cellar. I could watch the machinery work. I saw the wheels of the social machine go around, and I learned that the dignity of manual labour wasn't what I had been told it was by the teachers, preachers, and politicians. The men without trades were helpless cattle. If one learned a trade, he was compelled to belong to a union in order to work at his trade. And his union was compelled to bully and slug the employers' unions in ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London

... a gentleman called the Assistant Director of Works came and made a plan of the city. Here a difficulty arose. In this climate a white man has his limitations, and one of them is that hard manual labour when the sun is summer-high is exhausting in the extreme, and is, moreover, explicitly forbidden between the hours of 10 a.m. and 4 ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett

... that the boy was right. Brahmins who, being of the priestly caste, claim to be semi-divine rather than mere men, will take up professions or clerical work, but with all his experience of India he had never heard of any of them engaging in such manual labour. ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly

... allowed her, as stepmother, to persuade him to place the narrator, Tatiana, in a convent, where she (Tatiana) lived from the age of nine till adolescence, and, meanwhile, was taught her letters, and also a certain amount of manual labour; until, later, her father married her off to a friend of his, a well-to-do ex-soldier, who was acting as forester on the ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky

... manual labour: with very few exceptions that is. Timmins will be fifty-five next month. He suffers from rheumatism ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant

... largely owing to the peculiar and wretched condition of internal communications, and to the fact that horses are seldom employed in cultivation of the soil, which is mostly performed by manual labour, supplemented by water buffaloes in the central and southern provinces and by ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready

... out shooting or fishing, he is content to sit still and contemplate nature. He has a separate name for each of the commoner birds and flowers. He also has names for many butterflies and moths. These are traits which are not found usually in the people of India. He is not above manual labour, and even the Khasi clerk in the Government offices is quite ready to take his turn at the hoe in his potato garden. The men make excellent stonemasons and carpenters, and are ready to learn fancy carpentry and mechanical work. They are inveterate chewers of supari and the pan ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon

... his income to a common fund, for various objects. These objects were—first: to buy land for the agricultural members to cultivate, paying their rent, not to the other members, but to the company; not refusing machinery, but preferring manual labour. Next, to buy mills and factories, to be likewise owned by the Guild and worked by members—using water power in preference to steam (steam at first not forbidden)—and making the lives of the people employed as well spent as might be, with ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood

... environment. He felt strongly tempted to reason with her unreasonableness, thus practically boasted as a virtue. It seemed so unworthy, this streak of snobbery, so senseless in an American at most three generations away from manual labour. But he had made up his mind long ago to trust to new surroundings, new interests to create in her a spirit more in ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)

... that April's there!' How could Browning write that line without his teeth chattering! How well I understand the desire of the British to keep India and South Africa! They must have some place to go where they can get warm! Now for unpacking, or any sort of manual labour which will put my frozen ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... the coming annual meeting in Kiukiang, improving this opportunity of bringing them in contact with the doctors, who have long since become the ideals of our school girls.... Referring to the fear some native Christians have shown of sending their girls to a school having manual labour in its curriculum, Dr. Ida exclaimed hotly, 'This fear of work is the bane of China.' Here are two doctors of exalted privileges, educated abroad, honoured alike by native and foreigner, and yet putting their hand to cooking ...
— Notable Women Of Modern China • Margaret E. Burton

... time is so taken up that, with the exception of three hours devoted to moral instruction, all the rest is employed in manual labour. ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon

... conception of well-being; and it is because labour with the hands or at the desk distorts or impairs the body, and the petty cares of a calling pursued for bread pervert the soul, that so strong a contempt was felt by the Greeks for manual labour and trade. "The arts that are called mechanical," says Xenophon, "are also, and naturally enough, held in bad repute in our cities. For they spoil the bodies of workers and superintendents alike, ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

... relieved her difficulties. In this establishment Galland studied Greek and Hebrew for ten years, after which the "strait thing at home" apprenticed him to a trade. But he was made for letters; he hated manual labour and he presently removed en cachette to Paris, where he knew only an ancient kinswoman. She introduced him to a priestly relative of the Canon of Noyon, who in turn recommended him to the "Sous-principal" of the College Du Plessis. Here he made such notable progress in Oriental studies, that ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton

... nation, which by a fortunate circumstance it has at its disposal, the principal resources that are necessary for it. Lastly, it is requisite to extend among our artists the knowledge of the advancement of the arts and that of machines, whose object is either to diminish manual labour or to give to the result of labour more uniformity and precision; and on those heads it must be confessed we have much to draw from foreign nations.[1] All these views can only be accomplished by giving a new turn ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 10, Issue 273, September 15, 1827 • Various

... of means," cried Ramage. "Leaders—brains—will always rise to the top; will always be rewarded more highly than mere manual labour. . . . They will occupy more remunerative positions under the State. . . . But the fruits of labour will only be for those who do the work—be it with their hands or be it with their heads. The profiteer must go; the ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile

... friends, any of you. You who go to the mills, or are engaged in any other manual labour, don't think, because you may be spending your evenings and leisure in mechanics' institutes, or in attending science classes, or in working up scientific subjects, that in these pursuits you can find real peace, without religion and without ...
— True to his Colours - The Life that Wears Best • Theodore P. Wilson

... a Socialist to show that most of what Mr Grinder himself has been telling us is nonsensical claptrap of the most misleading kind. He tells us that the employers work with their brains and the men with their hands. If it is true that no brains are required to do manual labour, why put idiots into imbecile asylums? Why not let them do some of the hand work for which no brains are required? As they are idiots, they would probably be willing to work for even less than the ideal "living wage". If Mr Grinder had ever tried, he would know that manual workers have to concentrate ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell

... houses at the Waimate mission station. He himself paid into the common fund the whole of his episcopal income of L1,200, and drew out as his proper share only L500. The farm was worked on communistic principles. Teachers and students must all take their share in manual labour. Lectures on Greek and Latin must be given in the intervals of ploughing, or printing, or teaching Maori children to read or hoe or spin. Each "associate" received a fixed salary; all profits went to the support ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas

... as well as that of Jamaica and Barbadoes, and from a consideration of the means of obviating the causes, which had hitherto operated to impede the natural increase of the slaves, and of lessening the demand for manual labour, without diminishing the profit of the planters, no considerable or permanent inconvenience would result from discontinuing the further importation ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson

... wholly physical: mental cultivation was little cared for, and indeed, as in feudal ages, was often treated with contempt. But now that our state is relatively peaceful—now that muscular power is of use for little else than manual labour, while social success of nearly every kind depends very much on mental power; our education has become almost exclusively mental. Instead of respecting the body and ignoring the mind, we now respect the mind and ignore ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer

... service for a stated time in order to defray the cost of their voyage from Europe. At a later time there were many of these "redemptioners" in the middle colonies, but in New England they were very few; and as no stigma of servitude was attached to manual labour, they were apt at the end of their terms of service to become independent farmers; thus they ceased to be recognizable as a distinct class of society. Nevertheless the common statement that no traces of the "mean white" are to be found in New England is perhaps somewhat too sweeping. Interspersed ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske

... industrial or economic aspects of the problem of city poverty. Scarcely any trade in its lowest grades is free from it; in nearly all we find the wretched "fag end" where the workers are miserably oppressed. This is true not only of the poorest manual labour, that of the sandwich-man, with his wage of 1s. 2d. per diem, and of the lowest class of each manufacturing trade in East and Central London. It is true of the relatively unskilled labour in every form of employment; the miserable writing-clerk, who ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson

... known to others the way to that Grace that held me up,'—he paused with excess of feeling—'all has been joy, even in the recollection of the darkest days. Mr. Wilmot's words come back now, that it may all have been training for my Master's work. Even the manual labour may have been my preparation!' His eyes brightened, and he was indeed more like the eager, hopeful youth she remembered than she had ever hoped to see him; but this brightness was the flash of steel, tried, strengthened, and refined in the fire—a brightness ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge

... creeds and castes and tongues. There are Bengalees and Madrasees of the educated classes, some of them Brahmans, who are chiefly engaged in clerical, technical, and managerial work. There are rougher Pathans and Punjabee Mahomedans, as well as Sikhs, who take more readily to heavy skilled manual labour. There are artisans and small traders and shopkeepers from all parts of India, and even a few picked carpenters from China as pattern-makers. The bulk of the unskilled labour is drawn from the Sonthal aboriginal population, industrious, ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol

... enormous walls, clothed with lianas and foliage. We often tried to land, but without success. Towards sunset we sailed along for an hour seeking to discover, not an opening (since none exists), but a spot less wooded, where our Indians by means of the hatchet and manual labour, could clear space enough for a resting-place for twelve or thirteen persons. It was impossible to pass the night in the canoe; the mosquitos, which tormented us during the day, accumulated toward evening beneath the ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt

... calico gowns and hats." All this sounds delightfully Arcadian and innocent, and it is certain that there was something peculiar to the clime and race in some of the features of such a life; in the free, frank, and stainless companionship of young men and maidens, in the mixture of manual labour and intellectual flights—dish-washing and aesthetics, wood-chopping and philosophy. Wordsworth's "plain living and high thinking" were made actual. Some passages in Margaret Fuller's journals throw plenty of ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.

... them; I don't go in for manual labour," said the little man proudly. "But if a man don't mind that, he's pretty sure of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... and exposed the ephemeral bulbous roots of speculation. Prejudice he found too deeply rooted to be dug up very easily, whilst the fashions and follies of the day seemed to him to lie so entirely on the surface of the soil, and to be so shortlived, that to throw away any manual labour in an attempt to eradicate ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 386, August 22, 1829 • Various

... Credo sung as a fragment. It would have been presumption on my part to have completed the Service, so I left it, and being much occupied, forgot all about it. Just about this time we decided to do away with manual labour in blowing the organ, and substituted a small hydraulic engine. I mention this because it has a bearing ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various

... take up a play-book (if ever you do take one up) it strikes you as being a very trifling thing—a mere insubstantial pamphlet beside the imposing bulk of the latest six-shilling novel. Little do you guess that every page of the play has cost more care, severer mental tension, if not more actual manual labour, than any chapter of a novel, though it be fifty pages long. It is the height of the author's art, according to the old maxim, that the ordinary spectator should never be clearly conscious of the skill and travail that have gone to the making of the finished product. But the ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp

... volcanoes. The population, at least 2500 to the square league, is one of the densest to be found in purely agricultural districts: property is subdivided to an extraordinary extent. Tillage is carried on almost entirely by manual labour, with spade, hoe, or mattock; only in exceptional cases a light plough is substituted drawn by two cows, the wife of the peasant not unfrequently taking the place of one of them in the yoke. The team serves at once to furnish milk and ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... a chorus of assent, for none were accustomed to hard manual labour, and the pain ...
— The Lion of Saint Mark - A Story of Venice in the Fourteenth Century • G. A. Henty

... earn a subsistence, I cannot imagine. The mind is necessarily imprisoned in its own little tenement; and, fully occupied by keeping it in repair, has not time to rove abroad for improvement. The book of knowledge is closely clasped, against those who must fulfil their daily task of severe manual labour or die; and curiosity, rarely excited by thought or information, seldom moves on ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft

... He was compelled, according to the then all but universal custom of rural parishes in Scotland, to do penance in church, before the congregation, in consequence of the birth of an illegitimate child. But not the amours, or the tavern, or drudging manual labour could keep him long from his true calling. "Rhyme," he says, "I had given up [on going to Irvine], but meeting with Fergusson's 'Scottish Poems,' I strung anew my wildly sounding lyre with emulating vigour." It was probably this ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various

... pretty nearly a dozen public holidays in the year. Saturday is always a half-holiday. Nine till five are the accepted hours for the clerk; half-past nine till six for the shop-assistant. The eight-hour system is generally accepted in all classes of manual labour. Some shops are open on Saturday evenings; but there is a strong movement to abolish this system. The clerk is rarely called back to work after hours. In all trades and professions the hours and work of the subordinates are much less than in England. When ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny

... afield; manual labour dulls, if it does not altogether exorcise, them; some have other less creditable means of seeking oblivion. But the poor women, shut in in their little houses, with their anxieties and sorrow staring them in the face—God ...
— North, South and Over the Sea • M.E. Francis (Mrs. Francis Blundell)

... The work of the citizen will be the willing performance of social office. He will be a worker whose best efforts, best ardour, and highest aims will be drawn out by his sense of the beneficence of his work, even though it be such a coarse routine of manual labour as machinery should soon remove altogether from human hands. He will be habituated to regard his wages, not as a quid pro quo, but as the provision made by society to enable him to carry out his labour."[1246] Will the "sense of beneficence" induce men who ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker

... pleasure unalloyed. She did not miss the luxuries to which she had become accustomed. She rather relished the hard, manual labour, to which she applied herself with full energy. But her baby was a stranger to her, cried when she wished to take her up, and became only gradually accustomed to her. Her faculties had been sharpened, too; she felt a certain ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various

... and patiently at the temporary manual labour on which he was employed, and when that came to an end he looked about ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed

... they are content with their harvests. Their carelessness is however unpardonable, in having never yet erected a mill. There is not one in all California; and the poor Indians are obliged to grind their corn by manual labour between two large, ...
— A New Voyage Round the World, in the years 1823, 24, 25, and 26, Vol. 2 • Otto von Kotzebue

... I added, that I did not see who was to pay the wages, nor who was to buy the goods. For, I remarked, you certainly cannot compete with foreign countries at this rate, and at home the Classes will be competing with you, being obliged to have recourse to manual labour. They said that was just what they wanted, everybody to labour with his hands. I answered that many of the Classes, a poor lot at best (cheers), would come on the Parish. Who was to pay the rates when everybody was ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, July 30, 1892 • Various

... severe subdivision of his time and thoughts, by unceasing prayers and manual labour, he did in about three months succeed in benumbing the earthly half of ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade

... The office cast upon him was great, its duties most onerous, and the obscurity of his past career afforded no guarantee of his ability to discharge them. His shortcomings moreover were on the surface. The education of a man whose early years had been spent in earning bread by manual labour had necessarily been defective, and faults of manner and errors of taste repelled the observer at the outset. In spite of these drawbacks, Mr. Lincoln slowly won for himself the respect and confidence of all. His perfect honesty speedily became apparent, ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams

... many other writers used the word in this its original sense; and Johnson explains it "to cultivate by manual labour," according to its literal derivation. In one passage Shakespeare uses the word ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe

... suffered—one from hopeless love— and the other from helpless sympathy. But it is all over now, and the probity of two, presumably, gallant officers is vindicated, while the paying teller of father's bank is behind the bars with a certain prospect of years of manual labour for bed and board. Why will men be so foolish? Easily answered. The love of gold, not made in an honest way, but by speculating with other folks' money. Mr. Barr, the aforesaid teller, is a nice young fellow with a wife and ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin

... take a long time to get the guns up by manual labour," said his companion meditatively, "and it seems to me that we might easily adopt another means. Now," he went on, in decisive tones, "there are plenty of ropes and wire cables, and my suggestion is, ...
— Under the Rebel's Reign • Charles Neufeld

... felt he had talent. He loved deeply, he knew that he was in turn as deeply beloved; but he was utterly powerless. On the confines of the estate, indeed, the men would run gladly to do his bidding. Beyond, and on his own account, he was helpless. Manual labour (to plough, to sow, to work on shipboard) could produce nothing in a time when almost all work was done by bondsmen or family retainers. The life of a hunter in the woods was free, but ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies

... boat. For the sort of spinning to which we are accustomed in England the thing was useless. The discomfort was vast and continuous, and as the hooks were everlastingly fouling in loose weeds, and the progress of the boat converted the hauling in of the line into not inconsiderable manual labour, the outlook became barren in the extreme. My companion A. in the stern was furnished with the orthodox hand-line, and I sat on the second thwart facing him. The rod rendered this necessary, and A. told me afterwards that Ben spent most of his time winking ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior

... limited, and it was very limited at that time. We were getting rather less than half a gallon per man for all purposes, which is perhaps just about the quantity used by the ordinary man for cooking and drinking in the cold weather at home; but in a khamsin when you are doing five or six hours' hard manual labour per diem, a gallon is easily consumed. Luckily these heat waves only last about three days, but ...
— The Fife and Forfar Yeomanry - and 14th (F. & F. Yeo.) Battn. R.H. 1914-1919 • D. D. Ogilvie

... more devout ladies in their room. The chroniclers show that this evasion was severely commented upon, and we may conclude that Le Liget was a tardy substitute—a cheap strip of forest land granted to an order which was celebrated for its dislike of covetousness, and whose rules required manual labour and a desert (and so valueless) land. Le Liget, be it noticed, is founded after the peace of Venice has given more power to the Papal elbow. The Lateran Council is also a little threatening towards King Henry in March, 1179, particularly on the question of the ferocity of mercenaries. Young ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson

... relation to regions adapted to the physical qualities of our own race, it seems not less clear for the regions beyond. To refuse the aid of the tropical populations for opening up the resources of countries where the Anglo-Saxon race cannot perform manual labour, and still less establish a permanent settlement, is not to advance but seriously to injure the true interests of this colony. By opening up portions of your Northern Territory with imported labour, a new outlet will be afforded for the investment of your capital, ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey

... slave labour, and that the working people of America must be educated and free, if they were to compete with the free working people of Great Britain and Europe. Contrariwise, the South believed that manual labour was a task for slaves, that cotton, rice and sugar were produced more rapidly by slave labour than by free labour. The Southern civilization was built on the plan of producing raw cotton, and exchanging it for manufactured goods. It did not escape the notice of Southern leaders, ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis

... murderer of a young girl is struck dead. In later life he realized the importance of monastic records. He had annals compiled, and bards preserved and arranged them in the monastic chests. At Iona the brethren of his settlement passed their time in reading and transcribing, as well as in manual labour. Very careful were they to copy correctly. Baithen, a monk on Iona, got one of his fellows to look over a Psalter which he had just finished writing, but only a single error was discovered.[1] Columba himself became proficient in copying and illuminating. He could not spend an hour ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage

... European states, it appears that, with the exception of Great Britain, by far the largest portion and greatest value of the exports of each country consist in the produce of the soil, either in its raw and natural state, or after having undergone a change that requires little industry, manual labour, or mechanical agency. Britain, on the contrary, derives her exports almost entirely from the produce of her wonderful mechanical skill, which effects, in many cases, what could alone be accomplished by an immense ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson

... life? Effective though he was as a teacher, he had no real confidence in the things which he taught. They only seemed to him a device of reason for expending its energies, just as men deprived by complex life of manual labour sought to make up for the loss by the elaborate pursuit of games. He did not touch the springs of being at all. He had collapsed, he felt, into placid acquiescence; Nature had been too strong for ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson

... presence, however, was no doubt a further exasperation to the malcontents. There existed in Isabella a little faction of some of the aristocrats who had never, forgiven Columbus for employing them in degrading manual labour; who had never forgiven him in fact for being there at all, and in command over them. And now here was another woolweaver, or son of a wool-weaver, come to put his finger in the pie that Christopher has apparently provided so carefully for himself ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young

... the piston up the valve would close and draw the water to the mouth of the pipe, where it poured out of a hole a few inches from the top into a wooden trough, which conveyed it into the pool. This meant hard manual labour; but as I only had to use it about once a week it was exercise for me, and I enjoyed it. So did the fish, for they would come to the new water in numbers, either because of the food contained in the water, or because of its coolness in the hot weather, or some other reason that I am not scientist ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling

... theatre where wealth and glory were to be gained. The cultivation of the West India Islands by the labour of Europeans, was found to be a task almost impracticable, and the attention was thence drawn to discover a source, from which manual labour could be obtained, adapted to the climate, and this resource was soon found in the black population of Africa. It is not to be doubted, that many of our African settlements were formed for the purpose of procuring a supply of ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish

... the other counties, or to found upon it a general description of the colony. It is, in fact, poorer in every respect than any tract of land of similar extent in the interior, and is still covered with dense forests of heavy timber, excepting when the trees have been felled by dint of manual labour, and the ground cleared at an expense that nothing but its proximity to the seat of government could have justified. But experience has proved, that neither the labour nor the the expense have been thrown away. Many valuable farms and extensive gardens chequer the face of the country, ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt

... frightful drudgery undergone by a man of the people who has vowed to educate himself,—to live at once two lives, each as severe as the whole of yours,—to bring to the self-imposed toil of intellectual improvement, a body and brain already worn out by a day of toilsome manual labour. I did it. God forbid, though, that I should take credit to myself for it. Hundreds more have done it, with still fewer advantages than mine. Hundreds more, an ever-increasing army of martyrs, are doing it at this ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al

... of two sous. Now two sous was about the price of a pound of salt butter in the bad times of about 1417; it was the price of half a pound in the worse times of 1419; and in 1444, just four years before Villon joined the University, it seems to have been taken as the average wage for a day's manual labour.[8] In short, it cannot have been a very profuse allowance to keep a sharp-set lad in breakfast and supper for seven mortal days; and Villon's share of the cakes and pastry and general good cheer, to which he is never weary ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... shudder. He would have found that robbery was held to be a calling, not merely innocent, but honourable. He would have seen, wherever he turned, that dislike of steady industry, and that disposition to throw on the weaker sex the heaviest part of manual labour, which are characteristic of savages. He would have been struck by the spectacle of athletic men basking in the sun, angling for salmon, or taking aim at grouse, while their aged mothers, their pregnant wives, their tender daughters, were reaping the scanty harvest of ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... the general principle, consists in learning what makes a man useful, respectable, and happy, in the line for which he is destined, whether for manual labour, or for study; for a high or ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair



Words linked to "Manual labour" :   manual labor, application, bodywork, handling, planking, wiring, picking, coating, labor, covering



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