"Manual labour" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... present the best way of educating them, and when you 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
... at extended production through its insistence on the importance and dignity of manual labour.[1] As we showed above, one of the principal achievements of Christianity in the social sphere was to elevate labour from a degrading to an honourable occupation. The example of Christ Himself and the Apostles ...
— An Essay on Mediaeval Economic Teaching • George O'Brien
... was sitting forward on his low chair, with his hands clasped between his knees. They were rather large hands—suggestive of manual labour. ...
— Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories • Henry Seton Merriman
... 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 ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... and is almost beyond the power of ordinary women cooks. This juice must now be placed in a small enamelled saucepan, and must be heated till it becomes thick and pulpy, when it can be put by for use. It will probably be found cheaper to buy spinach extract than to make it, as manual labour cannot compete ...
— Cassell's Vegetarian Cookery - A Manual Of Cheap And Wholesome Diet • A. G. Payne
... myself on such occasions, and Mr. —— seemed positively degraded in my eyes, as he stood enforcing upon these women the necessity of their fulfilling their appointed tasks. How honorable he would have appeared to me begrimed with the sweat and soil of the coarsest manual labour, to what he then seemed, setting forth to these wretched, ignorant women, as a duty, their unpaid exacted labour! I turned away in bitter disgust. I hope this sojourn among Mr. ——'s slaves may not lessen my respect for ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... policy seems clear in 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 Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... 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 and housework of every kind, ...
— Notable Women Of Modern China • Margaret E. Burton
... Headmaster being foremost, and earned a labouring man's wage at unloading the trucks and carrying the goods to their billets. Some of our new acquaintances watched the scene with a shocked surprise that authorities should share in the manual labour, instead of looking on and paying for it. But their feelings at last determined to admiration. "Why, sirs," they exclaimed, "you get it done as if you were used to move every three weeks." But, in ...
— Uppingham by the Sea - a Narrative of the Year at Borth • John Henry Skrine
... 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 ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... labour-power in the steam-engine came at a time when the existing supply of manual labour was proving utterly inadequate to cope with the demands of the manufacturer. This was especially the case in textile fabrics. In its earlier stages the manufacture of cotton had been retarded by the difficulty ...
— History of the English People, Volume VIII (of 8) - Modern England, 1760-1815 • John Richard Green
... habits, scarcely ever washing their porringers, or only doing so in their broth; they hardly ever wash their clothes, more especially "when there is thunder about;" and they eat rats, mice, &c., if they are badly off for other food. The men are not brought up to any manual labour, their whole occupation consisting in hunting, shooting with bow and arrows, watching the flocks, and riding. The women and girls are very athletic and very brave, they prepare furs and make clothes, drive carts and camels, and as polygamy ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... have nothing to say about my life, which is filled up with manual labour. At moments perhaps some image appears, some memory rises. I have just read a fine article by Renan on the origins of the Bible. I found it in a Revue des Deux Mondes of 1886. If later I can remember something of it, I may be ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... 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
... 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. ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... 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 without study, ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... Thomas Blount," said the Vicar, still more huskily; "there is nothing to be ashamed of in honest manual labour." ...
— The Vast Abyss - The Story of Tom Blount, his Uncles and his Cousin Sam • George Manville Fenn
... manual labour, with the consequence that Sam Donny's tongue began to run rather freely, a certain intimacy having existed in the past between Roy and the miller's man connected with the demand and supply of meal-worms for catching and feeding nightingales, ...
— The Young Castellan - A Tale of the English Civil War • George Manville Fenn
... sufficient of itself to produce separate subcastes. The Ekbahia (one-armed) Telis are so called because their women wear glass bangles only on the right hand and metal ones on the left. This is a custom of several castes whose women do manual labour, and the reason appears to be one of convenience, as glass bangles on the working arm would be continually getting broken. Among the Ekbahia Telis it is said that a woman considers it a point of honour to have these metal ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... Linkhouse, near Dunbar. His father was a notary; but, being in poor circumstances, he apprenticed his son, in his eleventh year, to a relative, who followed the conjoined business of a builder and house-carpenter. The drudgery of heavy manual labour proved very uncongenial; and the apprentice suddenly took his departure, walking a long distance to Edinburgh, whither his parents had removed their residence. He now selected the profession of a printer, and entered on an indenture to Mr ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... lake. Upon this headland the peasantry had been given permission to build their cabins by former owners of the Georgian house standing on the pleasant green hill. The present owners considered the village a disgrace, but the villagers paid high rents for their plots of ground, and all the manual labour that the Big House required came from the village: the gardeners, the stable helpers, the ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... I can give you no other answer; and that, and no other, is the way of the world. You are an obstinate man, Aune! You are opposing me, not because you cannot do otherwise, but because you will not exhibit 'the superiority of machinery over manual labour'. ...
— Pillars of Society • Henrik Ibsen
... following, search was again made for fresh water, and Grant went up the creek which was found to terminate in a salt marsh. The trees on the bank were not large but the underwood was thick. He penetrated inland for some distance and saw spots "as if cleared by manual labour...covered with good tender grass," a delightful sight to him. The open land had the appearance of being frequently overflowed and he thought it was well adapted for the purpose of fattening cattle; numbers of black swans and other water-fowl ...
— The Logbooks of the Lady Nelson - With The Journal Of Her First Commander Lieutenant James Grant, R.N • Ida Lee
... in tandem and drawn to the shore by a stout rope, 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 trench late that afternoon. ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... which they seldom fail to add the crime of perjury, whenever it can be useful to shield themselves or their friends from the punishment of the law. Totally without moral education, and very seldom trained to any trade or occupation by which they can earn an honest livelihood by manual labour—their youths excluded from becoming apprentices, and their females from engaging themselves generally as servants, on account of the superstitious adherence to the mere ceremonial of their persuasion, as it respects meat not killed ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... self-congratulation on which a meagre type of religion has elevated them. But at length his little stock of money was nearly expended, and there was nothing that he could do, or learn to do, in this seaport. He felt impelled to seek manual labour, partly because he thought it more likely he could obtain that sort of employment, without a request for reference as to his character, which would lead to inquiry about his previous history; and partly, perhaps, from an instinctive feeling that hard bodily labour ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... 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
... education, their sensibility and their 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 ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... sensibility, like the pain of hunger, or of cold, or of a musical discord; it is purely artificial; custom has made it, and could unmake it. The feeling of fatigue from overwork is natural; the repugnance of caste to manual labour is factitious. The dignity attached to the military profession, and the indignity of the office of public executioner, are capricious, arbitrary, and sentimental. Our prospective regard to the comforts of our declining years points to a real interest; our feelings as to the disposal of ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... 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 two children, but his life ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin
... a tithe of 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 a fair wage, healthy work, and so forth. ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... came again, 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 popular air ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... in the parish of Fraserburgh, Aberdeenshire, on the 1st day of January 1814. At the time of his birth his father rented a farm, but, being unfortunate, he was compelled to seek the support of his family by manual labour. With a limited education at the parish-school of Longside, whither his parents had removed, the subject of this memoir was sent, in his eleventh year, to tend cattle. When somewhat older, he found employment as a farm-servant; ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... The fourth word of the Decalogue prescribes, then, that the Israelite should for ever remember the holy day of sabbath, as a representative of religion, and should, during that day, abstain, and cause all his dependants to abstain, from all manual labour and earthly occupation, that might distract him from the contemplation of heavenly subjects, which should exclusively occupy his ...
— A Guide for the Religious Instruction of Jewish Youth • Isaac Samuele Reggio
... from floes for the water supply, or heaving up the sounding line, it goes without saying that all the afterguard turn out to do it. There is no hesitation and no distinction. It will be the same when it comes to landing stores or doing any other hard manual labour. ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... to feel jolly, and I could see that Philip was discontented. He had never been accustomed to manual labour; he did not like being exposed to the cold winds, to the frost or rain, with no shelter except that afforded by our small tent. While at work we were always dirty, and often wet; and after we had passed a miserable night, daylight found us shivering, until warmth came with hard work. One morning ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... two picks and a shovel, called Ted Chown and a minute later had struck the first blow towards restoration of his granite cross. All laboured with their utmost power, and Will, who had flung off his coat and waistcoat, bared his arms, tightened his belt, and did the work of two men. The manual labour sweetened his mind a little, and scoured it of some bitterness. While Mr. Blee, with many a grunt and groan, removed the soil as the others broke it away, Blanchard, during these moments of enforced idleness, looked hungrily at the little window of the upper chamber ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... bound themselves to 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" ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... 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 ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... few in the matter of money, but then he had had so little—not half enough to learn to love it! Nor had he the slightest idea of any mode in which to make it. Most of the methods he had come in contact with, except that of manual labour, in which work was done and money paid immediately for it, repelled him, as having elements of the unhandsome where not the dishonest: he was not yet able to distinguish between substance and mode in such matters. The only way in which he ever dreamed of coming ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... rules, no vows, no constitution, and no cells formed. Prayer and study, and manual labour, were their only occupations. They applied themselves to the education of youth, and raised up little academies in the neighbourhood, where the members of Port-Royal, the most illustrious names of literary France, presided. None considered his birth entitled ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... Mauprats were clever enough not to demand money of them, for money is what the peasant in such a district obtains with the greatest difficulty, and parts from with the greatest reluctance. "Money is dear," is one of his proverbs, because in his eyes money stands for something different from manual labour. It means traffic with men and things outside his world, an effort of foresight or circumspection, a bargain, a sort of intellectual struggle, which lifts him out of his ordinary heedless habits; it means, ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... should be noticed. One, the dock or plunge hole, which is a deep place by a sharply raised bank, both made with careful manual labour. Next, the sunning place, generally an ant-hill on which the Beaver lies to enjoy a sun-bath, while the ants pick the creepers out of his fur. Third, the mud-pie. This is a little patty of mud mixed with a squeeze of the castor or body-scent glands. It ...
— Wild Animals at Home • Ernest Thompson Seton
... 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
... during the winter, for the Kolyma River teems with fish, and edible berries are obtainable in the woods. Geese, duck, and other wild fowl are plentiful in the spring, and as fire-arms are not prohibited, game at this season is a welcome addition to a generally naked larder. Manual labour, too, is procurable, and an exile may earn a few roubles by fishing, trapping, wood-cutting, &c.; but the dark winter months must be passed in a condition of inactive despair. During the winter season there are two mails from Russia brought by the Cossacks in charge of the yearly consignment ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... Levant; the most recent in English is Athelstan Riley's Athos (1887). The life is mainly given up to devotional contemplative exercises; the church services are of extreme length; intellectual study is little cultivated; manual labour has almost disappeared; there are many ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • 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 error of all, ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... 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
... a Southerner and a native of Kentucky, a fact which he never forgot and of which he was exceedingly proud. After the wandering boyhood of a pioneer and a period of manual labour as a "rail-splitter" he had settled in Illinois, where he had picked up his own education and become a successful lawyer. He had sat in the House of Representatives as a Whig from 1846 to 1848, the period of the Mexican War, during which he had acted with the main body of ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... and cultivation on all sides; and the natives appear finer specimens than their more southern relations. The irrigation, too, seems to be carried on with more systematic appliances than further south — the water being raised by the Persian wheel, and bullock-power introduced in aid of manual labour. ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... of the flaws in the above argument, but at least it shows a manual labour act performed both afloat and ashore under precisely similar conditions as to (a) its nature, (b) its musical setting; called by the same name, with the same pronunciation in each case; and lastly, connected, in one case, with an actual hut or shanty. Against this concrete argument we have ...
— The Shanty Book, Part I, Sailor Shanties • Richard Runciman Terry
... are reserved for Frenchmen, but among the lower grades you may find a number of other nationalities; Spaniards and Sardinians—hardiest of white Mediterranean races—as well as some Italians, and not a few Greeks. The manual labour in the ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... 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 his hand flat upon it, and catching hold ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... their troubles 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 help them! So narrow are their lives, so few their experiences, ...
— North, South and Over the Sea • M.E. Francis (Mrs. Francis Blundell)
... bully, backbite, and speak 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 your loops and flourishes; ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the evil charm is unwound. The Brownie—the 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
... 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 toldo covered with palm-leaves, which served to ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... could well afford to stand us drinks,' was Chalks's cheerful commentary. 'We ain't much on book-learning, this side the river, Mr. Blake. We're plain blunt men, that ain't ashamed of manual labour—horny-handed sons of toil, in short. But we're proud to meet a cultivated gentleman like yourself, all the same, and ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... politician drudges more than the professional lawyer; and, to come to my own case, the volunteer author subjects himself to the risk of painful criticism, and the assured certainty of mental and manual labour, just as completely as his needy brother, whose necessities compel him to assume ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... 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 ...
— From Slave to College President - Being the Life Story of Booker T. Washington • Godfrey Holden Pike
... for the Imperial household, and in that capacity they went by the name of provincial Imibe. Perhaps the most intelligible description of them is that they constituted the peasant and artisan class, and that they were attached to the uji in subordinate positions for purposes of manual labour. By degrees, when various kinds of productive operations came to be engaged in as hereditary pursuits, the tomobe were grouped according to the specialty of the uji to which they wore attached, and we hear of Kanuchibe, or the corporation ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... saying that if he broke out again, he would be worse than the most savage tiger ever let loose on the community. As a means of obviating such an outbreak, Butler suggested that, intellectual employment having failed, some form of manual labour should be found him. Bain complied with Butler's request, and got him a job at levelling reclaimed ground in the neighbourhood of Dunedin. On Wednesday, March 10, Butler started work, but after three hours of it relinquished the effort. Bain saw Butler again in Dunedin ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... hand 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 ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... horrid precipices. In this work he was assisted by his numerous 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, and became the mother ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... 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 ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... the one fitting over the other in a manner which keeps the whole steady even in rough weather. Small steam-engines placed inside the breastwork serve to turn the turrets, which, however, can also be worked by manual labour should necessity demand it. ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne
... of painting; and astrology and the other sciences pass through manual operation, but they are mental in the first place, as painting, which first of all exists in the mind of the composer, and cannot attain to fulfilment without manual labour. With regard to painting, its true and scientific principles must be established: what constitutes a shaded body, what constitutes a primary shade, a derivative shade, what constitutes light: that is, darkness, light, colour, size, shape, position, distance, propinquity, motion, rest, ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci
... labour of the hands, how much time they ought to be expected to consume in their regular and stated occupations, and how much would remain to them for relaxation and leisure. It has been said(18), that half an hour in the day given by every member of the community to manual labour, might be sufficient for supplying the whole with the absolute necessaries of life. But there are various considerations that would inevitably lengthen this period. In a community which has made any considerable ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... and had nicked 'em for at least three hundred dollars, would you still think something malignant might be put over on him by a mere scrub buckeroo named Sandy Sawtelle, that never made a cent in his life except by the most degrading manual labour? No, you wouldn't. No fair-minded ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... for (as few persons of birth, or fortune, or even of scholastic education, will submit to the drudgery of servitude and the manual labour of copying the trash of an office) should this infatuation prevail to any considerable degree, we must rarely expect to see a gentleman of distinction or learning at the bar. And what the consequence may be, to have the interpretation ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... population had their days of rest and amusement, which were then much more numerous than at present. At that period the festivals of the Church were frequent and rigidly kept, and as each of them was the pretext for a forced holiday from manual labour, the peasants thought of nothing, after church, but of amusing themselves; they drank, talked, sang, danced, and, above all, laughed, for the laugh of our forefathers quite rivalled the Homeric laugh, and burst forth with a ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... conclusions, as though they were axiomatic, he asserts that the measure of exchange between one class of commodities and another—such, for example, as cigars, printed books, and chronometers—is the amount of manual labour, estimated in terms of time, which is on an average necessary to the production of each of them. His meaning in this respect is illustrated with pictorial vividness by his teaching with regard to the form in which the measure of exchange ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... at Grafton Underwood in the eighteenth century, one Thomas Carley, who was born in that village in 1755, having no hands and one deformed leg. Notwithstanding that nature seemed to have deprived him of all means of manual labour, he rose to the position of parish schoolmaster and parish clerk. He contrived a pair of leather rings, into which he thrust the stumps of his arms, which ended at the elbow, and with the aid of these he held a pen, ruler, knife and fork, etc. The register books of ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... 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 range of rocky limestone hills, luxuriantly grassed, ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... 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 ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... 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. ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... radiant with genius, recently married to a man of serious mind, who was touching on old age, and but recently mother of her first child, Madame Roland was born in that intermediary condition in which families scarcely emancipated from manual labour are, it may be said, amphibious between the labourer and the tradesman, and retain in their manners the virtues and simplicity of the people, whilst they already participate in the lights of society. The period in which aristocracies fall ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... expense in cleansing and repairing would be prodigious. Let us take as our text a document submitted to the Marylebone Vestry in 1840, and acted on by them in the case of Oxford Street; and remember that the expenses of cleansing were calculated at the cost of the manual labour—a cost, we believe, reduced two thirds by the invention of Mr Whitworth. The ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... 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 ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot
... 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 to them the fruits ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... 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 ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... And since manual labour cherishes silently or openly a bitter grudge against intellectual labour, the latter has to protect itself by a pretence of sturdy simplicity; when two teachers are competing for the head-mastership of a classical ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... supposititious Peace Angel's wing, after the first occasion on which, when 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 diversion must be much more interesting than being ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... services, 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 ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... actual doing from those who know how to do them; for although manuals and treatises exist for every possible department of skill and activity, yet the human voice and hand go much further in making knowledge acceptable than the textbook with diagrams. The dignity of manual labour comes home from seeing it well done, it is shown to be worth doing and deserving ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... A man cannot do 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 in custody would not be permitted to appear before a magistrate ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... is the enemy of the soul; hence brethren ought, at certain seasons, to occupy themselves with manual labour, and again, at certain ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... our period was due to improved processes of manufacture and increased facilities of transport, and in a far higher degree to the substitution of machinery moved by the power of water or steam for manual labour. The north, hitherto the most backward part of England, became the chief seat of industrial life and commercial enterprise. Wealth was increased, industry became more dependent on capital, and changes were effected ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... Tolstoy made on himself and on others to abandon all customary ways of life and to start afresh in a new direction. In his own case he was never allowed to test the effects of a life of extreme poverty and manual labour, such as he advocated; nor did those of his followers who adopted such a life achieve much success therein. Tolstoy's artistic sincerity is indeed shown by the fact that, despite his spiritual fervour and his profound conviction that he had really found the road to salvation for mankind, ...
— Plays - Complete Edition, Including the Posthumous Plays • Leo Tolstoy
... unruly Spaniards. His 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 ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... wore, keeping 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
... barrel, and when I drew 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 ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... come to be considered as an inferior one. And, O child, in the Krita age, there were neither gods, nor demons, nor Gandharvas, nor Yakshas, nor Rakshasas, nor Nagas. And there was no buying and selling. And the Sama, the Rich, and the Yajus did not exist. And there was no manual labour. And then the necessaries of life were obtained only by being thought of. And the only merit was in renouncing the world. And during that yuga, there was neither disease, nor decay of the senses. And there was neither malice, nor pride, nor hypocrisy, nor discord, nor ill-will, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... on a horizontal and stationary hearth, the flame passing over a mass of ore resting on such hearth. In order to expose the upper surface of the ore to contact with air the material is turned over by manual labour. This furnace of the reverberatory type is provided with side openings by which the turning over of the ore can be manually effected, and the new ore can ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... common 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 ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... function 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 ...
— Study and Stimulants • A. Arthur Reade
... ashes—the remains of extinct 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 ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... ballonet, or air-chamber of the balloon, and to be the father of later successful airships. His designs were mere descriptions; they could not be carried out; there was at that time no light engine in existence, and his own suggestion that the airscrews should be worked by manual labour may be called a design for an engine that weighs something over half a ton for every horse-power of energy exerted. In 1798 the French author Beaumarchais recommended the construction of airships in the long shape of a fish. As the years passed, models ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... 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 Christian ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... 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
... matter of calculation and management, even in games of chance. Night after night will men play at rouge et noir, upon what they call a system, and for hours their attention never ceases, any more than it would if they were in the shop or oh the wharf. No manual labour is more fatiguing, and more degrading to the labourer, than gaming. Every gamester feels ashamed. And this vice, this worst vice, from whose embrace, moralists daily inform us, man can never escape, is just the one from which the majority of men ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... don't think of 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 ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with a platform avowedly based on modern social 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 economic ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... have is perhaps borrowed. Of 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 themselves. But they would ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... 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 sense ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... repugnance 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, ...
— In Flanders Fields and Other Poems - With an Essay in Character, by Sir Andrew Macphail • John McCrae
... 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 21, 1919. • Various
... Noyon 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. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... were given; such temptations led parties to crowd the colony with numbers of miserable persons, quite unable to perform any laborious employment. It was the general opinion that, owing to physical inability, scarcely one in a hundred of these Coolies was fit for manual labour; and whilst our correspondent was at Demerara a law was issued by the governor granting permission for labourers to enter Guiana from certain countries only, omitting the East Indies. The wretchedness of these immigrant Coolies was truly distressing; numbers of them ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... 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 the body. Both these ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... had also pronounced esteem for manual labour to be genuinely and originally German, and therefore each pupil was assigned a place where he could wield spades and pickaxes, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... made thereof by tippling sweet-lipped bibbers, who out of it frame quills and pipes, through which they with their liquor-attractive breath suck up the new dainty wine from the bung of the barrel. Some modern Pantagruelists, to shun and avoid that manual labour which such a separating and partitional work would of necessity require, employ certain cataractic instruments, composed and formed after the same manner that the froward, pettish, and angry Juno did hold the fingers of both her hands interwovenly clenched together ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... 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 Temple, or at least of ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... distinct method of dressing skins has been devised, which is called "white leather dressing." Before I describe this, however, it may be as well to say that no liquid, powder, or combination of liquids or powders, is known into which a skin can be plunged, and—without the aid of manual labour—come out as leather. I mention this to correct a popular error, many people supposing that labour has no part in the preparation of "white leather." To those who are not prepared to work hard, and very hard indeed, I say, Do not waste your time in ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... lamenting the passing away of something loved and dear,—the boats, the Kanakas, the hides, my old shipmates. Death, change, distance, lend them a character which makes them quite another thing from the vulgar, wearisome toil of uninteresting, forced manual labour. ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... the easy, sociable 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 him. He had fitted so easily into the pleasant scheme of things, and he was doing nothing in ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... 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 ...
— True to his Colours - The Life that Wears Best • Theodore P. Wilson
... 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 ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... 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 ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... intelligent people. The hands and feet were generally small and well-shaped, in wonderful condition—though not necessarily clean—owing to the inborn reluctance which all the people of Brazil have towards manual labour. ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... to imagine what would become of him without money and without friends in this wilderness of London. With ten pounds he might have done something; without, what could he do? Nothing, unless it were manual labour, and he did not know where to ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... out. He was clear in his mind that slavery was an enormous evil for the whites as well as for the blacks, for the individual as for the nation. He had himself, as a young man, been brought up to do toilsome manual labour. He would not admit that there was anything in manual labour that ought to impair the respect of the community for the labourer or the worker's respect for himself. Not the least of the evils of slavery was, in his judgment, its inevitable influence in bringing ...
— Abraham Lincoln • George Haven Putnam |
