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Subservience   /səbsˈərviəns/   Listen
Subservience

noun
1.
The condition of being something that is useful in reaching an end or carrying out a plan.
2.
In a subservient state.  Synonym: subservientness.
3.
Abject or cringing submissiveness.  Synonyms: obsequiousness, servility.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Subservience" Quotes from Famous Books



... of this organisation would be the return of party men mainly. The member-makers would look, not for independence, but for subservience—and they could hardly be blamed for so doing. They are agents for the Liberal party; and, as such, they should be guided by what they take to be the wishes of their principal. The mass of the Liberal party ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot

... accomplished, whether good or bad, improves in character with every revolution of this little world around the sun, that heavenly example of subservience. And now Mr. Jellicorse was well convinced, as nothing had occurred to disturb that will, and the life of the testator had been sacrificed to it, and the devisees under it were his own good clients, and some of his finest turns of words were in it, and the preparation, execution, and attestation, ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore

... and Ramiro was now bowing low and ceremoniously before Madonna. His face I could not see, since his back was towards me, but his tones, as they floated across the hall to where I stood, came laden with subservience. ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini

... aristocrat was no doubt conscious of his inherent dignity, but he was ready on occasion to hail Swift as 'Jonathan' and, in the case of so highly cultivated a specimen as Addison, to accept an author's marriage to a countess. The patrons did not exact the personal subservience of the preceding period; and there was a real recognition by the more powerful class of literary merit of a certain order. Such a method, however, had obvious defects. Men of the world have their characteristic weaknesses; and one, to go no further, is significant. ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen

... successor, to have his place filled by one selected and instructed by himself. All our personal feelings and affections are by no means intended to be swallowed up by a passion for the general interest; when they can be kept alive and be brought into play, in subordination and subservience to the great end, they are cherished as useful, and revered as laudable; and whatever austerity and rigour you may impute to my character, there are few more susceptible of ...
— Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist - (A Fragment) • Charles Brockden Brown

... Newcastle, sanguine to the verge of rashness, loyally adherent to Lord Raglan while governed by his own judgment, distrustful under stress of popular clamour; Panmure, ungenerous, rough-tongued, violent, churlish, yet not malevolent—"a rhinoceros rather than a tiger"—hurried by subservience to the newspaper Press into injustice which he afterwards recognized, yet did but sullenly repair. We see finally that dominant Press itself, personified in the all-powerful Delane, a potentate with convictions at once flexible and vehement; forceful without spite and merciless without ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell

... from this trying sphere of a Chinese circle at Brentford, reside in the densest part of Bethnal-green. Their abstraction from the objects among which they live, or rather their conviction that those objects have all come into existence in express subservience to fowls, has so enchanted me, that I have made them the subject of many journeys at divers hours. After careful observation of the two lords and the ten ladies of whom this family consists, I have ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens

... hat-in-hand to his sovereign and his nobleman, is a less shameful figure than the "citizen" executing his genuflexion before the public of which he is himself a part. No European court journal, no European courtier, was ever more abject in subservience to the sovereign than are the American newspaper and the American politician in flattery of the people. Between the courtier and the demagogue I see nothing to choose. They are moved by the same sentiment and fired by the same hope. Their method is flattery, and ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce

... ultimately been made a sine qua non, our commissioners (Mr. Adams excepted) would have relinquished them rather than have broken off the treaty. To Mr. Adams's perseverance alone, on that point, I have always understood we were indebted for their reservation. As to the charge of subservience to France, besides the evidence of his friendly colleagues before named, two years of my own service with him at Paris, daily visits, and the most friendly and confidential conversation, convince me it had not a shadow of foundation. He possessed the ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.

... father's example and injunctions, Rebecca had learnt to bear herself courteously towards all who approached her. She could not indeed imitate his excess of subservience, because she was a stranger to the meanness of mind, and to the constant state of timid apprehension, by which it was dictated; but she bore herself with a proud humility, as if submitting to the evil circumstances in which she was placed as the daughter of a despised ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott

... hardly possible to find other ministers who to equal abilities would add equal subservience, it is not surprizing that the highest offices were constantly filled by men of notorious incapacity. Indeed, the King seemed to have an instinctive antipathy to everything great and noble. During the reign of George II the elder Pitt had won for himself a reputation which covered ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various

... dispassionate man. He may effect more, if he may serve among the representatives of that hitherto unrepresented thing—Literature; if he redeem, by an ambition above place and emolument, the character for subservience that court-poets have obtained for letters—if he may prove that speculative knowledge is not disjoined from the practical world, and maintain the dignity of disinterestedness that should belong to learning. But the end of a scientific morality is not to serve others only, but also to perfect ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... Islington; she knew nothing of Mr. Jordan, and made no inquiries about him. Strongly impressed, as every woman must needs be, by his air and tone of mild authority, she congratulated herself on the arrival of such an inmate; but no subservience appeared in her demeanour; she behaved with studious civility, nothing more. Her words were few and well chosen. Always neatly dressed, yet always busy, she moved about the house with quick, silent step, and cleanliness marked her path. The meals were ...
— Victorian Short Stories of Troubled Marriages • Rudyard Kipling, Ella D'Arcy, Arthur Morrison, Arthur Conan Doyle,

... passion, or even truth, may not be introduced, and even profitably introduced, into a poem—for they may serve in elucidation, or aid the general effect, as do discords in music, by contrast—but the true artist will always contrive, first, to tone them into proper subservience to the predominant aim, and secondly, to enveil them, as far as possible, in that Beauty which is the atmosphere and the essence ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe

... watched us, silently, ominously, maliciously. They crept from door to door, stole up the stone steps and vanished, appeared, as it seemed, right beneath our horses' feet and disappeared. If we caught them with our eyes they bowed with a loathsome, trembling subservience. There were many little Jewish children, with glittering eyes, naked feet, bare scrubby heads and white faces. Nikolai at length caught an old man and asked him where the soldiers were. The old man replied in very tolerable Russian that all the soldiers had gone last night—not ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole

... has justly remarked, "the true use and function of property (in whatsoever it consisteth—coins, or land, or houses, or merchant-stuff, or anything which may be named as holden of right to one's own subservience) as also of honors, titles, preferments and place, and all favor and acquaintance of persons of quality or ableness, are but to get money. Hence it followeth that all things are truly to be rated as of worth in measure of their serviceableness to that ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce

... a vigour among them which was altogether lacking at home. Under the influence of excitement the populace there was capable of rising and asserting themselves, but their general demeanour was that of subservience ...
— The Young Carthaginian - A Story of The Times of Hannibal • G.A. Henty

... ambitious and yet incurably fearful, to wit, the habits, on the one hand, of unpleasant assertiveness, of somewhat boisterous braggardism, of incessant pushing, and, on the other hand, of conformity, caution and subservience. He is forever talking of his rights as if he stood ready to defend them with his last drop of blood, and forever yielding them up at the first demand. Under both the pretension and the fact is the common motive of fear—in brief, the common motive of the insecure and uncertain ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan

... gigantic task of classifying machines into the genera and sub-genera, species, varieties and sub-varieties, and so forth, of tracing the connecting links between machines of widely different characters, of pointing out how subservience to the use of man has played that part among machines which natural selection has performed in the animal and vegetable kingdoms, of pointing out rudimentary organs {1} which exist in some few machines, feebly developed and perfectly ...
— Samuel Butler's Canterbury Pieces • Samuel Butler

... blood, on the dear human heart, and the sacred, mysterious human body, as things repellent to her spirituality, fine only in their sacrifice to the hungry, solitary flame. She had known nothing of their larger and diviner uses, their secret and profound subservience to the flame. She had come near to knowing through her motherhood, and yet she ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair

... he exclaimed, with his unfailing wit, "Well, colonel, in spite of all our differences, I suppose there are no two men in England who would be gladder to see each other than you and I." But while Lord North could jest about his blindness, the memory of his ill-judged subservience to the king was something that he could not laugh away, and among his nearest friends he was sometimes heard to reproach himself bitterly. When, therefore, in 1783, he told Fox that he fully agreed with him in thinking that ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske

... charges of High Treason were exhibited against persons who were, at the worst, but indiscreet reformers, excited the apprehensions of even the least sensitive friends of freedom. It is, indeed, difficult to say how far the excited temper of the Government, seconded by the ever ready subservience of state-lawyers and bishops, might have proceeded at this moment, had not the acquittal of Tooke and his associates, and the triumph it diffused through the country, given a lesson to Power such as England is alone capable of giving, and which will long be remembered, to the honor ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore

... parliament a while, I am confident, has been and will be still, not that they may serve you, but for to serve the Lord Jesus Christ; and that parliament will glory more in their subordination and subservience to him, than in the empire and ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie

... the discovery of a plot to assassinate Napoleon, the fighting was still continued in the mountains with the keen determination of despair. In vain did Prince Eugene offer the insurgents a general pardon, confirming the subservience of their country; the peasants proudly rejected the conditions offered them. Crushed by the combined French and Bavarian forces, the Tyrolese succumbed with glory: their popular leader, Andrew Hofer, was taken in a remote mountain retreat where he had taken refuge, brought to Mantua ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt

... of modern times, by which the powers of nature are made to act in subservience to the use and comfort of mankind, steadily tend to one great political result, viz., the permanently uniting and knitting together of much larger numbers of men into one and the same community, and subjecting them to ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various

... can gain profit. A few great and generous minds will probably set themselves to resist the torrent, and they may produce a great effect upon a future age; but in their own, they are almost sure to meet with nothing but ridicule, abuse, and neglect. We see this deplorable subservience of talent, even of a very high cast, to the taste of the majority holding preferment in their hands, around us in Great Britain at this time; and the same evil was experienced in an equal degree in France during the whole course of the reign of Louis XV. and his virtuous ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various

... grin cracked Stetson's big features. "I'm soooooo happy you have the proper attitude of subservience ...
— Missing Link • Frank Patrick Herbert

... important members of the human body have been regarded as to a greater or less extent sacred, their importance depending on their subservience to man's needs. The head of an enemy gives the slayer wisdom and strength; an oath sworn by the head or beard of one's father is peculiarly binding; the heart, when eaten, imparts power; a solemn oath may be sworn by the sexual organs. In no case does the ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy

... so natural, and its effects are so evident, that the law inevitably loses some of its majesty in the eyes of the public. And, in fact, the salaries paid by the State makes priests and magistrates mere employes. Steps to be gained foster ambition, ambition engenders subservience to power, and modern equality places the judge and the person to be judged in the same category at the bar of society. And so the two pillars of social order, Religion and Justice, are lowered in this nineteenth century, which asserts itself as ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac

... interested leaders of insurrectionary movements in Spain, or by the signally incompetent men who had been sent out to represent England, and who distributed broadcast British money and British arms to the most unworthy applicants. By their lavishness and subservience to the Spaniards our representatives increased the natural arrogance of these people, and caused them to regard England as a power which was honoured by being permitted to share in the Spanish efforts against the French generals. General ...
— With Moore At Corunna • G. A. Henty

... old woman, who stood in cringing subservience with a plain white garment in her hands. This she placed on the girl's shoulders, fastening it at the bosom with a small skull of jade stone whose grinning teeth were pearls, and whose eye-sockets were empty with an awful blackness. The gold circlet ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle

... Marie Antoinette replied to her mother in a tone of such mingled submissiveness and affection as showed how sincere was her desire to remove every shade of annoyance from the empress's mind; and which may, perhaps, lead to a suspicion that even her subservience to the aunts proceeded in a great degree from her anxiety to win the good-will of every one, and from the kindness which could not endure to thwart those with whom she was much associated; though at the same time she complained to the ambassador that ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge

... quality of his understanding and will; and it can also be known that his earthly body is formed to serve the understanding and the will in the world, and to skillfully accomplish their uses in the outmost sphere of nature. For this reason the body by itself can do nothing, but is moved always in entire subservience to the bidding of the understanding and will, even to the extent that whatever a man thinks he speaks with his tongue and lips, and whatever he wills he does with his body and limbs, and thus the understanding and the will are what act, while the body by itself does ...
— Heaven and its Wonders and Hell • Emanuel Swedenborg

... household for the last twenty years had been due in part to his knowing the time to yield, a knowledge that would have prolonged the sway of many a despot. He went up-stairs in a rebellious mood which found expression in invectives against womankind, its blindness, its wilfulness, its weak subservience to usage. But when he appeared at the breakfast table, the conventional shirt and trousers testified to the extent of ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith

... by a knowledge of his intimacy with the Gulab. Just what had occurred did not matter—not in the least; it was his place to explain it. That was Elizabeth's way—it was her manner of thought; a subservience of impulse to propriety, to class. In the light of her feeling when she had lain, wet-eyed, beating the pillow, she knew that if he had put his arms about her and said just even stupid words—"I'm sorry, ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser

... the student should have the proper mental attitude. That attitude should not be one of subservience, of blind believing, but should be one of mental courage and determination. His object is to understand the subject, not simply to read a book. If the book is a proper one for him to read, that is to say, if he has the ...
— How to Study • George Fillmore Swain

... the Catholics, another will shock the summer girl. Anybody can take a fling at poor old Mr. Rockefeller, but the great mass of average citizens (to which none of us belongs) must be left in undisturbed possession of its prejudices. In that subservience, and not in the meddling of Mr. Morgan, is the reason why American journalism is so flaccid, so repetitious ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann

... nothing, noways surprised at being forgot! He knew human nature well who acted thus after writing the Esprit des Loix. Power loves talent as long as it serves itself, when it is useful but manageable; it hates it when it becomes its instructor. Self-love is gratified by the subservience of genius in the first case; it is mortified by its ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various

... we find that the only mention of laughter made by Simonides of Amorgos is where he says that some women may be compared to apes, and then gives a very rude description of their persons. This subservience to the eye can also be observed in the appreciation of monkeys and dancing horses, already mentioned, the latter forming a humorous exhibition, as the animals were trained with a view to amuse. We have marks ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange

... Fitch, the Indianapolis attorneys, for a postponement of the trial of a damage suit against the Sycamore Company in which Waterman represented the plaintiff, and this now assumed new significance in the lawyer's mind. If he got before a mass meeting with a chance to arraign the courts for their subservience to corporations, he was confident that it would redound to his credit at the fall election. His affairs were in such shape that some such miracle as his election to Congress was absolutely necessary to ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson

... are ever one inseparable whole, and advance continuously to higher and higher forms. But for the fact that psychology was in the first instance studied, not for its own sake, but in subservience to speculation, this cardinal importance of activity would not have been so long overlooked. We should not have heard so much of passive sensations and so little of active movements. It is especially ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall

... to one, spend their days in the public house, and their nights in my preserves, and leave their wives and children to attend to my gates. This Craddock is evidently the very man for me; I am not a model landowner, but I like to combine charity with subservience to my own interest occasionally. I have heard of the old fellow. Something of a demagogue, isn't he? But that will not frighten me. I will allow him to get the better of me in political discussion, if he will leave ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... gathered to see what was occurring. They came, yawning with sleep, from the straw they had been sleeping on, or drifted in from the streets, where they had been smoking in the sun. They were true republicans, those French soldiers. They saluted the officers without subservience, but as man to man. And through a break in the crowd a new arrival was shoved forward. ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... against the sage of Ferney. To finish it? No, now was the time to begin it. A new one! A different one! One in which the ridiculous old fool should be shown up as he deserved: for his pusillanimity, his half-heartedness, his subservience. He an unbeliever? A man of whom the latest news was that he was on excellent terms with the priests, that he visited church, and on feast days actually went to confession! He a heretic? He was a chatterbox, a boastful coward, nothing more! But the day of reckoning ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler

... deplorable than the worship of wealth, which is already weakening the hold of the middle-class Eastern man upon the American idea. In the West mere wealth does not carry assurance of respect, much less can it demand subservience. ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland

... swung into the orbit of Jupiter and headed in toward the enormous red-belted body, the two Earth men were heartily disgusted with the voyage and with themselves. Repeated doses of the pink gas—the ignominy of their utter subservience to the will of Antazzo—had worn them down no less than had the hard work and loss of sleep. Both were in vile humor. They endured the triumphant chatter of their captor ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent

... little love. The two men were very dissimilar in character; and though at times Ashley had friendly communications with Peel, yet in his diary Ashley often complains bitterly of his want of enthusiasm, of what he regarded as Peel's opportunism and subservience to party policy. The one had an instinct for what was practical and knew exactly how far he could combine interests to carry a measure; the other was all on fire for the cause and ready to push it forward against all obstacles, at ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore

... prurient laws," said Lopez, rising suddenly from his chair. "I will neither appeal to them nor will I obey them. And I expect from you as little subservience as I myself am prepared to pay. Lizzie Eustace, will you go with me, to that land ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope

... relation to natural objects. The Pyramids would appear insignificant in such a situation, for in them we should perceive only a vain attempt to vie with greater things. But here we see the powers of nature brought to act upon a great scale, in subservience to the purposes of men; one river created, another (and that a huge mountain-stream) shouldered out of its place, and art and order assuming a character of sublimity. Sometimes a beck is conducted under the canal, and passages called ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles

... immeasurable superiority. He, was, in the startling language of Gibbon, at once "a priest, an atheist, and a god." [8] Surrounding his person and forming his court were usually those of the nobility who were the most absolutely degraded by their vices, their flatteries, or their abject subservience. But even these men were not commonly the repositories of political power. The people of the greatest influence were the freedmen of the emperors—men who had been slaves, Egyptians and Bithynians who had come to Rome with bored ears and with chalk ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar

... for sincerity above everything; for utter honesty in art, in life, in manners and morals alike. To them Philistinism was the substitution of convention for conviction. For the spirit of imitation, of blind subservience to authority, the Pagans had no tolerance. While they held themselves always open to conviction, they refused assent to any thing which was offered them ex cathedra; they devoted themselves to art with a passion of enthusiasm which was in itself ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates

... beneath the spur of that foul outrage to the dignity and the innocence of the woman he had quitted, he had allowed a passionate truth to force its way through the barriers of rank and the bonds of subservience. Insult to himself he had borne as the base prerogative of his superior, but insult to her he had avenged with the vengeance of equal to equal, of the man who loved on the man who ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]

... those minds which would most willingly leave freedom to others, both as a blessing and a duty, become unintentionally compelling influences to beget and perpetuate, in those around them, a tendency to subservience and dependency. ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble

... man was at first ignorant. Impatience at detention in such a place warred with strict conceptions of duty, yet his excellent training in subservience to his Church and a ready gift of oratory assisted him in a decision to do the best he could for the new paroisse, heretofore so distinctively Catholic, of Juchereau de St. Ignace. That M. Poussette's congregation was more distingue than numerous did not for a moment affect the preacher ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison

... of illegal proceedings; but finding such subjects of complaint rare, he had finally turned upon his own tenants. A tenant became his enemy, his inferior, his subject, his vassal; he laid claim to his subservience, and looked upon any man as a brute who passed him on the stairway without speaking. He wrote out his bills for rent himself, and sent them on the morning of the day they fell due. The debtor who was behindhand in his payment received ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac

... lessons of which the influence can never be outlived even by the careless and unobserving. Today the great leaders of men, led by inspiring thoughts which would have appalled their forefathers, perfect schemes for overcoming the obstacles inhering in the vast forces of nature, and harness them into subservience to the growing needs of ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield

... could understand Arabic, the order of the Emir would have been unintelligible to them had it not been for the conduct of Mansoor. The unfortunate dragoman, after all his treachery and all his subservience and apostasy, found his worst fears realised when the Dervish leader gave his curt command. With a shriek of fear the poor wretch threw himself forward upon his face, and clutched at the edge of the Arab's jibbeh, clawing with his ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle

... absolute social equality. Prejudice weakens, and ere long will fail completely. The advent of general education sounds its death knell. And may the day be not afar off when America shall proclaim her emancipation from the basest of all servitudes, the subservience to prejudice! ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper

... was made to minimize the effect of international influence on the situation. As the sycophantic vernacular press of the capital, long drilled to blind subservience, had begun to speak of his enthronement as a certainty on the 9th February, a Circular Note was sent to the Five Allied Powers that no such date had been fixed, and that the newspaper reports to that effect ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale

... in all matters where she felt that her husband was capable of deciding and where he ought to decide, was not without activity and force of character. But all was directed by a gentle and loving spirit, and in subservience to a profound conviction that every occurrence in life was under the direction or permission of God. No matter what she was called upon to suffer, either of bodily or mental pain, she never murmured, but lifted her heart upward with pious ...
— Lizzy Glenn - or, The Trials of a Seamstress • T. S. Arthur

... great heat-givers; of carbon, the chief light-giver and heat-giver; of water, the great solvent and the storehouse of heat; of the atmosphere and the vapours in it, the protector of the earth which it surrounds. We should trace the beneficent effects of pain and pleasure in their subservience to the purification of life. The marks of a purpose impressed from the first on all creation would be even more visible ...
— The Relations Between Religion and Science - Eight Lectures Preached Before the University of Oxford in the Year 1884 • Frederick, Lord Bishop of Exeter

... saving his papers, except the "full-power" needful for signing a treaty. He reached Cuxhaven in great exhaustion; and arrived at Berlin on 17th March, only to find that the French by daring and intrigue had cowed the North German States into subservience. The terrible winter of 1798-9 largely accounts for the delays which ruined the subsequent campaign. Whitworth remained long without news from Downing Street; and at last, on 12th February, announced that he had received nine posts ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose

... fifty or sixty thousand people working as if the church were the first object in their lives; to encourage hundreds of these to adopt church-work as their profession and make it their only chance of worldly success; and yet to hold all this devotion and energy in absolute subservience to Mrs. Eddy herself and to prevent any one of these healers, or preachers, or teachers from attaining any marked personal prominence and from acquiring a personal following. In other words, the church was to have all the vigor of spontaneous growth, but was to grow only as Mrs. Eddy ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various

... maintained the highest doctrines of prerogative; but they were current doctrines, both at the Council board and on the bench; and they were not discredited nor extinguished by his fall. To be on good terms with James and Buckingham meant a degree of subservience which shocks us now; but it did not shock people then, and he did not differ from his fellows in regarding it as part of his duty as a public servant of the Crown. No doubt he had enemies—some with old grudges like Southampton, ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church

... Lloyd George said things and did things which the most experienced and successful solicitors of the district would have shrunk from as ruinous to their business. He made it a practice never to waste a word in any subservience to magistrates who showed an overbearing disposition. The magistrates, to their amazement, found they could not overawe the young upstart. When one realizes the unchallenged caste rule of those local bigwigs ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot

... The new knowledge sweeps away the venerable checks of pestilence and disease, and confronts us with the congestions and explosive dangers of an over-populated world. The old tradition demands a special prolific class doomed to labor and subservience; the new points to mechanism and to scientific organization as a means of escape from this immemorial subjugation. Upon every main issue in life, there is this quarrel between the method of submission and the method ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger

... France. Although he did not tell him so, it was also quite as illegal in England, where Lord Cardigan had, a little earlier, only just wriggled out of a conviction for taking part in one by a combination of false swearing and the subservience of his brother peers. ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham

... this prescriptive right is unknown to me. I observed, however, that this dominion did not extend to other things; for the other nations often make war with the French, and not seldom force them to sue for peace on very hard terms; but subservience in dress and living nevertheless continues. In quickness of judgment, inquisitiveness after news, and fruitfulness of discovery, the French ...
— Niels Klim's journey under the ground • Baron Ludvig Holberg

... an agreeable and convenient opportunity present itself, and I empty my purse with the utmost freedom; not that I would have the reader imagine I am extravagant from a motive of ostentation, quite the reverse; it was ever in subservience to my pleasures, and, instead of glorying in expense, I endeavor to conceal it. I so well perceive that money is not made to answer my purposes, that I am almost ashamed to have any, and, still more, to make ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau

... approached the mature beauty, and taking the goblet out of her hand with affectionate subservience, as a son might wait on his honored and suffering mother, he gave it to the Greek slave. The Empress bowed her thanks again and again to the praetor with much affability, and then said, with a slight infusion of cheerfulness ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... to receive Sharpe. This nonplussed the fanatic, who had come possibly with an eye to business. He expressed disgust at the way the Doukhobors were in subjection to Veregen, "But they must be the people of God," he said, "or they would not be in such subservience. Veregen has a fine graft and I would like to run the spiritual side of the business for him." However, the redoubtable Peter wanted no partner, so Sharpe and his following crossed back to the States, informing Constable ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth

... intently to the astonishing conversation, did not quite comprehend what it meant. Janet's harsh statement bewildered her as much as did her father's subject subservience to the woman. All she realized was that Janet Orme, her dead mother's nurse, wanted money—Alora's money—and her father was reluctant to give it to her but dared not refuse. Money was an abstract quantity to the eleven year old child; ...
— Mary Louise Solves a Mystery • L. Frank Baum

... with his companion, though it was only an equality in crime, had suddenly brought about a change for the better in Spurling. He carried himself freely, in the old defiant manner, and had lost his attitude of cringing subservience. At first Granger had it in his heart to hate him for the change, knowing, as he did, that it arose from an unhesitating acceptance of this chance-heard, unproved assertion of his own kindred degradation. But ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson

... front faade resemble somewhat the same part of the edifice at Amiens, excepting that it is far more florid, and less strict and severe in its main divisions. At Amiens the details are kept in strictest subservience to the structural lines of the edifice. At Rheims it is the magnificent wealth of details that crowds upon the view, the walls and arches are surcharged with statues, with niches, with brackets, pinnacles, tracery, foliage, finials and turrets. The sides of the entrances ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various

... in America, the reason is very simply given in the fact that there can be no literary genius without freedom of opinion, and freedom of opinion does not exist in America." Harriet Martineau, an English woman, who came to America in 1830, thought that the subservience to opinion in and around Boston amounted to a sort of mania. We have already seen how Cooper in his early days deferred to English taste (p. 127), and how Andrew Jackson in his rough way proved something of a corrective ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck

... was a flavour of egotism in almost every page. Lady Fareham wrote as only a pretty woman, courted, flattered, and indulged by everybody about her, ever since she could remember, could be forgiven for writing. People had petted her and worshipped her with such uniform subservience that she had grown to thirty years of age without knowing that she was selfish, accepting homage and submission as a law of the universe, as kings and ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon

... fashionable amateurs. "During the summer of my year," says Dudley, "I am as free as a wild Indian, enjoying myself at liberty amid the grandest scenes of nature; while during my winters and springs I am not only cabined, cribbed, and confined in a miserable garret, but condemned to as intolerable subservience to the humour of others, and to as indifferent company, as if I were a literal galley slave." I have promised him your acquaintance, Delaserre; you will be delighted with his specimens of art, and he with your Swiss fanaticism for mountains ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... rights as citizens, and it was so construed by the whole Democratic party; but everyone knew that a Mormon apostle had no rights as a citizen that were not second to his Church allegiance, and the political manifesto simply made public the fact of such subservience, authoritatively. We Republicans welcomed it, with our eyes on the future freedom of politics in Utah; Thatcher and Roberts refused to accept the dictation of their quorums, and what was practically ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins

... would otherwise call for earnest protest. I feel sure, for example, your assertion that I and my fellow-countrymen derive our opinions of German conduct wholly from corrupt and venal newspapers, or usually from a single newspaper which doles out mental poison in subservience to a single political party, was not intended to be as insulting as it really sounded. Your emotion doubtless led you to make charges which your sense of justice and courtesy would, under other circumstances, condemn. I believe also that in a calmer time you ...
— Plain Words From America • Douglas W. Johnson

... galled him. His twenty years might possibly, then, by extremity of good luck, be curtailed by five. By diligent execution of menial drudgery; by performing to some overlooker's satisfaction his daily toil; by careful obedience and subservience to these Jacks in office, themselves but servants, and yet whose malice or ill-humor might cause them to report him for the most trifling faults, or for none at all, and thereby destroy even this hope—he might be a free man in fifteen years! He would, even then, he was told, be still ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn

... too, has been caused by the doctrine of the equality of the sexes which Christianity revealed; not "woman's rights" as interpreted by infidels; not the ignoring of woman's destiny of subservience to man, as declared in the Garden of Eden and by St. Paul, but her glorious nature which fits her for the companionship of man. Heathendom reduces her to slavery, dependence, and vanity. Christianity elevates her by developing her social and moral excellences, ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord

... temperament so finely strung as to make all other women seem gross and material beside her. He felt and knew her to be both his moral and intellectual superior,—and this very fact rendered it impossible that he could ever master her mind and tame it down to the subservience of married life. That dauntless spirit of hers would never bend to an inferior,—not even love (if she could feel it) would move her thus far. And the man she had adventured across ocean to rescue—what was he? She confessed that she had loved him, though that love ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli

... docile, and clever enough to be admitted at once to the performing troupe. But to-night the beast's eyes were red with some ill-humor. Twice the trainer spoke to him before he heeded; but then he assumed instantly an air of mildest subservience. The expression of a new-weaned puppy is not more innocently mild than the look which a bear can assume when ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts

... orator Demades, who became one of the chief men in Athens by his subservience to the Macedonians and Antipater, and who was forced to say and to write much that was derogatory to the glory and contrary to the traditional policy of Athens, used to excuse himself by pleading that he did not come to the helm before the vessel of the State was an utter wreck. This ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch

... a Moro thinks no more about lopping off another's head than he does about pulling a cocoanut from the palm-tree. The chief abhors the white man because he interferes with the chief's living by the labour of his tribe, and the tribesman himself is too ignorant even to contemplate emancipation. Subservience to the bidding of the wily Datto, poverty, squalidity, and tribal warfare for bravado or interest seem as natural to the Moro as the sight of the rising sun. Hence, when the Americans resolved to change all this and marched into the tribal territories for the purpose, the war-gongs rallied ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman

... to lower himself thus—What happens? The rich man goes to a church where flattery and subservience are more plentiful. The stiff-necked rector seeks in vain for funds. For lack of money his church runs down. It cannot keep up its charities and ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco

... David should have arisen from his bed and done reverence to this woman, his wife, bowing his face to the earth. Yet we find this Bible teaching the subservience of woman to man, of the wife to the husband, of the queen to the king, ruling the world to-day. During the recent magnificent coronation ceremonies of the Czar, his wife, granddaughter of Victoria, Queen of England ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton

... whole family. The admiration which the world is at first ready to bestow on a young girl, but for which, sooner or later, it takes its revenge, had added to Emilie's pride, and increased her self-confidence. Universal subservience had developed in her the selfishness natural to spoilt children, who, like kings, make a plaything of everything that comes to hand. As yet the graces of youth and the charms of talent hid these faults ...
— The Ball at Sceaux • Honore de Balzac

... and annihilation of the one good of geometry, — which was thus shamefully turning its back upon the unembodied objects of pure intelligence to recur to sensation, and to ask help (not to be obtained without base subservience and depravation) from matter; so it was that mechanics came to be separated from geometry, and, repudiated and neglected by philosophers, took its place as a military art. Archimedes, however, in writing to king Hiero, whose friend and near relation he was, had stated, that ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough

... beaten enemies were resolute enough, accepting defeat with grim carelessness, or with sphinx-like indifference, or even with airy jocularity. But for the most part their alert, eager deference, their tame subservience, the abject humility and debasement of their bent shoulders drove Jadwin to the verge of self-control. He grew to detest the business; he regretted even the defiant brutality of Scannel, a rascal, but none the less keeping his head high. The ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris

... necessary in the sixteenth century. It looks as if the first growth of Mongolian Buddhism was part of a political system and collapsed together with it. But so long as the Yuan dynasty reigned, Lamaist influence was strong and the downfall of the Yuan was partly caused by their subservience to the clergy and extravagant expenditure on religious buildings and ceremonies. After the departure of Pagspa, other Lamas held a high position at the Court of Peking such as Chos-kyi-hod-zer and gYun-ston ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot

... proof of affection, but a foolish and criminal act. But it harmonized finely with the Greek ideal—the notion that patriotism is even a woman's first duty, and her life not worth living except in subservience to her husband. There is good reason to believe[327] that this story was a pure invention of Xenophon and deliberately intended to be an object lesson to women regarding the ideal they ought to live up to. The whole of the book in which it appears—[Greek: ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck

... that authority must represent interests of country and people and must for that reason deserve loyalty. Educationally, the problem is quite the reverse of the educational problem of the autocracy. The people are not to be trained in obedience and subservience to the state, but we have mainly to create in the minds of all people the capacity to recognize true leaders. It is not loyalty to authority as such, we say, that is wanted, but loyalty to leader who has no power at all except the power of the good and its forceful ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge

... widely-ranging intellect; of an intellect which, if not efficacious to infuse truth as a vital fluid into the heart, might at least make it a powerful tool in the hand. Outward profession,—which, for practical purposes, is an act of most desirable subservience,—would then wait upon those objects to which inward reverence, though not felt, was known to be due. Schemes of ample reach and true benefit would also promise best to insure the rewards coveted by personal ambition: and ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth

... as to the use and destiny of the creatures which He has made and continually preserves. This God cannot do, for He cannot act aimlessly. It would be renouncing the direction of His own work, and making the creature His superior. God is incapable of such renunciation and subservience. He must, then, will the cooperation which He lends, and the concurrent action of the creature, to take a certain course, regulated and prescribed by Himself: which is our proposition, that God cannot but will to bind His creatures to certain lines of action. If His free creatures choose to stray ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.

... that urged him on, it is certain that Asshur-danin-pal rebelled against his sire's authority, and, raising the standard of revolt, succeeded in carrying with him a great part of the kingdom. At Asshur, the old metropolis, which may have hoped to lure back the Court by its subservience, at Arbela in the Zab region, at Amidi on the Upper Tigris, at Tel-Apni near the site of Orfa, and at more than twenty other fortified places, Asshur-danin-pal was pro-claimed king, and accepted by the inhabitants for their sovereign. Shalmaneser must have ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson

... outbreaks of violence in connection with industrial 'disputes arise from the violation of what are considered to be fundamental rights, and from the perversion or subversion of governmental institutions'' (p. 146). It mentions, among such perversions, the subservience of the judiciary to the mili- tary authorities,[33] the fact that during a labor dispute the life and liberty of every man within the State would seem to be at the mercy of the Governor (p. 72), and the use of State troops in policing strikes (p. 298). At Ludlow (Colorado) ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell

... of emotions and passions stronger than herself, because the heritage, the instinct, of all the race of women, the eternal predisposition. At the moment her will was not sufficient to rule them to obedience. She was in the first subservience to that power which feeds the streams of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... he writes. "What do I see? Have you sunk so deep in weakness and fear, O Reuchlin! that you cannot endure blame even for those who have fought for you in time of danger? Through such shameful subservience do you hope to reconcile those to whom, if you were a man, you would never give a friendly greeting, so badly have they treated you? Yet reconcile them; and if there is no other way, go to Rome and kiss the feet of Leo, and then write against us. Yet you shall see that, against your will, ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan

... natives did not budge from their post. Only, as the angry lady flung open one of the folding doors, they closed together and barred the way with their pikes. Accustomed to absolute subservience from her own peons, Mrs. Merriman saw at once that insistence was useless. If these men did not obey instantly they ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang

... architecture of the scene to the convenience of the missionary workers above enumerated; to the peculiar necessities of the civilization they have achieved. For the sake of which the cathedral, the monastery, the temple, and the tomb, of Bertha, contract themselves in distant or despised subservience under the colossal ...
— The Pleasures of England - Lectures given in Oxford • John Ruskin

... uproar of the usually placid river, there was but one bark found bold enough to venture upon her angered bosom, and this, although but an epitome of those that have subdued the world of waters, and chained them in subservience to the will of man, now danced gallantly, almost terrifically, from billow to billow, and, with the feathery lightness of her peculiar class, seemed borne onward, less by the leaping waves themselves than by the white and driving spray that fringed their summits. ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson

... PERGAMON.—More subservience the Romans found in the East. In the same year that the desperate resistance of the Numantians was overcome, Attalus III., king of Pergamon, an ally of Rome, whose sovereignty extended over the greater part of Asia Minor, left his kingdom ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher

... to be returned, item for item. In this respect it is to be noted that marriage contracts are almost relentlessly rigid, a fact that suggests an explanation of the length of the period that is usually required to terminate the negotiations. For it is only by many acts of attention and even of subservience that the suitor's relatives break down the obdurateness of the fianc's relatives and make them relax the severity of their original demands. Very minute and strict accounts of the various payments, including such small donations as a few liters ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan

... alliance with that city. So that up to the last moment you were in constant expectation of hearing that the whole of Boeotia was laid at the feet of Thebes. With the late incidents all is changed. You need fear Thebes no longer. One brief despatch (27) in cipher will suffice to procure a dutiful subservience to your every wish in that quarter, provided only you will take as kindly an interest in us as we ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon

... the religious idea. The 'Ecloga Theoduli' alluded to by Chaucer in the House of Fame[19] appears to be the work of an Athenian writer, and is ascribed to various dates ranging from the fifth to the eighth centuries. While preserving as its main characteristic a close subservience to its Vergilian model, the eclogue participated in the general rise of allegory which marked the later middle ages. Pastoral colouring of no very definite order had shown itself in the elegies ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg

... those bloody contests for badges which we are at first sight tempted to regard them. But these deeper motives animated very little the nobles and the knightly gentry; [Amongst many instances of the self-seeking of the time, not the least striking is the subservience of John Mowbray, the great Duke of Norfolk, to his old political enemy, the Earl of Oxford, the moment the last comes into power, during the brief restoration of Henry VI. John Paston, whose family had been sufficiently harassed ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... indignant. He thoroughly disliked his Aunt Adeline, and his cousin's meek subservience ...
— Three Men and a Maid • P. G. Wodehouse

... year when the affairs of Hungary were at their most crucial point. For long the situation had been growing more and more strained between Austria and Hungary. Austria had been trying her hardest to force Hungary into entire subservience to herself—to force her to give up her separate individuality as a nation and become fused into the Austrian empire. But Hungary made a gallant stand against all these attempts which aimed at destroying her independence. She had always been a constitutional monarchy, with power of electing ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking

... to be paralogistic at the best. Much influence must still be left to chance, much accounted for by what pagans called Fate, and we Providence. We can only say, Victrix causa diis placuit, and Cato must make the best of it. What is called poetical justice, that is, an exact subservience of human fortunes to moral laws, so that the actual becomes the liege vassal of the ideal, is so seldom seen in the events of real life that even the gentile world felt the need of a future state of rewards and ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell

... difficult for him, as he had always been in the habit of regarding her as his social superior; yet still, considering the confidences which existed between this extraordinary pair, it was certainly strange that he should have preserved with such constancy his attitude of meek subservience. Here, at Chetwynde, he addressed her as the steward of the estates should have done; and even when discussing the most delicate matters his tone and demeanor corresponded with ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille

... I have already said: but in six years more, reading and observation had intensely confirmed my first auguries. It was clear beyond denial, that for a century after the death of Edward VI. the bishops were the tools of court-bigotry, and often owed their highest promotions to base subservience. After the Revolution, the Episcopal order (on a rough and general view) might be described as a body of supine persons, known to the public only as a dead weight against all change that was distasteful ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman

... become by years and disappointment, and the ennui of an aimless widowhood, little relieved by the unceasing attendance of a confidante, yet Lady Vinsear's childless and withered heart seemed to be touched to life again when she gazed on her brother's beautiful and modest boy. Courteous without subservience, and attentive without servility, Julian, by his graceful and unselfish demeanour, won her complete affection, and she dropped to the family no ambiguous hints, that, for Julian's sake, she should renew her intercourse with them, and make him her heir. Circumstanced as he was, Mr Home could not ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar

... because it is true," said Mowbray; "it is what every man knows and feels and sees. You think it strange, then, that they act as they do, in this perfect subservience to woman, knowing what I have said is true. It is not more strange than any other ludicrous inconsequence which men are guilty of. Look at me! I know that what I have said is as true as the existence of this earth; and now, what would I do? I ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous

... direct concern," he pointed out that the country threw away the scabbard only when confronted by necessity of choice between keeping and breaking solemn obligations, between the discharge of a binding trust and a shameless subservience. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 2nd, 1914 • Various

... wits; for here I met strong and alert-brained, withal horny-handed, members of the working-class; unfrocked preachers too wide in their Christianity for any congregation of Mammon-worshippers; professors broken on the wheel of university subservience to the ruling class and flung out because they were quick with knowledge which they strove to apply to the affairs ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London

... quo warranto against them, and earnestly begged to have their charters renewed. The King granted them new charters, which rivetted strong fetters about the guilds, placed them, bound hand and foot, at the mercy of the King, and reduced the city to entire subservience. James II. showed no inclination to release the city and the companies from their bonds, until the news of the advent of the Prince of Orange forced him to make an act of restitution; the old charters ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various

... with which revolt had been suppressed, and of the foreign soldiery on whom the Council relied, there were signs of resistance which would have made less reckless statesmen pause. The temper of the Parliament had drifted far from the slavish subservience which it showed at the close of Henry's reign. The House of Commons met Northumberland's project for the pillage of the bishoprick of Durham with opposition, and rejected a new treason bill. In 1552 the Duke was compelled to force nominees of his own on the constituencies by writs from ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green

... He was in his garden, sitting on a garden seat, with a book in his hand, but work had been declared an insult by the two rosy rogues, a boy and a girl, by the way, who had escaped from Nurse, now vainly seeking them in the house. Kathleen was beside her husband, watching in an amused manner the subservience of the master of men to ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin

... affords an illustration of the domineering insolence of Democratic Abolitionism—an element in our Federal Government which will stop at no extremity of violence, in order to subdue the people of the Slave States, and force them into a miserable subservience to its fanatical dominion. And it is worthy of note, that the shooting of Sheriff Jones and others in Kansas, occurred immediately after the arrival of the New Haven Emigrant Rifle Company! This, too, calls to mind forcibly the very delectable conversational ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow

... practically too far removed for useful interference; while nurse is an ever-present power, capable of sly pinches and secret raids, as well as of more open oppression—a power, therefore, to be propitiated, if only with the subservience of a Yezidi, too much afraid of the Evil One to oppose him. Wherefore nurse is propitiated, failing the protection of the glorified creature just gone to her grand dinner in a cloud of lace and a blaze of jewels; and the first lesson taught the youthful ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous

... predisposition, inclination, propensity, susceptibility; conatus[Lat], nisus[Lat]; liability &c. 177; quality, nature, temperament; idiocrasy[obs3], idiosyncrasy; cast, vein, grain; humor, mood; drift &c. (direction) 278; conduciveness, conducement[obs3]; applicability &c. (utility) 644; subservience &c. (instrumentality) 631. V. tend, contribute, conduce, lead, dispose, incline, verge, bend to, trend, affect, carry, redound to, bid fair to, gravitate towards; promote &c. (aid) 707. Adj. tending &c. v.; conducive, working towards, in a fair way to, calculated ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... propose) such names as, from their want of rank, fortune, character, ability, or knowledge, are likely to betray or to fall short of their trust, he is in an independent House of Commons,—in an House of Commons which has, by its own virtue, destroyed the instruments of Parliamentary subservience. This House of Commons would not endure the sound of such names. He would perish by the means which he is supposed to pursue for the security of his power. The first pledge he must give of his sincerity in this great reform ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... not console Allen, and his silence and cynicism about his hosts gave the impression that he had outstayed his welcome, since he had neither wealth, nor the social brilliance or subservience that might have supplied its place. He had scarcely energy to thank his mother for her faultless transcription of "The Single Eye," and only just exerted himself to direct the neat roll ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge

... newspaper,—a powerful weapon in the hands of a ruler, as well as a factor of development. Then I shall organize a superior court for the punishment of capital crimes. Not that I do not recognize the right of a man to kill if his reasons satisfy himself, but there can be no subservience to authority in a country where murder is practically licensed. American immigration will be more than encouraged, and it shall be distinctly understood by the Americans that I encourage it. Everything, of course, will be done to promote good-will between the Californians and the new-comers. ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... officer, architect, engineer, or politician. But for lack of criticism he lost his bearings, and it caused his undoing. According to all the records the Emperor William I. was of a very different nature. Yet Bismarck often had a hard task in dealing with him, though Bismarck's loyalty and subservience to the dynastic idea made him curb his characteristically ruthless frankness. But William I. was a self-made man. When he came to the throne and began to govern his kingdom was tottering. Assisted by the very ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin

... stamped with a peculiar and degrading meanness, more irritating to those who suffered under it than harsher wrong. In his hands government was a thing of eavesdropping and espionage, a system of petty persecution, a school of subservience and hypocrisy. He had been the instrument at Olmuetz of such a surrender of national honour and national interests as few nations have ever endured with the chances of war still untried. This surrender may, in the actual condition of the Prussian ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe

... at the center of things, to remain ascendant, meant that all things of lesser importance, outside the center, must be made subservient to him, else that ascendancy was lost. And if they would not assume positions of subservience, they ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton

... smaller students tried to climb in through the ventilator, but this was nailed down, and then as a last resort the "smoking machine" was brought into action. This was an "infernal machine," employed in hazing students who had in any way offended the opinion of the class, especially by indecorous subservience to the authorities or informing against their fellow students. The latter was a rare offense and never pardoned. The smoking machine consisted of a short length of stove-pipe with a nozzle at each end, into one of which was introduced a bellows, and the other was put through ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James

... is said to be subject to God when it is subservient to His dominion. But we cannot attribute subservience to the human nature of Christ; for Damascene says (De Fide Orth. iii, 21): "We must bear in mind that we may not call it" (i.e. Christ's human nature) "a servant; for the words 'subservience' and 'domination' are not names of the nature, but of relations, as the words 'paternity' and 'filiation.'" ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas

... us the dominion, but also the decline and fall of, Rome. It followed the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, with the negation of those rights in the oppression of the Reign of Terror, the despotism of Napoleon, the popular submission to the second empire and the subservience of the individual citizen to official superiority which still prevails so widely on the continent of Europe. The tremendous potency of the other subdued the victorious Normans to the conquered Saxon's conception of justice, rejected the claims of divine ...
— Experiments in Government and the Essentials of the Constitution • Elihu Root

... Miss Marlowe is very different. In his manner of receiving applause there is something almost resentful, as if, being satisfied to do what he chooses to do, and in his own way, he were indifferent to the opinion of others. It is not the actor's attitude; but what a relief from the general subservience of that attitude! In Miss Marlowe there is something young, warm, and engaging, a way of giving herself wholly to the pleasure of pleasing, to which the footlights are scarcely a barrier. As if unconsciously, ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons

... of autocracy, the lover of freedom, that is the England I would fain here represent to you to-day. To-day, when India stands erect, no suppliant people, but a Nation, self-conscious, self-respecting, determined to be free; when she stretches out her hand to Britain and offers friendship not subservience; co-operation not obedience; to-day let me: western-born but in spirit eastern, cradled in England but Indian by choice and adoption: let me stand as the symbol of union between Great Britain and India: a union of hearts and free choice, not of compulsion: ...
— The Case For India • Annie Besant

... balked in his dearest hope and wish. The very resistance of the girl stimulated his purpose, for throughout all his life nothing so enhanced his desire for anything as difficulty and denial. The subduing the girl's high spirit into subservience to his own was in itself a peculiarly alluring prospect, and he proved how little he appreciated her character by whiling away part of the night over "Taming of the Shrew." A creature of fitful impulse, nurtured into an arrogant sense of superiority, he banished all compunctions, ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe

... little comparative projection is given,—nay, the masterly group of Agamemnon, Nestor, and Ulysses, and, still more in advance, that of Achilles, Ajax, and Thersites, so manifestly occupying the fore-ground, that the subservience and vassalage of strength and animal courage to intellect and policy seems to be the lesson most often in our poet's view, and which he has taken little pains to connect with the former more interesting ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge

... escaped the last humiliation, saw in the gigantic hosts whose onset a few years later shook her to her centre, the armed subjects of the many smaller states, in whose subjugation she had acquiesced during the period of the Czar's moral subservience to Napoleon. ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan

... informed of the seat of her injury she turned upon it disgust and scorn such as never before had she felt (and she, had felt it always) for the whole order of things for which it stood. She felt her very blood run acid, causing her to twist, in her acid contempt for the subservience of women, and most of all for that Laetitia's subservience, floated on that ghastly coquetry like a shifting cargo that in the first gale will capsize the ship; she felt her very temples throb, and almost thought they must be heard, in her fierce detestation of all the ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson

... basis of the impression created by his last month of life. That the protagonist in a great Cause should recant in the face of death seems to argue an almost incredible degree of pusillanimity, and suggests that pusillanimity and subservience are the key to his career. Nevertheless, but for that short hour of abasement nobly and humbly retrieved, the general judgment would probably be altogether different. And that breakdown does not appear to have been characteristic. Twice in the reign of ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes

... have been in Germany at the time of Gellert, it is by no means new, nor yet of recent existence in our language. Spite of the licentiousness with which Spenser occasionally compels the orthography of his words into a subservience to his rhymes, the whole FAIRY QUEEN is an almost continued instance of this beauty. Waller's song GO, LOVELY ROSE, is doubtless familiar to most of my readers; but if I had happened to have had ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... rather slim, but not at all commanding. There are people whose very bodies express character; and this tall, supple, graceful frame of Bella Bruce breathed womanly subservience; so did her gestures. She would take up or put down her own scissors half timidly, and look around before threading her needle, as if to see whether any soul objected. Her favorite word was "May I?" with a stress ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade

... This "intuitive surrender" has nothing to do with subservience to artistic convention. More than one revolt in modern art has been dominated by the desire to get out of the material just what it is really capable of. The impressionist wants light and color because paint can give him just these; "literature" in painting, the sentimental ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir

... beauty and not because they have a real purpose, not because they will more intimately convey, even to the initiated, the intent of his writing. That these practices are the result of carelessness, sometimes, as well as of his subservience to beauty, the fascination that words merely as words or visions merely as visions exert upon him, is, I think, true. It is but seldom, I believe, that the underlying thought is incoherent. In almost all of his ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt

... one or two shining exceptions, experience may teach us to foretell that a lawyer thus educated to the bar, in subservience to attorneys and solicitors[n], will find he has begun at the wrong end. If practice be the whole he is taught, practice must also be the whole he will ever know: if he be uninstructed in the elements and first principles upon which the rule ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone

... in Washington, for there was little difference on the merits. Adams was sure to learn backwards, but the case seemed entirely different with Cameron, a typical Pennsylvanian, a practical politician, whom all the reformers, including all the Adamses. had abused for a lifetime for subservience to moneyed interests and political jobbery. He was sure to go with the banks and corporations which had made and sustained him. On the contrary, he stood out obstinately as the leading champion of ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams



Words linked to "Subservience" :   subordinateness, status, subservient, subservientness, obsequiousness, sycophancy, servility, subserve, condition, submissiveness, subsidiarity



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