"Unfitness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... have brought out," the instructor said. "Billy has just demonstrated his unfitness to be class president. I am therefore removing him from this position and appointing ...
— Be It Ever Thus • Robert Moore Williams
... there is in me, and from thee good alone,—from myself and my own corrupted will all evil and the consequents of evil,—with inward prostration of will, mind, and affections I adore thy infinite majesty; I aspire to love thy transcendant goodness!—In a deep sense of my unworthiness, and my unfitness to present myself before thee, of eyes too pure to behold iniquity, and whose light, the beatitude of spirits conformed to thy will, is a consuming fire to all vanity and corruption;—but in the name of the Lord Jesus, of the dear Son of thy love, in whose perfect obedience thou deignest ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... supervision over all the administrative work arising under the act. It has extensive powers of control over the appointment of trustees, and conducts an audit of their accounts; and it may, subject to appeal to the court, remove them from office for misconduct, neglect or unfitness. A report upon the proceedings under the act is annually presented to parliament by the Board of Trade, and although the department is practically self-supporting, a nominal vote is each year placed upon the public estimates, thus bringing the administration under direct parliamentary ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... things which would not at all trouble an employer accustomed to free labor. I once had an argument with a Georgia planter who vociferously insisted that one of his negro laborers who had objected to a whipping had thereby furnished the most conclusive proof of his unfitness for freedom. And such statements were constantly reinforced by further assertion that they, the Southern whites, understood the negro and knew how to treat him, and that we of the North did ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... of a future state, that all his happiness in the present depends, ver. 77, &c. IV. The pride of aiming at more knowledge, and pretending to more perfection, the cause of Man's error and misery. The impiety of putting himself in the place of God, and judging of the fitness or unfitness, perfection or imperfection, justice or injustice of his dispensations, ver. 109, &c. V. The absurdity of conceiting himself the final cause of the creation, or expecting that perfection in the moral world, which is not in the natural, ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... supper; and if it were not for another great evil, the unfrequent celebration of the Communion, the system could not go on: because the deacon would be so often obliged to apply to other ministers to perform that duty for him, that the inconvenience, as well as the unfitness, of the actual practice, would be ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... always compatible, you say, and, before all, you insist upon good partnership. How will you insure yourself against unfitness? Surely not by a registering and weighing of qualities, not by bargaining and speculating. We do not choose our wives as we do our saddle-horses; we do not plan our marriages as we plan our houses. It may sound ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... least practically the rule for the senators to vote in the eighteen equestrian centuries, and the other places in these were assigned chiefly to the young men of the nobility. The military system, of course, suffered from this not so much through the unfitness for effective service of no small part of the legionary cavalry, as through the destruction of military equality to which the change gave rise, inasmuch as the young men of rank more and more withdrew from service in the infantry. The closed aristocratic corps ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... at last to think that his own unfitness for such a communion helped him to his disbelief in its possibility, and from that hour the feeling of his father's nearness weighed more and ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... sense of propriety. On the twenty-fourth of January, 1863, when Henry W. Raymond, the powerful editor of the New York Times, was on a visit to the camp, Burnside took him into his tent and read him an order removing Hooker because of his unfitness "to hold a command in a cause where so much moderation, forbearance, and unselfish patriotism were required." Raymond, aghast, inquired what he would do if Hooker resisted, if he raised his troops in mutiny? "He said he would Swing him before ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... receiving much information respecting the manners and customs of Ingilistan, or England. The choice of a ship, and the selection of sea-stock, were of course matters of grave consideration, and the more so from the peculiar unfitness of the habits and religious scruples of an Indian Moslem for the privations unavoidable at sea; but a passage was at last taken for the khan and his two servants on board the Edinburgh of 1400 tons, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... the composer; because the classification of verbs depends upon this very matter, whether they have, or have not, an object after them; and no general principle has been, or can be, furnished beforehand, by which their fitness or unfitness for taking such government can be determined. This must depend upon usage, and usage must conform to the sense intended. Very many verbs—probably a vast majority—govern an object sometimes, but not always: many that are commonly intransitive or neuter, are not in all their uses so; and many ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... saddened by what he saw of the wickedness of men, even those who professed to be the people of God, and their unfitness to receive Him for whom they were looking. Led by the Spirit of God, John retired to the wilderness of Judaea, in the region of the Dead Sea and the Jordan, for meditation and communion with God. But he was not entirely ...
— A Life of St. John for the Young • George Ludington Weed
... their future abode throws in upon them none of its solemn shadows and warnings. A clear luminous perception of the nature and characteristics of that invisible world which is soon to receive them, would make them thoughtful and anxious for their souls; for they would become aware of their utter unfitness, their entire lack of preparation, to see God face to face. Still, live and act as sinful men may, eternity is over and around them all, even as the firmament is bent over the globe. If theirs were a penitent and a believing eye, they would look up with adoration into its serene depths, and joyfully ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... present Becky on the concert-stage flashed through Betty's usually hopeful mind. She felt a heartache, as she thought of her friend's unfitness and inevitable disappointment. Becky—plain, ungainly, honest Becky—felt it in her to do great things, yet she hardly knew what great things were. Persons of Betty's age never count upon having years of time in which to make themselves ...
— Betty Leicester - A Story For Girls • Sarah Orne Jewett
... offered to Frederic, Elector Palatine. Frederic was married to the bright and fascinating Princess Elizabeth of England, the darling of Protestant hearts; other qualifications for that crown of peril he had none. But in an evil hour he accepted the offer. Soon his unfitness appeared. A foreigner, he could not rein the restive and hard mouthed Czech nobility, a Calvinist and a pupil of the Huguenots, he unwisely let loose Calvinist iconoclasm among a people who clung to their ancient images though they had ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... and the good soul enjoyed that far more than her dinner, for she meant to ask Mr. Power to help her find the right sort of home for the stranger whose unfitness for her present place was every day made more apparent to ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... become painful to him, he secretly resolved to leave it as soon as he believed he could do so without leading to any surmises respecting the true cause of the change he contemplated. Accordingly, in a few months, he began to suggest his own unfitness for making a profitable partner in country trade, and finally came out with a direct proposition to his brother to buy him out at a sum which he knew would be a temptingly low one. And the result was, that the proposition was accepted, "the partnership dissolved by mutual ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... everything except to know how to live and how to make himself happy. Finally, when this enslaved child, this little tyrant, full of learning and devoid of sense, enfeebled alike in mind and body, is cast upon the world, he there by his unfitness, by his pride, and by all his vices, makes us deplore human wretchedness and perversity. We deceive ourselves; this is the man our whims have created. Nature makes men ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... 19th. Solemn thoughts yesterday in reading that solemn tract, "The Inconvenient Season." In visiting I met with another affecting illustration of the unfitness of old age for beginning religion, in the senseless self-righteousness of poor old Mary N. She says every night and morning the prayers she learned when a child, which she evidently thinks an abundant supply of religion,—saying, "if people only do the best they have been brought up to, that is ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... comprehend it first to its inmost fibre. He cannot comprehend his own Creator. Admire as we may 'Paradise Lost;' try as we may to admire 'Paradise Regained;' acknowledge as we must the splendour of the imagery and the stately march of the verse; there comes upon us irresistibly a sense of the unfitness of the subject for Milton's treatment of it. If the story which he tells us is true, it is too momentous to be played with in poetry. We prefer to hear it in plain prose, with a minimum of ornament and the utmost possible precision of statement. ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... at sea braced Craven as nothing else could have done. As the ship neared France the perplexities of the charge he was preparing to undertake increased. His utter unfitness filled him with dismay. On receipt of John Locke's amazing letter he had both cabled and written to his aunt in London explaining his dilemma, giving suitable extracts from Locke's appeal, and imploring her ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... words. But {52} there is not a hint of his own case in all he says, and it is not desertion that he discusses but incompatibility of temper. Masson even sees reason to think that he began the first pamphlet before his wife left him, but when, no doubt, her unfitness to be his wife was only too evident. However all that may be, we can only think with wondering pity of those summer weeks of 1643 and of the two years which followed. Everything in Milton's life and writings shows him a man ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... portion and with few things, benevolence, frankness, no love of superfluity, freedom from trifling, magnanimity. Dost thou not see how many qualities thou art at once able to exhibit, as to which there is no excuse of natural incapacity and unfitness, and yet thou still remainest voluntarily below the mark? Or art thou compelled, through being defectively furnished by nature, to murmur, and to be mean, and to flatter, and to find fault with thy poor body, and to try to please men, and to make great display, and ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... fulfil the conditions laid down in the Instrument of Transfer; that (2) the succession should devolve on the Maharajah's lineal descendant, whether by blood or adoption, except in the case of disqualification through manifest unfitness to rule; and that (3) the Maharajah and his successors shall at all times remain faithful in allegiance and subordination to the British Crown, and perform all the duties which, in virtue of such allegiance and ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... in R——, and is now to quite an extent elsewhere, to elect as school committee those especially noted for their ignorance and unfitness for the duties, perhaps to keep them out of the almshouse, or to educate them by the absorption process while hearing pupils recite. These men were paid two dollars for each call they made at schools, consequently they "called" early and often, especially when the school ma'ams were ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... one or more of said trustees shall die, or by removal or otherwise shall, according to their judgment become unfit or incapable to serve the interests of said college, do, as soon as may be, after the death, removal, or such unfitness or incapacity of such trustee or trustees, elect and appoint such trustee or trustees as shall supply the place of him or them so dying, or becoming incapable to serve the interests of said college; and every trustee so elected and appointed, shall, by ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... being that Raaff and Del Prato spoil the recitative by singing it quite devoid of all spirit and fire, and so monotonously. They are the most miserable actors that ever trod the stage. I had a desperate battle royal with Seeau as to the inexpediency, unfitness, and almost impossibility of the omissions in question. However, all is to be printed as it is, which at first he positively refused to agree to, but at last, on rating him soundly, he gave way. The last rehearsal ...
— The Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, V.1. • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
... to atone for my error of judgment in mistaking my man, is to send you back again to your old place in the fo'c's'le, where I think you'll find yourself far more at home than you were on the poop. Davis, you are no longer second mate of the Josephine! I disrate you on account of your unfitness for the post, and you will now return to your former rating, as I have restored your name to the list of the crew. You will be in Mr Marline's watch, and I hope you'll do your duty as well as you used ...
— The White Squall - A Story of the Sargasso Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... goes on. There is no action: there is being. The struggle is rooted in the deep divisions of men's souls, not in unwonted crime or plotting. And Anna Mahr, the free woman of a freer world, parts from Johannes because she recognises their human unfitness to take up the burden of tragic sorrow which any union between them must create. The time for such things has not come, and may never come. Thus Johannes is left desolate, powerless to face the unendurable ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... reasons, also, why this superiority should not much longer continue. Europe is old,—America is young. Land has been cultivated for centuries in Europe, and often by the same family; its capacity tested, its fitness or unfitness for particular crops proved, the local and special effects of different fertilizers well known, and the experience of many generations has been preserved, so as to be equivalent to a like experience, in time and extent, by the ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... in so playing fast-and-loose with such a man, particularly in a moment of such utter unfitness to resist him, is, notwithstanding the French protection enjoyed by the Signory, amazing in its reckless audacity. It was fortunate for Florence that the Pope's orders tied the duke's hands—and it may be that of this the Signory had knowledge, ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... led a simple, retired life among sheep and cows and books asleep in the skins of sheep and cows. He wore old-fashioned rural whiskers, thickest in the throat, thinning toward the jawbone, scant about the lower lip, absent from the upper. These evidences of unfitness to cope with up-to-date corruption seemed to ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... to a great deal of puling over the circumstances in which we are placed. The great refinement of many poetical gentlemen has rendered them practically unfit for the jostling and ugliness of life, and they record their unfitness at considerable length. The bold and awful poetry of Job's complaint produces too many flimsy imitators; for there is always something consolatory in grandeur, but the symphony transposed for the piano becomes hysterically sad. This literature of woe, as Whitman calls it, this MALADIE ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... China, Siam, and the Pacific islands,—playing Shylock to Mexico on Jecker's forged bond, that his own inconvenient vessels might have an American port to trim their yards in. Meanwhile, to forget the utter unfitness of Paris for the capital of any imaginary Commercial France, he plays ship with Eugenie on the gentle Seine, or amuses himself with the marine romance of the Parisian ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... once talked of passing this winter in Italy; but I hope your plans will be entirely guided by the state of your health and feelings. Your society would undoubtedly be a very great resource to me, but I am so well aware of my own present unfitness for society that I would not have you risk the chance of an uncomfortable ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... Christianity should be less willing to pass over lightly. The ruthless cruelty of the Spanish conquerors in the new world is a profoundly instructive illustration of the essential narrowness of the papal Christianity, its pitiful exclusiveness, its low and bad morality, and, above all, its incurable unfitness for dealing with the spirit and motives of men in face of the violent temptations with which the wealth of the new world now assailed and corrupted them. Catholicism had held triumphant possession of the conscience of Europe for a dozen centuries and more. The stories of ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... wrote Latin letters." Odder still, perhaps, Richard Baxter, whose history of his own life and times is one of the most informing books in the world, never so much as mentions the one and only man whose name can, without any violent sense of unfitness, be given to the age about which ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... justifiable if she hesitated to entrust herself and her happiness to the keeping of one she had known but two months. It was prudent—not false—in her to weigh, to the finest grain, the evidence furnished by her brother to prove my unfitness to be her husband. But having done all this, she should have remembered that I had rights also. It was infamous, cowardly, cruel beyond degree, to cast her vote against me without giving me a chance of self-exculpation. Her ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... the peasant war under Wat Tyler and Straw, who wished to abolish servitude at a blow, failed of its object, we find that there were a great many instances of emancipation by individuals in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries when death or sickness overtook them, in which they declared the moral unfitness of slavery. (Wycliffe: "When Adam dalve and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?") Elizabeth liberated the last serfs of the crown. Compare 12 Charles II, ch. 24, 1660. Emancipation in the lowlands of Scotland was completed in 1574. (Tytler, ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... this to be needless alarm, let him think a moment. Government by the people must ever rest upon the people's ability to govern themselves, upon their intelligence and public spirit. The slum stands for ignorance, want, unfitness, for mob-rule in the day of wrath. This at one end. At the other, hard-heartedness, indifference, self-seeking, greed. It is human nature. We are brothers whether we own it or not, and when the brotherhood is denied in Mulberry Street we shall look vainly for the virtue of good ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... Brutus chosen as the leader of the conspiracy? In what events of the play does he show his fitness as a leader? In what events does he show his unfitness? ...
— Teachers' Outlines for Studies in English - Based on the Requirements for Admission to College • Gilbert Sykes Blakely
... is he a person for whom I can properly vote? And, if I find, when I go to the meeting of the policy-holders, that most of them know nothing of this and other evidences of what, by the mildest judgment, must be termed Mr. A.'s unfitness for administrative [289] responsibilities, am I to let them remain in their ignorance? I leave the answer and its application to ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... are hardly deserving the name of men, on account of organic, intellectual, and moral incapacity, are forcibly carried into the regions of Christian religion and civilization, there to become civilized in spite of their unfitness for civilization. The mariners, usually occupied in risking life or health merely for the sake of base traffic and filthy lucre, are suddenly transformed into ministering agents of civilization and religion. It gives a priestly character to the captain of a slave-ship,—to him that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... second century of the Christian aera.(24) In default, therefore, of distinct historical evidence or definite documentary proof that at some earlier period than that it terminated abruptly, nothing short of the utter unfitness of the verses which at present conclude S. Mark's Gospel to be regarded as the work of the Evangelist, would warrant us in assuming that they are the spurious accretion of the post-apostolic age: and as such, at the end of eighteen centuries, to be deliberately rejected. We must ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon
... crimes too dreadful for women to think of. She would not believe that Bertram was one of these; but it was fearful to think that any one should so call him. Caroline, perhaps, would not so much have minded this flaw in her future husband's faith if it had not been proof of his unsteadiness, of his unfitness for the world's battle. She remembered what he had said to her two years since on the Mount of Olives; and then thought of what he was saying now. Everything with him was impulse and enthusiasm. All judgment was wanting. How should such as he get on in the world? And had she indissolubly ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... Senators at Sacramento stood true to their party pledges, and voiced the will of the people in their votes on the Direct Primary bill yesterday. Thirteen other Senators wrote into the record conclusive proof of their unfitness for the offices they hold, when they voted against the Wright-Stanton bill, and for the corrupt political machine which is the Southern Pacific Railroad. Every man of these thirteen confessed corruptionists knew what he was doing, knew whose will he was putting above ...
— Story of the Session of the California Legislature of 1909 • Franklin Hichborn
... an indifference to the things of the world, or in the more dubious palliation that successive incumbents have only a life-interest in their incomes, the experience of three centuries has proved the singular unfitness of spiritual persons for the administration of secular trusts; and the friends of the establishment may be grateful that the judgment of the English laity ultimately guided them to this conclusion. They were influenced, it is likely, by a principle which they showed rather in their deeds than in ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... full of his unfitness for the sight of men, but gathering a little courage when he found the dining-room so dark. He descended to the basement and opened the door of the kitchen, looked in, and shut it again. ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... been given time to demonstrate his unfitness for the task he had undertaken, Tomaso's whip cracked again. Instantly King descended from his pedestal, ran over to the teeter-board, and mounted it at the centre. The goat, unwilling to be dispossessed of his high place, stamped and butted at him indignantly, but with one scornful ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... colony—as a colony, for the first twenty years of its existence, no element of progress was in it—but to show how certain naval officers, in spite of the difficulties of the penal settlement days, in spite very often of their own unfitness for this to them strange service, did their work well, not perhaps always governing wisely, but holding to ground won in such circumstances and by such poor means as men with more brains and less "grit" would have ...
— The Naval Pioneers of Australia • Louis Becke and Walter Jeffery
... misfits is into those who are fitted to do detail work, trying to do executive work, and those who are natural-born executives compelled to do detail work. This is a very common cause of unfitness. ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... vision of myself sitting there alone in the chair in that wide emptiness, with the chief performer directing attention to me every other moment or so, for perhaps an hour. Let me hurry on to say that it did not happen. I dare say he realized my unfitness for the work, and the far greater appropriateness of conferring the honor on General Grant, for in the end he gave him the ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... apprehensive ... that Green never will overcome his propensity to drink; that it is this which occasions his frequent sickness, absences from work and poverty. And I am convinced, moreover, that it answers no purpose to admonish him." Yet, though "I am so well satisfied of Thomas Green's unfitness to look after Carpenters," for a time "the helpless situation in which you find his family, has prevailed on me to retain him," and when he finally had to be discharged for drinking, Washington said, "Nothing but compassion for his helpless family, ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... is this beer unfit for the people to drink, but too often the men and women are unfit to drink it. On the other hand, it is their very unfitness that drives them to drink it. Ill-fed, suffering from innutrition and the evil effects of overcrowding and squalor, their constitutions develop a morbid craving for the drink, just as the sickly stomach of the overstrung Manchester factory operative hankers ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... principle is false, no sane man can doubt the expediency of proving it so. Falsehood may be useful to individuals, but cannot tend to the moral and political advancement of nations. Apologists of error find the presumed unfitness of their fellow creatures to appreciate truth a sufficient reason for not teaching it. To raise up the populace to their own intellectual level they deem impracticable, and therefore speak down to their lowest passions and prejudices: like Varro they contend ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... of genius in the remark. Its very vacuity told of the man's exceeding unfitness for the role thrust upon him by certain desperadoes in the far ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... been for some time subject to attacks of strangury; and having before experienced relief from James's powders, had again recourse to that popular medicine. His medical attendants are said to have remonstrated with him on its unfitness in the stage to which his disorder had reached; but he persevered; and his fever increasing, and some secret distress of mind, under which he owned to Dr. Turton that he laboured, aggravating his bodily complaint, he expired on the 4th of ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... continental nations have boasted great native painters and architects, while these arts were long truly foreign to us. Theoretical critics, at a loss to account for this singularity, accused not only our climate, but even our diet, as the occult causes of our unfitness to cultivate them. Yet Montesquieu and Winkelmann might have observed that the air of fens and marshes had not deprived the gross feeders of Holland and Flanders of admirable artists. We have teen outrageously calumniated. So far from any national ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... evolution, giving the historical facts with as much detail as possible, and setting forth finally the portrait of this new soldier. That this is a prodigious task is too evident to need assertion—a task worthy the most lofty talents; and in essaying it I humbly confess to a sense of unfitness; yet the work lies before me and duty orders me to enter upon it. A Major General writes: "I wish you every success in producing a work important both historically and for the credit of a race far more deserving than the world has acknowledged." A Brigadier General who commanded ...
— The Colored Regulars in the United States Army • T. G. Steward
... these arms have been found out to be faulty and unworthy of trust. Some of them are brittle, and break, others are soft, and bend, so there are a large number of those in use which will have to be discarded on account of unfitness. Where the blame lies we don't know, but doubtless some one has been unfaithful to their trust, or the thing could not ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness
... had sent to Hartwell several drafts of proclamations, with none of which, he said, the King was satisfied. On allowing me the copy of the last of these drafts I frankly told him that I was quite of the King's opinion as to its unfitness. I observed that if the King should one day return to France and act as the general advised he would not keep possession of his throne six months. Driesen then requested me to dictate a draft of a proclamation conformably with my ideas. This ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... certainly and instantly to the worst fate that he had pictured to himself,—could he immediately rush away from these abstract speculations, encumbered as they were with personal flattery, into his own most unpleasant, most tragic matter! It was the unfitness that deterred him and not the possible tragedy. Nevertheless, through it all, he was sure,—nearly sure,—that she was playing her game, and playing it in direct antagonism to the game which she knew that he wanted to play. Would it not be better that he should go away and write ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... respect, his primary aim was the general good. Simply a friendship for him, or his measures, without other and requisite qualifications, would not ensure from Mr. Adams an appointment to office. Neither did an opposition to his administration alone, except there was a marked practical unfitness for office, ever induce him to remove an individual from ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... upon the personal character of individual representatives. At the General Election of 1906 there were at least two English constituencies (one Liberal and the other Conservative) which returned candidates whose personal unfitness had been to most men's minds proved by evidence given in the law courts. Neither constituency was markedly unlike the average in any respect. The facts were well known, and in each case an attempt was made by a few public-spirited ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... interior, late in the evening and not very long ago, a train was nearly ready to start. It was a train possessing a certain consideration. For the benefit of a public easily gulled and enamored of grandiloquent terms, it was advertised as the "Denver Fast Express"; sometimes, with strange unfitness, as the "Lightning Express"; "elegant" and "palatial" cars were declared to be included therein; and its departure was one of the great events of the twenty-four hours in the country round about. A local poet described it in the "live" paper of the ...
— The Denver Express - From "Belgravia" for January, 1884 • A. A. Hayes
... his words to bear on his unfitness for death, and judg'd them very decent and properly spoken: and took occasion to hint this in ...
— The Splendid Spur • Arthur T. Quiller Couch
... tendency to weak-mindedness, their inborn laziness, lack of vitality, and unfitness for organized activity, contain the people who complain that they are starving for want of work, though they will never perform any work that is given them. Feeble-mindedness is an absolute dead-weight on the race. It is an evil that is unmitigated. The heavy and complicated social burdens ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... and every finite thing may thus be perfect in its way and perfect in its place, while in the absolute truth or God there is realized the meaning of the whole order. But if so, there is evidently something that escapes God, to wit, the meaningless and unfitness, the error and evil, of the stages in their successive isolation. Nor is it of any avail to insist (as did Plato, Aristotle, and Spinoza alike) that these are only privation, and therefore not to be counted in ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... may say, "The evidence of spiritual verity in me is so small that I am afraid. I feel so far from victory over the flesh that to reach out for a present realization of my hope savors of temerity. Because of my own unfitness for such a spiritual animus my strength is naught, and my faith fails." O thou "weak and infirm of purpose." Jesus ...
— Pulpit and Press (6th Edition) • Mary Baker Eddy
... babies; before the birth of the third, John's brow was again clouded, again he had begun to rail and fume at the unfitness of things. His business was a failure, partly because he dealt with a too rigid honesty, partly because of his unstable nature, which left him at the mercy of whims and obstinacies and airy projects. He did not risk the ordinary kind of bankruptcy, but came down and down, until ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... to speak of my previous evening's engagement while Beatrice sipped the rather sticky champagne, which was the first item of the meal to reach us. But a certain sense of unfitness or disinclination stopped me after a few sentences, and I did not again refer to my new friends; though I had been thinking a good deal of Constance Grey and her plain-faced, plain-spoken aunt. I felt strangely out ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... concern ourselves about the form of the pulpit. But sermons cannot always be good; and I believe that the temper in which the congregation set themselves to listen may be in some degree modified by their perception of fitness or unfitness, impressiveness or vulgarity, in the disposition of the place appointed for the speaker,—not to the same degree, but somewhat in the same way, that they may be influenced by his own gestures or expression, irrespective of the sense of what he says. I believe, therefore, in the first place, ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... she had not only fifteen past admirers but a current one. Still, he might be mistaken. Stimulated now by ancient memories and present tenderness to use every effort to make her his wife, despite her conventional unfitness, he strung himself up to sift this mystery. If he could only win her—and how could a country girl refuse such an opportunity?—he could pack her off to school for two or three years, marry her, enlarge her mind by a little travel, and take ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... any of these received canons of etiquette is to commit a decided solecism and to discover an utter unfitness for the desired social rank. Fortunately, there is no need, even for those not to the manor born, of displaying any ignorance in this matter when the simple consultation of a standard work on social etiquette will ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... born with the most violent propension to pleasure, and at the same time was master of so much good sense, as to be able to discern the extreme folly of licentious courses, their moral unfitness, and the many calamities they naturally produce. He maintained a perpetual struggle between reason and appetite. He frequently fell into indulgencies, which cost him many a pang of remorse, and under the conviction of the danger of a vicious ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... peculiar unfitness of simultaneous mastication and speech struck him, for he paused a few moments, then continued,—"Yes, fitness. Supplies for the table absolutely needed. Healthy exercise a ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne
... has not only peaks, but plains, and dark valleys. As she cooled and her passion descended to a less exalted level, she began to see the difficulties of, and her unfitness for, the role she had so impulsively accepted. An uneasiness for the future crept upon her. As she had told Mr. Blake, she had never handled a case in court. True, she had been a member of the bar for two years, but her duties with the Municipal League had consisted ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... part, his patience exhausted, Adams dismissed two of his secretaries, in a passion, in 1800. Later, through the wiles of Aaron Burr, Republican leader in New {180} York, a pamphlet, written by Hamilton to prove Adams's utter unfitness for the Presidency, was brought to light and circulated. Against this discredited and disorganized party, the Republicans, supporting Jefferson again for the Presidency and thundering against the Sedition Law, triumphantly carried ...
— The Wars Between England and America • T. C. Smith
... believed that sufficient power was reserved to the King to secure respect for him, as the political head of the nation, cannot be doubted. We have only to lament, that subsequent events afforded proofs of the unfitness of the French people, at that period, for the blessings of a more popular government. It must also be admitted, that many who professed republicanism, and boasted of their regard to the people's rights were unprincipled and ambitious men, whom power had intoxicated, or who entertained ...
— Memoirs of General Lafayette • Lafayette
... to attract her attention, or for some other reason, Hubert soon managed to turn the conversation to the subject of woman's rights, and the old doctor and the young parson were soon hurling at each other all the staple and now somewhat stale arguments about woman's fitness and woman's unfitness for many things. At last, perhaps because he was a little cornered, ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... knows Mr. Wilson, who knows Mr. Lloyd George, who knows Mr. Clemenceau, nothing could be sillier than the chapters of Keynes and Dillon in which they undertake to picture the President's unfitness to cope with the European masters of diplomacy. Mr. Wilson for years had been playing with European masters of diplomacy as a cat plays with a mouse. To assume that Mr. Wilson was ever deceived by the transparent tactics of Mr. Lloyd George ...
— Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements • Frank B. Lord and James William Bryan
... persecutions of Motiers made me think of quitting Switzerland, this desire was again strengthened by the hope of at length finding amongst these islanders the repose refused me in every other place. One thing only alarmed me, which was my unfitness for the active life to which I was going to be condemned, and the aversion I had always had to it. My disposition, proper for meditating at leisure and in solitude, was not so for speaking and acting, and treating of affairs with men. Nature, ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... of selfish and silly details? I merely wish to assure you that it was not the frivolous forgetfulness of a mind, occupied by what is called pleasure (not in the true sense of Epicurus), that kept me away; but a perception of my, then, unfitness to share the society of those whom I value and wish not to displease. I hate being larmoyant, and making a serious face ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... acknowledges that such an indictment destroys itself. It recoils upon its framers, and proves nothing but their intense hatred of their victims and their total unfitness to sit ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... pray for the conversion of the world without blushing before God. Does any one shrink from this criterion of his piety? I fear he will shrink away from the presence of his final Judge, and bury himself in the darkness of hell; his works and conscience alike testifying his unfitness for ...
— The Faithful Steward - Or, Systematic Beneficence an Essential of Christian Character • Sereno D. Clark
... your unfitness to occupy a position of such responsibility when you allowed yourself to be influenced by a man of Neifkins' stripe, to say nothing of the lack of knowledge of human nature which you have shown ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... yet prettier costumes of fresh daintiness; and when these two dropped their little hooded shoulder-wraps of silk and lace, and she saw that they were the two Ryder cousins, poor Angela suddenly began to feel a strange sense of awkwardness and unfitness. This feeling increased as she noticed the unmistakable start that the cousins gave as they caught sight of her, and heard Nelly's astonished ...
— A Flock of Girls and Boys • Nora Perry
... ask it. They were waiting tea for her; and the bright cheerful room, with its peaceful home-look, the table and familiar tea-service, the perfectly settled and calm aspect of everything about, struck upon her disturbed fancy with a jarring sense of unfitness. But in a very little while the calm began to have a more reasonable effect; and by the time tea was over, she was ready to hear what had been done, without such an exaggerated idea of its importance, as she had been entertaining during her ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 2 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... Eleanor's mind. This woman, who swears and treats her with such abominable coolness, knows something of her past or present, possibly from Elizabeth, with whom she may be acquainted. This last remark is an insinuation of her unfitness to die, and that her soul is ripe for perdition. The implied slur gradually increases and exaggerates itself in Eleanor's brain, sensitive to a degree. She sees in it a deliberate insult, and following Paulina, ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... called) figures of speech, both as to their kind, their frequency, and their occasions, which on a subject of equal weight would be vicious and alien in correct and manly prose. I contend, that in both cases this unfitness of each for the place of the other frequently ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... himself, that he was forced to renounce all the glories of his station. Wealth almost unlimited was at his command,—and rank, and youth, and such personal gifts of appearance and disposition as best serve to win general love. He had talked to his brother of his unfitness for his earldom; but he could have blazoned it forth at Scroope and up in London, with the best of young lords, and have loved well to do so. But this adventure, as he had been wont to call it, had fallen upon him, and had broken him as ...
— An Eye for an Eye • Anthony Trollope
... Englishmen which makes them over-confident and foolhardy, and they will require to be taught by some very severe lessons before they learn the importance of caution. This want of caution in an officer, when entrusted with the lives of brave men, is a very great fault, and shows great folly and an unfitness for command. The vice, I am happy to say, is not so prevalent generally in the navy. Most spirited and dashing enterprises are undertaken, and are successful, for the very reason that forethought is employed and proper precautions are taken to ensure success. Young officers ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... Have you tried to make them fit? Besides, their fitness or unfitness has nothing to do with it. It is their country; let them grow fit by experience. But I believe they are fit. How many of your great men ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... that a walking suit in which one could not walk, and a winter suit which exposes the throat, head, and feet to cold and damp, was rather a failure, Clara, especially as it has no beauty to reconcile one to its utter unfitness," said Dr. Alec, as he helped Rose undo her veil, adding, in a low tone, "Nice thing for the eyes; you'll soon see spots when it's off as well as when it's on, and, by and by, be a case ...
— Eight Cousins • Louisa M. Alcott
... my baggage from Daet to Cabusao in a schooner, I proceeded on foot, by the road to that place, to the coast on the west side of the Bay of San Miguel. We crossed the mouth of the river in a boat, which the horses swam after; but they were soon abandoned from unfitness. At the mouth of the next river, Sacavin, the water was so high that the bearers stripped themselves naked and carried the baggage over on their heads. In simple jacket and cotton hose, I found this precaution needless; indeed, according to my experience, it is both ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... public measures, the elector quite rightly votes for those who will give effect to his opinions, irrespectively of personal qualifications, though, even in these cases, there might be an amount of unfitness which would warrant neutrality or opposition. Peculiarly perplexing cases of competition between the rival claims of others sometimes occur in the domain of the resentful feelings, which, in their purified ...
— Progressive Morality - An Essay in Ethics • Thomas Fowler
... impose. To get rid of such discrepancies between words and music is advantageous to both, and although this treatment cannot of course be applied to english hymns,—which it is not allowable to alter, except in cases of glaring unfitness or absurdity, such as would if uncorrected cause the neglect of a good hymn[24],—yet, where the hymn has to be translated from a foreign language, some reconstruction is generally inevitable, and it can follow no better aim than that of the mutual enforcement of words and music. And the words owe ...
— A Practical Discourse on Some Principles of Hymn-Singing • Robert Bridges
... With the black, to-day is—"to be, contents his natural desire!" The past is not worth thinking about, if not entirely forgotten; the future unembarrassed by problems. Crafts and artifices, common enough a few years ago, are fast passing away. New acquirements are generally saddening proofs of the unfitness of the aboriginal for the battle of life when once his primitive condition is disturbed by the wonder-working whites. Bent wire represents a cheap and effective substitute for fish-hooks of pearl-shell, ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... nourishes, and whether they have any such thing peculiar in point of bigness, colour, shape, longaevity, fitness or unfitness to make good meat, &c. as may be rather adscribed to the peculiar nature of the place, than to the barrenness of the ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... dress of the slumberer was travel-stained, tattered, yet with the remains of a certain pretence; an air of faded, shabby, penniless gentility made poverty more painful, because it seemed to indicate unfitness to grapple with it. The face of this person was hollow and pale, but its expression, even in sleep, was fierce and hard. I drew near and nearer; I recognized the countenance, the regular features, the raven hair, even a peculiar gracefulness ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... which habit and custom had given nearly the force of law with maidens of her condition, though her reason and judgment no less than her affections were both strongly enlisted on the other side. Indeed, with the single exception of the general unfitness of a union between two of unequal stations, there was nothing to discredit her choice, if that may be termed choice which, after all, was more the result of spontaneous feeling and secret sympathy than of any other cause, ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... himself been a Post Office clerk, then would not this chosen friend have been fit to love her? There were unfitnesses, no doubt, very common in this world, which should make the very idea of love impossible to a woman,—unfitness of character, of habits, of feelings, of education, unfitnesses as to inward personal nobility. He could not say that there were any such which ought to separate his sister and his friend. If it was to be that this sweet sister should some day give her heart to a lover, why ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... Maria was stunned by the blow. His withdrawal from the duties of the sovereignty in favour of such a son had proved a constitutional unfitness for the duties of his station. The life he loved was one of seclusion in a round of pious exercises, petty studies, peddling economies, and mechanical amusements. A powerful and grasping Pope was on the throne of Rome. Urban at this ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... unless it reaches a spot of especially marked intensity which forces the return of attention. An initial rejection, perhaps consciously brought about by the judgment on the ground of incorrectness or unfitness for the actual purpose of the mental act, may therefore account for the fact that a mental process continues until the onset of sleep ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... for divorce is "indisposition, unfitness, or contrariety of mind, arising from a cause in nature unchangeable, hindering, and ever likely to hinder, the main benefits of conjugal society, which are solace and peace." Without the "deep and serious verity" of mutual love, wedlock is "nothing but the empty husks of a mere outside matrimony," ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... stood alone. She seemed a dead thing; but the sense of his having done gloriously in mastering himself to give these worldly people of hers a lesson and proof that he could within due measure bow to their laws and customs, dispelled the brief vision of her unfitness to be left. The compressed energy of the man under his conscious display of a great-minded deference to the claims of family ties and duties, intoxicated him. He thought but of the present achievement and its just effect: he had cancelled a bad reputation among ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... game!" cries the practical politician. There is loud talk of the defilement, the "dirty pool" and its resultant darkening of fair reputations, the total unfitness of lovely woman to take part in "the rough ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... tolerate the Protestant religion?" Mr. Dunning next insisted, that the civil law, as well as the criminal law of England, should be preserved, and that the institution of juries, however unpalatable it might prove to the Canadians, ought not to be dispensed with. He concluded by showing the unfitness of this political state to the habits and character of English settlers, and that there was an insurmountable difficulty in reconciling the feelings and habits of the small minority with the great French majority. The bill was ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... them one by one to join me, slowly and with a fitting dignity, the empty stare, destitute of sense or sincerity, of these six upstanding Chinese gentry, sucking at tobacco-pipes as long as their own overfed bodies, forced upon me a sense of my unfitness for the unknown conditions of the life of the place, a sense of loneliness and social unshelteredness in the sterile waste of their fashionable life. They spoke to me subsequently, and I bravely threw at them a Chinese phrase or two; but when the conversation got above my head, ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... passed by his manor. Nat showed what he called his "Pass", written on a piece of brown paper and signed by the rebel general Heath, which exempted him from further impressment into the rebel service on account of his "extreme poverty, and the unfitness of his horse and wagon to be of any further service" to their army! When it is considered what the exigencies of the rebel service are in the best of times, some idea may be formed of the prospective perils of the journey ...
— Our campaign around Gettysburg • John Lockwood
... my heartiest congratulations to Mr. Spender? He has my admiration; he is a brave man; when I was young, I should have run away from the sight of you, pierced with the sense of my unfitness. He is more wise and manly. What a good husband he will have to be! And you—what a good wife! Carry your love tenderly. I will never forgive him—or you—it is in both your hands—if the face that once gladdened my heart should be changed ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... It is not my intention, were it in my power, to enter into the inquiry as to the true method of dividing the cetacea into groups and families.... Utter confusion exists among the historians of this animal (sperm whale), says Surgeon Beale, A. D. . Unfitness to pursue our research in the unfathomable waters. Impenetrable veil covering our knowledge of the cetacea. A field strewn with thorns. All these incomplete indications but serve to torture us naturalists. Thus speak of the whale, the ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... be classed with "divers weights and divers measures," with their false standards. The day will come when the public will insist that the "weaker brother's" output be measured to determine just how weak he is, and whether it is weakness, unfitness for that particular job, or laziness that is the cause of his output being low. When he reaches a certain degree of weakness, he will be assisted with a definite measured quantity of assistance. Thus the "weaker brother" may be readily ...
— The Psychology of Management - The Function of the Mind in Determining, Teaching and - Installing Methods of Least Waste • L. M. Gilbreth
... happen to be degrees of unfitness—yours and mine for instance, you blind old bat! Go along now, and enjoy the good you deserve. As for me—I have sinned and must ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... tyranny. In these days of liberty the young people have it more their own way. When parents object to a lover on the mere ground of his poverty, or some personal prejudice, a girl may be excused for making her own choice when she is of age. If she binds herself secretly to a man whose moral unfitness is objected to, she is courting certain misery ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... it may be doubted whether he heard this interruption. He took no notice of it as he went on. "Of course I am unfit to maintain the proprieties of a seeming confidence between a Crown all-powerless and a people all-powerful. No man recognises his own unfitness for such work more clearly than I do, Mr. Monk. But if I took in hand such work at all, I should like to be the leader, and not the led. Tell us fairly, now, what are your convictions worth in ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... heart we accept the post of honour God is offering us. With regard to the school of intercession, I am confident that the result of the first month's course will be to awake the feeling of how little we know how to intercede. And a second and a third month may only deepen the sense of ignorance and unfitness. This will be an unspeakable blessing. The confession, "We know not how to pray as we ought," is the introduction to the experience, "The Spirit maketh intercession for us"—our sense of ignorance will lead ...
— The Ministry of Intercession - A Plea for More Prayer • Andrew Murray
... intelligible. My father, by way of curbing my extravagance, tells me I must give up all pretension to the life of a gentleman, and go into an office as a clerk. I refuse. He insists, and tells me, moreover, a number of little pleasant traits of my unfitness to do anything, so that I interrupt him by hinting that I might possibly break stones on the highway. He seizes the project with avidity, and offers to supply me with a hammer for my work. All fact, on my honour! I am neither adding to nor concealing. I am relating what occurred ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... thought little of anybody else's discomforts as she hurried along the road; she only wished to get to the beloved farm, and to be free there from questions, and from the evidences of her unfitness for the simple duties which life seemed offering her with heartless irony. She was not good for anything after all, it appeared, and she had been cheating herself. This was no life at all, this fretful ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... is in England in truth distasteful to all classes, had taken himself down to Quinborough as a candidate in opposition to the nobleman's nominee. He had been backed by all the sympathies of the American Senator who knew nothing of him or his unfitness, and nothing whatever of the patriotism of the Marquis. But he did know what was the population and what the constituency of Liverpool, and also what were those of Quinborough. He supposed that he knew what was the theory of representation in ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... render his contemplated visit to Canada agreeable to himself, and successful in its objects. I have, more than once, through the press, disclaimed any imputation upon his integrity, motives, or character; but with his recorded declaration of my "utter want of integrity," and my unfitness for social intercourse in private life, I feel that my own conduct towards him should be confined to official acts and official occasions; in which I shall treat him with as much cordiality as I would any other member of the English Conference. Had it not been ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... travellers are not so frequently needed here as they are on the Continent; but, still, there is often to be found a crowd of people ready to eat if only the wherewithal were there. We are often told in our newspapers that England is disgraced by this and by that; by the unreadiness of our army, by the unfitness of our navy, by the irrationality of our laws, by the immobility of our prejudices, and what not; but the real disgrace of England is the railway sandwich,—that whited sepulchre, fair enough outside, but so meagre, poor, ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... women were disembarked, and the provisions and stores landed, it was found that twenty casks of flour (from the unfitness of the ship to perform such a voyage, being old and far from tight) were totally destroyed. This was a serious loss to us, when only four pounds of flour constituted the allowance of that article for one man ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... corruption in official circles and inaction and inefficiency in the military. The new governor relates his efforts to improve the condition of the city and administer the affairs of the islands; but he is accused, especially by the ecclesiastics, of immorality and tyrannical behavior, and of general unfitness for his office. The Indians are oppressed in various ways; and some mutinies among them have been suppressed. Formal submission to the Spanish crown is required from the Indians; but this proves difficult ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume X, 1597-1599 • E. H. Blair
... criminal types and of the pathetic victims of toil in the child-labor factories. Another result is the familiar overcrowding of tenements, the forcing of the children into the street, the ensuing prostitution, alcoholism and almost universal physical and moral unfitness. ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... oppressed towns without regarding themselves as having done anything very remarkable, would alone indicate a weak and contemptible morale, and might justify us, did we know no more, in regarding the calamities of his reign as the fruit of his own unfitness to rule an empire. But there is sufficient evidence that he had other, and worse, vices. He was noted, even among Asiatic sovereigns, for luxury and debauchery; he neglected all state affairs in the pursuit of pleasure; his wives and male favorites were allowed to rule his kingdom at their ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson
... gentleman at our hotel, I discovered that he was more obliging in his general capacity of politician and prominent citizen than he was in his particular duties of customs collector. Like many other instances of the kind in the United States, his was a case of evident unfitness for the post he held. A. socially smaller man would have made a much better customs official. Unfortunately for the comfort of the public, the remuneration attached to appointments in the postal ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... Should he adjure this young man not to marry the breeches-maker's daughter because of the blood of the Newtons and the expected estate, or were he to do so even on the score of education and general unfitness, he must suggest some other mode or means of living. But how could he advise the future Newton of Newton Priory to marry Polly Neefit? The Newtons had been at Newton Priory for centuries, and the men Newtons had always married ladies, as the women Newtons had always either married ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... conversation on the engrossing subject of Christmas presents. It was a conversation at once animated and depressing. The time was at hand when none of us could hope to escape these tokens of regard, and the elaborate and ingenious character of their unfitness was frankly and fairly discussed. What baffled us was the theory of choice. Suddenly the old lady flooded this dark problem with light by observing that she always purchased her presents at bazaars. She said she knew they were useless, and that nobody wanted them, but ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... unfitness for the duties of quiet government. The money collected by his father was quickly squandered by him, and with the eagerness of an untutored boy he plunged into every kind of daring amusement that presented itself, risking his life in ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 9 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. Scandinavian. • Charles Morris
... chivalrous or pastoral romances, they have after the manner of Tragedy chained themselves down to history, and by means of their heavy seriousness, and the pedantry of their rules, they have so managed matters, that Dulness with leaden sceptre presides over the opera. The deficiencies of their music, the unfitness of the French language for composition in a style anything higher than that of the most simple national melodies, the unaccented and arbitrary nature of their recitative, the bawling bravura of the singers, must be left to the ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... the other chiefs' laps he suggested that I call it a day and be withdrawn in favor of one whose services to his country were not so invaluable as mine. Appreciating his delicacy I withdrew, but only to be sent out on another job that defies description. Even here I quickly demonstrated my unfitness and have consequently been incorporated once more into the ...
— Biltmore Oswald - The Diary of a Hapless Recruit • J. Thorne Smith, Jr.
... world's better off, I'm convinced of it now, Than if heroes, like buns, could be bought for a penny, To regard all mankind as their haltered milch-cow, And just care for themselves. Well, God cares for the many; And somehow the poor old Earth blunders along, Each son of hers adding his mite of unfitness, And, choosing the sure way of coming out wrong, Gets to port, as the next generation ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... on at the dancing until I could endure it no longer. Overcome by a sense of isolation and unfitness, I slipped out of the room, avoiding the teacher's eye, and went home ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... by means of this long and patiently evolved and highly trained faculty that the race is still developing towards perfection with constant strain and effort—although the planet is far advanced in its decadence and within measurable distance of its unfitness for life ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... cold and unconcerned in the comfort and the welfare of a stranger. So, with this experience fresh in his mind, he was resolved not to re-settle in his own commonwealth, but to go to a city, though feeling his unfitness for urban life. But he thought, as so many men and women have been forced to think, that life in a crowd would invite forgetfulness, that his slow broodings would find a swift flow into the tide that swallows the ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... began Durant saw a faint hope of release in his own stupidity, his obvious unfitness for the game. By a studied carelessness, an artful exaggeration of his deficiencies, he courted humiliation, ejection in favor of the dummy. But, as it happened, either his evil destiny had endowed him with her own detestable skill, or else his stupidity was supreme. Trying with might and main to ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... gingham dress," she felt they were asking, "and get off a lot of this college stuff to us?" What right indeed? She was convinced, in short, that she had been embarked upon a hopeless piece of snobbery, and, finding the whole business distasteful, it had not been difficult to discover her unfitness. ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... dropped with the base desertion of Butler. Filled with remorse, he ran upstairs without taking off his hat or overcoat. The feeling of resentment toward Butler was lost in this new, overpowering sense of dread; the discovery of his own lamentable unfitness for "high life" expeditions faded into nothingness in the face of this possible catastrophe. What if Phoebe were to die? He would be to blame. He remembered feeling that he should not have left her that evening. It had been a premonition, and this ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon
... the Moose Lake band had none, owing to a division amongst them. It appeared that the Indians from the Che-ma-wa-win desired to be a distinct band and have their reserves where I had seen them at the entrance of the river from Cedar Lake; but noticing, on my way up, the unfitness of the locality for a reserve, and having learned that at Moose Lake, where part of the band desired to live, a most suitable locality could be had, I had decided before meeting them upon the course I should take, which was, not to encourage ...
— The Treaties of Canada with The Indians of Manitoba - and the North-West Territories • Alexander Morris
... and affecting; the typewriters with such kindly faces and fine posies, Madame so demure, and Jim—how shall I describe that poor, transfigured Jim? He began by taking the minister aside to the far end of the office. I knew not what he said, but I have reason to believe he was protesting his unfitness, for he wept as he said it; and the old minister, himself genuinely moved, was heard to console and encourage him, and at one time to use this expression: "I assure you, Mr. Pinkerton, that there are not many who can say so much"—from which I gathered that ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... feelings of majesty or beauty or mystery, the ethical spirit is not the predominant one. That rapturous winged spirit which he calls Love Triumphant might just as easily be called Music or Song, and another allegory be attached to it without our feeling any more special fitness or unfitness in the explanation. I see a beautiful exultant figure, but I do not feel love as the fundamental mood in the painter, as I feel the religious mood is fundamental in the Angelus of Millet. I do not need to look for a title to that or for the painting of The Shepherdess ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... your lordship think right to stop my mouth as a clergyman in your diocese, you must proceed to do so in an ecclesiastical court in accordance with the laws, and will succeed in your object, or fail, in accordance with the evidences as to the ministerial fitness or unfitness which may be produced respecting ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... friend was about to build a new town-house, and letting me know the situation, he asked my advice as to the mode of construction. The inconveniences of an ordinary American town-house were pointed out to him,—its unfitness for the general state of society, the climate, the other domestic arrangements, and its ugliness. All were admitted, and the plan proposed in place of the old style of building was liked, but still my friend hesitated about adopting ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... him, in any way, with the object of your mission. If I obtain the abbot's consent, I shall simply send for him, rate him soundly for his conduct, but telling him I make all allowances for his natural unfitness for his vocation; and that I have, as a matter of grace, obtained from the abbot permission to use his services for a while, and to suspend his sentence upon him, until it be seen how he comports himself; and, with that view, I am about to send him as your companion, ...
— Both Sides the Border - A Tale of Hotspur and Glendower • G. A. Henty
... soon rejected the theory of Fred being bilious, though any reason for his unfitness except Nina would have been welcome. After a few minutes spent in the unsatisfactory pursuit of finding out that my batting average for St. Cuthbert's was 2.4, which I discovered not for my own gratification but to please Fred, ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... tractable subjects for that most trying of all social experiments, matrimony. In reviewing the great names of philosophy and science, we shall find that all who have most distinguished themselves in those walks have, at least, virtually admitted their own unfitness for the marriage tie by remaining in celibacy;—Newton, Gassendi, Galileo, Descartes, Bayle, Locke, Leibnitz, Boyle, Hume, and a long list of other illustrious sages, having all led ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... dogmas as we find them, and to show that they do not come up to the claims of being "the highest conception," etc. We think that the strongest point against the dogmas may be found in the claims of their advocates. That the Church is now growing away from them only proves their unfitness as "the highest conception." And Reincarnationists hold that as the Church grows in favor of the Immaterial Immortal Soul, so will it find itself inclining toward the companion-doctrine of Pre-existence and Re-birth, in some of its varied forms, probably ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... competent, visible Land Estate, as a Pledge to his Electors that he intends to abide by them, and has the same Interest with theirs in the publick Taxes, Gains and Losses. I have heard and weigh'd the Arguments of those who, in Opposition to this, urged the Unfitness of such, whose Lands were engaged in Debts and Mortgages, to serve in Parliament, in comparison with the mony'd Man who had no Land: But those Arguments never ...
— Franco-Gallia • Francis Hotoman
... him, and by a singular and unexpected chance Franklin furnished that excuse. It was the humble and discredited colonial agent who unwittingly but not unwillingly gave the jar which toppled the great earl into retirement. His fall when it came gave general satisfaction. His unfitness for his position had become too obvious to be denied; he had given offense in quarters where he should have made friends; he had irritated the king and provoked the cabinet. Franklin, with his observant sagacity, quickly ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... conscious of his blunder, may be a stumbling-block in another's path; but restrained as he will be by his secret pangs of conscience, he can scarcely be an active obstructionist. But a man who, having mistaken the field of his life's labor, yet remains amiably self-satisfied, and unconscious of his unfitness, may do more harm in his serene ignorance than he might have done good if he had chosen his proper sphere. Such a man as the last was the Reverend Harold. A good-natured, broad-shouldered, tactless, self-sufficient person, he had taken up his ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... knows the needs of the people and supplies them whether the people wish it or not. For example, in Germany we have to a great extent abolished poverty and such degrading slum conditions as prevail in English and American cities. We know that slums lead to drink, vice and physical unfitness. We know that we must kill the slums or see the slums kill efficiency ...
— The Conquest of America - A Romance of Disaster and Victory • Cleveland Moffett
... bed-chamber who were to carry his Majesty's train, felt about on the ground, as if they were lifting up the ends of the mantle, and pretended to be carrying something; for they would by no means betray anything like simplicity, or unfitness for ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... and your brothers, is the grandson of Anastasius Wilders, a lad of whom I know nothing, except that he is quite unfitted to assume the dignity of an Earl of Essendine, should fate ever will it that he should succeed. This unfitness you will readily appreciate when I tell you that he is at present a private soldier in a marching-regiment in the East. Stranger still, this regiment is the same as that in which poor Anastasius is serving—the Royal Picts. The young man's name is McKay—Stanislas Anastasius Wilders McKay. ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... following in the New England States. The leaders in those States, first and second, must be persuaded to work unanimously for Adams and Pinckney, with the distinct understanding that in other States votes for Adams will be thrown away. This, after I have persuaded them of Adams's absolute unfitness for office. If we carry and it comes to a tie, there is no doubt to whom the House ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... our Wynnie with Percivale, he seems to be as good as she is. I should for my part have more apprehension in giving her to one who would be called a thoroughly religious man; for not only would the unfitness be greater, but such a man would be more likely to confirm her in doubt, if the phrase be permissible. She wants what some would call homoeopathic treatment. And how should they be able to love one another, if they are not fit to be married to each other? The ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... urged you not to appoint me, and now indeed you see my unfitness. Take my life, I beg you, as ...
— A Chinese Wonder Book • Norman Hinsdale Pitman |
