"Elective" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... years. In India the local government is carried on in some places by a Council of Village Elders, and in other places by a Headman whose office is sometimes described as hereditary, but is more probably elective, the choice being confined, as in the case of the old Teutonic kingship, to the members of a particular family. In the Russian village, on the other hand, the government is conducted by an assembly at which every head of a household is expected to be present and vote on all ...
— American Political Ideas Viewed From The Standpoint Of Universal History • John Fiske
... fate is entirely dependant. So great is the number of the working-classes in every old and opulent community, compared to those who possess the advantages of property and superior education, that nothing is more certain than that, if the elective franchise be widely diffused, and no mode of classifying the votes, as at Rome, has been discovered, the sway of a numerical majority of incompetent electors will, erelong, become irresistible. Certain ruin then awaits the state. It was that which ruined Athens ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... appearance) to the arbitrament of the people, has fully satisfied all the demands of the principle of Popular Sovereignty! Their other questions are all "political"; the questions as to the organization of their executive, legislative, and judicial departments, as to their elective franchise, their distribution of districts, their banks, their rates and modes of taxation, etc., etc., are not domestic questions, but political; and provided the people are suffered to vote on the future (not the existing) condition of slaves, faith has been sufficiently kept. Popular ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... language that everybody can understand,—where Constitution and Law provide for their own amendment at the will of the sovereign people expressed in a regular and solemn manner,—where the will of the people thus governs, and (for example,) there is no "taxation without representation,"—where the elective franchise is free, and every man capable of intelligently exercising the right may give his voice for altering the Constitution or Law,—and where, therefore, there can be no necessity of violently opposing the laws, and no excuse for meanly evading them;—such a nation is very differently ...
— The Religious Duty of Obedience to Law • Ichabod S. Spencer
... the Imperial and French troops should return to their respective countries. Christendom had well nigh been embroiled anew by the death of John Sobieski, king of Poland, who died at the age of seventy in the course of this summer, after having survived his faculties and reputation. As the crown was elective, a competition arose for the succession. The kingdom was divided by factions; and the different powers of Europe interested ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... display of force seems to have been thought necessary. Two authorities, both years later and both untrustworthy, refer to a speech delivered during the ceremony by the archbishop, in which he emphasized the fact that the English crown was elective and not hereditary. Did not these authorities seem to be clearly independent of one another we should forthwith reject their testimony, but as it is we must admit some slight chance that such a speech ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams
... and then they promulgated the famous constitution of eighteen twenty-four. It was a noble constitution, purely democratic and federal, and the Texan colonists to a man gladly swore to obey it. The form was altogether elective, and what particularly pleased the American element was the fact that the local government of every ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... Cromarty, 'Mr. Stewart stood alone. Pope refers in his satires to a strange power of creating love and admiration by just "touching the brink of all we hate." Now, into this perilous, but singularly elective department, Mr. Stewart could enter with safety and at will. We heard him, scarce a twelvemonth since, deliver a discourse of singular power on the sin-offering as minutely described by the divine penman ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... machinery can reach that point in its evolution, when the non-capitalist masses can make the first and smallest use of it against their small and large capitalist masters. If, for example, the Supreme Court of this country should ever be made elective, or by any other means be shorn of its political power, and if then the President's veto were abolished, and others of his powers given to Congress, there would remain still other alternatives for vetoing the execution of the people's will—and one veto is sufficient for every practical ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... Clara in the world, whom he had once loved—and his mother and Lothair. They had all vanished from his mind; he lived for Olimpia alone. He sat beside her every day for hours together, rhapsodising about his love and sympathy enkindled into life, and about psychic elective affinity[10]—all of which Olimpia listened to with great reverence. He fished up from the very bottom of his desk all the things that he had ever written—poems, fancy sketches, visions, romances, tales, and the heap was increased ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... had conducted the proconsular administration of Gaul. Caesar was even then considered as the leader of the popular party, and as an opponent of the senate and its influence in the constitution. [238] It was at that time that Caesar, on going from home to the elective assembly, said to his mother, 'To-day you shall see your son either as pontifex, or you shall never see him again.' Caesar, however, is here called an adolescentulus only in comparison with the aged Catulus, for he was at that ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)
... marshal of Jacksonville. This was an elective office. The position made him head of police force ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... their dealings, have ample scope for industrial enterprise, and are free to choose their private pleasures, they resign themselves to the loss of electing their rulers without great unhappiness. There are greater evils in the world than the deprivation of the elective franchise, lofty and glorious as is this privilege. The arbitrary rule of the emperors was fatal to political aspirations and rights and the growth of a genuine manhood; yet it is but fair to note that the evils of political slavery were qualified and set off ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... the compulsory salute to officers; gave the private soldier the right to discard his uniform when not actually on service and to leave barracks freely during "off-duty" hours. Finally, it placed all matters pertaining to the management in the hands of elective committees in the composition of which the men were to have four-fifths of the elective ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... protests in the committee-room against the election of surrogates, sheriffs and county clerks had defeated that proposition, and in referring to the section of the report making justices of the peace elective, he said it had been a source of sincere regret that the committee overruled him. But a majority of the committee, he continued, in his smooth and adroit manner, had no strong personal predilections on the question of the election of sheriffs ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... name of the Commons the Speaker invested him with a mantle of State, placed the sceptre in his hand, and girt the sword of justice by his side. By the new Act of Government Cromwell was allowed to name his own successor, but in all after cases the office was to be an elective one. In every other respect the forms of the older Constitution were carefully restored. Parliament was again to consist of two Houses, the seventy members of "the other House" being named by the Protector. ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... to rid itself of the evils of the state legislature by these heroic methods assumes a heavy responsibility. When the burden of direct legislation is added to the task of choosing from the long list of elective officers which is placed before the voter at every local and state election, it is not surprising that there should set in a reaction in favor of simplified government. The mere separation of state and local elections does not solve the problem. It somewhat minimizes the chances ...
— The Boss and the Machine • Samuel P. Orth
... Michael to the vacant throne of Servia was the first step towards the substitution of hereditary for elective succession. One of the first measures of the new prince was to induce the Skuptschina, or National Assembly, to legalise for the future that which had been an infraction of the law. The sixteen years which intervened between 1842, when Michael was ejected, ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... and sciences encouraged, and they looked no further. They did not imagine, that he who had been the instrument of recovering the independence of their country, could be the very man who was to effect the ruin of their liberties. By the Constitution of Sweden their kings were elective, and the powers of the crown were exceedingly limited. The unsuspecting people even voluntarily gave up their right of election, and suffered Gustavus to enlarge the powers of the crown, and entail it in his own family! This is the account which the history of Sweden has given ...
— The Original Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 4 • Samuel Adams
... Providence, and in so doing they appear to me to deprive physiology of its life and strength, and language of its beauty and meaning. I am as much offended in taste by the turgid mystical bombast of Geoffroy as I am disgusted by his cold and irrational materialism. When men of his school talk of the elective affinity of organic types, I hear a jargon I cannot comprehend, and I turn from it in disgust; and when they talk of spontaneous generation and transmutation of species, they seem to me to try nature by an hypothesis, and ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... generally received doctrine as to the succession to kingdoms and duchies. Everywhere a single kingly or princely house supplied, as a rule, candidates for the succession. Everywhere, even where the elective doctrine was strong, a full-grown son was always likely to succeed his father. The growth of feudal notions too had greatly strengthened the hereditary principle. Still no rule had anywhere been laid down for cases where the late prince ...
— William the Conqueror • E. A. Freeman
... had passed into English hands. All that was needed, he concluded, was persistence along the old path. The same view was of course strenuously urged by the English merchants in the colony, who continued to demand, down to the very eve of the Revolution, an elective Assembly and other rights ...
— The Canadian Dominion - A Chronicle of our Northern Neighbor • Oscar D. Skelton
... demand," said Jella[vc]i['c], in his declaration of war, "we demand equality of rights for all the peoples and for all the nationalities who live under the Hungarian crown." Before he left Zagreb he transformed the feudal Croatian Diet into an elective assembly. This new Parliament cancelled the institution of serfdom and proclaimed that one of their objects was to have the Habsburg monarchy a federation, on the model of Switzerland. One would suppose that it was clear to ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... the capital; rumors were circulated that the government was dissolved, that the Elector of Brunswick was hourly expected to take possession of the Austrian territories; apprehensions were entertained of the distant provinces—that the Hungarians, supported by the Turks, might revive the elective monarchy; different claimants on the Austrian succession were expected to arise; besides, the Elector of Bavaria, the Elector of Cologne, and the Elector Palatine were evidently hostile; the ministers themselves, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... had often resorted of late, as the best means of restoring their own republican aristocracy, was now adopted by Dioclesian as the simplest engine for overthrowing finally the power of either senate or army to interfere with the elective privilege. This he endeavored to centre in the existing emperors; and, at the same moment, to discourage treason or usurpation generally, whether in the party choosing or the party chosen, by securing to each emperor, in the case of his own assassination, an avenger in the person ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... originated at Union, spreading to other universities by migration or initiation of their members. The distinction most sought for by ambitious students, the marshalship of the "commencement" ceremonies,—i.e. the conferring of degrees, speech-making, etc., of the graduating class,—was an elective office and voted for by all the members of the class, so that, for this position of a day, scholarship was only of secondary importance, the personal popularity of the candidates determining the election. The societies grouped themselves ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... were violated; the accusation of Laud, that eminent defender of the Protestant faith, for Popery; the imprisonment of the bishops for claiming their ancient privileges; or, lastly, a dependent and elective body voting itself supreme and permanent, and in that state levying war upon the King, by whose writs they were first summoned and consolidated; when you can find, I say, in the arbitrary proceedings of the Star Chamber, or of ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... and Germans settled in our own country, it is essentially barbaric and anti-republican. The characteristic principle of barbarism is, that power is a private or personal right, and when democrats assert that the elective franchise is a natural right of man, or that it is held by virtue of the fact that the elector is a man, they assert the fundamental principle of barbarism and despotism. This says nothing in favor of restricted suffrage, or against what is called universal ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... voice-production, he appears now and then to be groping for it. Thus, when he speaks of the fundamental tone being reinforced by its overtones—by a number of secondary sounds higher in pitch and fainter in intensity—he adds very beautifully that every resonance-cavity has what may be called its elective affinity, or one particular note, to the vibrations of which it responds sympathetically like a lover's heart answering that of his beloved. "As the crude tone issues from the larynx, the mouth, tongue and soft palate, ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller
... one elective committee that probably will need to be acted on, which is always done at the meeting before, and that's the nominations committee for ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 41st Annual Meeting • Various
... house in the West had been searched for its marriageable females. At one time a daughter of the Doge of Venice was nearly chosen. Unfortunately there were influential Greeks of greater pride than judgment to object to the Doge. He was merely an elective chief. He might die the very day after celebrating the espousals, and then—not even the ducal robes were inheritable. No, the flower to deck the Byzantine throne was not ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... adopted. Southerners and New Englanders brought to their new homes widely differing political usages. The former were accustomed to the county as the principal local unit of administration. It was a relatively large division, whose affairs were managed by elective officers, mainly a board of commissioners. The New Englanders, on the other hand, had grown up under the town-meeting system and clung to the notion that an indispensable feature of democratic local government is the periodic ...
— The Old Northwest - A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond, Volume 19 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Frederic Austin Ogg
... the same limitation to the exercise of the elective franchise. Those only should be permitted to exercise this power who are qualified to do so with advantage to the community; and all laws which regulate or limit the possession of this power should have in ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... what you've got. The public servant who has stolen or lied, If called on, may resign with honest pride: As unjust favor put him in, why doubt Disfavor as unjust has turned him out? Even it indicted, what is that but fudge To him who counted-in the elective judge? Whitewashed, he quits the politician's strife At ease in mind, with pockets filled for life; His 'lady' glares with gems whose vulgar blaze 60 The poor man through his heightened taxes pays, Himself content ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... practicing gymnastic exercises over the fence of the sty, and marauding in the garden. I wonder that Fourier never conceived the idea of having his garden land ploughed by pigs; for certainly they manifest quite a decided elective attraction for ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... garrisoned it with a Roman colony. The strangers thus brought to Rome were not admitted to a participation of civic rights; they were like the inhabitants of a corporate town who are excluded from the elective franchise: by successive immigrations, the number of persons thus disqualified became more numerous than that of the first inhabitants or old freemen, and they naturally sought a share in the government, as a means of protecting their persons ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... he did hold the shocking dogma attributed to him by more than one calumniator; and that, had the time been ripe, had there been aught to gain by it, instead of all to lose, he would have been the first to assert that Scotland was elective instead of hereditary—"elective as in the days of paganism," as one Thevet says in holy horror.[81] And yet, because the time was not ripe, I find no hint of such an idea in his collected works. Now, the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the whig ministry, drawn on broad and simple lines, struck at the root of this system. Its twofold basis was a liberal extension of the suffrage with a very large redistribution of seats. The elective franchise in counties, hitherto confined to freeholders, was to be conferred on L10 copyholders and L50 leaseholders; the borough franchise was to exclude "scot and lot" voters, "potwallopers" and most other survivals of antiquated electorates, but to include ratepaying L10 householders. ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... take care not to confound this frequent difficulty of transmission of our ideas with want of ideas. I suppose that a man's mind does in time form a neutral salt with the elements in the universe for which it has special elective affinities. In fact, I look upon a library as a kind of mental chemist's shop filled with the crystals of all forms and hues which have come from the union of individual thought with local circumstances or ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... tribe, a simple development of the former, an agglomeration of men of the same blood, who could all trace their pedigree to the acknowledged head; possessing, consequently, a chief of the same race, either hereditary or elective, according to variable rules always based on tradition. This was the case among the Jews, among the Arabs, with whom the system yet prevails; even it seems primitively in Hindostan, where modern research ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... Salemina wrapped herself in Francesca's long black cloak, and climbed into the cart. Dinnis hauls turf in it, takes a sack of potatoes or a pig to market in it, and the stubborn little ass, blind of one eye, has never in his wholly elective course of existence taken up ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... half abolished, emancipation is but half completed, while millions of freemen with votes in their hands are left without education. Justice to them, the welfare of the States in which they live, the safety of the whole Republic, the dignity of the elective franchise,—all alike demand that the still remaining bonds of ignorance shall be unloosed and broken, and the minds as well as the bodies ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... matter of negro suffrage I deemed it my duty to confine myself strictly to the practical aspects of the subject. I have, therefore, not touched its moral merits nor discussed the question whether the national government is competent to enlarge the elective franchise in the States lately in rebellion by its own act; I deem it proper, however, to offer a few remarks on the assertion frequently put forth, that the franchise is likely to be extended to the colored man by the voluntary action of the southern ...
— Report on the Condition of the South • Carl Schurz
... are satisfied if he gives the same reason. And so of various odors, which are pleasing to some persons and repulsive to others. We do not pretend to go behind the fact. It is an individual, and it may be a family, peculiarity. Even between different personalities there is an instinctive elective dislike as well as an elective affinity. We are not bound to give a reason why Dr. Fell is odious to us any more than the prisoner who peremptorily challenges a juryman is bound to say why he does it; it is enough that he "does ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... measure, self-perpetuating. It is a thoroughly democratic group of men, since it is composed of all the old men in the ato, no matter how wise or foolish, rich or poor — no matter what the man's social standing may be. Again, it is democratic — the simplest democracy — in that is has no elective organization, no headmen, no superiors or inferiors whose status in the in-tug-tu'-kan is determined by the members of the group. The feature of self-perpetuation displays itself in that it decides when the various men ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... equality of rights with them; we never could have an equality of the exercise and enjoyment of those rights—because, the great odds of numbers are against us. We might indeed, as some at present, have the right of the elective franchise—nay, it is not the elective franchise, because the elective franchise makes the enfranchised, eligible to any position attainable; but we may exercise the right of voting only, which to us, is but ...
— The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States • Martin R. Delany
... the absence of any contrary provision, all officers of this State, whether heretofore elected or appointed by the Governor, shall hold their positions only until other appointments are made by the Governor, or if the officers are elective, until their successors shall have been chosen and duly qualified according to the provisions ...
— School History of North Carolina • John W. Moore
... Assembly, and insisted on paying their salaries out of colonial funds. The Representative Assembly declined to furnish the supplies, complained of arbitrary infringement of the Constitution, and demanded that the Legislative Council, instead of being nominees of the Crown, should be made elective. ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... right to put questions to the Executive on matters of administration and, in the case of the Viceroy's Council, to discuss the financial policy of Government if and when the budget to be laid before it involved fresh taxation. The Act of 1892 did not, however, admit "the living forces of the elective principle" on which the Congress leaders had laid their chief stress, and they went on pressing "not for Consultative Councils, but for representative institutions." Their hopes never perhaps rose so high as when one of their own veterans, ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... acceptance, why do you sit so lumpishly in your great-great-grandfather's oaken chair, as if preferring it to the gubernatorial one? We have all heard of King Log; but, in these jostling times, one of that royal kindred will hardly win the race for an elective chief-magistracy. ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... been conferred on mankind. We have seen anarchy and servitude at once removed, a throne strengthened for the protection of the people, without trenching on their liberties, all foreign cabal banished, by changing the crown from elective to hereditary; and what was a matter of pleasing wonder, we have seen a reigning King, from an heroic love to his country, exerting himself with all the toil, the dexterity, the management, the intrigue, in favour of a family of strangers, ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... Legal rather than Priestly.—While some of these priestly colleges exercised large powers, these powers were always regarded not as inherent but deputed. The sacred offices were not hereditary but elective; no course of training was necessary to qualify for them; men were chosen for them by the state as for any other public office, and those who became priests did not cease to be citizens but continued to sit in the Senate, and, as it might happen, to hold other ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... exigencies, whatever they may be, of the British empire; but they make this participation of the publick burden a duty of very uncertain extent, and imperfect obligation, a duty temporary, occasional, and elective, of which they reserve to themselves the right of settling the degree, the time, and the duration; of judging when it may be required, and when it ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... in the eighty-fifth year of the Explosion, had established a Parliamentary form of government, set up generally along the usual model: bicameral, elective and pretty slow. Trade relations with Earth and with the six other inhabited planets had been set up as rapidly as possible, and Wohlen had become a full member of the Comity within ...
— The Man Who Played to Lose • Laurence Mark Janifer
... impulse; and that for two reasons: the first external, because there he will render the best services; the second personal, because a demand of his own nature is to him without appeal whenever it can be satisfied with the consent of his other faculties and appetites. If he has no such elective taste, by the very principle on which he chooses any pursuit at all he must choose the most honest and serviceable, and not the most highly remunerated. We have here an external problem, not from or to ourself, but flowing from the constitution of society; and we have our ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... number of provinces, each with the usual corps of elective officers. A governor-general appointed by the Crown of Great Britain ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... to preach and arm in peace. And here is nothing between him and his task of supervision—no pampered soldiery to repress his rising, no iron authority to lay him by the heels. The militia is fraternal, the magistracy elective. Europe may hold out a little longer. The Great Powers may make what stage-play they will, but they are not maintaining their incalculable armaments for aggression upon one another, for protection from one another, nor for fun. These vast forces are purely ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... information was conveyed to these princes, and particularly to the latter, who had the rule of Asia, that numerous private consultations were held, as to the duration of their authority, and the person of the individual who should come after them. The succession of the Roman empire was elective; and consequently there was almost an unlimited scope for conjecture in this question. Among the various modes of enquiry that were employed we are told, that the twenty-four letters of the alphabet were artificially disposed in a circle, and that a magic ring, being suspended ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... mule by the bridle into the town, and removed to a respectful distance the importunity of the crowd. Without renouncing his title by royal descent, Palaeologus encouraged a free discussion into the advantages of elective monarchy; and his adherents asked, with the insolence of triumph, what patient would trust his health, or what merchant would abandon his vessel, to the hereditary skill of a physician or a pilot? The youth of the emperor, and the impending ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... was retained upon the crown owing to a series of disputed successions to the throne. The Anglo-Saxon monarchy had always been in theory elective, and William had been careful to observe the form. His son, William II, had to obtain election in order to secure the throne against the claims of his elder brother Robert, and Henry I followed his example for similar reasons. Each had to make election promises in ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... believe, is unequally applicable to different nations, who have made unequal advances in the establishment of property. Among the Caribbees, and the other natives of the warmer climates in America, the dignity of chieftain is hereditary, or elective, and continued for life: the unequal distribution of property creates a visible subordination. [Footnote: Wafer's Account of the Isthmus of Darien.] But among the Iroquois, and other nations of the temperate zone, the titles of magistrate and subject, of ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... temporary chief magistrates did not enjoy their dignity long enough to become torpid or careless, but were interested in distinguishing themselves by the activity of their conduct while in office; whereas, in hereditary power, or elective monarchy, the personal feelings of the chief, which must have an influence upon the conduct of a nation, must sometimes, happily for mankind, lead him to seek peace ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... Arts. This is a nuance to be observed. Under the Empire, hard and despotic as was the rule of Bonaparte, and anxious even as he was to draw round him all the aristocratic names that would consent to serve his government, there was—owing to the mere force of events and the elective origin of the throne—a strong and necessary democratic feeling, that assigned importance to each man according to his works. Besides this, let it be well observed, the first Empire had a strong tendency ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... the right to hold legislative or administrative office, either elective or appointive, to all Jews other than those whose parents and grandparents were all ...
— The Jew and American Ideals • John Spargo
... Cacama, the present king, a young prince who was two-and-twenty years old when he ascended the throne, after a sanguinary war with an ambitious younger brother. In Tezcuco, as in Mexico, the office of king was elective and not hereditary. It was, indeed, confined to the royal family; but the elective council, composed of the nobles and of the kings of the other two great confederate monarchies, selected the member of that family whom they considered best ...
— By Right of Conquest - Or, With Cortez in Mexico • G. A. Henty
... whirlpool of dangers, even if Divine Providence may not permit a nation to be stranded and wrecked altogether. In the politics of Savonarola we see great wisdom, and yet great sympathy for freedom. He would give the people all that they were fit for. He would make all offices elective, but only by the suffrages of the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... retained his dignity for life: he was even removed from all responsibility to the people. That Mueller should consider this an admirable institution, "a splendid monument of early Grecian customs," seems to me not a little extraordinary. I can conceive no elective council less practically good than one to which election is for life, and in which power is irresponsible. That the institution was felt to be faulty is apparent, not because it was abolished, but ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... reprisals on their Irish neighbours, seized robbers, recovered stolen property, and continued during some weeks to act in all things as an independent commonwealth. The government was carried on by elective officers, to whom every member of the society swore fidelity on the Holy ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... degree they come under the control of the Church. The commissioners appoint the teachers in the schools and keep up the school buildings, but their outlay is also very small, for the salaries of teachers, usually women, are appallingly low. The really important elective office in the parish is that of churchwarden (marguiller). In the church the churchwardens have a special seat of honour assigned to them. They control the temporalities and may beard even the cure himself. Large sums of money pass ...
— A Canadian Manor and Its Seigneurs - The Story of a Hundred Years, 1761-1861 • George M. Wrong
... United Provinces. They hoped that these princes, moved by the connections of blood, as well as by the tie of their common religion, would interest themselves in all the fortunes of Frederic, and would promote his greatness. They therefore made him a tender of their crown, which they considered as elective; and the young palatine, stimulated by ambition, without consulting either James[*] or Maurice, whose opposition he foresaw, immediately accepted the offer, and marched all his forces into Bohemia, in support of his ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... German was an elective study, it was by no means a favorite in the school, and, it may be, Miss Sausmann was not a popular teacher. Broken English, too great an affection for, and estimation of the grandeur of, the Fatherland, joined with a quick temper, do not ...
— Miss Ashton's New Pupil - A School Girl's Story • Mrs. S. S. Robbins
... been written on all sides of this subject, there now remains no doubt that, from the earliest to the latest age of Rome, the Senate was strictly, although an aristocratical, still an elective ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... opportunities will have broadened, and you begin to have something similar to the elective system. You can choose more freely how to spend your time. Your development to this point, I have already said, may be called the rounding of the handle; and your education will be normal if you have average ...
— A Jolly by Josh • "Josh"
... and governed by two principles; one of them corresponds to the vie animale of BICHAT, and the other to the vie organique. Since the power of sensation and of voluntary or elective motion, says he, is a property of animals, and since that of growth and nutrition is common both to animals and plants; the former may be called attributes of the soul, and the latter attributes of nature. Whence we say, that animals are governed by the soul and by nature, while plants ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... toward his own wife, and perhaps increase hers also. In this way, a flame which threatened to destroy conjugal happiness may sometimes serve to strengthen it, by reviving afresh the mutual feelings of love and desire. In the first part of his "Wahlverwandtschaften" (elective affinities), Goethe designates this phenomenon by the term mental adultery; but I am of the opinion that it is rather the expression of a mental conjugal fidelity which is strengthened by ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... Certainly we cannot suppose that the divine beings actually and literally turn our bodies and direct our hands and our feet this way or that, to do what is right: it is obvious that they must actuate the practical and elective element of our nature, by certain initial occasions, by images presented to the imagination, and thoughts suggested to the mind, such either as to excite it to, or avert and withhold it from, any ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... her neat little gloved hand, bid stop. She stepped lightly into it, while I, with my usual impetuosity, without knowing exactly what I was doing, sprang after her. I consoled myself for my apparent rudeness by throwing the entire blame upon the elective affinities. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... the licensing authorities be appointive or elective? By whom should they be appointed, and for what term ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... assured. The several actions of the colonial governing bodies lend us that assurance. England can do no more for us than already has been done; and what has been done by the Colonies will be guaranteed by the elective body of the people in the days of independence. I am fearful of the hazards that will accompany this enlistment. Give me leave to address you on this topic that you may understand my troubled state of mind. I appeal to you. Give me leave ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... political affairs which we now term revolutions. It may best be described by saying that the monarchy was put into commission. The powers heretofore accumulated in the hands of a single person were parcelled out among a number of elective functionaries, the very name of the kingly office being retained and imposed on a personage known subsequently as the Rex Sacrorum or Rex Sacrificulus. As part of the change, the settled duties of the supreme judicial office devolved on the Praetor, at the time the first functionary in the commonwealth, ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... from the outbreak of hostilities was Poland. That Republic entered on a new lease of life in the spring of the year 1791. The constitution adopted with enthusiasm on 3rd May substituted an hereditary for an elective monarchy, and otherwise strengthened the fabric of that almost anarchic State. Social and civic reforms promised also to call its burghers and serfs to a life of activity or comfort. But the change at once aroused keen dislike at St. Petersburg and Berlin. ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... had the balance of forces carried the nation bodily over to Protestantism (as was very nearly the case) towards the end of the sixteenth century. Heinrich Heine has expressed the opinion that the western races contain a large proportion of men for whom the moral principle of Judaism has a strong elective affinity; and in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Old Testament certainly seems to have exercised a much more powerful influence on the minds of religious reformers than the New. "The Jews," says ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... Spencer has well expressed the same idea by the Survival of the Fittest. The term "natural selection" is in some respects a bad one, as it seems to imply conscious choice; but this will be disregarded after a little familiarity. No one objects to chemists speaking of "elective affinity;" and certainly an acid has no more choice in combining with a base, than the conditions of life have in determining whether or not a new form be selected or preserved. The term is so far a good ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... Commons as may render its votes the express image of the opinion of the middle orders of Britain. A pecuniary qualification we think absolutely necessary; and in settling its amount, our object would be to draw the line in such a manner that every decent farmer and shopkeeper might possess the elective franchise. We should wish to see an end put to all the advantages which particular forms of property possess over other forms, and particular portions of property over other equal portions. And this would content us. ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... qualities,[711] this chemistry and vegetation, these metals and animals, which seem to stand there for their own sake, are means and methods only, are words of God, and as fugitive as other words. Has the naturalist or chemist learned his craft, who has explored the gravity of atoms and the elective affinities, who has not yet discerned the deeper law whereof this is only a partial or approximate statement, namely that like draws to like, and that the goods which belong to you gravitate to you and need not be pursued with pains and cost? Yet is that statement approximate also, ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Common Council, which rules over the City of London within the old boundaries. The Folks' Mote was a Parliament of the People—a rude and tumultuous assembly, no doubt, but a free assembly. When the City grew great such a Parliament became impossible. It therefore became an elective Parliament. The election was—and is still—conducted at the Ward Motes, each Ward returning so many members in proportion to its population, for the Common Council. The Councillors are elected for one year only. If there is a vacancy an Alderman ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant
... State authority, and to station a Federal officer at every cross-road. This, of course, cannot be done, and ought not even if it could. The true way and the easiest way is to make our government entirely consistent with itself, and give to every loyal citizen the elective franchise,—a right and power which will be ever present, and will form a wall of fire ...
— Collected Articles of Frederick Douglass • Frederick Douglass
... or resolutely royalist, gave birth to the 221 on that famous day when the struggle openly began between the most august, grandest, and only true power, royalty, and the most false, most changeful, most oppressive of all powers,—the power called parliamentary, which elective assemblies exercise. The salon du Ronceret, secretly allied to the Cormon salon, ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... for a XVI. Amendment to the National Constitution, to secure to women the right of suffrage, is now pending in Congress. Some phase of this question is being debated every year in State Legislatures. Propositions for so amending their constitutions as to extend the elective franchise to women will be voted upon by the people in four of the Western States within the coming two years. These successive steps of progress during forty years are as surely a part of the History of Woman Suffrage as ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... Conrad, Duke of the Franks, grandsons of Henry IV, were the hereditary and dynastic successors to the throne of Germany, when with the death of Henry V in 1125 the male line of the Franconian dynasty ended. The brothers demanded the assertion of the elective right in the imperial office, and Lothair, Duke of Saxony, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... our critics so uniformly accuse us of subjectivism, of denying the reality's existence? It comes, I think, from the necessary predominance of subjective language in our analysis. However independent and elective realities may be, we can talk about them, in framing our accounts of truth, only as so many objects believed-in. But the process of experience leads men so continually to supersede their older objects by newer ones which they find it more satisfactory to believe in, that the notion ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... inhabitants are long-lived; they trade in brass, lead, iron, steel, copper, skins, furs, deals, oak, pitch, and tar: They are civil, and so industrious that a beggar is not to be seen among them; good soldiers, strong and healthy. It was formerly elective, but now hereditary. It is governed by a King and the States, which consist of the nobility, clergy, and the merchants; their religion is Lutheranism, ...
— A Museum for Young Gentlemen and Ladies - A Private Tutor for Little Masters and Misses • Unknown
... even restored the republic, there is reason to believe that the nation would again have been soon distracted with internal divisions, and a perpetual succession of civil wars. The manners of the people were become too dissolute to be restrained by the authority of elective and temporary magistrates; and the Romans were hastening to that fatal period when general and great corruption, with its attendant debility, would render them an easy prey to ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... executive responsible to the representatives of the people. Office-holders were made ineligible to seats in the Legislature. The Ministers were henceforth to be removable only upon a vote of want of confidence passed by a majority of all the elective members of the Legislature. The Nobles, instead of being appointed by the King, were to be elected for terms of six years, by electors who should be possessed of taxable property worth $3,000, or in receipt of ...
— The Hawaiian Islands • The Department of Foreign Affairs
... latter. For by necessity here he means the motive cause of bodies, which in other places he calls Fate. And this with great propriety; since every body is compelled to do whatever it does, and to suffer whatever it suffers; to heat or to be heated, to impart or to receive cold. But the elective power is unknown to a corporeal nature; so that the necessary and the nonelective may be said to be the ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... constitution from its natural enemies, the spirit of sophistry, the spirit of party, the spirit of intrigue, profligacy, and corruption, and the pestilence of foreign influence, which is the angel of destruction to elective governments, if a love of equal laws, of justice and humanity, in the interior administration; if an inclination to improve agriculture, commerce, and manufactures for necessity, convenience, and defense; if a spirit of ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... with the Pope, was never a close bond of union, even in his stern and able hands. Under his weak successors that imposing league rarely promoted peace among its peoples, while the splendour of its chief elective dignity not seldom conduced to war. Next, feudalism came in as a strong political solvent, and thus for centuries Germany crumbled and mouldered away, until disunion seemed to be the fate of her richest lands, and particularism ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... an elective monarchy, like that of Poland, the king being selected from the royal family by the votes of the nobles of the kingdom. There was a royal family, an aristocracy, a privileged priesthood, a judiciary, and a common people. Here we have ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... inequality? Are not the very letter and spirit of the marriage contract based on the idea of the supremacy of man as the keeper of woman's virtue—her sole protector and support? Out of marriage, woman asks nothing at this hour but the elective franchise. It is only in marriage that she must demand her rights to person, children, property, wages, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. How can we discuss all the laws and conditions of marriage, without perceiving its essential essence, end, and aim? Now, whether the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... real culprit. He had finally taken his own life—years afterward the facts had come out. At the time the story had both puzzled and worried Amory. Now he realized the truth; that sacrifice was no purchase of freedom. It was like a great elective office, it was like an inheritance of power—to certain people at certain times an essential luxury, carrying with it not a guarantee but a responsibility, not a security but an infinite risk. Its very momentum might drag him ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... has certainly offered a new and striking subject to the historical school of British art. A little further on, speaking of Mary Powell, he says, "We have no portrait of her, nor any account of her appearance; but on the usual rule of the elective affinities of opposites, Milton being fair, we will vote her to have been dark-haired." I need say nothing of the good taste of this sentence, but its absurdity is heightened by the fact that Mr. Masson himself had left ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... representative assemblies in each province, also a National Senate, in preparation for an elective government. Tumultuous demands made for ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... change was made in the traditional custom of entrusting the management of each uji's affairs to its own Kami. But, in order to guard against the abuses of the hereditary right, an uji no Kami ceased in certain cases to succeed by birthright and became elective, the election requiring ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... of the Kansas Legislature meeting a Cake of Soap was passing it by without recognition, but the Cake of Soap insisted on stopping and shaking hands. Thinking it might possibly be in the enjoyment of the elective franchise, he gave it a cordial and earnest grasp. On letting it go he observed that a portion of it adhered to his fingers, and running to a brook in great alarm he proceeded to wash it off. In doing so he necessarily got some on the other hand, ...
— Fantastic Fables • Ambrose Bierce
... to a critical juncture. The Constitution had been adopted. The new government had been set in operation under the supervision of Washington, as the first President of the Republic. The people, influenced by certain "elective affinities," had become sundered into two great political parties—Conservative and Progressive, or Federal and Democratic. Both were distrustful of the Constitution. The former believed it too weak to consolidate a government ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... the author of the last of the 'Rulers of India' series—Sir Somebody Something, K.C.S.I. My unconscionable humbug of a parent probably wants to get something approaching a fact out of him. Daddy's writing a thing for one of the reviews on the elective principle for India this week. He says he's the only writer on Indian subjects who isn't disqualified by ever having been there, and is consequently quite ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... by a surprising conjunction of circumstances he was lifted, at one bound, to the highest and widest sphere of influence, upon the opinion of the country, which our political establishment presents—I mean the Senate of the United States. The elective body, the Legislature of Ohio, was filled in almost equal numbers with Whigs and Democrats, but a handful of Liberty party men held the control to prevent or determine a majority. They elected Mr. Chase. The concurrence is similar, in its main features, ...
— Eulogy on Chief-Justice Chase - Delivered by William M. Evarts before the Alumni of - Dartmouth College, at Hanover • William M. Evarts
... were held as to the constitution of the chief executive office. After the initial question, whether the office should be single or plural, was decided, the manner of election remained to be considered. The early proposal to make the President elective by the national legislature was dropped as the office assumed greater importance in the general scheme. If the independence of the legislature was to be maintained, some form of indirect popular choice was favored. But if the people were to elect, the larger States would have a decided advantage. ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... there was a great ringing of bells in Casterbridge, and the combined brass, wood, catgut, and leather bands played round the town with more prodigality of percussion-notes than ever. Farfrae was Mayor—the two-hundredth odd of a series forming an elective dynasty dating back to the days of Charles I—and the fair Lucetta was the courted of the town....But, Ah! the worm i' the bud—Henchard; what he ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy |
