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Pettifogging   Listen
adjective
Pettifogging  adj.  Paltry; quibbling; mean.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Pettifogging" Quotes from Famous Books



... happiness of childhood into political discussion, and this opened up a new source of political power. By touching something deeply instinctive in millions of people, Judge Lindsey animated dull proposals with human interest. The pettifogging objections to some social plan had very little chance of survival owing to the dynamic power of the reformers. It was an excellent example of the creative results that come from centering a ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann

... James Stuart Hay, father of John Sobieski and Charles Edward Stuart, this mysterious person avers that he never knew Scott's opinion to be held as of any value by antiquaries (1829). They probably missed in him "a sort of pettifogging intimacy with dates, names, and trifling matters of fact,a tiresome and frivolous accuracy of memory" which Sir Arthur Wardour reproves in Monkbarns. Scott, in brief, was not as Dry-as-dust; all the dead bones that he touches come to life. He was as great ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott

... consequence of a blow struck by her, and concerned themselves not with several previous abortive blows. The prisoner, knowing himself proved actually guilty, and the numerous chances existing against him on the record, if he chose to make pettifogging experiments upon its technical sufficiency, submitted to his ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various

... knew fairer or more noble conduct in a pleader than in Otis; that he always defended his causes solely on their broad and substantial foundations." Among other stories and items of fact put forth in evidence of his contempt of the pettifogging and professional lying so common in these degenerate days, is the following: Being engaged on one occasion to recover the amount of a bill which was alleged by the defendant to have been paid, he discovered, quite ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 4, April, 1886 • Various

... that honour and patriotism were ideologies bourgeoises and that the "economic interests" of Belgium would be best promoted by a submission. These pedantic barbarians got the answer which they deserved; but on their pettifogging thesis Raemaekers' cartoon is ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers

... had been nominated at the right time and in the right way, according to your understanding of punctilios, wouldn't the same resistance have been made and the same row got up? You know right well that there would. Then what is all your pettifogging about technicalities worth? The only question that anybody cares a button about is this, "Shall woman be allowed to participate in your World's Temperance Convention on a footing of perfect equality with man?" If yea, the whole dispute turns on nothing, and isn't worth six lines in ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper

... was his distinct pledge to the people during his campaign, that if they elected him governor he would make himself the leader of the party, would broadly and not with pettifogging legalism interpret his constitutional relationship to the Legislature, would undertake to assist in legislative action, and not wait supinely for the Legislature to do something, and then sign or veto the thing done. Moreover, he had insisted on the principle of ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty

... forwards the next day, we passed through Pettifogging, a country all blurred and blotted, so that I could hardly tell what to make on't. There we saw some pettifoggers and catchpoles, rogues that will hang their father for a groat. They neither invited us to eat or drink; but, with a multiplied train of scrapes and cringes, ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais

... to Schuetz requesting him to journey to Schaffhausen on important business. The attorney arrived, and Wilhelmine observed how shabby was his coat, how rusty his general appearance. He was again the pettifogging lawyer in poor circumstances, and Wilhelmine reflected that he would be all the more anxious to serve her in order to return to his ill-gotten splendour at ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay

... reported to her confederates. "For calm self-complacency I've never seen anybody to equal her. The idea of imagining me as a new girl at her wretched pettifogging old school! Oh, it's too precious! She'd patronize the Queen herself! The Poplars must be executing a war-dance for joy to have got rid of her. Probably they'd have subscribed for more than a bracelet to pass ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil

... preparation the older, the "ladylike," Suffrage women did, but we came at last to see that all that was possible to accomplish that way had been done. The Cause hadn't moved an inch for years. It was even doing the other thing. Yes, it was going backward. Even the miserable little pettifogging share women had had in Urban and Borough Councils—even that they were deprived of. And they were tamely submitting! Women who had been splendid workers ten years ago, women with the best capacities for public service, had fallen ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins

... with a harsh laugh. "You must remember there are two sides to the question. I should say that the interests of a husband and wife were identical, but that is not the view taken by those wretched little pettifogging country lawyers." ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant

... of the mother. The distiller was to her as the publican to the ancient Jew. No dealing in rags and marine stores, no scraping of a fortune by pettifogging, chicane, and cheating, was to her half so abominable as the trade of a brewer. Worse yet was a brewer owning public-houses, gathering riches in half-pence wet with beer and smelling of gin. The brewer was to ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald

... apprenticeship was only held for a season. Indeed, Khalid must have recoiled from the practice. Or in his recklessness, not to say obtrusion, he must have been outrageous enough to express in the office of the honourable attorney, or in the neighbourhood thereof, his views about pettifogging and such like, that the said honourable attorney was under the painful necessity of asking him to stay home. Nay, the young Syrian was discharged. Or to put it in a term adequate to the manner in which this was done, ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani

... dissimilarity in the mode of election, as fatal to this argument in the mouth of an English High Churchman, I was told that "the Crown now represents the Laity!" Such a fiction may be satisfactory to a pettifogging lawyer, but as the basis of a spiritual system is indeed ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman

... persons who usually threw their boots away or sold them to second-hand dealers may have been induced to send them to Mr Bosher instead. But all the same nearly everybody said it was a splendid idea: its originator was applauded as a public benefactor, and the pettifogging busybodies who amused themselves with what they were pleased to term 'charitable work' went into imbecile ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell

... the time, but at the cost of lasting distrust among the Powers. Generous in his aims, he at first befriended the German and Italian national movements, but forfeited all the fruits of those actions by his pettifogging conduct about Savoy and Nice, the Rhineland and Belgium; while his final efforts to please French clericals and Chauvinists[20] by supporting the Pope at Rome, lost him the support of States that might have retrieved the earlier blunders. In brief, by helping on the nationalists ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose

... here give the further history of this claim. It met with the usual delays and obstructions that private claims, having nothing but their intrinsic merits to support them, are compelled to encounter. It called forth the usual amount of legislative pettifogging. Session after session passed away, and still it hung between the two Houses of Congress, until the very time which had elapsed since it was first presented began to be brought up as an argument against it. At length, when Congress established the Court of Claims, a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... plural form, which may be used without offence; but in Paris every profession, learned or unlearned, has its omega, the individual who brings it down to the level of the lowest class; and the written law has its connecting link with the custom right of the streets. There are districts where the pettifogging man of business, known as Lawyer So-and-So, is still to be found. M. Fraisier was to the member of the Incorporated Law Society as the money-lender of the Halles, offering small loans for a short period at an exorbitant interest, is to ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac

... a pettifogging colonial policy, commerce was turned into the merest peculation by a class of persons who made it their object to restrict the agriculturist, and hold his interests at their mercy. The more the farmer raised, the more he ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton

... that if she possessed a fief, the whole of it was confiscated. A good many sections of the code deal with legal procedure and the conduct and duty of magistrates, the great objects being to make the administration of justice simple, prompt, and pure, while repressing everything in the shape of pettifogging or factious litigation. ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi

... pettifogging barrister, with all his father's faults and none of his grandfather's virtues—for whom Mary had advanced money so that he could go to college, came to her in her dire extremity and proffered help. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard

... This good fellow, quotha? I scorn that base, broking, brabbling, brawling, bastardly, bottle-nosed, beetle-browed, bean-bellied name. Why, Robin Goodfellow is this same cogging, pettifogging, crackropes, calf-skin companion. Put me and my father over to him? Old Silver-top, and you had not put me before ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various

... man for honestly advocating any policy which he thinks will aid the Union cause. But the country was never more disgusted than it is at present, with men who use politics as a mere trade by which to live. The infamy which has attached to the miserable and imbecile Buchanan, that type of degraded, pettifogging diplomacy, is rapidly extending to his whole tribe—and their name is legion. It is significant that a bank, whose notes bore as vignette a portrait of the ex-honorable ex-President, has been obliged to call them ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... pity that some good man has not set Hadley up in a better business than pettifogging. Apply to your patron, Judge Innes. Lick his foot. There's an immaculate judge for you! Talk of corruption! I've been present at every session of the court whenever the case of Burr came up. Away back as early as the beginning of November Daviess ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable

... a humiliating confession of impotence to maintain order within the national borders, or it justified Canning's contention that it was in retaliation for the "Leopard's" action. His further plea, that it must therefore be taken into the account in determining the reparation due, was pettifogging, reducing a question of insult and amends to one of debit and credit bookkeeping; but the American claim that the step was necessary to internal quiet was puerile, and its precipitancy carried the appearance ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan

... difference between a country attorney and an attorney in Paris; tall Cointet was too clever not to know this, and to turn the meaner passions that move a pettifogging lawyer to good account. An eminent attorney in Paris, and there are many who may be so qualified, is bound to possess to some extent the diplomate's qualities; he had so much business to transact, business in which large ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac

... deceptive, sophistical, jesuitical; illusive, illusory; specious, hollow, plausible, ad captandum [Lat.], evasive; irrelevant &c 10. weak, feeble, poor, flimsy, loose, vague. irrational; nonsensical &c (absurd) 497. foolish &c (imbecile) 499; frivolous, pettifogging, quibbling; finespun^, overrefined^. at the end of one's tether, au bout de son latin. Adv. intuitively &c adj.; by intuition; illogically &c adj.. Phr. non constat [Lat.]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... should display so open a disregard of the ordinary rules of courtesy and hospitality. To drag in their political differences at such a time, when he had come beneath the other's roof merely to render him an unavoidable service! To stoop to the pettifogging sophistry of the agitator simply because his opponent had ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow

... Minor Canon; a libel action had ensued, and the jury had been beguiled into finding for the defendant on a bare literal construction of words which to anybody acquainted with local circumstances bore another and much blacker meaning. This Mrs. Baxter called a pettifogging trick, and she pursued her parallel till the same terms were obviously indicated as ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope

... unhealthy, repulsive face, I was overcome by a feeling of almost physical nausea. I realised fully how loathsome this gutter Iago had become to me during the past few months, during which I had had ample opportunity to note his pettifogging envy and jealousy, his almost simian inquisitiveness and prying curiosity. I felt I could not work with him; his presence had become intolerable to me. I realised that this was the finale, the destined end of the Tocsin and of my active revolutionary ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith

... initiative alone, and vigilant supervision, as did Hawke and Rodney, or by adding to this the broad view of discretion in subordinates which Nelson took. Before leaving this subject, note may be taken of a pettifogging argument advanced by Lestock and adopted by the Court, that orders to these three ships to press ahead would have resulted in nothing, because of the lightness of the wind then and afterwards. True, doubtless, and known after the fact; but who before the ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan

... using precautions that seemingly set suspicion at defiance, to engage in smuggling-adventures on a large scale, for which his proximity to the coast afforded a local opportunity. Notwithstanding all his pettifogging cleverness, the ex-attorney was detected, however, in his illegal traffic, and fined to an amount which swept away half his real property. Driven to desperation by the publicity of his failure, as well as by the failure itself, he tried another grand effort to retrieve his fortune; ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various

... an encumbrance, since he was in the vein for operatic entertainments just then, and, furthermore, he pictured himself as a future monopolist controlling the destinies of two houses. For he never dreamed, did this haggling, pettifogging lawyer, that Swiney would swerve from the old time allegiance to him, and he felt so secure on this point that he privately encouraged the desertion of his own forces. He made one exception, however, by stipulating that Cibber should remain at Drury ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins

... the morality of public bodies. They grow more and more tenacious of their idle privileges and senseless self-consequence. They get weak and obstinate at the same time. Those who belong to them have all the upstart pride and pettifogging spirit of their present character ingrafted on the venerableness and superstitious sanctity of ancient institutions. They are naturally at issue, first with their neighbours, and next with their contemporaries, on all matters of common propriety and judgment. They become ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt

... damaging, and is really a libel, but to sustain an action real damage must be proved, or it must be shown that malice and ill-will have prompted the objectionable adverse opinions. But, as we know, there are certain pettifogging men of law who are ever ready to encourage people to bring actions for libel for the mere sake of getting damages. I believe I have thus stated the case correctly, but I am not a "limb of the law," not even an amputated limb, or a law student. I speak from what I have seen in the Libel Acts ...
— A Tale of One City: The New Birmingham - Papers Reprinted from the "Midland Counties Herald" • Thomas Anderton

... said Major Overstone with an affectation of tone and manner different from that in which he had addressed his previous companions, "have the Ninth United States Cavalry helped to serve a State court's pettifogging process?" ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... morning's work he started off in the direction of Lincoln's Inn Fields. He was pleased to find that the firm of George Fleming & Co. occupied good offices, and that the clerks looked as if they had been there a long time. It was just as well not to have a pettifogging lawyer to deal with. Mr. Fleming was in, but he was engaged for a little time. Perhaps the gentleman would state his business; but on the ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White

... the world shattered upon so slight a pretext? A little time, a few days, even a few hours, might have sufficed to preserve the world from present horrors, but no time could be granted. A colossal snap judgment was to be taken by these pettifogging diplomats. A timely word from the German Chancellor would have saved the flower of the youth of Germany and Austria from perishing. It would be difficult to find in recorded history a greater discourtesy to a friendly power, for Austria was ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various

... doubt, regarded as typical of the noble qualities of its wearer. These being so hateful to the ugly, sly, intriguing, slandering, malevolent, ill-conditioned, pettifogging, pitiful arch-enemy, it might well be supposed that the mere apparition of that type would scare him away. To this supposition is ascribable the adoption of the horse-shoe, as an infallible charm against the visits ...
— The True Legend of St. Dunstan and the Devil • Edward G. Flight

... pettifogging schemer told me he didn't wish me to come to his house again, and I wouldn't, even for Fanny Wyndham, force myself into any man's house. He would not let me see her when I was there, and I could not press it, because her brother was only just dead; so I'm obliged to take ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope

... high priest in his vestments. What come vividly back on my mind are remembrances of my delight in the histories of Joseph and of David; and of my keen appreciation of the chivalrous kindness of Abraham in his dealings with Lot. Like a sudden flash there returns back upon me, my utter scorn of the pettifogging meanness of Jacob, and my sympathetic grief over the heartbreaking lamentation of the cheated Esau, "Hast thou not a blessing for me also, O my father?" And I see, as in a cloud, pictures of the grand phantasmagoria of the Book ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley

... my perversity. I have a certain pleasure in overcoming these obstacles, and fighting these folks with their own weapons. I do so long to be able to trust men implicitly. I have such a horror of all this literary pettifogging. I could be so content myself, if the necessity of making a position would allow it, to work on anonymously, but — I see is determined not to let either me or any one else rise if he can help it. Let him beware. On my own subjects I am his master, and am quite ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley

... his Church, did not wish to incur the accusation of grasping and avarice, he dreaded nothing so much as a law-case. To accept lightly the gifts and legacies offered was to lay himself open to expensive pettifogging. Far better to refuse than to lose both his money and reputation. So were reconciled, in this man of prayer and meditation, practical good sense with the high disinterestedness of the ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand

... momentum of the blow, which in an instant laid him flat on the floor, deprived of all sense and motion; and Trunnion hopped upstairs to dinner, applauding himself in ejaculations all the way for the vengeance he had taken on such an impudent pettifogging miscreant. ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett

... relate; and, instead of forming the instruments of knightly vengeance and redress, remind us of the machinery of a bad German novel, or of the disclosures which might be expected on the trial of a pettifogging attorney. The obscurity and intricacy which they communicate to the whole story, must be very painfully felt by every reader who tries to comprehend it; and is prodigiously increased by the very clumsy and inartificial manner in which ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney

... had no more arithmetic for computing fingers than any perfect-headed marble Apollo mutilated at the wrists. He should have consented to know but the grand personal adventure on the grand personal basis: nothing short of this, no poor cognisance of confusable, pettifogging things, the sphere of earth-grubbing questions and two-penny issues, would begin to be, ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James

... recognised treatises, it is still a law of modern Political Economy that the larger the scale on which Capitalistic Production is carried on, the less can it support the petty devices of swindling and pilfering which characterise its early stages. The pettifogging business tricks of the Polish Jew, the representative in Europe of commerce in its lowest stage, those tricks that serve him so well in his own country, and are generally practised there, he finds to be out of date and out of place when he comes to Hamburg ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels

... Therefore, in what follows, we shall consider names, independent of whether they are first or last. And to begin with, look what a pull Cromwell had over Pym—the one name full of a resonant imperialism, the other, mean, pettifogging, and unheroic to a degree. Who would expect eloquence from Pym—who would read poems by Pym—who would bow to the opinion of Pym? He might have been a dentist, but he should never have aspired to be a statesman. I can only wonder that he succeeded as he did. Pym and Habakkuk stand first ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... of the Glenvarloch estate!" said Dalgarno. "Dare not say it is, or I will, upon the spot, divorce your pettifogging soul from your carrion carcass!" So saying, he seized the scrivener by the collar, and shook him so vehemently, that he ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott

... out, Thady: kick him out, will ye?—Have ye none of the owld blood left round your heart, that you'll not kick him out of the house, for a pettifogging schaming blackguard!" and Larry got up as though he meant to have a kick at ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope

... majority, or the national necessity for the time being, has always been constitutional; which is only as much as to say that the Convention of 1787 was not wholly made up of inspired prophets, who could provide beforehand for every possible contingency. The doctrine of a strict and even pettifogging interpretation of the Constitution had its rise among men who looked upon that instrument as a treaty, and at a time when the conception of a national power which should receive that of the States into its stream as tributary ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell

... himself. It will be seen, despite of all that has been said to the disadvantage of the devil, that he has very much improved in his management of worldly affairs; so much so, that, instead of an administration of witches, wizzards, magicians, diviners, astrologers, quack doctors, pettifogging lawyers, and boroughmongers, he has selected some of the wisest men as well as greatest fools of the day to carry his plans into effect. His satanic majesty seems also to have considerably improved in his taste; owing, no doubt, to the present improving state of society, and the ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian

... not reinstated till the British Empire had been without a cabinet for eleven weeks. The French overran the whole of Hanover and rounded up the Duke of Cumberland at Kloster-Seven. Mordaunt and his pettifogging councils of war turned the joint expedition against Rochefort into a complete fiasco; while Montcalm again defeated the British in America by ...
— The Great Fortress - A Chronicle of Louisbourg 1720-1760 • William Wood

... head, which Mrs. Brookes perceiving, she shook her head in turn, and, taking out her handkerchief, wept copiously. Dr. Tuffnell tried to soothe the patient with gentle words, but she (mistaking him for a pettifogging lawyer, whom D'Alton had engaged to bind her over to keep the peace) ...
— The Mysteries of Montreal - Being Recollections of a Female Physician • Charlotte Fuhrer

... pettifogging attorney, who derived a tolerable income from a rather disreputable legal practice picked up among the courts that held their sessions in the various halls of the State-house. He was known in the profession ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb

... where the train was standing, and tears trickled down each side of his nose. It was hard, he thought, to be within sight of safety and almost of home, and to be baulked by the want of a few wretched shillings and by the pettifogging mistrustfulness of paid officials. Very soon his escape would be discovered, the hunt would be up, he would be caught, reviled, loaded with chains, dragged back again to prison and bread-and-water and straw; his guards and ...
— The Wind in the Willows • Kenneth Grahame

... defraud his creditors, with the aid of a pettifogging lawyer, and he makes over all his property to his clerk, Podkhaliuzin. The latter has long sighed for Lipotchka, but his personal repulsiveness, added to his merchant rank, has prevented his ever daring to hint at such a thing. Now, however, he sees his ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood

... grunters to be captured for the benefit of his neighbour's half-starved negroes, provided, always, they were hunted with honourable hound-dogs. He held such animals in high esteem, while curs he looked upon with utter contempt; he likened the one to the chivalrous old rice-planter, the other to a pettifogging schoolmaster fit for nothing but to be despised and shot. With these feelings he (Romescos) declared his intention to kill the very first negro he caught in his swamp with cur-dogs; and he kept his word. Lying in ambush, he would await their approach, and, when most ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams

... is monstrous foolish pettifogging,' Katharine said. 'No king would believe a treason in ...
— The Fifth Queen • Ford Madox Ford

... there rode into the great gate of the Manhattoes two lean, hungry-looking Yankees, mounted on Narraganset pacers, with saddle-bags under their bottoms, and green satchels under their arms, who looked marvelously like two pettifogging attorneys beating the hoof from one county court to another in quest of lawsuits; and, in sooth, though they may have passed under different names at the time, I have reason to suspect they were the identical varlets who had negotiated the worthy ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving

... had gone by. The Marquis de Vandenesse wore mourning for his father, and succeeded to his estates. One evening, therefore, after dinner it happened that a notary was present in his house. This was no pettifogging lawyer after Sterne's pattern, but a very solid, substantial notary of Paris, one of your estimable men who do a stupid thing pompously, set down a foot heavily upon your private corn, and then ask what in the world there is to cry out about? If, by accident, they come to know the full ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac

... honour, a quality of imagination, and a clearness of intelligence that renders possible for them things inconceivable of any other existing nation. I may be the slave of perspective effects, but when I turn my mind from the pettifogging muddle of the English House of Commons, for example, that magnified vestry that is so proud of itself as a club—when I turn from that to this race of brave and smiling people, abruptly destiny begins drawing with a bolder hand. Suppose the Japanese were ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells

... to the Colony. Up to the beginning of the 18th century the offices of solicitors and notaries were filled from Mexico, where the licences to practise in Manila were publicly sold. After that period the colleges and the university issued licences to natives, thus creating a class of native pettifogging advocates who stirred up strife to make cases, for this purpose availing themselves of the ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman



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