"Self-constituted" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... don't ye now tie it too tight, else it won't 'ave room to swell," implored my self-constituted adviser, and I followed his advice—was only too thankful for it, in fact—and by the time my mate returned with the turkey, the pudding was bubbling away in the bucket which did duty as saucepan ...
— The Moving Finger • Mary Gaunt
... there was no Council of the Heads of States (the so-called Council of Four); in fact it was not recognized as an organized body until the latter part of March, 1919. Prior to that time the directing body of the Conference was the self-constituted Council of Ten composed of the President and the British, French, and Italian Premiers with their Secretaries or Ministers of Foreign Affairs, and two Japanese delegates of ambassadorial rank. This Council had a membership identical with that of the Supreme War Council, which ...
— The Peace Negotiations • Robert Lansing
... was thoroughly happy as a self-constituted master of ceremonies. 'No one would accept ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... headaches—undoubtedly a touch of tule chill. Saunders, at work with his partner in Eagle Bar, was as usual generous with apparently irrelevant facts on all subjects—but that of the strangers. It would seem as if the self-constituted Committee ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... to his dream. During all the hilarity of the feast and the drinking of the mock whiskey, be acted as self-constituted sentinel. Finally, when everybody else had succumbed to sleep, he gathered together several broken and discarded lariats of various materials—leather, buffalo's hair and horse's hair. Having lengthened this variegated rope with innumerable knots, he fastened one end of ...
— Indian Boyhood • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... hip. And so my two visitors with the aristocratic titles staggered off, and left us plain, untitled citizens, Hiram and myself, to set our posts, and consider the question whether we lived in a free country or under the authority of a self-constituted order of quasi-nobility." ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... but not tell him how he was to obtain it; for Mortimer had an uneasy idea that there was something of the Puritan deep planted under the stolid young man's hide, and that he might make some absurd and irrelevant objection to the perfectly proper methods employed by his newly self-constituted guide and mentor. No; that was no concern of Plank's. All he had to do was to be ready. As for Quarrier, anybody could forecast his action when ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... poor triviality that once noble thing had grown to be. Institutions become effete. Age is apt to sap the strength of movements as of men. Feudalism and the Crusades had commissioned the knight-errant; and now, when law began to hold sword for itself, the self-constituted legal force—knight-errantry—was no longer needed. But to know when an institution has served its purpose is little less than genius. Some things can be laughed down which can not be argued down. A jest is not infrequently more ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... Academy, have never had a chance of judging for themselves what they approve of and what they do not, and their taste has been vitiated for generations by the exhibition of what this self-constituted authority, no doubt unconsciously, conceives to be best for them—and which, as might be expected, is usually found to coincide pretty nearly with the sort of thing they are capable of producing themselves. Hogarth's predictions at the time the Academy ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... a popular demand to have hell left out of the Bible? Were there any petitions from the people sent up to this self-constituted legislature of pinchbeck ministers, praying to have hell abolished, and "hades" inserted? Not a petition. And what is this hades? Where is it? Nobody knows. They have taken away our orthodox hell, that has stood by us since we first went to Sunday school, and given us a hades. Half of us wouldn't ...
— Peck's Compendium of Fun • George W. Peck
... in converse with love-sick tales and languishing swains? They will become love-sick, too, and long for marriage with one who is like the hero of their last-read romance. Perhaps they will not think their matrimonial debut sufficiently flavored with romantic essence, unless they run off with some self-constituted count, or at least ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... by the foreman of their department, who begged some rough, movable desks for them, and aided by timely but not oppressive prizes from the Messrs Wilson, and by the presence of Mr J. P. Wilson, the little self-constituted school progressed considerably, until it reached the number of thirty; then a large old building was cleared out, a rickety wooden staircase taken down, an iron one put up in its stead, and a lofty school-room, capable ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 446 - Volume 18, New Series, July 17, 1852 • Various
... pretend to a special and enormous knowledge of it, and who show enough truth in their pretension to gain the unlimited support of Puritan capitalists. The vice crusade, to mention one example, has produced a large crop of such self-constituted experts, and some of them are in such demand that they are overwhelmed with engagements. The majority of these men have wholly lost the flavour of sacerdotalism. They are not pastors, but detectives, statisticians and mob orators, and not infrequently their secularity ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... not peculiar to the Rosicrucians; there is too much of it in even the religious sects of this enlightened age; it is too much, 'Lord, bless me and my sect;' 'Lord, bless us, and no more.' There are self-constituted mountain-tops that would extract all the mercy and grace with which the winds come freighted from the great ocean of Love, so that they would pass over beyond them hot, dry winds of wrath. But I am glad that this ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... instance. A certain self-constituted "board of morals" is quoted in a dispatch from the United States to the effect that 1,046 men of the "north-eastern States" were locked up in the guardhouse following their first pay day, ...
— The Stars & Stripes, Vol 1, No 1, February 8, 1918, - The American Soldiers' Newspaper of World War I, 1918-1919 • American Expeditionary Forces
... they took me before a self-constituted committee of vigilance. These committees were very common in the South, and still more summary in their modes of administering justice, or rather vengeance, than were the celebrated vigilance committees ...
— Daring and Suffering: - A History of the Great Railroad Adventure • William Pittenger
... counted the greatest among themselves, and each one fearful that his own betrayal might come next, every crook, every thug in the Bad Lands now eyed his oldest pal with suspicion and distrust, and each was a self-constituted sleuth, with the prod of self-preservation behind him, sworn to the accomplishment of that unhallowed slogan—death to the Gray Seal. Almost daily now he must show himself as Larry the Bat in some gathering of the underworld—a prolonged absence from his haunts ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... have shown, Louis was by no means slow in deprecating the self-constituted authority of Richelieu; but he was nevertheless so well aware of his own incapacity, that the idea of being thus abandoned by a minister whose grasp of intellect and subtle policy had complicated ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... The alliance between the police and criminal vice had become so open and aggressive under this bi-boss patronage that the people were aroused and indignant. But as they had no capable leaders and no way of selecting leaders, there arose a self-constituted leadership of uptown Phariseeism and sentimentality, planning the ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... lighted their pipes and provided themselves, each man, with a stiff rummer of grog. A cursory observer would possibly have thought the scene grotesque; but the four men ranged at the foot of the table speedily detected in the countenances of their self-constituted judges, an expression of stern determination which caused their hearts to sink and their cheeks to ...
— The Voyage of the Aurora • Harry Collingwood
... signification as Cimarron. As the difference between the two states—on account of the mildness of the climate, and the ease with which the wants of the natives are supplied—is far less than it would be in Europe, these self-constituted exiles are more frequently to be met with than might be supposed; the cause of their separation from their fellowmen sometimes being some offence against the laws, sometimes annoying debts, and sometimes a mere aversion to ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... charm. The ice was broken, and the current became free. Without more ado, as if in opposition to the self-constituted authority from the high-backed chair, the guests, with one exception only, commenced with a vigorous discharge of "airy missiles," which by degrees subsided into a sort of desultory sharp-shooting; but their words were neither few nor well applied. It was evident ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... he denounced the bill as a party measure, exposed its weak points, riddled it with sarcasm, and piled up damaging evidence of partisan zeal. "This is an honourable body," he concluded, "and few measures go out of it that are open to serious criticism by the self-constituted guardians of legislative virtue, but if this bill goes through the Senate we shall invite from the thinking people of the country the same sort of criticism which we now receive from the ignorant. If the high standard of this body is to be maintained, ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... House of Burgesses for his handling of counterfeiters; but he had better reason to be disturbed by another development. On March 12, the House revived its committee of correspondence and extended its functions. As proposed by a self-constituted meeting at the Raleigh Tavern and headed by Richard Henry Lee, the House instructed its new committee of correspondence to inquire into the Gaspee affair, to keep in touch with the legislatures of the other ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education
... increased to about seventy-nine, all exhibiting the same unsophisticated and amiable characteristics as we have before described. Other two Englishmen had settled amongst them; one of them, called Nobbs, a low-bred, illiterate man, a self-constituted missionary, who was endeavoring to supersede Buffett in his office of religious instruction. The patriarch Adams, it was found, had died in March, 1829, aged sixty-five. While on his deathbed, he ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... seemed to calm Ninitta. She allowed Helen to arrange the soiled and crumpled pillows, and yielded when her self-constituted nurse wished her to lie down again. The latter procured a bowl of water, and with her handkerchief bathed the sick girl's face, soothing her with womanly touches which waked in Edith a new feeling of sympathy and tenderness. Mrs. Greyson's ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... ecclesiastical vestments is because of environment. They have been trained that way. Here again we see the natural tendency of sects to make sectarians and thus reproduce their kind. When particular forms and ceremonies, which are not required by Scripture, are enforced upon men by a self-constituted, self-perpetuating ecclesiastical authority, the inevitable result is to stamp the same principles upon succeeding generations and thus perpetuate the sect system exercising ...
— The Last Reformation • F. G. [Frederick George] Smith
... of honesty or conscientious rectitude would subscribe to. This must of course, in both cases, be taken with exceptions, but it is but too often the fact. And hence has arisen another evil, which is, that there are hundreds of self-constituted ministers, who wander over the western country, using the word of God as a cloak, working upon the feelings of the women to obtain money, and rendering religion a by-word among the men, who will, in all probability, some day rise up and lynch some dozen of them, as a hint ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... men this election was now made a turning-point in Kansas politics. Held together as a compact party by their peaceful resistance to the bogus laws, emigration from the North had so strengthened their numbers that they clearly formed a majority of the people of the Territory. A self-constituted and self-regulated election held by them for sundry officials under their Topeka Constitution, revealed a numerical strength of more than seven thousand voters. Feeling that this advantage justified them in receding from their attitude of non-conformity, ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... thought. Who could the self-constituted watcher have been? Who was interested in this case other than the proper authorities? Apparently some one knew more than Mackay, more than Kennedy. Whoever it was had made no effort to communicate with any of us. This was a new angle to the mystery, a mystery which ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve
... women before dinner. He had made up his mind that he would make no further attempt at reconciling the father to his daughter. He had often declared to his wife that there could be nothing so hateful to a man as the constant interference of a self-constituted adviser. "I so often feel that I am making myself odious when I am telling them to do this or that; and then I ask myself what I should say if anybody were to come and advise me how to manage you and ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... that the already overburdened County Council could properly carry on the work. On the other hand, the Fabian Society was in a stronger position. The Chairman of the Technical Education Board was something more than a self-constituted authority on the organisation of education: and the other members of the Society were engaged on a contest on their home ground. Into the details of the resolutions submitted to the Fabian Society outlining a plan for London education it is needless now to enter, except to say that ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... been hasty," she admitted. "You see, I am intolerant of restraint. If you only knew how I have been compelled to fight for my freedom. It is a sore point with me, this being told what I am to do or not do by you self-constituted lords of creation.-Viaburi I You stop along kitchen. No bring 'm Noa Noah.—And now, Mr. Sheldon, what am I to do? You don't want me here, and there doesn't seem to be any place ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... least and desired most to have abridged was the liberty of being governed, in that province where he had formerly been happy in the competent discharge of official duties, by a self-constituted and illegal popular government intrenched in the town of Boston. In a letter which he wrote in 1765 but did not send, ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... seem to occur to the self-constituted leaders that their proper course was to draw up the most effective measure possible, let its effectiveness be known to the people - as was done in the case of the Anti-Gambling bill - and insist that the Legislature go on record ...
— Story of the Session of the California Legislature of 1909 • Franklin Hichborn
... to fear, "You are the cause of all sickness; but you are a self-constituted falsity,—you are darkness, nothingness. You are without 'hope, and without God in the world.' You do not exist, and have no right to exist, for 'perfect Love casteth ...
— Retrospection and Introspection • Mary Baker Eddy
... us, is one of admitted importance, possibly of difficult solution; and it is further embarrassed by not only the conflicting views of those entitled to some respect, but by the multifarious prescriptions intruded by a host of self-constituted experts and by all of the quack financiers of the land. Every crocheteer and pamphleteer, cocksure "there's no two ways about it," generously contributes his advice free of charge; but sound, trust-worthy advice does not roam like tramps and seldom comes uninvited. Many of the facts ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... The self-constituted leader, alive with the spirit of revenge, moved, still chanting, away from the fire—away in the direction the white men took when they rode off from the raid. Upon his heels the others followed, stepping as he stepped, moving as he moved; ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... reality they were something different. Though they were Russian by origin, language, and sympathy, the habit of kidnapping Tartar women introduced among them a certain admixture of Tartar blood. Though self-constituted champions of Christianity and haters of Islam, they troubled themselves very little with religion, and did not submit to the ecclesiastical authorities. As to their religious status, it cannot be easily defined. Whilst professing allegiance and devotion to the Tsar, they ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... and extremely straight-laced in doctrine, and eminently puritan in practice, intolerant, bigoted, and presumptuous. Potts had accomplished one great aim of his mission: he had married a lady of fortune, and assumed more purity than any one else, and was a sort of self-constituted exponent of the only true doctrines of his church. Arrogant and conceited, he, though a very young man, thrust himself forward as a censor, and very soon was in controversy with Dr. Clapp. Without a tithe of his talent, or ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... leaping back through the fire, and lay groaning on the floor, where the kahveh's owner's seven sons poured water on him by Kagig's order. His burns were evidently painful, but not nearly so serious as I expected. I got out the first-aid stuff from our medicine bag, and Will, who was our self-constituted doctor on the strength of having once attended an autopsy, disguised as a reporter, in the morgue at the back of Bellevue Hospital in New York City, beckoned a gipsy woman, and proceeded to instruct her ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... in his humour.' It may be suggested here that in this company of feeble Bacchanalians Boswell had copied the Rabelaisian fay ce que vous voudras of the Franciscans of Medmenham Abbey with Sandwich, Wilkes, and others. At any rate, as their self-constituted laureate, he produced the following extraordinary song, which can be paralleled for inanity only by the stave he sang before Pitt in the Guildhall of London, as a means of attracting the notice of the Premier with a view to Parliament. The ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... flagman, a self-constituted umpire. "Git out 'er the way there, Chick, and give the gent a chanct to see what ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... commissariat, or for other Government purposes, on the ground of having been once or twice employed on that duty; and what they get is but a small portion of that which the public lose. One of these self-constituted functionaries has a boat seized on its way down or up the river; and the crew, who are merely hired for the occasion, and have a month's wages in advance, seeing no prospect of getting soon out of the hands of this pretended Government servant, desert, ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... unquestioned admission into the church which the blacksmith had so ably represented. There was yet another trial to ensue, and another jury to pronounce upon the merits of the anxious candidate. He had yet to prove to the perfect satisfaction of the self-constituted junto, that styled itself a church, how God had mercifully dealt with him—to detail, with historic accuracy, the method and procedure of his regeneration, and to find evidence of a spiritual change, that carried on its front the proof of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... reason why even to-day a number of persons avowedly united in the same 'Belief' and recognizing each other as the self-constituted social vanguard should not form a recognized spiritual community centering round some kind of 'religious' edifice and ritual, and agree to register and consecrate the union of any couples of the members according to a ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... as we have seen, who succeeded in outwitting and overthrowing the self-constituted regency on the death of his brother Hsien Feng, and, with the Empress Dowager, seated her infant son upon the throne, with the two Empresses and himself as joint regents. This condition continued for some years, with the senior Empress exercising no authority, and Prince Kung continually ...
— Court Life in China • Isaac Taylor Headland
... regard to the welfare of others,—that meals, parties, lessons, came at any time; that caucuses and elections happened when any one desired them; that prisons and hospitals took people or not, just as superintendents felt; that everybody was a self-constituted policeman, yet no one wanted to be looked after himself;—what a hard time ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... gum, cotton, silk, and wool; honors himself with architecture; writes laws, and contrives to execute his will through the hands of many nations; and, especially, establishes a select society, running through all the countries of intelligent men, a self-constituted aristocracy, or fraternity of the best, which, without written law or exact usage of any kind, perpetuates itself, colonizes every new-planted island and adopts and makes its own whatever personal beauty or extraordinary native ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... is a good thing in its way and place, but it may be carried too far, or employed amiss; and this looks like an illustration. The boy, in more than fifteen years, had never done anything in prison that called for discipline; but because some self-constituted and arbitrary psychologist chose to believe, or to say, that his temper was not under full control, he was doomed to spend the rest of his life in a cell. This prisoner knows, of course, that he has been wronged, but he ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... go to St. Louis, but I must get even with the old hag before starting. I did not wish to leave in debt to anyone in the neighborhood and so I cudgeled my brain to devise a means for settling old scores with my self-constituted governess. ...
— Thirty-One Years on the Plains and In the Mountains • William F. Drannan
... does not condescend to justify his ways to man, he gives judgment on the past controversy. The self-constituted pleaders for him, the acceptors of his person, were all wrong; and Job—the passionate, vehement, scornful, misbelieving Job—he had spoken the truth; he at least had spoken facts, and they had been defending a transient theory as an ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... if patriotism, or love for the Union were insufficient to restrain us from attempting this fatal measure, we have seen that it would blast forever the fortunes of the planters of Mississippi. But what States will unite in this convention? Georgia has disavowed the act of the self-constituted, self-elected minority convention that acted in her name. The history of Virginia speaks in the voice of indignant rebuke to all those States that assemble sectional conventions. North Carolina, unassuming, but steadfast in support of the Union, will enter ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... was deep, and found expression in actions more eloquent than words. She was thankful for the slightest evidence of kindness from her self-constituted protectors. She even exaggerated the amount of consideration which she received. She was not free from the hereditary taint of pride; but in her it took a new form and unprecedented expression. The sense of indebtedness spurred ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... the social machine; but your first fright will go off like a conscript's terror on the battlefield. You will grow used to regarding men as common soldiers who have made up their minds to lose their lives for some self-constituted king. Times have altered strangely. Once you could say to a bravo, 'Here are a hundred crowns; go and kill Monsieur So-and-so for me,' and you could sup quietly after turning some one off into the dark for the ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... Mondragon (Don), a bully and tyrant, the self-constituted arbiter of all disputes in a tennis-court ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... position, her cleverness in class, her aptitude for music, her skill at games, made her an all-round force and a referee on most subjects. There is no doubt that Ingred would have had the undivided post of favorite in her form had it not been for Bess Haselford. Not that Bess was in any way a self-constituted rival—on the contrary she was rather shy and retiring, and made no particular bid for popularity. Perhaps that was one reason why the girls liked her. She was generous in lending her property, invited her form-mates to charming parties at Rotherwood, and often persuaded an indulgent father to include ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... movement, that is not so admirable. This is the attack on ideas, manners, customs and amusements peculiar to certain foreign peoples, not because they are necessarily wrong, or antagonistic to genuine Americanism, but merely because they are different. According to some of these self-constituted authorities the way to instill patriotism and love of country into the benighted aliens is to persuade them to abandon all that links them with the land of their ancestors, and become exactly like the prevailing type of Bangor, Maine, Augusta, ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... pint, illustrates the capacity of many of those who are subjects of a single idea. They do not hold but one, and it would be useless to prescribe a larger number. In a country like ours, in which every thing is new and everybody is free, there are multitudes of self-constituted doctors, each of whom has a nostrum for curing all physical and moral disorders and diseases,—a patent process by which humanity may achieve its proudest progress and its everlasting happiness. The country is full of hobby-riders, booted ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... much the worst. My most innocent remark to the beautiful youth appeared to rouse suspicion in his self-constituted guardian. If he did not say in so many words, Beware, dear lad, she's stringing you! or whatever the English of that is, it was because nobody could so wound the faith in the b. y.'s candid eyes. But to see the fluttering, anxious wing the Scotchman tried to ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... wonder these investigating committees want to shirk their duties. I, being only a committee of one, and self-constituted, feel as if I'd had quite enough of exploring downstairs. But what on earth Cousin Dempster is making such a fuss about, I have no idea. One would think there was something dreadful on that square piece of paper by the way he acted; but he's like everybody else, I suppose, when ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... for this subject. Let us now return to the lynch law of the desert. It was before a tribunal without appeal, and in the presence of self-constituted judges, that Don Antonio de Mediana was about to appear. A court assembled in a city, with all its imposing adjuncts, could not have surpassed in solemnity the assizes which at this moment were convoked in the desert, where three ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... might in the future be developed. For a long time, even at Klin, within the walls of the Corps, Ivan had heard tales almost incredible in their strangeness of bitterness and rupture among the finest families between father and son, mother and daughter:—the members of the old regime against the self-constituted advocates of the new. Nor did a few months put an end to this incomprehensible movement. Sonya Kovalevsky, in the company of her chivalrously nominal young husband, had left her parental estate and was at work in Heidelberg, perfecting that mathematical ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... loyal to the cause as their means, learning, political interest and race pride suggest that they should be. True, it frequently happens that our papers fall into the hands of characterless adventurers who are "anything for a dollar," and it is felt that the best method of rebuking their self-constituted and erratic leadership is to treat them with silent contempt. To this no thinker can offer a reasonable objection. A journal that does not represent the highest impulses of a community does not deserve support. The ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... the protest of silent tears, and the airs of a much injured mortal. Had Kirsty been backed by the child's father, she might have made something of her; but it grew more and more painful to think of her future, when her self-constituted guardian should have lost what influence she had ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... eye upon the electric light. Certainly Birmingham has been rather lax in taking up electric illumination, and possibly more enterprise would have been evinced in this direction if the Corporation had not become dealers in gas and water on their own terms, viz., no competition allowed. Some self-constituted prophets shook their heads and said that before the gas debt was paid off gas would literally have "gone out" as a general illuminant. Before the eighty-five years allowed for the redemption of the capital invested in the gas have elapsed a good many things may certainly happen. ...
— A Tale of One City: The New Birmingham - Papers Reprinted from the "Midland Counties Herald" • Thomas Anderton
... new gold diggings it was usual to establish a self-constituted form of government among the diggers themselves, which in the absence of any regular police force or law of the land was responsible for the protection and good conduct of the entire community. Some capable man was elected ...
— Five Years in New Zealand - 1859 to 1864 • Robert B. Booth
... it some day," he had said. But he had told Dan the whole story, and, although he did not know it, Dan had from that time on been his self-constituted bodyguard. During his campaign speeches Dan was always near, his right hand on a revolver in his coat pocket, and for hours at a time he stood outside the pharmacy, favoring every seeker for drugs or soap or perfume with a scowling inspection. When he could not do ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... evening of the fourth day after his return, Mr. Belcher was waited upon at his house by a self-constituted committee of citizens, who merely called to inquire into the wonders of the region he had explored. Mr. Belcher was quite at his ease, and entered at once upon a narrative of his visit. He had supposed that the excitement was without any good foundation, but the oil ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... to be tried," he says to the doctor, speaking in a kind of shrill sing-song that cut your nerves in that room full of bottled-up excitement like a locust on a hot day. "You are to be tried before this self-constituted court of Caucasian citizens—Anglo-Saxons, sir, every man of them, whose forbears were at Runnymede! The charge against you is stirring up the negroes of this community to the point of revolt. You are accused, sir, of representing yourself to them as some kind of ...
— Danny's Own Story • Don Marquis
... little property on which she relied for support to her unprotected youth or helpless age,—a sister who was virtually an orphan, who had no natural claim upon her present patroness, but might be dismissed penniless from the house that sheltered her, without exposing the self-constituted ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... long to wait till a man arose, in Germany, to marshal the forces of discontent and to lead them against the Church of Rome. Though in his personal conduct Luther fell far short of what people might reasonably look for in a self-constituted reformer, yet in many respects he had exceptional qualifications for the part that he was called upon to play. Endowed with great physical strength, gifted with a marvellous memory and a complete mastery of the German language, as inspiring ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... her condemnation, a self-constituted committee of women, with one man on it,—Mistress Thomas Sherwood, Goodwife Odell, Mistress Pell, and her two daughters, Goody Lockwood, and Goodwife Purdy,—visited the prison, and pressed her to name any other witch in town, and so receive such consolation from the ...
— The Witchcraft Delusion In Colonial Connecticut (1647-1697) • John M. Taylor
... gods and devils waged eternal war against each other with wretched man as the prize of victory; and the priest, self-constituted interpreter of the will of the gods, stood in front of the only refuge from harm and demanded as the price of entrance that ignorance, that asceticism, that self-abnegation which could but end in the complete subjugation of man to superstition. He was taught ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... the self-constituted nun appeared likely to continue for an indefinite time. She had learned that there was one possibility in which her formerly imagined position might become real, and only one; that her husband's absence should continue long enough to amount to positive desertion. ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... accommodation. As the loss was nothing to the broker, of course this imposition was looked over, because it saved his own time, and did not diminish his own commission.{17} It is clear, therefore, that the Stock Exchange is a self-constituted body, without any charter, but merely established at the will of the members, to the support of which a subscription is paid by each individual. They are ruled by by-laws, and judged by a committee, chosen from among themselves. This committee, as well as the members, ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... intelligence to dispute the empire of Mind or to dethrone Mind and take the government into 378:24 its own hands. Sickness is not a God-given, nor a self-constituted material power, which copes astutely with Mind and finally conquers it. God 378:27 never endowed matter with power to disable Life or to chill harmony with a long and cold night of discord. Such a power, without the divine permission, is ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... in which you maintain the ascendency of your own country on all proper occasions, without descending to vulgar abuse of ours. You are obliged to bring the two nations in collision, and I respect your liberal hostility." This will probably be esteemed treason in our own self-constituted mentors of the press, one of whom, I observe, has quite lately had to apologize to his readers for exposing some of the sins of the English writers in reference to ourselves! But these people are not worth our attention, ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... appointing provost-marshals to take private property for public use, and every little post commander exercised the power to appoint such officials. The land swarmed with these vermin, appointed without due authority, or self-constituted, who robbed the people of horses, mules, cattle, corn, and meat. The wretched peasants of the middle ages could not have suffered more from the "free companies" turned loose upon them. Loud complaints came up from State governors and from hundreds of good citizens. ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... defied analysis as he made his way through the crowded hall to the rear veranda. He peered into the smoking-room in passing and found several self-constituted Lords of Misrule holding full sway. Two young scions of great New York families were fencing with billiard cues, punctuating each other's coats with blue chalk dots and dashes, while a swaying ring cheered them on. One youth emerged from the room ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... well fitted to act the part of a diplomatist as he was to sail a ship. It was, in truth, a somewhat delicate mission on which his son had sent him, for he could not assert definitely that the hermit actually was Kathleen Holbein's father, and her self-constituted parents did not relish the idea of letting slip, on a mere chance, one whom ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... choice to break through all these hypocrisies, the patent cheats and masks of brute force, and help set the world free, or else stand aside and let it be dominated through sheer weight of arms and the arbitrary choices of the self-constituted masters by the nation which can maintain the biggest armies, the most irresistible armaments, a power to which the world has afforded no parallel, in the face of which political freedom must ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson
... witchcraft and the "Sadducees," give the story a considerable interest and render the outcome of the trial significant. The only case of its sort in its time, it was nevertheless most typical of the superstition of the time. A little town in Wiltshire had been disturbed by a stray drummer. The self-constituted noise-maker was called to account by a stranger in the village, a Mr. Mompesson of Tedworth, who on examining the man's license saw that it had been forged and took it away from him. This, at any rate, was ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... been emphasized, in these days of reaction from the old attitude of literary obsequiousness, by harsh distinctions and hard words, which are paid back by equally emphasized contempt. The apostles of light regard the rest of mankind as barbarians and Philistines, and the world retorts that these self-constituted apostles are idle word-mongers, without any sympathy with humanity, critics and jeerers who do nothing to make the conditions of life easier. It is natural that every man should magnify the circle ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... common political platform against British methods of government than on a platform of social and religious reforms which offended many different prejudices and threatened many vested interests. The Congress developed into a purely political body, and like all self-constituted bodies with no definite responsibilities it showed greater capacity for acrid criticism, often quite uninformed, than for any constructive policy. As the years passed on without any tangible results from its expanding flow of oratory ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... some thinker outside, and when the bread-and-butter purveyors of theology, science and the schools have become indoctrinated, and prefer to pay their money for the new instead of the old—then these self-constituted teachers of humanity will all know that the cow was to eat the grindstone—and teach the fact. We simply state a fact, known to history, that the progress of the world is due to the inventor and discoverer, and not to the schools. Every ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, December 1887 - Volume 1, Number 11 • Various
... therefore a subject for self-adulation and—generally speaking—airs; so that Harold, hugging his slate and his chains, was out of the question now. In such a matter, girls were worse than useless, as wanting the necessary tenacity of will and contempt for self-constituted authority. So eventually I slipped through the hedge a solitary protestant, and issued forth on the lane what time the rest of the civilised world was ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... troops of Great Britain, who had shown no disposition for hostilities, though they might be expected to feel resentment at the exertions employed to deprive them even of the necessaries of life." He also reminded this self-constituted provincial congress that while they affected to complain of alterations made in their charter by acts of parliament, their very meeting was in direct violation of their own constitution; and, finally, he exhorted them to desist from all illegal ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... hailed by the dock-loafers, and made the victim of the proverbial Yankee inquisitiveness, stated that he had just come from the West Indies with a load of lignum-vitae, pineapples, and hides, which he hoped to sell in Boston. The self-constituted investigating committee seemed satisfied, and the captain strolled ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... beautiful and innocent, and the consequent victim of insane bigotry and unbridled profligacy. And it is at this moment (when the heart is kindled and bursting with indignation at the revolting abuses of self-constituted power) that Sir Walter stops the press to have a sneer at the people, and to put a spoke (as he thinks) in the wheel of upstart innovation! This is what he "calls backing his friends"—it is thus he administers charms and philtres to our love of Legitimacy, makes ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... rendered it worse was that his good nature—and indeed every one of his gifts, which were all of the popular order—was subservient to an assumption not only self-satisfied but obtrusive!—And yet—and yet—the objectionable character of his self-constituted judge being clear as the moon to the mind of the curate, was there not something in what he had said? This much remained undeniable at least, that when the very existence of the church was denounced as a humbug in the hearing of one who ate her ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... been well content, as they have ever been, despite the protests of self-constituted "reformers" of the order established by the Infinite. Man is creation's lord de facto and de jure. The immutable laws of nature make his sovereignty both a privilege and a duty. The voice of prophecy proclaims him king; he wears his crown by ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... servant found her fevered and unconscious when she came an hour later to awaken her for breakfast. The struggle that had been waged around the bed of the young child was now renewed by that of his self-constituted nurse. Weeks passed away before it was over, and ere that time the music of little feet had ceased about the ancient mansion, and the stroke to pride and love had rendered the invalid grand-mother still ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... to most of the Indios Bravos of Peru. Uniformity of speech, manners, and arms, unite together a number of Indians, who thus form a race, but there is among them no bond of subjection, or of duty to any government, either voluntarily chosen, or self-constituted. Among the inhabitants of Lower Ucayali, however, the oldest, or the bravest individuals of each race are either publicly, or silently recognised as chiefs. Respect to age prevails only among a few of the races, as the Setebos, Mayorhunas, ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... jealous God of Israel, by the side of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man and converts them into commodities. Money is the general and self-constituted value of all things. Consequently it has robbed the whole world—the world of mankind as well as Nature—of its peculiar value. Money is the being of man's work and existence alienated from himself, and this alien being rules him, and he ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... a gift!" modestly admitted the self-constituted "flapjacketer," as he laughingly ...
— The Boy Ranchers Among the Indians - or, Trailing the Yaquis • Willard F. Baker
... Wagnerian drama in America. But the force which compelled the reform was an external one. It came from the public. To the people, as they spoke through the box office, Abbey, Schoeffel & Grau were always readier to give an ear than the stockholders or the self-constituted champions of Italian opera in the ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... render that ridiculous which was only hated before. But the effect on Ishmael Bush was not so disheartening. Grave in exterior, saturnine by temperament, formidable by his physical means, and dangerous from his lawless obstinacy, his self-constituted tribunal excited a degree of awe, to which even the intelligent Middleton could not bring himself to be entirely insensible. Little time, however, was given to arrange his thoughts; for the squatter, though unaccustomed to haste, having previously made up his mind, was not disposed ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... spring, of its obliging usefulness in relieving them of detachable burdens. In fact, it had no activity or interest of its own to account for, so it proposed, in default of any such original reason for existence, to look after the accounts of others, as a self-constituted body of financial police. For those engaged in it, except those who had been born mentally deformed, or those who had become unnaturally perverted by long usage, it was a sort of ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... additional representatives by counties to be added to the Committee. Redmond at once publicly declared that this amounted to refusal of his offer, and he put the issue very plainly. The Provisional Committee was originally self-constituted and had been increased only by co-option. The majority of its members, he was informed, were not supporters of the Irish party: of the rank and file at least 95 per cent., he said, were supporters of the Irish party ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... are represented in the government by men, and that their rights and interests are better protected through that indirect representation than they would be by giving them a direct voice in the government. The teachings of history in regard to the condition of women under the care of these self-constituted protectors, to which I can only briefly allude, show the value of this argument as applied to past ages; and in demonstration of its value as applied to more recent times, even at the risk of being tedious, I will give some examples from my own professional experience. I do this because nothing adds ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... out of this several civilians were shot at and wounded, either by accidental shots meant for soldiers or for refusing obedience to the new self-constituted authorities. ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard
... voted that he should be brought to trial. On the 20th of January, Charles Stuart, King of England, was brought before the Court of High Commission, in Westminster Hall, and placed at the bar, to be tried by this self-constituted body for his life. In the indictment, he was charged with being a tyrant, traitor, and murderer. To such an indictment, and before such a body, the dignified but unfortunate successor of William the Conqueror demurred. He refused to acknowledge the jurisdiction of the court. But the solemn ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... Kentucky; the emaciated Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia, who apparently had not a month to live, yet who rivaled Talleyrand in political intrigue; John Wentworth, a tall son of New Hampshire, transplanted to the prairies of Illinois; Andrew Johnson, of Tennessee, a born demagogue and self-constituted champion of the people; John Slidell, of New Orleans; Robert Dale Owen, the visionary communist from Indiana; Howell Cobb, of Georgia, and Jacob Thompson, of Mississippi, who were busily laying the ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore |
