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More "Debasement" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... From this state of debasement he soon began to meditate his escape. Accordingly, one evening, just as the sun had set, and while his keeper's eye was off him, he fled. An immediate and diligent search was made for him, but he could not be found until the second day, when he was discovered still ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... suffering of the poor under this system, plunged into a state of debasement not more tolerable than that of the Gallic plebs—and the injustices of the rich, in whom all political power was then vested—are facts well attested by the poems of Solon himself, even in the short fragments preserved to us. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... confiding, and romantic girl, she was good without misanthropy, pure without pretension, and joyous, as youth and hopes not crushed might make her. She was one of those of whom society might justly be proud. She obeyed its dictates without question, but her feelings underwent no debasement from the contact. If not a child of nature, she was by no means the slave ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... logo kai dia logou], the true 'noumenon' or 'ens intelligibile' of Christ. To bow at hearing the 'cognomen' may become a universal, but it is still only a non-essential, consequence of the former. But the debasement of the idea is not the worst evil of this false rendering;—it has afforded the pretext and ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... words are, of course, in a large measure taken from Scripture, and from the hymns heard at church; and for this reason these religious songs do not by any means illustrate the full extent of the debasement of the dialect." Of words funnily distorted through failure to understand their meaning there are, however, many examples. "Paul and Silas, bound in jail," was often sung "Bounden Cyrus born in jail;" "Ring Jerusalem" appeared as "Ring Rosy Land," etc., etc. "I never fairly ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... jockey. 'How singular,' said I, 'is the fall and debasement of words; you talk of a gang, or set of shorters; you are, perhaps, not aware that gang and set were, a thousand years ago, only connected with the great and Divine: they are ancient Norse words, which may be found in the heroic poems of the ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... of the soil, as distinguished from the thickness of the coating, it may be said that modern discoveries enable us to see the ways whereby we may for an indefinite period avoid the debasement of our great heritage, the food-giving earth. We now know in various parts of the world extensive and practically inexhaustible deposits, whence may be obtained the phosphates, potash, soda, etc., ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... the question, and here we give a diagram of it. Owing a stern and solemn duty to the public, PUNCH has indignantly spurned the offers of the British Association to join in their mummeries at Plymouth—to appear at their dinners for the debasement of science. No; here in his own pages, and in them only, doth he propound his invention. But he is not exclusive; having published his wonderful invention, he invites the makers to copy his plan. Mr. Murphy is already busily arranging his Almanac for 1842, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 14, 1841 • Various
... hereafter, in their physical, social, and moral light,—the level of slaves to one sole master, of tools to one universal agent. But the equalizing process does not stop here: beasts, birds, fishes, insects, all participate of the same honor or debasement; all are, like man, the slaves of God, the tools and automata of his will; and hence Mahomet is simply logical and self-consistent when in the Koran he informs his followers that birds, beasts, and the rest are 'nations' like themselves, nor does any intrinsic distinction ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... indulgences for sin, nor undermine morality by a specious casuistry, nor incite to massacres, insurrections, and wars. This complicated system of despotism, this Protean diversified institution of beggars and tyrants, this strange contradiction of glory in debasement and debasement in glory (type of the greatness and littleness of man), was not then matured, but was resplendent with virtues which extort esteem,—chastity, poverty, and obedience, devotion to the miserable, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... arguments of Mr. Davis. "Suppose, instead of issuing paper money," said Mr. Bayard, "it had pleased Congress to order a debasement of our National coinage. Suppose twenty-five per cent more of alloy or worthless metal had been injected into our currency, and with that base coinage men had come forward to buy your bonds, what would ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... rebellion against this debasement of his art disappeared when he saw his Josephina in the house whose ornamentation he was constantly improving, converting it into a jewel case worthy of his love. She was happy in her home, with a splendid carriage in which to drive every afternoon and perfect freedom to spend money on her ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... sovereign's power from such debasement! 270 Far rather, Sire, let it descend in vengeance On the base villain, on the faithless slave Who dared unbar the doors of these retirements! For whom? Has Casimir deserved this insult? O my misgiving heart! If—if—from Heaven 275 Yet not ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... upon me to win from Charles his consent to the withdrawal of the British troops from Holland. This will insure the fall of Luxembourg—the key to our success. You see, Buckingham, I must not fail. England's debasement ...
— Mistress Nell - A Merry Tale of a Merry Time • George C. Hazelton, Jr.
... that Rodney was happy amid such scenes? Ah! no; he was alarmed at himself. He felt degraded and guilty; he felt that he was taking sudden and rapid strides in the path of debasement and vice. He thought of his home and its sweet influences. He knew how deep would be the grief of those who loved him, should they hear of his course. His conscience condemned him, and he thought of what he was becoming with horror. But he seemed to be drawn on by ...
— The Runaway - The Adventures of Rodney Roverton • Unknown
... their own opinion of their personal interest. I do not speak of the influence of a sense of duty, or feelings of philanthropy, motives never to be mainly relied on, though (except in countries or during periods of great moral debasement) they influence almost all rulers in some degree, and some rulers in a very great degree. But I insist only on what is true of all rulers, viz., that the character and course of their actions is largely influenced (independently ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... jockey. "How singular," said I, "is the fall and debasement of words; you talk of a gang, or set, of shorters; you are, perhaps, not aware that gang and set were, a thousand years ago, only connected with the great and Divine; they are ancient Norse words, which may be found in the heroic poems of the north, and in the Edda, a collection ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... has actually taken place in modern Europe through the introduction of Christianity. This sublime and beneficent religion has regenerated the ancient world from its state of exhaustion and debasement; it is the guiding principle in the history of modern nations, and even at this day, when many suppose they have shaken off its authority, they still find themselves much more influenced by it in their views of human affairs than ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... image," born immortal and capable of progress, and so differing from Socrates and Shakspeare only in degree. It is but a sliding scale from this melancholy debasement up to the most regal condition of humanity. A traceable line of affinity unites these outcast children with the renowned historic races of the world: the Assyrian, the Egyptian, the Ethiopian, the Jew,—the beautiful Greek, the strong ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... mankind. We will neither abate our energy, relax in our feelings, nor in the expressions which those feelings dictate. Nothing but corruption like his own could enable any man to see such a scene of desolation and ruin unmoved. We feel pity for the works of God and man; we feel horror for the debasement of human nature; and feeling thus, we give a loose to our indignation, and call ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... himself may reach; but if a woman marry a man beneath her in society she always goes down to his level. That is a law inexorable, and there are no exceptions. Is any woman so high up that she can afford to plot for her own debasement? There is not a State in the American Union that has not for the last twenty years furnished an instance of the sudden departure of some intelligent woman from an affluent home to spend her life with some one who can make five dollars a day, provided he ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... what a creature beside him! Some there are who confound the nephew with the uncle, to the delight of the Elysee, but to the shame of France! The parodist assumes the airs of a stage manager. Alas! a splendour so infinite could not be tarnished save by this boundless debasement! Yes! worse than Hudson Lowe! Hudson Lowe was only a jailor, Hudson Lowe was only an executioner. The man who has really assassinated Napoleon is Louis Bonaparte; Hudson Lowe killed only his life, Louis Bonaparte ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... the editorial department are so glaring, that we are left in doubt, after all, if we may congratulate ourselves on possessing all these sacred blunders of the Elizabethan typesetters in their integrity and without any debasement of modern alloy. If it be gratifying to know that there lived stupid men before our contemporary Agamemnons in that kind, yet we demand absolute accuracy in the report of the phenomena in order to arrive at anything like safe statistics. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... moral one, and I am content with the order which Scripture has established." He saw insurmountable obstacles against immediate emancipation, one of which was that the negro would exchange the evil now affecting him for greater ones—for a relapse into deeper debasement, if not for bloodshed ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... temperance reformers appeal in vain on this question, and that their facts and arguments are viewed with plausible indifference, or insidious opposition, by persons whose appetites and instincts have been undergoing debasement, and perversion from the very dawn of their lives. My own deliberate conviction is that nothing but harm comes to nursing mothers, and to the infants who are dependent upon them, by the ordinary use of ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... crouches beneath a window-ledge, to sleep where there is some shelter from the rain, have little to bind them to life, but what have they to look back upon, in death? What are the unwonted comforts of a roof and a bed, to them, when the recollections of a whole life of debasement stalk before them; when repentance seems a mockery, and sorrow ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... the ridicule and contempt of civilized mankind, promoting among our own people the growth of serious doubts as to the practicability of democratic institutions on a great scale; and in an endless variety of ways it introduces into our political life more elements of demoralization, debasement, and decadence than any other agency of evil I know of, aye, perhaps more than all other ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... was the only expedient by which we could defeat the free coinage of silver. Each of us regarded the measure proposed by the Senate as a practical repudiation of one-third of the debts of the United States, as a substantial reduction of the wages of labor, as a debasement of our currency to a single silver standard, as the demonetization of gold and a sharp disturbance of all our business relations with the great commercial nations of the world. To defeat such a policy, so pregnant with evil, I was willing to buy the entire product of American silver ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... centuries, the process of the debasement of the Roman tongue went on with great rapidity. The influence of the provincials began what the irruptions of the northern tribes consummated. In many scattered parts of the empire it is probable that separate Latin ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... elector, and of eligibility to the office of a representative, of the people; in a word, that no person nor their posterity, may ever be debased beneath the level of the recognised basis of American citizenship. This debasement and degradation is "corruption of blood"; politically understood—a legal acknowledgement ...
— The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States • Martin R. Delany
... heathen has been for a few of the most self-sacrificing men and women to give up country and home and all the comforts and benefits of a Christian community, and then commence the family state amid such vice and debasement that it was ruinous to children to be trained in its midst. And so the result has been, in multitudes of cases, that children were born only to be sent from parents to be trained by strangers, and the true "Christian family" could not be exhibited in heathen lands. And ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... fortunate purchased life by the sacrifice of half their treasures. At this time, however, there suddenly broke forth a formidable insurrection amongst these miserable subjects—the Messenians of the Iberian Sparta. The Jews were so far aroused from their long debasement by omnipotent despair, that a single spark, falling on the ashes of their ancient spirit, rekindled the flame of the descendants of the fierce warriors of Palestine. They were encouraged and assisted ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book IV. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... divested of partiality to my own case, that, as far as my judgment shall permit, I will never have that in view, when I am presuming to hint my opinion of general rules. For, most surely, the honours I have received, and the debasement to which my best friend had subjected himself, have, for their principal excuse, that the gentleman was entirely independent, had no questions to ask, and had a fortune sufficient to make himself, as well as the person ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... that no real improvement was effected until within the period of his own memory. 'Our services were probably without a parallel in the world for their debasement.' (See ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... to the slaughter on the Coelian Hill, which happened not long before it was written, I will add here that whatever color it may have pleased Aurelian to give to that affair—as if it were occasioned by a dishonest debasement of the coin by the directors of the mint—there is now no doubt, on the part of any who are familiar with the history of that period, that the difficulty originated in a much deeper and more formidable cause, well known to Aurelian himself, ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... the nearest relation to us, who is the "head of all principality and power," and who pervades all nature with his presence. The object of the Christian religion is to recover man from his degraded, miserable condition, elevate him above his debasement, and reinvest him with the character of Christ, that he may eventually dwell with the angels in the ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 11, November, 1880 • Various
... one, a poet be he or a cobbler, enjoys such a license. I told Khalid that the logical and most effective course to pursue, in view of his rigorous morality, would be to pour a gallon of kerosene over his own head and fire himself out of existence. For the instruments of deception and debasement are not in the peddling-box, but rather in his heart. No; I did not think peddling was as bad as other trades. Here at least, the means of deception were reduced to a minimum. And of a truth, if everybody were to ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... struggling to recover lost rights. Massachusetts clings with the tenacity of profound conviction to the teachings of her own illustrious sons. She was taught by Benjamin Franklin that "slavery is an atrocious debasement of human nature;" by John Adams that "consenting to slavery is a sacrilegious breach of trust;" by John Quincy Adams that "slavery taints the very sources of moral principle"—"establishes false estimates of virtue and vice;" by Daniel Webster that ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... (the deluge): the waved lines yield beneath the bodies and wildly lave the edge of the moulding, two birds, as if to mark the reverse of all order of nature, lowest of all sunk in the depth of them. In later times of debasement, water began to be represented with its waves, foam, etc., as on the Vendramin tomb at Venice, above cited; but even there, without any definite ornamental purpose, the sculptor meant partly to explain a story, partly to display dexterity of chiselling, but not ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... only of good moral character, but of high religious attainments, and their painful exhibitions of fear, distrust, and gloom, originate in physical rather than in spiritual causes. It is interesting to witness this strange perversion of the imagination, this morbid debasement of the religious faculties, and dejection of mind, due to causes disturbing the functions of the liver and ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... alienated from his service the best and wisest of the citizens. But the pride of the monarch was flattered in the exercise of power, or, as he thought, of virtue; and the people, safe in their obscurity, applauded the danger and debasement of their superiors. This extraordinary rigor was justified, in some measure, by its salutary consequences; since, after a scrutiny of seventeen days, not a complaint or abuse could be found in the court or city; and it might be alleged that ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... unregenerated person to perdition; but as I knew it to be only a temporary falling off, a specimen of that liberty by which the chosen and elected ones are made free, I closed my eyes on the wilful debasement of our principles, knowing that the transgressions could never be accounted to your charge, and that in good time you would come to your senses, and throw the whole weight of your crimes on the shoulders that had voluntarily ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... headed a conspiracy of nobles, such as Huntly, Lennox, and Buchan, seized Cochrane and other favourites of James, and hanged them over Lauder Bridge. The most tangible grievance was the increasing debasement of the coinage. James was immured at Edinburgh, but, by a compromise, Albany was restored to rank and estates. Meanwhile Gloucester captured Berwick, never to be recovered by Scotland. In 1483 Albany renewed, ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... sovereigns of the line followed in some degree the honorable example set them by the distinguished founder of it; but this example was soon lost, and was succeeded by the most extreme degeneracy and debasement. The successive sovereigns began soon to live and to reign solely for the gratification of their own sensual propensities and passions. Sensuality begins sometimes with kindness, but it ends always in the most reckless and intolerable cruelty. The Ptolemies became, in the end, the most ...
— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott
... stated are for the awakening of parents and guardians of girls. If I were to presume to say anything to the possible victims of this awful scourge of white slavery it would be this: "Those who enter here leave hope behind." The depths of debasement and suffering disclosed by the investigation now in progress would make the flesh of a seasoned man of the world ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... insuperable—Mr. John O'Connell and his immediate followers had so solemnly abjured, denounced and cursed the principles of the great majority with whom they were asked to league, that they could not comply without such a debasement of character as to compel the scorn of all men, not only to themselves, but all those with whom they were united. It could not fail to strike any ordinary observer that materials so incongruous and repulsive ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... of genius. His very cat knew it, and forebore to whisk her tail in the presence of the man of genius. His large water-dog was acquainted with the fact, and upon the approach of his master, betrayed his sense of inferiority by a sanctity of deportment, a debasement of the ears, and a dropping of the lower jaw not altogether unworthy of a dog. It is, however, true that much of this habitual respect might have been attributed to the personal appearance of the metaphysician. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Preston jail, says: "Thirty-six per cent. come into jail unable to say the Lord's Prayer; and seventy-two per cent. come in such a state of moral debasement that it is in vain to give them instruction, or to teach them their duty, since they cannot understand the meaning of the words used to them." Here we have, as cause and effect, the philosophy of Mr. Ball, and the facts of Mr. Clay. And, further, this ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... ignorance and debasement still manifest in various features of the popular character.—Entire want, in early life, of any idea of a general and comprehensive purpose to be pursued—Gratification of the senses the chief good.—Cruelty a subsidiary resource.—Disposition to cruelty ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... frequented our house Lord Lyttelton was most decidedly my abhorrence; I knew that he frequently led my husband from the paths of domestic confidence to the haunts of profligate debasement. Toward me his lordship affected great indifference. He has even in my presence declared that no woman under thirty years of age was worth admiring; that even the antiquity of forty was far preferable to the insipidity ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... hath settled on my soul. Knowing the nature of man, the perversity of those who govern, and the debasement of the governed—this knowledge hath disgusted me with life; and since there is no choice but to be the accomplice or the victim of oppression, what remains to the man of virtue but to mingle his ashes ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... Disquiets, and the Sport of such various Passions; let them answer, as they can, if the Pains they undergo, do not outweigh their Enjoyments. The Infidelities on the one Part between the two Sexes, and the Caprices on the other, the Debasement of Reason, the Pangs of Expectation, the Disappointments in Possession, the Stings of Remorse, the Vanities and Vexations attending even the most refined Delights that make up this Business of Life, render it so silly and uncomfortable, that no Man is thought wise till ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... common conventions, common orders. Here, alone, slipping in and out among the crowd, she looked abandoned, the sight of her in her bare white feet and the travesty of her dress was a wound. Her humility screamed its violation, its debasement of her race; she woke the impulse to screen her and hurry her away as if she were a woman walking in her sleep. She had on her arm a sheaf of the War Cry. This was another indignity; she offered them right and left, no one had a pice for her except one man, a sailor, who ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... on the value of public faith may pass with some men for declamation—to such men I have nothing to say. To others I will urge, Can any circumstance mark upon a people more turpitude and debasement? Can anything tend more to make men think themselves mean, or degrade to a lower point their estimation of virtue and their standard ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... house in the scrub a number of men were drinking sake with much uproar, and a superb-looking Aino came out, staggered a few yards, and then fell backwards among the weeds, a picture of debasement. I forgot to tell you that before I left Biratori, I inveighed to the assembled Ainos against the practice and consequences of sake-drinking, and was met with the reply, "We must drink to the gods, or we shall die;" but Pipichari ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... disguise slavery," cried he, "it is slavery still. Its chains, though wreathed with roses, not only fasten on the body but rivet on the mind. They bend it from the loftiest virtue to a debasement beneath calculation. They disgrace honor; they trample upon justice. They transform the legions of Rome into a band of singers. They prostrate the sons of Athens and of Sparta at the feet of cowards. They make man abjure his birth ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... of ardent spirits, men, women and—shocking to say—children. This hateful vice, which contributes more than any other to the debasement of human nature, seems to produce more baneful effects upon the Indian, both physically and morally, than upon the European. The worst propensities of his nature are excited by it. While under the influence of this demon he spares ...
— Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory • John M'lean
... deadly irridescence." How one thinks of Ingalls and his "honesty in politics is an iridescent dream." To resume our Morley. "Passions moved it in strange orbits. Private depravity and political debasement went with one of the most brilliant intellectual awakenings in the history of the western world. Another dark element is the association of merciless selfishness, violence, craft and corruption with the administration of sacred things. If politics ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... The debasement is quite intelligible, when one remembers what accumulated miseries these provinces have undergone. Memories of refinement were starved out of the inhabitants by centuries of misrule, when nothing was of interest or of value save what helped to fill the belly. The work of bestialization ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... was a plan that would make honest impartial public action at least possible. And the purer the government of Florence would become—the more secure from the designs of men who saw their own advantage in the moral debasement of their fellows—the nearer would the Florentine people approach the character of a pure community, worthy to lead the way in the renovation of the Church and the world. And Fra Girolamo's mind never stopped short of that sublimest end: the objects ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... Mahomet; and from that hour to this Islam has had sway within its walls. Not once since have its echoes been permitted to respond to a Christian prayer or a hymn to the Virgin. Nor was this the first instance when, to adequately punish a people for the debasement and perversions of his revelations, God, in righteous ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... lead a man too weak to stand in his own strength when appetite, held only in abeyance, springs back upon him to trust in God as his only hope of permanent reformation. First we must help him physically, we must take him out of his debasement, his foulness and his discomfort, and surround him with the influences of a home. Must get him clothed and in his right mind, and make him feel once more that he has sympathy—is regarded as a man full of the noblest possibilities—and so be stimulated ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... have been built up by proceedings either not socially beneficial, or in some cases positively harmful. Consider some of the commoner methods of growing rich. There is first the selling of rubbish for money, exemplified by the great patent medicine fortunes and the fortunes achieved by the debasement of journalism, the sale of prize-competition magazines and the like; next there is forestalling, the making of "corners" in such commodities as corn, nitrates, borax and the like; then there is the capture of what Americans call "franchises," ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... will find no difficulty in understanding the meaning of Edmund Burke's words when he said : "The code against the Catholics was a machine of wise and elaborate contrivance; and as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment, and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man." And, elsewhere: "To render men patient under the deprivation of all the rights of human nature, every thing which could give ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... front of wood, and ears once attentive are deaf. And the pity is that they have closed not to the evil alone, but to the good. This is the crime of those who distort and degrade speech: they shake confidence generally. We consider as a calamity the debasement of the currency, the lowering of interest, the abolition of credit:—there is a misfortune greater than these: the loss of confidence, of that moral credit which honest people give one another, and which makes speech circulate like an authentic currency. Away with ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... their own well-being,—who are really unconcerned about their own elevation. The friends of the industrious should faithfully tell them that they must exercise prudence, economy, and self-denial, if they would really be raised from selfish debasement, and become elevated to the dignity of thinking beings. It is only by practising the principles of self-dependence that they can achieve dignity, stability, and consideration in society; or that they can acquire such influence and ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... the re-establishment of her rank and position. She wrote a very curt note, begging that her thanks might be given to his Majesty,—and then she burned the private secretary's letter. No congratulations were anything to her till she should see her daughter freed from the debasement of ...
— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope
... mortifying are those proofs of thy excellence? How deep is that debasement into which I am sunk, when I ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... subjected, have, by no means, sunk down to his standard of corruption; and some of them at least would seem ready to hang their heads when they call him "father." I cannot at this moment think of a more loathsome example of moral debasement than this person presents. I sometimes meet him, and from early associations, even take his hand; but I never do it without feeling myself in contact with the very ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... effect of all his manoeuvres, from which it seems he was sanguine enough to entertain hopes, upon the state of the country, he himself informs us,—"The event has proved the reverse of these hopes, and accumulation of distress, debasement, and dissatisfaction to the Nabob, and disappointment and disgrace to me.—Every measure [which he had himself proposed] has been so conducted as to give him cause of displeasure. There are no officers ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... business. He meant to show Miss Bently that she had made a bad business speculation after all. Thus ambition became the controlling element in his character; and he might have had a worse one. Moreover, in all his moral debasement he never lost a decided tendency toward truthfulness and honesty. He would have starved rather than touch anything that did not belong to him, nor would he allow himself to deceive in matters of business, and it was upon ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... her labor. This fact is discovered by some female gossip, and she is dismissed from the factory as an immoral woman, and descends to the lowest depths of prostitution,—still for the purpose of supporting her child. Jean Valjean, the reformed criminal, discovers her, is made aware that her debasement is the result of the act of his foreman, and takes her, half dead with misery and sickness, to his own house. Meanwhile he learns that an innocent person, by being confounded with himself, is in danger of being punished for his former deeds. He flies ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... is such an atrocious debasement of human nature, that its very extirpation, if not performed with solicitous care, may sometimes open a source ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... passions—but she had no affections. There have been many Jezebels—but few Athaliahs. The affections compose so large a part of a woman's nature that we disown one who is without them. In her deepest guilt, in her lowest debasement, they still cling to her; and raised to the summit of power, they do not ...
— Notable Women of Olden Time • Anonymous
... absence of the scriptural idea of family relation; the despotism exercised by the priesthood with the aid of an Inquisition, and the unnumbered toll-gates they have placed on the road to heaven; the effeminacy of the higher classes and debasement of the peasantry; the absorption of half the revenues of the country in superstitious and idolatrous purposes, and the uncleanly habits superinduced by mental and physical degradation for generations, so that the word leper is ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... Exchequer rather than the War Office. "At one of the most critical conjunctures of the Peninsular war, he drew up a most able paper on the true principles of Portuguese banking; and at Seringapatam, after very serious evils had been experienced from a long-standing debasement of the coinage, a memorandum was accidentally discovered in the treasury from the pen of Colonel Wellesley, every prediction and observation of which had been exactly verified by events." His desire to stand by his order, to uphold government by that order, and to maintain its revenues by the protection ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... peculiar and diversified description, to which we can find no parallel in the history of man, the effect of which no ordinary mind could have borne. These were, in general, connected with that lowliness and debasement to which he submitted for the benefit of our sinful race; but occasionally, as at his birth, his baptism, and transfiguration, there burst forth some bright rays of glory from behind the dark cloud of his humanity, which proved his possession of a ...
— The Church of England Magazine - Volume 10, No. 263, January 9, 1841 • Various
... democratic institutions survives for a few generations, and to it are superadded the decision and certainty which are the attributes of government when all its powers are directed by a single mind. It is true that this preter-natural vigor is short-lived: national corruption and debasement gradually follow the loss of the national liberties; but there is an interval before their workings are felt, and in that interval the most ambitious schemes of foreign conquest ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... detriment, but, without becoming thereby worthy of being classed with the lowest of the low. Do not misunderstand us, gentle reader. We do not wish in the slightest degree to palliate the coarse language, the debasement, the harsh villainy, which shock the virtuous when visiting the haunts of poverty. Our simple desire is to assure the sceptical that goodness and truth are sometimes found in strange questionable places, although it is undoubtedly true ...
— The Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... and should it appear that they, or any of them, had proceeded against him in any thing touching his honor, or the prosperity of the family, or of the estate, either in word or deed, whereby might come a scandal and debasement to my family, and a detriment to my estate; in that ease, nothing farther shall be given to them or him, from that time forward, inasmuch as they are always to be faithful to Diego and ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... leads him to look upon himself as the aim of earthly life and the centre of earthly nature; this, he says, is nothing but vanity and haughtiness. Several writers in the "Ausland" faithfully second him in this debasement of the value of man. Its editor ("Ausland," 1874, No. 48, p. 957), for instance, reproaches Ludwig Noire, although he otherwise sympathizes with him, that in his book "Die Welt als Entwicklung des Geistes" ("The World as Development of Mind"), Leipzig, Veit & ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... legalization; and were that point once effected, I am of opinion that its most objectionable feature would be altogether removed. Even as it now exists it appears to me to be unattended with a hundredth part of the debasement and misery which may be seen in our native country from the lamentable abuse of ardent spirits, and those who so sweepingly condemn the opium trade on that principle need not, I think, leave the shores of England to find a far greater ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... are, to a great degree, results of inherited tendencies over which we have no control,—accidents of birthplace, in the choosing of which we had no voice. The high in the world do not shine altogether by their own light, not do the lowly grovel altogether in their own debasement,—I felt the excuse for humanity. I was overwhelmed with one feeling,—only God can weigh such circumstantial evidence; we, in our little knowledge of results, pronounce sentence, but final judgment is reserved ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... which they were kept before. Thee perhaps hast been surprised to see them at my table, but by elevating them to the rank of freemen, they necessarily acquire that emulation without which we ourselves should fall into debasement and profligate ways." Mr. Bertram, this is the most philosophical treatment of negroes that I have heard of; happy would it be for America would other denominations of Christians imbibe the same principles, and follow the same admirable rules. A great number ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... pressed close to the limits of human endurance, and seemed almost to threaten the extermination of the population. The prosperity of the cities was crushed by war contributions, even when they escaped being plundered like Magdeburg; and the debasement of the coinage practised by the emperor and the princes bore hardly upon all who bought or sold. [Footnote: Gindeley, History of the Thirty Years' War (English trans.), II., 390-395] During the later ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... the Persian king Artaxerxes III. (about 340 B.C.), and from that time until our own day no native prince has ever sat upon the throne of the Pharaohs. Long before the Persian conquest, the Prophet Ezekiel, foretelling the debasement of Egypt, had declared, "There shall be no more a prince of the land of Egypt." ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... the combative qualities, the argument forgets a darker moral phase. It forgets the moral wrecks which are the sad products of war; it forgets the effect of the loss of the refining influence of womanhood upon the soldier; it forgets the debasement of sinking men to the physical type of life. And the argument assumes that peace has no "equivalent for war," declared by a famous educator to be the greatest need of the age. Courage and endurance are as necessary in social reforms as in carnal battle. To wrestle against principalities ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... cried Nugent. "No, Germany will never endure the disgrace and debasement of Poland; she will never sink to ruin and perish like Poland. It is true, a majority of the German princes bow to Napoleon's power, and we may charge them with infidelity and treason against Germany; but we can not prefer the same ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach
... placed his regiment in the front line! And if perchance some memory came to him of a pair of dark eyes that might take on a tenderer light in reading the account of that day's doings, who shall blame him for the unmartial thought or count it a debasement of ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... last words of Monty's sermon, I laid down my pencil on the dug-out floor with a little start. As in a flashlight I saw their truth. They created in my mind the picture of that AEgean evening, when Monty turned the moment of Doe's death, which so nearly brought me discouragement and debasement, into an ennobling memory. And I foresaw him going about healing the sores of this war with the ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... trammel, of all her complete immunity from every scruple and every fastidiousness of her sex. But, for once, within sight of that noble and haughty beauty, a poignant, cruel, wounding sense of utter inferiority, of utter debasement, possessed and weighed down her lawless and indomitable spirit. Some vague, weary feeling that her youth was fair enough in the sight of men, but that her older years would be very dark, very terrible, came on her even in this hour of the supreme ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... I think, pretty well canvassed the subject, and I shall therefore hasten to a conclusion. And first, I ask the West Indians, whether they think that they will be allowed to carry on their present cruel system, the arbitrary use of the whip and the chain, and the brutal debasement of their fellow-creatures, for ever. I say, No; I entertain better hopes of the humanity and justice of the British people. I am sure that they will interfere, and that when they once take up the cause, they will never abandon it till they have obtained their object. ...
— Thoughts On The Necessity Of Improving The Condition Of The Slaves • Thomas Clarkson
... you his—yea, and maybe saved you From a debasement that could madden or kill, For women thieves ere now have felt a knife Severing ear or nose. And yet the feud You sowed with Otkell's house shall murder Gunnar. Otkell was slain: then Gunnar's enviers, Who could not crush him under his own horse At the big horse-fight, ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... with its annoying symptoms, such as constipation, indigestion, diarrhea, auto-intoxication, emaciation, anemia, muddy complexion, foul breath, blotches and pimples on the face, each and all of which indicate a physical debasement. ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... enlightened politicians, and Miss Burney among the rest, seem to have thought that any person who considered the subject with reference to the public interest, showed himself to be a bad-hearted man. Nobody wonders at this in a gentleman usher; but it is melancholy to see genius sinking into such debasement. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Davis sent out men to scurry the country for old stoves and every iron scrap was picked up to be melted into weapons. At the close of the war tenpenny nails were used as five-cent pieces and currency in North Carolina. To crown all other disasters came the debasement of the currency. Macaulay says that the world has suffered less from bad kings than from bad shillings and sixpences. The Confederacy issued one billion dollars of paper money, States issued another flood ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... socialistic, are to be fostered for the purpose of destroying non-Jewish civilization (Protocol 3). In the event of unfavorable action by any power or group of powers, it is to be met by resistance in the form of universal war (Protocol 7). Disorganization of the economic life of the world through the debasement and ruin of the credit and currency systems, of the principal nations, and the creation of "a universal economic crisis" are also to be used to the same end ...
— The Jew and American Ideals • John Spargo
... Socialism must be attacked in the derived propositions about which popular discussion centers, and the assault must be, not to prove that the doctrines are scientifically unsound, but that they tend to the impoverishment and debasement of the masses. These propositions are three, and I lay down as my thesis—for I ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams
... they degenerate into a populace, that they are incapable of exercising the sovereignty. Usurpation is then an easy attainment, and an usurper soon found. The people themselves become the willing instruments of their own debasement and ruin. Let us, then, look to the great cause, and endeavor to preserve it in full force. Let us by all wise and constitutional measures promote intelligence among the people as the best means of preserving ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... of our own making; they are, to a great degree, results of inherited tendencies over which we have no control,—accidents of birthplace, in the choosing of which we had no voice. The high in the world do not shine altogether by their own light, not do the lowly grovel altogether in their own debasement,—I felt the excuse for humanity. I was overwhelmed with one feeling,—only God can weigh such circumstantial evidence; we, in our little knowledge of results, pronounce sentence, but final judgment is reserved for a higher court, that sees the cross-purposes in which we ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... England, and unless indeed many other important considerations are attended to, which appear to have hitherto escaped the regard of the Imperial Government. Why, for instance, is there that indifference in regard to the clothing of the men? What but discontent, debasement, and enervation, can be the effects of that ragged and almost naked condition in which they have so long been suffered to remain, notwithstanding the numerous applications that have been made for the necessary clothing? I would also inquire the ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, G.C.B., Admiral of the Red, Rear-Admiral of the Fleet, Etc., Etc. • Thomas Cochrane, Earl of Dundonald
... the free coinage of silver. Each of us regarded the measure proposed by the Senate as a practical repudiation of one-third of the debts of the United States, as a substantial reduction of the wages of labor, as a debasement of our currency to a single silver standard, as the demonetization of gold and a sharp disturbance of all our business relations with the great commercial nations of the world. To defeat such a policy, so pregnant with evil, I was willing to buy the entire ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... from the cold classicismo of the late sixteenth century showed itself in the following period, in the lawless and vulgar extravagances of the so-called Baroque style. The wealthy Jesuit order was a notorious contributor to the debasement of architectural taste. Most of the Jesuit churches and many others not belonging to the order, but following its pernicious example, are monuments of bad taste and pretentious sham. Broken and contorted pediments, huge scrolls, heavy mouldings, ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... serf ATTACHED TO THE GLEBE, it only periphrased the literal meaning of the word servus.[16] Spontaneous reason, oracle of fate itself, had therefore condemned the subaltern workman, before science had established his debasement. Such being the case, what can the efforts of philanthropy do for beings ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... will be treated of in boudoirs, and decided according to the caprice of abandoned women. They will dispose of administrations, lower politics to the level of their own minds, and even ecclesiastical dignities will depend on their patronage. As a consequence of that general debasement, an unmeasured disdain will arise in the inferior classes of all that is great in the state. Doubt will be applauded, and it will extend to the power of the king, the noblesse, and the clergy. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... the unity of God and the immortality of the soul, constitute the philosophy of Freemasonry. When we wish to define it succinctly, we say that it is an ancient system of philosophy which teaches these two dogmas. And hence, if, amid the intellectual darkness and debasement of the old polytheistic religions, we find interspersed here and there, in all ages, certain institutions or associations which taught these truths, and that, in a particular way, allegorically and symbolically, then we have a right ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... I mean Rome. Its system was once prevalent in England, and, during the period that it prevailed there, was more prolific of debasement and crime than all other causes united. The people and the government at last becoming enlightened by means of the Scripture spurned it from the island with disgust and horror, the land instantly after its disappearance becoming a fair ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... development. The Primaire: the development of the style finding its best example at Paris. The Secondaire: the Perfectionnement at Reims, and its Apogee at Amiens. The Tertiaire: practically the beginning of the decadence, in St. Ouen at Rouen, only a shade removed from the debasement which soon followed. As to the merits or demerits of the contemporary structures of other nations, that also would be obviously of comparative unimportance herein except so far as a comparison might once and again ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... adroit lawyers who were prepared to work on their minds and to direct the debates. The bull, nevertheless, if its exact tenor had been known, might well have produced in many respects a contrary effect to the wishes of the King. The reproaches of Boniface touching the debasement of the coinage and the royal exactions, reproaches which so irritated Philip, might have met with other sentiments from the townsmen. The chancellor, Peter Flotte, foresaw this; he distributed among the public, instead of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... cave pictures. And their new art develops at the expense of decoration; it becomes perfect and sterile. What is commonly called decay is merely stylistic development. The exquisite art of Byzantium was wrongly considered as the debasement of Greco-Roman art. It was really the decorative expansion of it; the conventionalising of exaggerated realism. The same might have happened in Europe after the Baroque and Rococo fashions had their day; politics and commerce ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... his beaten enemies were resolute enough, accepting defeat with grim carelessness, or with sphinx-like indifference, or even with airy jocularity. But for the most part their alert, eager deference, their tame subservience, the abject humility and debasement of their bent shoulders drove Jadwin to the verge of self-control. He grew to detest the business; he regretted even the defiant brutality of Scannel, a rascal, but none the less keeping his head high. The more the fellows ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... venal, he [121] so evidently calls them this in an agony of apprehension for his Philistine or middle-class Parliament, which has done so many great and heroic works, and is now threatened with mixture and debasement, that the Populace do not lay his words seriously to heart. So the voice which makes a permanent impression on each of our classes is the voice of its friends, and this is from the nature of things, ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... DEBASEMENT OF CHRISTIANITY. Thus far Bishop Newton; but to return to the times of Constantine: though these concessions to old and popular ideas were permitted and even encouraged, the dominant religious party never for a moment hesitated to enforce its decisions by the aid of the civil power—an ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... here, or whoever comes here, brought by poverty or violence, an exile from misery or from power, and whatever be his ethnological distinction, is a republican of this country because he is a man. Here he is to find safety, cooperation, and welcome. His very ignorance and debasement are to be welcomed by a country eager to exhibit the plastic power of its divine idea,—how animal restrictions can be gradually obliterated, how superstition and prejudice must die out of stolid countenances before the steady gaze of republican good-will, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... and Scandinavian stocks seem never to have had that period of enslaved womanhood, that polygamous harem culture; their women never went through that debasement; and their men have succeeded in preserving the spirit of freedom which is inevitably lost by a race which has servile women. Thus while it is admitted that roughly speaking the period of Androcentric Culture corresponds with the period of progress, these considerations ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... he, "it is slavery still. Its chains, though wreathed with roses, not only fasten on the body but rivet on the mind. They bend it from the loftiest virtue to a debasement beneath calculation. They disgrace honor; they trample upon justice. They transform the legions of Rome into a band of singers. They prostrate the sons of Athens and of Sparta at the feet of cowards. They make man abjure his birth right, bind himself to another's will, and give that into ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... distinctness to any object whatsoever; and from hence we may deduce the uselessness, if not the absurdity, of certain recent schemes which promise an artificial memory, but which in reality can only produce a confusion and debasement of the fancy. Sound logic, as the habitual subordination of the individual to the species, and of the species to the genus; philosophical knowledge of facts under the relation of cause and effect; a cheerful and communicative ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... there is some shelter from the rain, have little to bind them to life, but what have they to look back upon, in death? What are the unwonted comforts of a roof and a bed, to them, when the recollections of a whole life of debasement stalk before them; when repentance seems a mockery, and sorrow comes ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... and long-continued suffering of the poor under this system, plunged into a state of debasement not more tolerable than that of the Gallic plebs—and the injustices of the rich, in whom all political power was then vested—are facts well attested by the poems of Solon himself, even in the short fragments preserved to us. It appears that immediately preceding the time of his ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... ever-increasing force, that the proposition that purity is vitally necessary for the woman, but of comparatively small account for the man, is absolutely false. Granted that, owing to social ostracism, the outward degradation of impurity to the woman is far greater, I contend that a deeper inner debasement is its sure fruition in the man. Cruelty and lies are its certain accompaniment. As Burns, with a poet's insight, ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... who stands in the nearest relation to us, who is the "head of all principality and power," and who pervades all nature with his presence. The object of the Christian religion is to recover man from his degraded, miserable condition, elevate him above his debasement, and reinvest him with the character of Christ, that he may eventually dwell with the angels in the perfections ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 11, November, 1880 • Various
... you the task of preventing, by the sole means which still remains after the others have been tried in vain, the destruction of every nobler impulse that may in the future possibly arise among us and this debasement of our entire nation. They present to you a true and omnipotent patriotism, which, in the conception of our nation as of one that is eternal, and as citizens of our own eternity, is to be deeply and ineradicably founded in the minds of all, by means of education. What this ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... (perhaps when resolved to its ungrammatical elements, "I is a warranty to ye") proceeds through "I's-a-warnd-ye," "I's-warn-ye" (all English provincialisms,) to its remote transatlantic ultimatum of debasement in ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 63, January 11, 1851 • Various
... "How singular," said I, "is the fall and debasement of words; you talk of a gang, or set, of shorters; you are, perhaps, not aware that gang and set were, a thousand years ago, only connected with the great and Divine; they are ancient Norse words, which may be found in the heroic poems of the north, and in the Edda, a collection of mythologic ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... latter being very numerous, and having settled upon the south side of Red river, to evade the pursuit of the United States' officer of justice, that portion then being considered within the boundaries of Texas. The whole region was one of peculiar debasement in all respects. As might be suspected, seasoned as it was with such a population, drunkenness, debauchery, and murder walked abroad, hand in hand, day and night. Human life was valued no higher than the life of an ox or a hog, and the heart of the settlement was cold, and palsied to ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... heard her; his being was possessed by the pitiable image of Hannah dying alone and dog poor. He had always pictured her—except in the fleet vision of debasement—as young and graceful and disturbing. Without further speech he left the kitchen and crossed the house to the shut parlor. It was screened against the day, dim and musty and damp. The orange plush of the chairs ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... non-Jewish civilization (Protocol 3). In the event of unfavorable action by any power or group of powers, it is to be met by resistance in the form of universal war (Protocol 7). Disorganization of the economic life of the world through the debasement and ruin of the credit and currency systems, of the principal nations, and the creation of "a universal economic crisis" are also to be used to the same ...
— The Jew and American Ideals • John Spargo
... things more affecting than that timorous debasement and self-humiliation of a woman. How she owns that it is she and not the man who is guilty; how she takes all the faults on her side; how she courts in a manner punishment for the wrongs which she has not committed and persists in shielding ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Lord Mar on this, as on many other occasions, to reap the ignominy of having accepted this pension, without ever receiving the profits of his debasement. ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson
... jury of Christendom (if composed half of men and half of women) which, after examining all the available evidence, would not render a verdict in her favor of "Not Guilty." The statement that She "paid the price of her own daughter's debasement and disgrace for the head of John the Baptist," is an assertion born wholly of the ecclesiastical, distorted imagination. Not even a hint, much less an iota of proof, to warrant such an assertion, is found anywhere in history—sacred or profane. While some anonymous writer of the early Christian ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... What in God's name was to be expected of us but what has happened? I went through my life bit by bit last night, I recalled all I've had to do with virtue and women, and all I was told and how I was prepared. I was born into cowardice and debasement. We all are. Our generation's grimy with hypocrisy. I came to the most beautiful things in life—like peeping Tom of Coventry. I was never given a light, never given a touch of natural manhood by all this dingy, furtive, canting, humbugging English world. Thank God! I'll soon be out of it! ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... most self-accused idleness, who have no self-consolation, are plunged in entire darkness, and have not only to lament the years of omission, but those of commission, not only the opportunities neglected, but the positive mischief done by the debasement of the faculties, the deterioration of the understanding, the impairing of the power of exertion consequent upon a long devotion to low, despicable, ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... surreptitious, snatched in William Grove's house; the servants, with their penetration of the tone of an establishment, knowing and insufferable; he lived over the increasing dissatisfaction with quick embraces in the automobile, and the final indignities of lying names and rooms of pandering and filthy debasement. The almost inevitable exposure followed, the furies and hysterical reproaches. That, indeed, would have involved them fatally: in such circumstances the world would be invincible, crushing; holding solidly its front against ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... materially above their commercial value and the restoration of the silver dollar at a rate which once was, but has ceased to be, its commercial value. Certainly the issue of our gold coinage, reduced in weight materially below its legal-tender value, would not be any the less a present debasement of the coinage by reason of its equaling, or even exceeding, in weight a gold coinage which at some past time had been commercially equal to the legal-tender value ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... religion of the Semitic nations, the Hebrews excepted, so far from containing in it a purifying element, tended to degrade its votaries by feeding the flame of sensual and revengeful passion. What but debasement could come from the worship of Astarte and the ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... is it the progress accomplished in the higher regions of intellect and of the feelings which here exerts its beneficent influence. On our moral greatness depends our material power. The elevation or debasement of character, the energy or debility of the will—such is the first source of good or evil. The world, a Chalmers rightly says, is so constituted that we should be materially happy if ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... that you have been guilty of great crimes and misdemeanours, crimes that would have sunk an unregenerated person to perdition; but as I knew it to be only a temporary falling off, a specimen of that liberty by which the chosen and elected ones are made free, I closed my eyes on the wilful debasement of our principles, knowing that the transgressions could never be accounted to your charge, and that in good time you would come to your senses, and throw the whole weight of your crimes on the shoulders that had voluntarily stooped to receive ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... to remind you of our little compact," said he. As she looked at him, he stood, smiling grossly, vulgar, sensual, mean. All the years of her debasement came to her memory with a new sting to her wounded pride, and she swept on, ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... of his toilet was an expense which his foes could not incur. It was the studied endeavor of those who now rode upon the crested yet perilous billows of power, to degrade royalty to the lowest depths of debasement and contempt—that the beheading of the king and the queen might be regarded as merely the execution of a male and a female felon dragged from the loathsome ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... monarch's crown, That not the midnight of Earth's blackest sin Can dim. All beauty emanates from soul, And all deformity. The piteous straw Where sickness writhes in suffering and want— The cold, bleak dwelling where the winds have will To brag o'er man's debasement, if possess'd In fortitude and patience, with the heart Clear in its honour, stedfast in its faith, Is to the eye of angels, beautiful as day; And this fair spot with all its waken'd charms Is purgatorial torture to the wretch Whose life shrieks in ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... of Angus headed a conspiracy of nobles, such as Huntly, Lennox, and Buchan, seized Cochrane and other favourites of James, and hanged them over Lauder Bridge. The most tangible grievance was the increasing debasement of the coinage. James was immured at Edinburgh, but, by a compromise, Albany was restored to rank and estates. Meanwhile Gloucester captured Berwick, never to be recovered by Scotland. In 1483 Albany renewed, with many of the nobles, his intrigues ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... shame personally undeserved, and therefore felt as wrongs, and with a blind ferment of vindictive working towards the occasions and causes, especially towards a brother, whose stainless birth and lawful honours were the constant remembrancers of his own debasement, and were ever in the way to prevent all chance of its being unknown, or overlooked and forgotten. Add to this, that with excellent judgment, and provident for the claims of the moral sense,—for that which, relatively to the drama, ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... of mediaeval education carried the blending almost to the absorption of poetic by rhetoric, and the debasement of rhetoric itself to ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... the king without due payment; the maintenance of courts at the gates of the king's castles in derogation of the common-law courts; the taking of "new customs," two shillings per tun of wine, two shillings for cloth and other imports, "whereby the price to the people is enhanced"; the debasement of current coin; that petitions of the Commons to Parliament were not received, etc., etc. All duties were then suspended, in order to know and be advised "what Profit and Advantage will accrue to him and his People by ceasing the taking of those Customs"—a precedent it were to be wished ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... Miss Laura saved from any fear for her future, and enabled to give more freely to the poor and needy. Barclay Fetters recovered the use of one eye, and embittered against the whole Negro race by his disfigurement, went into public life and devoted his talents and his education to their debasement. The colonel had relented sufficiently to contemplate making over to Miss Laura the old family residence in trust for use as a hospital, with a suitable fund for its maintenance, but it unfortunately ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... fond of ardent spirits, men, women and—shocking to say—children. This hateful vice, which contributes more than any other to the debasement of human nature, seems to produce more baneful effects upon the Indian, both physically and morally, than upon the European. The worst propensities of his nature are excited by it. While under the influence ...
— Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory • John M'lean
... naval officer should be surrounded by circumstances calculated to impart a requisite dignity to his position, it is not the less certain that, by the excessive pomp he at present maintains, there is naturally and unavoidably generated a feeling of servility and debasement in the hearts of most of the seamen who continually behold a fellow-mortal flourishing over their heads like the archangel Michael with a thousand wings. And as, in degree, this same pomp is observed toward their inferiors by all the grades of commissioned officers, ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... indeterminate. Confronting this world (that is nature and man) there is another world which is God. God is the infinite and the perfect, and particularly the perfect and infinite will. The world that we know is a debasement from that without our being able to conceive how the perfect can be degraded, and how an emanation of the perfect can be imperfect and how the non-being can come out of being, since relatively to the infinite, the finite has no existence, and relatively ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... pride of all her fiery liberty from every feminine trammel, of all her complete immunity from every scruple and every fastidiousness of her sex. But, for once, within sight of that noble and haughty beauty, a poignant, cruel, wounding sense of utter inferiority, of utter debasement, possessed and weighed down her lawless and indomitable spirit. Some vague, weary feeling that her youth was fair enough in the sight of men, but that her older years would be very dark, very terrible, came on her even in this hour of the supreme ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... reproach, discredit, dishonor, shame, infamy, degradation, disrepute, ignominy, obloquy, odium, opprobrium, scandal, debasement, abasement. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... the crowning glory of man, and his consciousness of it puts him in a high place above the animal world. Men live and die; nations rise and fall, but the struggle of individual lives and of individual nations must be measured not by their immediate needs, but as they tend to the debasement or perfection of ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... independent, still it may be said that poetically, and in spirit, the Chorus was the source of its existence, and that without these persevering supporters and witnesses of the incident a totally different order of poetry would have grown out of the drama. The abolition of the Chorus, and the debasement of this sensibly powerful organ into the characterless substitute of a confidant, is, by no means, such an improvement in tragedy as the French, and their imitators, would ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... mankind, which has wasted in the chase of chimeras very much of the world's best intellect, fatally perverted our moral sentiments, fomented discord and division, supported all the tyranny of privilege and sanctioned all debasement of the people. Far be it from me to argue this point with any dissident. I prefer to leave him to the logic of events, which has convinced me, and may some ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... this famous code—a code which Burke truly described as 'well digested and well disposed in all its parts; a machine of wise and elaborate contrivance, and as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment, and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... because men have gone pleasure-mad and sport-mad, and in their madness cannot see the difference between a clever athlete and a mental or moral giant. We prove what our own tastes are, we prove the quality of our own hearts and minds, we prove our own debasement, when we exalt physical strength above excellence of character, when we make our heroes out of muscle instead of soul, when we worship those who serve our pleasure more than those who set us examples of noble things, and lead the way in them. It is only another rendering of the old ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... be found.—In Africa, wretchedly enslaved by domestic tyrants; in our islands perpetual martyrs; in the southern United States, the meanest of slaves; in the northern, domestics; in Europe, universally contemned, every where proscribed, like the Jews; in a word, every where in a state of debasement. ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... than the gentle zephyr of a June day on the hide of a rhinoceros. Socialism must be attacked in the derived propositions about which popular discussion centers, and the assault must be, not to prove that the doctrines are scientifically unsound, but that they tend to the impoverishment and debasement of the masses. These propositions are three, and I lay down as my ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams
... fellows under common conventions, common orders. Here, alone, slipping in and out among the crowd, she looked abandoned, the sight of her in her bare white feet and the travesty of her dress was a wound. Her humility screamed its violation, its debasement of her race; she woke the impulse to screen her and hurry her away as if she were a woman walking in her sleep. She had on her arm a sheaf of the War Cry. This was another indignity; she offered them right and left, no one had a pice ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... habits are apt to be all forgotten, these restraints to be all broken through under the strain of Chelaship. He is now in an atmosphere of illusions—Maya. Vice puts on its most alluring face, and the tempting passions attract the inexperienced aspirant to the depths of psychic debasement. This is not a case like that depicted by a great artist, where Satan is seen playing a game of chess with a man upon the stake of his soul, while the latter's good angel stands beside him to counsel and assist. For the ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... an extreme case. It assumes a particularly bad mother and a particularly ill-chosen nurse, and what is probably only a transitory phase of sexual debasement. The average nurse of the upper- class child is often a woman of highly developed motherly instincts, and it is probable that our upper class and our upper middle-class is passing or has already passed through that phase of thought ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... at least, one that demands from England a rigid inquiry, when we call to mind what a den of debasement, what a sink of soul and body, a prison yet is amongst the most civilized and humane people in ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... war develops the combative qualities, the argument forgets a darker moral phase. It forgets the moral wrecks which are the sad products of war; it forgets the effect of the loss of the refining influence of womanhood upon the soldier; it forgets the debasement of sinking men to the physical type of life. And the argument assumes that peace has no "equivalent for war," declared by a famous educator to be the greatest need of the age. Courage and endurance are as necessary in social reforms as in carnal battle. To wrestle against principalities and powers ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... is what has actually taken place in modern Europe through the introduction of Christianity. This sublime and beneficent religion has regenerated the ancient world from its state of exhaustion and debasement; it is the guiding principle in the history of modern nations, and even at this day, when many suppose they have shaken off its authority, they still find themselves much more influenced by it in their views of human affairs than they ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... best deserved that title posterity will decide. But my greatness appeared sufficiently in that very act which seemed to you a debasement. ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... prejudice; but if their degradation were but skin-deep, they might easily overcome it. . . . . Of course, we understand that the evil we contemplate is complex and retroactive—that the political degradation of the blacks is a cause as well as a consequence of their moral debasement. Had they never been enslaved, they would not now be so abject in soul; had they not been so abject, they could not have been enslaved. Our aborigines might have been crushed into slavery by overwhelming force; but they could ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... being a pig; so, it is possible that a man may frequent a low tavern, not without detriment, but, without becoming thereby worthy of being classed with the lowest of the low. Do not misunderstand us, gentle reader. We do not wish in the slightest degree to palliate the coarse language, the debasement, the harsh villainy, which shock the virtuous when visiting the haunts of poverty. Our simple desire is to assure the sceptical that goodness and truth are sometimes found in strange questionable places, although it is undoubtedly ...
— The Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... of good moral character, but of high religious attainments, and their painful exhibitions of fear, distrust, and gloom, originate in physical rather than in spiritual causes. It is interesting to witness this strange perversion of the imagination, this morbid debasement of the religious faculties, and dejection of mind, due to causes disturbing the functions of the liver and other ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... active and vigilant in quest of Delight; under so many Disquiets, and the Sport of such various Passions; let them answer, as they can, if the Pains they undergo, do not outweigh their Enjoyments. The Infidelities on the one Part between the two Sexes, and the Caprices on the other, the Debasement of Reason, the Pangs of Expectation, the Disappointments in Possession, the Stings of Remorse, the Vanities and Vexations attending even the most refined Delights that make up this Business of Life, render it so silly and uncomfortable, that no Man is thought wise till he hath got over it, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... striven—and I hope with some prospect of eventual success—to bring about its legalization; and were that point once effected, I am of opinion that its most objectionable feature would be altogether removed. Even as it now exists it appears to me to be unattended with a hundredth part of the debasement and misery which may be seen in our native country from the lamentable abuse of ardent spirits, and those who so sweepingly condemn the opium trade on that principle need not, I think, leave the shores of England to find a far greater and ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... eternal honour of AEgypt and Athens, they were the only places that we can find, where slaves were considered with any humanity at all. The rest of the world seemed to vie with each other, in the debasement and oppression of these unfortunate people. They used them with as much severity as they chose; they measured their treatment only by their own passion and caprice; and, by leaving them on every occasion, without the possibility of an appeal, they rendered their situation the ...
— An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African • Thomas Clarkson
... legitimacy: 'Trade is justly deserving of blame, because, considered in itself, it satisfies the greed for gain, which knows no limit, and tends to infinity. Hence trading, considered in itself, has a certain debasement attaching thereto, in so far as, by its very nature, it does not imply a virtuous or necessary end. Nevertheless gain, which is the end of trading, though not implying, by its nature, anything virtuous or necessary, ...
— An Essay on Mediaeval Economic Teaching • George O'Brien
... have caught the crowd. As to the poetry by itself, anything good in that repels rather. I am not as blind as Romney, not to perceive this. He had to be blinded, observe, to be made to see; just as Marian had to be dragged through the uttermost debasement of circumstances to arrive at the sentiment of personal dignity. I am sorry, but indeed ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... laid against the existing electoral system—it is in no small measure responsible for that increasing degradation in the methods of warfare which has characterised recent political and municipal contests. This debasement of elections cannot fail to contribute to that undermining of the authority of the House of Commons, upon which stress has already been laid. Indeed, there is abundant evidence to show that in conjunction with the imaginary instability of the electorate, the debasement of elections ...
— Proportional Representation - A Study in Methods of Election • John H. Humphreys
... world have been built up by proceedings either not socially beneficial, or in some cases positively harmful. Consider some of the commoner methods of growing rich. There is first the selling of rubbish for money, exemplified by the great patent medicine fortunes and the fortunes achieved by the debasement of journalism, the sale of prize-competition magazines and the like; next there is forestalling, the making of "corners" in such commodities as corn, nitrates, borax and the like; then there is the capture of what Americans call "franchises," securing at low terms by expedients that usually ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... men and women round the triumphal galley, amidst the foul chorus of the air of the Carmagnole; embraces, more obscene than patriotic, between these women and the soldiers, who threw themselves into each others' arms; and in order to put the cope-stone on this debasement of the laws, Petion the Maire of Paris, the magistrates of the people assisting personally at this fete, and sanctioning this insolent triumph over the laws by their weakness or their complicity. Such was this fete: an humiliating copy of the 14th of July, an infamous ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... the characteristic which especially distinguished Sodom. During the Revolution there was manifest a state of moral debasement and corruption similar to that which brought destruction upon the cities of the plain. And the historian presents together the atheism and the licentiousness of France, as given in the prophecy: "Intimately connected ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... safety, pleasure before all else—who had no ideal of womanhood—who could not have protected women—who would not fight to save women from the apish Huns—who remained behind to fall in the wreck of the war's degeneration, and to dance, to drink, to smoke, to ride the women to their debasement. ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... laid down my pencil on the dug-out floor with a little start. As in a flashlight I saw their truth. They created in my mind the picture of that AEgean evening, when Monty turned the moment of Doe's death, which so nearly brought me discouragement and debasement, into an ennobling memory. And I foresaw him going about healing the sores of this war with ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... his first sin,—his hearkening to the suggestions of his flesh against the clear light and knowledge of his spirit. The apple was beautiful to look on and sweet to the taste, and this engaged man. Thus the voluntary debasement and subjection of the spirit—which was breathed in of God—unto the service of that dust which God had appointed to serve it hath turned into a necessary slavery, so that the flesh being put in the throne cannot be cast out. And this is the righteous ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... the other German chiefs many who sympathised with him in his indignation at their country's debasement, and many whom private wrongs had stung yet more deeply. There was little difficulty in collecting bold leaders for an attack on the oppressors, and little fear of the population not rising readily at ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... marrying a woman beneath him in society may raise her to any eminence that he himself may reach; but if a woman marry a man beneath her in society she always goes down to his level. That is a law inexorable, and there are no exceptions. Is any woman so high up that she can afford to plot for her own debasement? There is not a State in the American Union that has not for the last twenty years furnished an instance of the sudden departure of some intelligent woman from an affluent home to spend her life with some ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... hasten to a conclusion. And first, I ask the West Indians, whether they think that they will be allowed to carry on their present cruel system, the arbitrary use of the whip and the chain, and the brutal debasement of their fellow-creatures, for ever. I say, No; I entertain better hopes of the humanity and justice of the British people. I am sure that they will interfere, and that when they once take up the cause, they will never abandon it till they have obtained their object. And what is it, ...
— Thoughts On The Necessity Of Improving The Condition Of The Slaves • Thomas Clarkson
... concupiscence that none but Almighty power could have saved him from utter destruction. Thousands of boys and young men are to-day standing on the slippery brink of that awful precipice from which but very few are snatched away. Soon they will plunge headlong over into the abyss of debasement and corruption from whence they will never escape. Oh that we had the power to reach each one of these unfortunate youth before it is too late, and to utter in their ears such warnings, to portray before them such pictures of ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... families, and their friends; when he saw the unhappy victims carried away by force; thrust into a dungeon in the hold of a ship, in which the interval of their passage from their native to a foreign land was filled up with misery, under every degree of debasement, and in chains; and when he saw them afterwards consigned to an eternal slavery; he could not but contemplate the whole system with horror. It was inhuman in its beginning, inhuman in its progress, and inhuman ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... pure and simple taste in the people, yet there is a system of social debasement throughout Japan, which was here so obvious that it cannot be passed without notice. It is no worse, perhaps, than in Vienna or Paris, where the law affords it certain sanction; but when realized in connection with the quiet, peaceful ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... seconded the arguments of Mr. Davis. "Suppose, instead of issuing paper money," said Mr. Bayard, "it had pleased Congress to order a debasement of our National coinage. Suppose twenty-five per cent more of alloy or worthless metal had been injected into our currency, and with that base coinage men had come forward to buy your bonds, what would be thought of the man who, when the day of ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... taught to repeat my father's name with disdain, and to scoff at my just claims to protection. I strove to think that all this grandeur was but more glaring infamy, and that, by planting his gold-enwoven flag beside my tarnished and tattered banner, he proclaimed not his superiority, but his debasement. Yet I envied him. His stud of beautiful horses, his arms of costly workmanship, the praise that attended him, the adoration, ready servitor, high place and high esteem,—I considered them as forcibly wrenched from me, and envied them all with novel ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... scarcity of corn, nor, perhaps, any augmentation in the real quantity of silver which was usually paid for it, must necessarily have occasioned some augmentation in the nominal sum. This event was the great debasement of the silver coin, by clipping and wearing. This evil had begun in the reign of Charles II. and had gone on continually increasing till 1695; at which time, as we may learn from Mr Lowndes, the current silver coin was, at an average, near five-and-twenty per cent. below its standard value. But ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... have stated are for the awakening of parents and guardians of girls. If I were to presume to say anything to the possible victims of this awful scourge of white slavery it would be this: "Those who enter here leave hope behind." The depths of debasement and suffering disclosed by the investigation now in progress would make the flesh of a seasoned man of the world creep with ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... bursting in rain and thunder; but our miserable plight had attracted a sympathising crowd. No question was asked of who? or whence? by a generous people, to wounded and wearied men and helpless women; till there pressed through the ring of bystanders a tall fellow, with a strong expression of debasement and desperate impudence upon his face, that seemed to say, "Infamy, you have done your worst." He demanded our names and passports, and arrested us all in the king's name, almost in the same breath. I struck him in the face with my ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... time, the usual mode of extending the Gospel among the heathen has been for a few of the most self-sacrificing men and women to give up country and home and all the comforts and benefits of a Christian community, and then commence the family state amid such vice and debasement that it was ruinous to children to be trained in its midst. And so the result has been, in multitudes of cases, that children were born only to be sent from parents to be trained by strangers, and the true "Christian family" could not be ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Does it become the servant of God voluntarily to expose herself to hear contempt and blasphemy attached to the Holy Name and the holy things which she loves; to see on the stage an awful mockery of prayer itself, on the race-course the despair of the ruined gambler and the debasement of the drunkard? The choice of the scenes you frequent now, of the company you keep now, is of an importance involved in the very nature of things, and not dependent alone on the expressed will of God. It is only the pure in heart who can see God.[99] It is only those ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... There can be no question that his own intimate familiarity with the details of the Bond of Virtue and the War of Freedom[7] of the glorious epoch when modern Germany headed and achieved the victorious movement against the world's debasement,—brought distinctly to Bismarck's mental vision the splendor of Cavour's impossibly unequal contest for Italian freedom! The situations were essentially much alike, but so much grander for the Italian statesman, Italy's odds being so immeasurably longer! But ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... too—as little was her gigantic power levelled with the dust by libels, but perished from the corruptions of the tyrannical government of the Emperors, which drained the nation of all its ancient virtue, and bred the slavery which produces an utter debasement of the mind (and which never could have been, if a free publication of political opinion had been suffered), and thus she fell an easy conquest and prey to the barbarians and Goths. Both these renowned states fell, because their governments ...
— A Sketch of the Life of the late Henry Cooper - Barrister-at-Law, of the Norfolk Circuit; as also, of his Father • William Cooper
... the means we have made use of, to relieve them from that bondage and ignorance in which they were kept before. Thee perhaps hast been surprised to see them at my table, but by elevating them to the rank of freemen, they necessarily acquire that emulation without which we ourselves should fall into debasement and profligate ways." Mr. Bertram, this is the most philosophical treatment of negroes that I have heard of; happy would it be for America would other denominations of Christians imbibe the same principles, and follow the same admirable rules. A great number of men would be relieved ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... and debasement still manifest in various features of the popular character.—Entire want, in early life, of any idea of a general and comprehensive purpose to be pursued—Gratification of the senses the chief good.—Cruelty ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... was most in accordance with the spirit of the people. But, owing to the corrupt condition of human nature, this would not be the strict religion of Jehovah, which, as coming from God, did not bring God down to the level of human debasement, but demanded that man should be raised to His elevation,—which placed the holiness of God in the centre, and founded upon it the requirement that its possessors should be holy;—but it would be the soft, sensual, ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... conduct so roused the indignation of the butchers of the city—a class of men scarcely less powerful than their brethren the fishmongers—that they made no secret that the price of meat would be raised still more if the debasement of the currency was carried out as proposed.(1340) Yet, in spite of all remonstrances and threats, a proclamation went forth that after the 17th August the shilling should be current for six pence sterling and no more, the groat for two pence, the penny ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... of to-day (as we venture to define him) views all this with some regret, and more concern. He sees that fine traditions are withering, that fine things are being marred by ignorant handling. He fears debasement, he hates vulgarity, and his realist soul admits the high probability of both in a society whose standards are broader than they are high. But he also sees new energies let loose and new resources discovered; he recognizes new forms ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... her hand in his, but made no attempt to translate the meaning of the moment into language. He had worked against her country; while she plied her rounds of mercy, he had written on the debasement and the fallacy of it all. Lying in the wreck of his idealism, in the grip of physical pain, dreading the torture of his own thoughts, could he express what her coming had meant? He wanted to tell her of his heart-hunger, of his loneliness, his gratitude, understanding, ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... should be obliged to take up with those thieves and robbers who were in the same state of condemnation with himself, always behaving himself towards then very distantly, and as if it would have been a great debasement to him if he had joined with them ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... country was again subjugated by the Persian king Artaxerxes III. (about 340 B.C.), and from that time until our own day no native prince has ever sat upon the throne of the Pharaohs. Long before the Persian conquest, the Prophet Ezekiel, foretelling the debasement of Egypt, had declared, "There shall be no more a prince of the land of Egypt." [Footnote: ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... had a powerful will and strong passions—but she had no affections. There have been many Jezebels—but few Athaliahs. The affections compose so large a part of a woman's nature that we disown one who is without them. In her deepest guilt, in her lowest debasement, they still cling to her; and raised to the summit of power, they do not often wholly ...
— Notable Women of Olden Time • Anonymous
... and their illimitable influence, acknowledging in them a certain etiquette and display—a monarch not only did not act in a manner derogatory to his high position, but found even repose, security, mystery, and general respect therein. On the contrary, in the debasement of a common or humble attachment, he would encounter, even among his meanest subjects, carping and sarcastic remarks; he would forfeit his character of infallibility and inviolability. Having descended to the region of petty human miseries, he would be subjected to paltry contentions. In one ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the end of such a society as is drawn in The Bishop orders his Tomb at St. Praxed's Church. That tomb is placed in Rome, but it is in Venice that this class of tombs reached their greatest splendour of pride, opulence, folly, debasement and irreligion. ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... your minds, for another age, to slavery and debasement. I have given back to the priests their power that was endangered. I have given them means to increase your burdens, to take your daughters, to send you to a war, covetous, ...
— Woman on Her Own, False Gods & The Red Robe - Three Plays By Brieux • Eugene Brieux
... influence. We must awaken the spiritual consciousness, and lead a man too weak to stand in his own strength when appetite, held only in abeyance, springs back upon him to trust in God as his only hope of permanent reformation. First we must help him physically, we must take him out of his debasement, his foulness and his discomfort, and surround him with the influences of a home. Must get him clothed and in his right mind, and make him feel once more that he has sympathy—is regarded as a man full of the noblest possibilities—and so be stimulated to personal ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... their prancing horsemen suggest a succession of riding-masters taking out young ladies' schools. The admirably human character of the figure survives the rusty decomposition of the bronze and the slight "debasement" of the art; and one may call it singular that in the capital of Christendom the portrait most suggestive of a Christian conscience is that of a ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... anthropocentric imagination" which leads him to look upon himself as the aim of earthly life and the centre of earthly nature; this, he says, is nothing but vanity and haughtiness. Several writers in the "Ausland" faithfully second him in this debasement of the value of man. Its editor ("Ausland," 1874, No. 48, p. 957), for instance, reproaches Ludwig Noire, although he otherwise sympathizes with him, that in his book "Die Welt als Entwicklung des Geistes" ("The World as Development ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... a priest, a sin committed against the rules, because he would not require one of the penances I most disliked, viz.: those which exposed of me to the observation of the nuns, or which demanded self-debasement before them, like begging their pardon, kissing the floor, or the Superior's feet, &c., and, besides, he as a confessor was said to be bound to secrecy, and could not inform the Superior against me. My conscience being as effectually unburthened by my ...
— Awful Disclosures - Containing, Also, Many Incidents Never before Published • Maria Monk
... large enough to counteract the vitiating influence of party interests: it was a plan that would make honest impartial public action at least possible. And the purer the government of Florence would become—the more secure from the designs of men who saw their own advantage in the moral debasement of their fellows—the nearer would the Florentine people approach the character of a pure community, worthy to lead the way in the renovation of the Church and the world. And Fra Girolamo's mind never stopped short of that sublimest end: the objects ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... attempt to picture the utter desolation of mind and the despair which filled her heart, when this man arrived at her door, to convey herself, and oh! far worse, her innocent and intelligent child, to that scene of vice and debasement. Although her dislike to the measure was known, yet from her quiet and reserved manners, little opposition was anticipated. The evils of life had accumulated upon her in a regular gradation, and she had been enabled to bear their weight, up to this point, with outward composure; ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... itelles, which at most can be considered as little better than childish amusement; your soul, still rich in its primitive candor, and favored with an energy tempered in the love and habit of virtue, would revolt at the thought of such debasement. And, nevertheless, unless you apply your mind to acquire a love for serious matters you will not escape a disorder which you so justly deplore in others; you will be captured in those windings which have proved fatal fastnesses to women of other ...
— Serious Hours of a Young Lady • Charles Sainte-Foi
... with the shame of Evelina's self-exposure. She was shocked that, even to her, Evelina should lay bare the nakedness of her emotion; and she tried to turn her thoughts from it as though its recollection made her a sharer in her sister's debasement. ...
— Bunner Sisters • Edith Wharton
... mystery and awe, in which he is reminded perforce of his own ignorance and weakness; in which he learns first to remember unseen powers, sometimes to his comfort and elevation, sometimes only to his terror and debasement; darkness; and with it silence and solitude, in which he can collect himself, and shut out the noise and glare, the meanness and the coarseness, of the world; and be alone a while with his own thoughts, his own fancy, his own ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... their history, and you invariably find that the insidious glass has been their companion, their solace, and their counsellor. And should not dark suspicion and decided reprobation be stamped upon that which is thus associated with the lowest debasement ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... nephew with the uncle, to the delight of the Elysee, but to the shame of France! The parodist assumes the airs of a stage manager. Alas! a splendour so infinite could not be tarnished save by this boundless debasement! Yes! worse than Hudson Lowe! Hudson Lowe was only a jailor, Hudson Lowe was only an executioner. The man who has really assassinated Napoleon is Louis Bonaparte; Hudson Lowe killed only his life, Louis Bonaparte is ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... the jockey. 'How singular,' said I, 'is the fall and debasement of words; you talk of a gang, or set of shorters; you are, perhaps, not aware that gang and set were, a thousand years ago, only connected with the great and Divine: they are ancient Norse words, which may be found in the heroic poems of the north, and in the Edda, ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... such scenes are not without an aspect of sadness. It is melancholy to look upon such a mingling of glitter and barbarism, wealth and poverty, sincerity, debasement, and crime. No human being is truly ridiculous, however grotesque may be the expression of his feelings, when they are the genuine outpouring of a contrite heart. These nobles, common citizens, and beggars, thus meeting upon common ground, in a country where the distinctions of rank are so rigidly ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... become. The higher minds alone can rest content with abstract imaginings; the lower must have concrete realities on which to pin their faith. With them, inevitably, ideals degenerate into idols. In all religions this unavoidable debasement has taken place. The Roman Catholic who prays to a wooden image of Christ is not one whit less idolatrous than the Buddhist who worships a bronze statue of Amida Butzu. All that the common people are capable of seeing is the soul-envelope, for the soul itself they are unable to ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... another factor working toward her debasement and that was the emancipation of her pocket-book. It was a fairy's purse now and she could not scatter her money faster than she found it renewed. Her entertainments grew more lavish and more reckless. ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... prosperous industry is to be spent upon the gratification of unworthy desires, if the increasing perfection of manufacturing processes is to be accompanied by an increasing debasement of those who carry them on, I do not see the ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... not the least among which are the low theatres, the concert halls, and other similar resorts where immorality nourishes as it flourished in Rome during that long moral night when Messalina dragged down an already debauched court to unspeakable debasement, when Nero thirsted for blood and wallowed in the sewers of moral degradation, and when Domitian's frightful cruelty only equaled his gross sensualism. The saloon, the black plague of nineteenth century life, overlaps ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... expert as old Grimaldi, and all this under a burning tropical sun. These caboceers were dressed in robes of leopard skin, hung round with tassels and chains, and in a short time afterwards about twenty of them, in all their dirt and debasement, stretched at full length before the king, stripped to the waist, and vying with each other, which should have the most dust, and kiss the ground with the greatest fervour. When any one speaks to the king, it must be addressed to him through the eunuch, who is prostrated by ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... religious freedom. When we think of the king and his suffering family, our sympathies are so enlisted in behalf of their woes that we condemn the letter as harsh and unfeeling. When we think for how many ages the people of France had been crushed into poverty and debasement, we rejoice to hear stern and uncompromising truth fall upon the ear of royalty. And yet Madame Roland's letter rather excites our admiration for her wonderful abilities than allures us to her by developments of female loveliness. This celebrated ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... N. lowness &c. adj.; debasement, depression, prostration &c. (horizontal) 213; depression &c. (concave) 252. molehill; lowlands; basement floor, ground floor; rez de chaussee[Fr]; cellar; hold, bilge; feet, heels. low water; low tide, ebb tide, neap tide, spring tide. V. be low &c. adj.; lie low, lie flat; underlie; crouch, slouch, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... tyranny of art. And if he now were to see some beautiful pale slave bound in these iron chains, and being exhibited for the amusement of an idle world, what would the fierce blood of the Macleods say to that debasement? He began to dislike this old man, with his cruel theories and his oracular speech. But he forbore to have further or any argument with him; for he remembered what the Highlanders call "the advice of the bell of Scoon"—"The thing that concerns you ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... of any importance. This settles the question of the right of inheritance, which Socialism will have no need to abolish formally."[322] "Socialism condemns as reactionary and immoral all that tends to the debasement of humanity. It condemns our industrial and commercial system as a degrading system—degrading both to the few who amass wealth and to the many who by their labour enable the few to lay up riches. It is degrading to those who rob and to those who ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... the taste for life." Their complaints are only a means by which the author hopes to raise up around him "that revengeful shame and the taste for life" of which he so often speaks. Here is the artful Mayakine, who, indignant at the debasement of the younger generation, is ready to take the most cruel means in order "to infuse fire into the veins" of his contemporaries. Varenka Olessova, the heroine of a story, incessantly repeats that people would be more interesting if they were more animated, if they laughed, played, sang more, if ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... shuffling of the population through the social and economic emergence of the one-time nameless and poor, whether of native origin or foreign, may have contributed fresh blood to an anaemic society, but the result most apparent to the eye and most disturbing to the soul was the debasement of standards and the fears that naturally come with violent, sudden, or merely unfamiliar change. The new religion may have contributed new hope and erected new standards, but it also contributed exaggerations, contradictions, and new uncertainties. The life ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... of shadows for good—Ottoman rule." The Turks, whether in their Pagan or Mohammedan phase, have only appeared on the world's scene to destroy. No social or civilizing art owes anything to the Turks but progressive debasement and decay. ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... records, because their writings are not extant; and there is no account given of them except by writers in succeeding ages, who mention them, and describe the purity and integrity of their lives, and also the successive decrease of such purity and integrity, resembling the debasement of gold to iron: but an account of the last or iron age, which commenced from the time of those writers, may in some measure be gathered from the historical records of the lives of some of their kings, ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... happiness; she cuts with solemnity even. Is there such a spirit in your Bon Marche? Is there such a spirit anywhere but here and there to one who remembers; who has an ideal and who refuses to make it less by selling it in the shops? Again, madame, I tell you it is a debasement so to do. I will none ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... went through the country or were attached to the lord's court to amuse the company, were a despised race because of their ribaldry, obscenity, cowardice, and unabashed self-debasement; and their newfangled dances and piping were loathsome to the old court-poets, who accepted the harp alone as an ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... day's rising sun shone upon Stratford-on-Avon; and here revived in some degree my Shakspearian mania, to the still higher exaltation of my English stilts, and the deeper debasement of all "rough Irish kernes." At Shrewsbury we parted with a kind old lady, who had shown me some good-natured attentions, and I was left with only an elderly gentleman, bound also for Dublin, who told me we must start at three o'clock the following morning for ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... Arabs, Jews, soldiers, Bohemians, jesters, poets, monks, courtesans, swarmed and clustered here, and hustled one another in the streets. There was confusion of tongues, customs, and costumes, an inextricable mixture of splendour and rags, riches and misery, debasement and grandeur. The austere poets of the Middle Ages stigmatised the accursed city in their writings under the ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - JOAN OF NAPLES—1343-1382 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... and crime. We are to believe that while the pure blood of English gentlemen in Virginia has produced not only the gentlemanly vices of pride, treachery, and falsehood in the leaders, but the ignoble faults of crime and debasement in the 'poor trash'—that some occult influence of climate has advanced an entire community at the North far above the position of its progenitors—that while the gentle Cavalier has been overcome ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... grave and unalarmed, stood his ground and Susan snatched him up. Then the mother smiled, gratified and reassured. She had no upper front teeth, and the wide toothless grin gave her a look of old age that had in it a curious suggestion of debasement. ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... outside the connatural apprehension of his sense and reason, when he is raised up so as to comprehend things that surpass sense and reason: or it may be due to his being cast down into a state of debasement; thus a man may be said to suffer ecstasy, when he is overcome by violent passion or madness. As to the appetitive power, a man is said to suffer ecstasy, when that power is borne towards something else, so that it goes forth out from itself, ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... student of church history, his letters show him trying every practical question by the tests of ancient authority as well as instructive piety, and, on these principles, already deploring the undue elevation of the pulpit and debasement of the Altar to which exclusive preference of preaching had led. Missions had, since the days of Carey's first opening of the subject become so predominant a thought with the Nonconformist bodies, and were often conducted so irregularly, that there ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... Heaven guard the sovereign's power from such debasement! 270 Far rather, Sire, let it descend in vengeance On the base villain, on the faithless slave Who dared unbar the doors of these retirements! For whom? Has Casimir deserved this insult? O my misgiving heart! If—if—from Heaven 275 Yet not ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... his fellow-traveller, always a coward, shrunk from him in positive fear. Instead of Jonas being his tool and instrument, their places seemed to be reversed. But there was reason for this too, Montague thought; since the sense of his debasement might naturally inspire such a man with the wish to assert a noisy independence, and in that licence to forget his real condition. Being quick enough, in reference to such subjects of contemplation, he was not long in taking ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... than this, that the accumulated wealth of the land, and the sources of power, are fast becoming concentrated in the hands of a few men, who use that wealth and power to the debasement and enthrallment of the wage workers. Already it is almost impossible to obtain any legislation, in State or Federal legislatures, to ameliorate the condition of the laboring classes. Capital has placed its tyrant grip upon the throat of the Goddess ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... ladies traveling in them, thundering into Saratoga on the Lord's Day. Women traveling in a public conveyance on the Sabbath. There is something in this peculiarly degrading and shameful. It ought to be only the lowest of the sex that would stoop to such debasement." And another paper said: "We are sorry to learn that the directors have established an accommodation train for Sunday morning between this city and Poughkeepsie, in addition to the mail train to Albany. Mr. James Boorman, through whose efficient service as President the road was mainly ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... and amidst strifes of Pope and Emperor, duchies and republics, cities and autocrats, there was formed that type of Italian character which is delineated in the pages of Macchiavelli. From the depths of debasement of that cynical age the Buonapartes were saved by their poverty, and by the isolation of their life at Sarzana. Yet the embassies discharged at intervals by the more talented members of the family showed that the gifts for intrigue were ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... once attentive are deaf. And the pity is that they have closed not to the evil alone, but to the good. This is the crime of those who distort and degrade speech: they shake confidence generally. We consider as a calamity the debasement of the currency, the lowering of interest, the abolition of credit:—there is a misfortune greater than these: the loss of confidence, of that moral credit which honest people give one another, and which makes ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... which trembled in her voice. It was a quick and rapid action; and for the moment some flash of his old bearing kindled in his form. In the next he went as he had come. Nor did this glimmer of a quenched fire seem to light him to a quicker sense of his debasement. ...
— The Chimes • Charles Dickens
... Renaissance achieved for the modern world was the liberation of the reason, the power of starting on a new career of progress. The false direction given to the art of sculpture at one moment of this intellectual revival may be deplored; and still more deplorable is the corresponding sensual debasement of the race who won for us the possibility of freedom. But the life of humanity is long and vigorous, and the philosopher of history knows well that the sum total of accomplishment at any time must be diminished by an ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
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