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More "Incompetent" Quotes from Famous Books



... daughter and son-in-law and holding a watching brief on the Assembly proceedings? I ask you, what would the League staff say of one of their members of which this should be revealed? Would he be regarded as a fit incumbent of the office he holds? Wouldn't he be dismissed, kicked out as incompetent—as unscrupulous, I mean," Henry amended quickly. His voice had risen in a shrill and trembling ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay

... by the by), let us take it. And as to where an untried child goes, whether to join the assembly of its elders who have borne the heat of the day,—fire-purified martyrs and torment-sifted confessors,—what know we? We promise heaven, methinks, too cheaply, and assign large revenues to minors incompetent to manage them. Epitaphs run upon this topic of consolation till the very frequency induces a cheapness. Tickets for admission into paradise are sculptured out a penny a letter, twopence a syllable, etc. It is all a mystery; and the more I try to express my meaning (having none that is clear), ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb

... this conduct to disaffection, but only suppose that his zeal for kirk and state had been lulled asleep by the opportunity of charging a stranger with double horse-hire; that, however, feeling himself incompetent to decide singly upon the conduct of a person of such importance, he should reserve it for consideration of the next quarter-sessions. Now our history for the present saith no more of him of the Candlestick, who wended dolorous and malcontent ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott

... petitioner desires that it may please you, inasmuch as the foregoing facts sufficiently prove the insanity and incompetency of the Marquis d'Espard herein described with his titles and residence, to order that, to the end that he may be declared incompetent by law, this petition and the documents in evidence may be laid before the King's public prosecutor; and that you will charge one of the judges of this Court to make his report to you on any day you may be pleased to name, and thereupon ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac

... seventeenth century, women in England, as well as France, suffered much in childbirth from the ignorance and superstition of incompetent midwives, owing to the prevailing conceptions of modesty, which rendered it impossible (as it is still, to some extent, in some semi-civilized lands) for male physicians to attend them. Dr. Willoughby, of Derby, tells how, in 1658, he had to ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... "You miserable and incompetent fools! Don't expect me to tell you your business. Why do I pay you? Why indeed? Nothing you have done has been of the very slightest use; on the contrary, through your beastly mismanagement I have been dragged into this degrading position, held ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths

... a woman fifty years of age, tall and lean, with a deeply lined face and a tendency to nervousness that was increasing with her years. She was a very clever teacher and a very incompetent business woman, so that her small school, of excellent standing and repute, proved difficult to finance. In character Miss Stearne was temperamental enough to have been a genius. She was kindly natured, ...
— Mary Louise • Edith van Dyne (one of L. Frank Baum's pen names)

... should have been exhausted by Napoleon's system of requisition, not to speak of the marauding to which the French soldiers were soon forced to resort. Ebstein says that the cause of the sad, the wretched condition concerning supplies was due to the fact that incompetent officers had been appointed as commissaries of the army; they held high military rank, were independent and could not be easily reached for their faults. It happened that soldiers were starving near well filled magazines, such magazines at Kowno, Wilna, Minsk, Orcha being not only well, but ...
— Napoleon's Campaign in Russia Anno 1812 • Achilles Rose

... this picture; and never did an anchorite pour fourth a more fervent orison to Heaven, than Romney when this labour was complete. He had a fine genius, with all its solitary feelings, but he was uneducated, and incompetent even to write a letter; yet on this occasion, relieved from his intense anxiety under so long a work, he wrote one of the most eloquent. It is a document in the history of genius, and reveals all ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli

... another General.' And they nominate another; nominate Broglio, the fat choleric Marshal, of Italian breed and physiognomy, whom we saw at Strasburg last year, when Friedrich was there. Broglio will quit Strasburg too soon, and come. A man fierce in fighting, skilled too in tactics; totally incompetent in strategy, or the art of LEADING armies, and managing campaigns;—defective in intelligence indeed, not wise to discern; dim of vision, violent of temper; subject to sudden cranks, a headlong, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... the same thing has always happened the world over under similar conditions. Our defeats were exactly such as any man might have foreseen, and there is nothing to be learned from the follies committed by incompetent commanders and untrained troops when in the presence of skilled officers having under them disciplined soldiers. The humiliating surrenders, abortive attacks, and panic routs of our armies can all be paralleled ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt

... said that you cite causes between two Romans, even against their will, before your tribunal. If you are conscious that this has been done by you, do not so presume in future, lest while seeking the office of Judge, for which you are incompetent, you wake up to find yourself a culprit. You, of all men, ought to be mindful of the Edictum, since you insist on its being followed by others. If not, if this rule is not observed by you, your whole power of decreeing shall be taken from you. Let the administration ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)

... John—Mahony had reluctantly resigned himself to being beholden to Mary's relatives and Mary's friends to the end of the chapter. At best, living in other people's houses was for him more of a punishment than a pleasure; but for sheer discomfort this stay capped the climax. Under Zara's incompetent rule John's home had degenerated into a lawless and slovenly abode: the meals were unpalatable, the servants pert and lazy, while the children ran wild—you could hardly hear yourself speak for the racket. Whenever possible, Mahony fled the house. He lunched in town, ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson

... turned away one artist: the poor creature was utterly incompetent to depict the sublime, graceful, and pathetic personages and events with which this history will most assuredly abound, and I doubt whether even the designer engaged in his place can make such a portrait of Miss ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray

... note was the captain, Juan del Rio. Diego de Vera had had enough of the corsairs, and sailed away with the remainder of his force. Of what became of him or of them there is no record, but he must have been a singularly incompetent commander when he could not make head against a rabble of pirates and Moors with the army at his disposition. Sandoval does not attempt to minimise the defeat, which, of course, would have been impossible; he contents himself with the following ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey

... callous husband, who never intended, but for the War, to come back from his big-game shooting, and who took no pains to arrange suitable guidance (there was a lawyer vaguely mentioned but he seems to have been singularly unobtrusive) for the obviously incompetent spouse whom he professes still to love? I am afraid it will not do. The one real point of weakness in the presentation was that Mr. EADIE could not modulate from the key of agreeable flippancy in which the comedy as a whole was set into that of the solemnly sentimental coda. Thus was the artistic ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug 29, 1917 • Various

... nothing for a moment. He was opposed to the use of force. Force, he believed, was the last resort of incompetence; he had said so frequently enough since this operation had begun. Of course, he was absolutely right, though not in the way he meant. Only the incompetent wait until the last extremity to use force, and by then, it is usually too late ...
— A Slave is a Slave • Henry Beam Piper

... beauty in the galleries and in the museums, and were simple enough to admire what they liked; young ladies of the present day can find nothing to admire except their own perspicacity in detecting faults in Raphael's drawing or Michael Angelo's colouring. This is the age of incompetent criticism in matters artistic, and no one is too ignorant to volunteer an opinion. It is sufficient to have visited half-a-dozen Italian towns, and to have read a few pages of fashionable aesthetic literature—no other education is needed to fit the intelligent young critic for his easy task. The ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford

... say most emphatically that the patient's chances of recovery are many times greater with proper non-surgical treatment than with an operation. Of course, patients have occasionally recovered, by accident, in the hands of most incompetent surgeons, but the death rate after appendicitis operations in the hands of incompetent ...
— Appendicitis: The Etiology, Hygenic and Dietetic Treatment • John H. Tilden, M.D.

... Girondists required, and yet, until then, a second-rate man, and almost unknown, had no fortune to hope for but as theirs culminated. His name would not give umbrage to their genius, and if he proved incompetent, or rebelled against their projects, they would remove him without fear, or crush him without pity. Brissot, the diplomatic oracle of the Gironde, was evidently to be the minister who was one day to control our foreign relations, ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine

... Being. God is individual, and man is His individualized idea. While material man and the physical senses receive no spiritual idea, and feel no sensation of divine Love, spiritual man and his spiritual senses are drinking in the nature and essence of the individual infinite. A sinful sense is incompetent to understand the realities of being,—that Life is God, and that man is in His image and likeness. A sinner can take no cognizance of the noumenon or the phenomena of Spirit; but leaving sin, sense rises to the fulness of the stature of ...
— No and Yes • Mary Baker Eddy

... Puritans demanded a stern enforcement of the penal laws. Complaints were made on both sides of the infringement of the cessation; but Munroe was the chief offender; and Owen O'Neill was summoned to consult with the Supreme Council in Kilkenny. Lord Castlehaven, who was utterly incompetent for such an appointment, was given the command of the army; and O'Neill, though he felt hurt at ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack

... friends, and remembering every detail of their circumstances, opinions, and conduct. Concerning the latter, he did not fail to remind them of any failings he had taken note of. Those who were frauds, incompetent, or lazy, he never spared, and often such conversations were a source of much amusement to me. On the other hand, those who had been true to him, and had not veered round with the tide of public opinion after 1896, were ever remembered and rewarded. It was remarkable to note the various Dutch ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson

... this refer to the pause that expresses the unutterable? or to the ruin of the measure of the verse by an incompetent heroine?] ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald

... have given no new life to agriculture, would not have stimulated trade, nor replenished the bankrupt fisc, nor incorporated the privileged classes with the bulk of the nation, nor done anything else to repair an organisation of which every single part had become incompetent for its proper function. It was the material misery and the political despair engendered by the reigning system, which brought willing listeners to the feet of the teachers who framed beneficent governments on the simple principles of reason and the natural ...
— On Compromise • John Morley

... representatives of the services, and to the dullest and smallest men in the whole assembly. It is obviously inconvenient—perhaps it is even perilous—that interests so grave and so gigantic should fall for their guardianship into hands so incompetent and so petty. It may be an inevitable accompaniment of our Parliamentary system that the naval debates should be so conducted; if so, one must put it down as one of the evils which must be taken as part of the price we pay for the excellences ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor

... Charles Goodyear, jun., patented in England a process for constructing a denture upon vulcanized caoutchouc as a base. Several modifications followed, each the subject of patented improvements. Though the cheapness and simplicity of the vulcanite base has led to its abuse in incompetent hands, it has on the whole been productive of much benefit. It has been used with great success as a means of attaching porcelain teeth to metallic bases of gold, silver and aluminium. It is extensively used also in ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various

... to have words repeated which they had failed to get; and New York claimed that Boston was one of the worst offenders. It was a rather hard position for me, for if I took the report without breaking, it would prove the previous Boston operator incompetent. The results made the operator have some hard feelings against me. He was put back on the wire, and did much better after that. It seems that the office boy was down on this man. One night he asked me if I could tell him how to fix a key so that it would not 'break,' even if the ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin

... a tight spot in the operating room, it could be a real test of skill to get him—and his patient—out of it, even on a relatively simple procedure. But organ-transplantation, with the delicate vascular surgery and micro-surgery that it entailed, was never simple. In incompetent hands, it ...
— Star Surgeon • Alan Nourse

... throw[18] of the principal British naval depots; here were large towns and harbors, filled with the rich commerce of the world, offering the dazzling attraction of rich booty. The French navy was at this time utterly incompetent to their defence; while England supported a maritime force at an annual expense of near ninety millions of dollars. Her largest fleets were continually cruising within sight of these seaports, and not unfrequently attempting to cut out their shipping. "At this period," says ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck

... over again that in no other civilised country in the world could so great an amount of property have passed through the hands of thieves without leaving some clue by which the police would have made their way to the truth. Major Mackintosh had been declared to be altogether incompetent, and all the Bunfits and Gagers of the force had been spoken of as drones and moles and ostriches. They were idle and blind, and so stupid as to think that, when they saw nothing, others saw less. The major, who was a broad-shouldered, ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope

... seated in Mrs. Majendie's drawing-room, she had no impulse to wound her mortally. Her instinct was rather to patronise and pity, to unfold the long result of a superior experience, to instruct this woman who was so incompetent to deal with men, who had spoiled, stupidly, her husband's life and her own. In that moment Sarah contemplated nothing more outrageous than a little straight ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair

... one's sails, scotch the snake, put a spoke in one's wheel; break the neck, break the back; unhinge, unfit; put out of gear. unman, unnerve, enervate; emasculate, castrate, geld, alter, neuter, sterilize, fix. shatter, exhaust, weaken &c. 160. Adj. powerless, impotent, unable, incapable, incompetent; inefficient, ineffective; inept; unfit, unfitted; unqualified, disqualified; unendowed; inapt, unapt; crippled, disabled &c. v.; armless[obs3]. harmless, unarmed, weaponless, defenseless, sine ictu[Lat], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget

... renders even so keen an intellect as that of Karl Marx an unsafe guide, we must, when we read his description of conditions for which he sought remedy, confess that he had been less a man had he been less emotional. The man whom daily contact with remediable misery will not render incompetent to always write logically, I would not wish to know. But it is the mission of such men to arouse action and not to finally determine its scope. The advocate may not be the judge. My animus is that I heartily desire most if not all the ends proposed by abstract ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams

... mean to suggest for a moment that there was the slightest real danger to the public who patronise those highly popular and excellently-conducted vehicles, or that any actual driver was either intemperate or incompetent; and that, should such an impression have been unfortunately produced—which he hopes is impossible—no one would regret so unjust an aspersion more sincerely than ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 22, 1892 • Various

... in the dilemma—creation or nothing? It was obvious that hereafter the probability would be immensely greater, that the links of natural causation were hidden from our purblind eyes, than that natural causation should be incompetent to produce all the phenomena of nature. The only rational course for those who had no other object than the attainment of truth was to accept "Darwinism" as a working hypothesis and see what could ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley

... journal: Our pilot proved incompetent, and we narrowly escaped shipwreck in consequence at Martin Garcia Bar, a bad spot in the River Plate. A small schooner captain, observing that we needlessly followed in his track, and being anything but a sailor in principle, ...
— Voyage of the Liberdade • Captain Joshua Slocum

... one-third by disease. The Portuguese, who numbered nearly as many, were raw and untried troops, scarce a man of whom had seen fire, and little reliance could be placed upon them. In spite of Lord Wellington's judicious and reiterated warnings, the incompetent and conceited Spanish generals risked repeated engagements, in which their armies—numerous enough, but ill disciplined, ill armed, and half-starved—were crushed and exterminated. The French side of the medal presented a very different picture. Elated ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various

... the verdict in silence. After five minutes he turned round and his face gave some of them a shock. His kindly blue eyes had a painfully puzzled, incompetent look, which had often come across them in Barcelona and in London. But in Somarsh only ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman

... aerial voyagers, finding this planet to be nothing but a howling wilderness, inhabited by us poor savages and wild beasts, shall take formal possession of it, in the name of his most gracious and philosophic excellency, the Man in the Moon. Finding however that their numbers are incompetent to hold it in complete subjection, on account of the ferocious barbarity of its inhabitants, they shall take our worthy President, the King of England, the Emperor of Hayti, the mighty Bonaparte, and the great King of Bantam, and, returning ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving

... head and ears in debt, that he never had a farthing of ready money, that his tenantry were worse off than any other in the country, that his agents and bailiffs and stewards were rogues who ground them and cheated him, that his farmers were careless and incompetent, and that the whole of his noble estate appeared to be going irretrievably to ruin; when the earl complaining one day bitterly of this state of things, for which he knew no remedy, she told him that she would find the remedy, and ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble

... "I am incompetent to give your father any advice. Our positions are dissimilar. I myself seek redress for personal injuries. Your father, the Duke of Orleans, ought to obey the dictates of his conscience as a prince, and the dictates of duty ...
— Louis Philippe - Makers of History Series • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott

... quite incompetent myself, from lack of medical knowledge, to dilate on this point satisfactorily, were it not that during a visit of a week to the place, I made the acquaintance of an English physician there of high repute, Doctor S. Edwin Solly, who went there years ago to seek relief himself ...
— The Truth About America • Edward Money

... me, is marriage to be merely a contract—something entered into for a time, and then broken again—or is the true marriage permanent? One resolution read by Mrs. Stanton said that, as men are incompetent to select partners in business, teachers for their children, ministers of their religion, or makers, adjudicators, or administrators of their laws, and as the same weakness and blindness must attend in the selection of matrimonial partners, the latter and most important ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... infecting our parliamentary system have grown still graver; when a democratic House, more and more broken up into small groups, more and more governed by sectional and interested motives, shall have shown itself evidently incompetent to conduct the business of the country with honour, efficiency, and safety; when the public has learned more fully the enormous danger to national prosperity as well as individual happiness of dissociating power from property and giving the many an unlimited ...
— Proportional Representation Applied To Party Government • T. R. Ashworth and H. P. C. Ashworth

... her figure from their point of view; and, finding it essentially embraceable, asked for nothing more. It might have been her bright complexion or it might have been the bold luster of her eyes (as the women considered it), that dazzled the lords of creation generally, and made them all alike incompetent to discover her faults. Still, she had compensating attractions which no severity of criticism could dispute. Her smile, beginning at her lips, flowed brightly and instantly over her whole face. A delicious atmosphere of health, freshness, and good humor seemed ...
— My Lady's Money • Wilkie Collins

... governed by incompetent men, became a mighty power for evil. Strikes and lockouts were common, and were followed by loss of wages and consequent suffering, while the bitterness of feeling between the two classes constantly increased. To meet the rising power of the labor organizations, the employers felt obliged ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan

... They were conscious, too, that the North, the sluggish North, which had been so long in putting forth its full strength, was now preparing for an effort far greater than any that had gone before. The incompetent generals, the tricksters and the sluggards were gone, and battle-tried armies led by real generals were coming in numbers that ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler

... not instituted a Committee of Public Safety for fun. It will enquire into Custine's conduct. Incompetent or traitor, he will be superseded by a General resolved to win the ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France

... good plan, and make ample arrangements for the supply of funds, but if he does not know how to choose, or where to find good builders, his scheme will come to a miserable end. He may choose builders that are competent but dishonest, or they may be honest but incompetent, or they may be subject to some other radical defect; in either of which cases the house will be badly built, and the scheme will ...
— Peter the Great • Jacob Abbott

... the evidence is decisive. The reading [Symbol: Alpha] is Alexandrian, adopted by B[Symbol: Aleph], and is bad Greek into the bargain, [Greek: enedreuontes thereusai] being very rough, and being probably due to incompetent acquaintance with the Greek language. If [Symbol: alpha] was the original, it is hard to see how [Symbol: beta] could have come from it. That the figurative language of [Symbol: alpha] was replaced in [Symbol: beta] by ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon

... Maddison. "The contractor for the conservatory undertook to erect it in a week, and my only satisfaction is that he is now paying me a forfeit of 500 dollars a day. As for the electricians in this country, sir, they are not incompetent men, but they must be taught to hustle if they are to work under American orders; and I don't quite see how they are to find a job ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston

... themselves, are the best material for rulers. It is a kind of compromise between their modesty and self-love: not burthening them with the trials and responsibilities of positions for which they feel incompetent, but soothing their vanity by the contemplation of office-holders not at all their superiors. Below a certain (or uncertain) grade, therefore, political stations are usually filled by men of very moderate abilities: and their elevation ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel

... western man, much older than I, to examine some properties for some mining men. They were all experienced miners, old hands at the business, and they regarded me, a young graduate from an eastern mining school, with no practical knowledge that they knew of, as totally incompetent to advise them, and, I think, invited me more out of courtesy than anything else; perhaps also, out of benevolent intention to give me an opportunity ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour

... could not make their personages talk character; they all spoke {190} alike. The author of the Rambler[426] is ridiculed, because his young ladies talk Johnsonese; but the satirists forget that all the presentable novel-writers were equally incompetent; even the author of Zeluco (1789)[427] is the strongest possible case ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan

... housekeepers, and slatternly in their persons, so also are many who neither know how to read nor write; just as there are many impracticable, inefficient, and slovenly men who are highly educated, and ignorant men who are also incompetent and inefficient. Education has nothing to do with making either men or women inefficient; the inefficient would be inefficient to the end of time, though their minds were ...
— Woman: Man's Equal • Thomas Webster

... frequently outran performance. Peter was undersized, unmuscular, and extraordinarily clumsy. For a long time Bobby Little thought that Peter, like one or two of his comrades, was left-handed, so made allowances. Ultimately he discovered that his indulgence was misplaced: Peter was equally incompetent with either hand. He took longer in learning to fix bayonets or present arms than any other man in the platoon. To be fair, Nature had done little to help him. He was thirty-three inches round the chest, five feet four in height, and weighed possibly nine stone. His complexion was pasty, and, ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay

... gratified with thee. Blessed be thou, thy desire is known to me. Make thy soul pure. Thou wilt then have all that thou desirest. I will give thee all weapons when thou wilt become pure. Those weapons, O son, of Bhrigu, burn a person that is incompetent and that is not deserving of them.' Thus addressed by that god of gods, that deity bearing the trident, the son of Jamadagni, bending his head unto that puissant high-souled one, said, 'O god of gods, it behoveth thee to give those weapons unto me that am always devoted to thy service, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown

... them, who still continued in the same employment with her faculties unimpaired, a recent edition of his Triumphs of Temper. His first instructor in the learned languages was a master in the same city, who appeared to be so incompetent to the task he had undertaken, that Mrs. Hayley removed her son to the school of a Mr. Woodeson, at Kingston. He had not been long here, when he was seized with a violent fit of illness, which obliged ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary

... inefficiency of this or that branch of the public service. The Government in power wait to see if the agitation dies a natural death; and if it is successfully kept up, a sort of pretence at reform takes place. There is a re-shuffle. Fresh names are given to old abuses; incompetent officials exchange posts; and a new building is erected at the public expense. Then ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst

... insisted on quitting the land; a great loss was incurred in an attempt to compel it to remain; then open rebellion broke out in the weakened state; and the reign, which had commenced under such fair auspices, terminated in calamity and confusion. Menephthah was quite incompetent to deal with the difficulties and complications wherewith he found himself surrounded; he hesitated, temporized, made concessions, retracted them, and finally conducted Egypt to a catastrophe from which she did not ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson

... "Incompetent people, I should think, from what you can see of the garden. Annoying to think that that used to be ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West

... present the exceptionally prepossessing maiden to whom this person has already referred. So varied and ornate were her attractions that it would be incompetent in one of my less than average ability to attempt an adequate portrayal. She had a light-coloured name with the letters so harmoniously convoluted as to be quite beyond my inferior power of pronunciation, so that if I wished to refer to her in ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah

... the secrecy attending the celebration of marriages in that Territory makes the proof of polygamy very difficult, and the propriety is suggested of modifying the law of evidence which now makes a wife incompetent to ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 8: Chester A. Arthur • James D. Richardson

... of the lay baronage. The chief business was to provide for the government during the minority. Gualo withstood the temptation to adopt the method by which Innocent III. had ruled Sicily in the name of Frederick II. The king's mother was too unpopular and incompetent to anticipate the part played by Blanche of Castile during the minority of St. Louis. After the precedents set by the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, the barons took the matter into their own hands. Their work of selection was not an easy one. Randolph of Chester was by ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout

... permission which this latter had granted (or, with an affectation of arrogance, had seemed to grant) had not itself made him pause. There are some things which a man never wants any permission to do; and one of those is—to love a woman. All the permissions—whether of competent authority or of incompetent—only retard him. It is an affair in which he must find his own permit, by his own power; and without it there can be ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various

... she endeavored to get order out of the chaos that reigned in the kitchen. Josie had determined to clean up in the kitchen and pantry first and then proceed to the other corners of the house. The succession of incompetent servants that had been employed by the present master of the old Waller house had left layers of dirt and grease, each according to to her lights. Josie was bent upon getting to the bottom of dirt as well as the mystery of what Chester ...
— Mary Louise and Josie O'Gorman • Emma Speed Sampson

... should be arranged. Prometheus had more experience, but Zeus had the power. Rivalry, combined with dislike,—that is the great force I speak of. Zeus didn't wish men to have fire. That was enough for Prometheus. He told himself how incompetent Zeus was to manage the world, how selfish he was, how indifferent to men's need of fire. And that was what braced him, at last, to escape from his wife, and bring down an ember from heaven, ...
— The Crow's Nest • Clarence Day, Jr.

... king are you, sir Lucifer," said she, "to keep such unmannerly blockheads; it is a sin that so large a kingdom should be under one so incompetent to govern them. O that I were made deputy over it!" At this moment behold the Coxcomb, nodding his head in the dark, "Your servant, sir," he would say to one over his shoulder.—"I hope you are quite well," said he to another.—"Is there any service which I can render you," to a third, smiling ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne

... of polite society, there are books published for persons of every class in life; and although of late years one sees the same sort of writings advertised in England, they have certainly not as yet produced any apparent effect upon us—perhaps from being written by incompetent people, or perhaps from the author dwelling too exclusively upon usages which change with the fashion of the day, instead of being based upon right and kind feelings, or, at anyrate, the appearance ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 462 - Volume 18, New Series, November 6, 1852 • Various

... London bureau are incompetent to establish guilty connivance of either Lanier in any crime except those assaults ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee

... big city where Sam got a chance to travel for a grocery store, and Jane Olive opened a inteligence office, where for an ample consideration she furnished incompetent help to distracted housekeepers, receivin' pay from both victims, and they laid up money fast. Then he went into pork and first we knew Sam wuz a very rich man, lived in great style, kep' his carriage, but wuz awful mean, so we heard, hadn't no morals at all to speak on so fur ...
— Samantha at the St. Louis Exposition • Marietta Holley

... sort of wages from me," interrupted Timothy Robinson decidedly. "I tell you plainly that I won't hire you. You're the wrong man's son for that. Your father was lazy and incompetent and, worst of all, untrustworthy. I did try to help him once, and all I got was loss and ingratitude. I want none of his kind around my place. I don't believe in you, so you may as well take yourself off, Ellis. I've no ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... believe that he should be able to get beyond the messengers. He was one of a class, not very small in numbers, who, from cultivating within their bosom a certain tendency towards suspicion, have come to think that all Government servants are idle, dilatory, supercilious and incompetent. That some of these faults may have existed among those who took wages from the Crown in the time of George III. is perhaps true. And the memory of those times has kept alive the accusation. The vitality of these prejudices calls to mind the story ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope

... hand, as MAIRE DU PALAIS to the incompetent Otto, and using the love-sick Princess for a tool and mouthpiece, he pursues a policy of arbitrary power and territorial aggrandisement. He has called out the whole capable male population of the state to military service; he has bought cannon; he has tempted ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson

... that way, myself; and I think,' said poor Milly, making an effort, and growing very red; she quite lost her head at that point, and was incompetent to finish ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu

... the Abbe Terrai, notoriously as corrupt as he was incompetent. One of his measures, reducing the interest on the Debt by one-half, was tantamount to an act of bankruptcy; but the national levity comforted itself by jests, and one evening, when the pit at the theatre was crowded to suffocation, one of the sufferers carried the company ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole

... which enclosed my knee—it was a live dog which he had cut open.' I recognised a cure used sometimes in mediaeval medicine. She had two masters, and their portraits, ideal Indian heads, painted by some most incompetent artist, stood upon either side of the folding doors. One night, when talk was impersonal and general, I sat gazing through the folding doors into the dimly lighted dining-room beyond. I noticed a curious red light shining upon a picture and got up to see where the red light came from. ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats

... unfortunately. She was libelled in San Francisco, had her cheques protested as fraudulent in Hawaii, and was fined for breach of quarantine in the Solomons. To save themselves, the newspapers could not tell the truth about her. When I discharged an incompetent captain, they said I had beaten him to a pulp. When one young man returned home to continue at college, it was reported that I was a regular Wolf Larsen, and that my whole crew had deserted because I had beaten it to a pulp. In fact the only blow struck on the Snark was when ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London

... are reported of him. He is first mentioned in connection with the fortune of Vortigern, who is represented by Geoffrey of Monmouth as at that time king of England. The Romans having withdrawn their legions from this island, the unwarlike Britons found themselves incompetent to repel the invasions of the uncivilised Scots and Picts, and Vortigern perceived no remedy but in inviting the Saxons from the northern continent to his aid. The Saxons successfully repelled the invader; but, having done this, they refused to return home. They determined to settle here, ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin

... law, it was always easy for those who understood the science of rigging the stock market, and that of strategic undermining, to wrest the control away from weak, or (treating the word in a commercial sense) incompetent, holders. This has been long shown by ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers

... lion and the scorpion are his danger, in the cave lurks the dragon, among flowers the poisonous serpent. In the sunshine a greedy neighbor is thinking how to decrease his land, in the night the active thief is breaking through the door to his granary. In childhood he is incompetent, in old age stripped of strength. When full of power, he is surrounded by perils, as a whale is surrounded by ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus

... going to the War Office? They're all corrupt and incompetent there. If I had my way, I'd make a clean sweep of them. Talking of red-tape, I'll just give you an instance. Now, this is a fact. It was told me by the brother-in-law of the uncle of the man ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham

... infancy, that person could do nothing more than keep the moral law perfectly. But supposing that the Creator allows a person to be born with an hereditary or ingrafted organic tendency, and then puts this person into the hands of teachers incompetent or positively bad, is not what is called sin or transgression of the law necessarily involved in the premises? Is not a Creator bound to guard his children against the ruin which inherited ignorance might entail on them? Would it be fair for a parent to put into a child's hands the title-deeds ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... American affairs. In this his first diplomatic undertaking, there appeared, however, one of the weaknesses of execution which constantly interfered with the success of his plans. He did not know how to sacrifice politics to statesmanship, and he appointed as his agents men so incompetent that they aggravated rather than settled the difficulty. Later he saw his mistake and made a new and admirable appointment in the case of Mr. William H. Trescot of South Carolina. Blaine himself, however, lost office before new results could be obtained; and Frelinghuysen recalled ...
— The Path of Empire - A Chronicle of the United States as a World Power, Volume - 46 in The Chronicles of America Series • Carl Russell Fish

... indeed impossible, except by an inefficiency of the enemy which was not to be presumed. These battles therefore are important, militarily, in a sense not at all dependent upon their consequences, which were ephemeral. They are significant as extreme illustrations of incompetent action, deriving from faulty traditions; and they have the further value of showing the starting point, the zero of the scale, from which the progress of the century is to be measured. In describing them, therefore, attention will be given chiefly ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan

... merely the obscure passages in the text, but also the subsequent experience of the United States and other countries where they relate to the views expressed by the authors. The most authentic text has been used; the antiquated and often absurd punctuation—largely due to incompetent early printers—has been rationalized; and an introduction, abundant cross-references, and a full index materially increase the value of this edition for both students and lawyers. Matter of obsolete or minor interest has been put in distinctive type. An appendix ...
— The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens • Georg Jellinek

... Madame Remisatu's, in company with Duroc. The question turned upon literary productions and the comparative merit of the compositions of modern French and foreign authors. "As to the merits or the quality," said Duroc, "I will not take upon me to judge, as I profess myself totally incompetent; but as to their size and quantity I have tolerably good information, and it will not, therefore, be very improper in me to deliver my opinion. I am convinced that the German and Italian authors are more ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton

... court,—save in open war; and there was almost war then. He well-knew nothing would so force them to desperation,—the desperation of unlicensed barbarism or the immovable determination of truth and justice driven to the wall. He knew, or if he did not, was so ignorant that he was incompetent, that in such a contest on such fundamental principles, such a decision must end in revolution and civil war. If he dreamed of peace, then he was ready to seal the doom of four million, and at the end of this century of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various

... sides Russia now suffered from its enemies. Moscow, with several hundred thousand Muscovites, was burned by the Tartars in 1571. Disaster followed disaster, which Ivan was too cowardly and weak to avert. Trusting to incompetent generals abroad, he surrounded himself at home with a guard of six thousand chosen men, who were hired to play the part of spies and assassins. They carried as emblems of office a dog's head and a broom, the first to indicate that they worried the enemies of the czar, the second that they swept ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... foreigner and a worshipper of another God, and therefore was all the more unpopular, as a Brahmin would be in England if he were a Cabinet Minister. He was capable and honest, and therefore all the incompetent and all the knavish officials would recognise in him their natural enemy. So, hostile intrigues, which grow quickly in courts, especially in Eastern courts, sprung up round him, and his subordinates laid their heads together in order to ruin him. They say, in the words of my text, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren

... in real quarrels, and following in the footsteps of the little Russians was becoming irksome—(especially to Fatima, whose predecessor—Peter—had been of a military turn, and had begun fortifications near the kitchen garden which she was incompetent to carry out) a new idea struck me. I announced that letters properly written and addressed to the little Russians, 'Reka Dom, Russia,' and posted in the old rhubarb-pot by the tool-house, would be duly answered. ...
— Mrs. Overtheway's Remembrances • Juliana Horatia Ewing

... improve the time by making their arrangements and canvassing their supporters so as to control the votes of the College at that future Conclave. Therefore Francesco Piccolomini, Cardinal of Siena (nephew of Pius II), a feeble octogenarian, tormented by an ulcer, which, in conjunction with an incompetent physician, was to cut his life even shorter than they hoped, was placed upon the throne of St. Peter, and assumed with the Pontificate ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini

... revolutions at the palace, the elevation of incompetent generals, and the general security in which the people indulged, resolved to march to a renewed attack. Again he crossed the Alps, with a still greater army, and invaded Italy, destroying everything in his path. Without obstruction he crossed the Apennines, ravaged ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord

... incompetent to carry out a liberating expedition, he had wonderful success in talking it up. For twenty years he had carried this project about with him in America and in Europe. It was elaborated to perfection in every part, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various

... set to work with a will, and it was not long before the benefits of his administration became manifest. He had been informed that the force was almost as incompetent and inefficient as its old time predecessor, and he resolved to stop this. He caused the creation of the grade of inspector, and the appointment of energetic and reliable men. These inspectors are required to keep a constant ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin

... representative of Messrs. Jardine, Matheson and Co. of Shanghai from whom the cars were purchased. He discovered immediately that the difficulties which the Chinese had encountered were largely the result of incompetent chauffeurs. ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews

... vulgar mind. The reader will of course understand the precise amount of seasoning which must be added to it before he adopts it as one of the axioms of his life. The speaker disclaims all responsibility for its abuse in incompetent hands.] ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... the latter monarchy; but for the present, the wish to retain the supremacy which it had had while the king was one of the tribe, made it the nucleus of a feeble and lingering opposition to David, headed by Saul's cousin Abner, and rallying round his incompetent son Ishbosheth.[Q] The chronology of this period is obscure. David reigned in Hebron seven years and a half, and as Ishbosheth's phantom sovereignty only occupied two of these years, and those evidently the last, it would appear almost as if the Philistines had held the country, ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren

... appointing or nominating officer shall object to an eligible named in the certificate, stating that because of some physical defect, mental unsoundness, or moral disqualification, particularly specified, said eligible would be incompetent or unfit for the performance of the duties of the vacant position, and if said officer shall sustain such objection with evidence satisfactory to the Commission, the Commission may certify the eligible on the register who is in average percentage next below ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Volume 8, Section 2 (of 2): Grover Cleveland • Grover Cleveland

... all, is merely the last resource of the hopelessly incompetent! Anyhow it must be very uncomfortable, I'm sure," said the Duchess, nodding her head. Yet she was quick to notice the distress in his voice, and the gleam of moisture among the curls at his temple, hence her tone was more encouraging as she continued. "Still, sir, speak ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al

... of his subject. It would be well if students in eastern colleges would sometimes put on a similar boldness; they would help heads of colleges out of very trying difficulties with well-meaning but incompetent or indolent professors. Undergraduate popularity is often illusive and unstable, but undergraduate perception of incompetency is often ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park

... naughty child not listen to me at all? Take him away, Praxinoa, and understand distinctly that I am much dissatisfied with you. You estrange my own child from me to curry favor with the future king. That is base, or else it proves that you have no tact, and are incompetent for the office entrusted to you. The office of wet-nurse you duly fulfilled, but I shall now look out for another attendant for the boy. Do not answer me! no tears! I have had enough of that with the child's screaming." ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... sketch to Reed whom he found in the Curator's room, with some of the finest Rafael drawings in existence, hanging on the walls. "Yes!" said Mr Reed; "I noticed this at the sale; but it's not Rafael!" Adams, feeling himself incompetent to discuss this subject, reported the result to Palgrave, who said that Reed knew nothing about it. Also this point lay beyond Adams's competence; but he noted that Reed was in the employ of the British Museum as Curator of the best — or nearly ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams

... them being men of very indifferent character, and far too much in the habit of consorting with thieves and the like, they never lost a public occasion of jobbing and trading in mystery and making the most of themselves. Continually puffed besides by incompetent magistrates anxious to conceal their own deficiencies, and hand-in-glove with the penny-a-liners of that time, they became a sort of superstition. Although as a Preventive Police they were utterly ineffective, and as a Detective Police were very loose and ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens

... the Anglo- Indian. It will be difficult to carry reform against the advice of The only class which seems competent to advise, viz., such Englishmen as have had experience of India. I hold such to be Totally incompetent as a class to take proper views of Indian problems—such men as Sir Richard Temple are the exception. His articles upon India seem to me most salutary and to denote a statesmanlike grasp of a subject of paramount importance to England. The reason why the Englishman in India is likely to ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie

... easily do, according to their fancy. But when one remembers that almost all the documents in these books have been written with a view to their later publication; and when one remembers also that, however incompetent diplomatists as a class may be, no one supposes them to be such fools as to entrust their most important ententes and understandings with each other to printed records—why, one comes to the conclusion ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter

... narrowed his lids when the Colonel pensioned Mr. Hood. But the Colonel had a will before which, when roused, even Mr. Hopper trembled. So that Eliphalet was always polite to Ephum, and careful never to say anything in the darkey's presence against incompetent clerks or favorite customers, who, by the charity of the Colonel, remained ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... the real master of the State he was just as incompetent as before. All his application was directed towards his master, and it had for sole aim that that master should not escape him. He wearied himself in watching all the movements of the prince, what he did, whom he ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon

... was crazy," agreed the seamen. It was as though the gaiety, the spring of gladness, within the little man had been dried up; there was left only the incompetent and despised Dago. He faced the routine of his toil now with no smile of preoccupation for a sweeter vision; he shuffled about decks, futile as ever, with the dreariness of a man ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon

... point of complete exhaustion and sudden death, should win for these willing servants a deeper consideration of their welfare. Too frequently are their manifestations of discomfort allowed to pass unheeded by careless, incompetent drivers lacking in a sense of compassion. Symptoms of malaise should never be ignored in any case; the humane and economic features should be realized ...
— Lameness of the Horse - Veterinary Practitioners' Series, No. 1 • John Victor Lacroix

... most senseless peasant in the Galtchinskoy district, was taking his old woman to the hospital. He had to drive over twenty miles, and it was an awful road. A government post driver could hardly have coped with it, much less an incompetent sluggard like Grigory. A cutting cold wind was blowing straight in his face. Clouds of snowflakes were whirling round and round in all directions, so that one could not tell whether the snow was falling from the sky or rising from the earth. The ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... obstinacy, folly, and error, and tending to inevitable ruin; that new men and new measures must be adopted before we could hope for success in war, or honour and security in peace; that as ministers had shown themselves incompetent to the management of the war when they only had the Americans to contend with, it was not to be expected that they would be able to contend with the united arms of France and America; and that they would be still less able if Spain joined the contest. Ministers and their ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... out into the highways and hedges and bring in anything we can find, any old thing, so long as we can patronize it. I have often thought of starting a League (I believe it would be immensely popular) for The Suppression of Social Service. The fussy, incompetent men and women who thrust themselves forward for that work are usually the last people who should rightly meddle with it. They either perform it from a sense of duty, or what they themselves call The Social Conscience ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke

... of you as I have found you. [I told him you were a disreputable hound, and that Moore had crossed a fight.] I told him you were a drunken ass, and Moore an incompetent and dishonest boxer. ...
— The Plays of W. E. Henley and R. L. Stevenson

... been most strenuously urged against the Constitution, and which were most formidable in their first appearance, are not only destitute of substance, but if they had operated in the formation of the plan, would have rendered it incompetent to the great ends of public happiness and national prosperity. I equally flatter myself that a further and more critical investigation of the system will serve to recommend it still more to every sincere and disinterested advocate for good government and will leave no doubt with ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison

... and an English butler, and as many strapping indoor men—some of them much better fitted for manual labor—as he liked, and find it a social glory; while a family of moderate means were obliged to pay high wages to crude incompetent women from the darkest backwaters of European life, just ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King

... assure citizens and peasantry that it was all true, that the Emperor would be in Paris again very shortly and that once more there would be an end to tyranny and oppression, to the rule of the aristocrats and a number of incompetent and ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy

... been invited by Philip to make ready to take in hand the affairs of Flanders, sadly disorganized under the incompetent rule of Alva. It occurred to him that if he were to issue victoriously from that enterprise—and so far victory had waited upon his every venture—if he were to succeed in restoring peace and Spanish order in rebellious Flanders, he would then be able to move against England with the ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini

... affairs of state, and when also great and eloquent men were not used to concern themselves about private causes; but, while the most important transactions were managed by the most eminent and able men, I think that there were others also, and those not very incompetent, who attended to the trifling disputes of private individuals; and as in these disputes it often happened that men had recourse to lies, and tried by such means to oppose the truth, constant practice in speaking encouraged audacity, so that it became unavoidable that those other ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero

... character. The compass of the voice remains exactly the same. He has merely exchanged several excellent tones below for some very poor ones above. I repeat, one who aspires to be a lyric artist requires the best possible teacher to guide his first steps; he may consult an inferior or incompetent professor, when so firmly established in the right path that he ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam

... association was content; or at least it gave no sign to the contrary. Now and then it captured a pilot who was 'out of luck,' and added him to its list; and these later additions were very valuable, for they were good pilots; the incompetent ones had all been absorbed before. As business freshened, wages climbed gradually up to two hundred and fifty dollars—the association figure—and became firmly fixed there; and still without benefiting a member of that body, for no member was hired. The hilarity ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... unimportant to do, too tiresome or laborious to undergo. Work well and conscientiously done must attract attention; there is a great deal of lolling and idleness among the many thoughtless and indifferent persons who drift on to the stage as the last refuge of the negligent or incompetent. ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles

... into Imperial Parliament. Never do men talk together of their experiences of bodily suffering, as sometimes even the least morbid of us will, but some one is found to recall afflictions at the hands of the physician of little wit. The "incompetent" is everywhere and if, sometimes, he finds his way into the pulpit, those who jeer at the Church on his account have ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson

... master such more complex arts as spinning, baking and brewing. Her expertness, perhaps, never reached a high level, but at all events she made a gallant effort. But that was long, long ago, before the new enlightenment rescued her. Today, in her average incarnation, she is not only incompetent (alack, as I have argued, rather beyond her control); she is also filled with the notion that a conscientious discharge of her few remaining duties is, in some vague way, discreditable and degrading. To call her a good cook, I daresay, was never anything but flattery; the early American ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken

... which he charged in 1185 suits, and in the preparation of many legal papers out of court, and still have been seriously addicted to laziness. Indeed, if so much legal business could have been transacted within three years and a half, by a lawyer who, besides being young and incompetent, was also extremely lazy, and greatly preferred to go off to the woods and hunt for deer while his clients were left to hunt in vain for him, it becomes an interesting question just how much legal business we ought to expect to be done by a young lawyer who ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler

... not a musical instrument—in practice," said the Reb, with evasive facetiousness. And, indeed, the performers were nearly always incompetent, marring the solemnity of great moments by asthmatic wheezings and thin ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... present Legislature will go down in history as the most incompetent body of lawmakers that ever sat in the ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs

... been authorized by them, or any of them. This doubt has gained strength by the circumstances which have unfolded themselves in the prosecution of the enterprise, which have marked it as a mere private, unauthorized adventure. Projected and commenced with an incompetent force, reliance seems to have been placed on what might be drawn, in defiance of our laws, from within our limits; and of late, as their resources have failed, it has assumed a more marked character of unfriendliness to us, the ...
— State of the Union Addresses of James Monroe • James Monroe

... aspect presented by Literature. It has become a profession; to many a serious and elevating profession; to many more a mere trade, having miserable trade-aims and trade-tricks. As in every other profession, the ranks are thronged with incompetent aspirants, without seriousness of aim, without the faculties demanded by their work. They are led to waste powers which in other directions might have done honest service, because they have failed ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes

... the General said When we met him last week on our way to the Line, Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of 'em dead, And we're cursing his staff for incompetent swine. "He's a cheery old card," grunted Harry to Jack As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack. * * * * * But he did for them both by his plan ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd

... a picture of what passes every day at Florence—in Pisa, on the contrary, all is stagnation and repose—even the presence of the sovereign, who usually passes a part of the winter here, is incompetent to give a momentary liveliness to the place. The city is nearly as large as Florence, with not a third of its population; the number of strangers is few; most of them are invalids, and the rest are the quietest people ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant

... modified by no authority. They would therefore take the place of the nation, and exercise as absolute a sway over society as the inherent weakness of judicial power would allow them to do. Undoubtedly, as the French judges are incompetent to declare a law to be unconstitutional, the power of changing the constitution is indirectly given to the legislative body, since no legal barrier would oppose the alterations which it might prescribe. But it is better to grant the power of changing ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville

... chill dismay, of a doom as yet imperfectly apprehended deepens as Barnet's record passes on to tell of the approach of winter. It was too much for the great mass of those unwilling and incompetent nomads to realise that an age had ended, that the old help and guidance existed no longer, that times would not mend again, however patiently they held out. They were still in many cases looking to Paris when the first snowflakes of that pitiless ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells

... moved a step nearer; and his words came, now, in answer to the unfinished threat with cutting force. "What would you do, you big, hulking swine? You can bully a weakling not half your size; you can beat a helpless incompetent like a dog; you can bluster, and threaten a tenderfoot when you think he fears you; you can attack a man with a loaded quirt when you think him unable to defend himself;—show me what you can ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright

... the character of the newspaper man in The Doctor's Dilemma is machine-made, the much more important character of B.B., the soothing and incompetent doctor, is a creation ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd

... high and mighty soldier was so unwilling to submit to the orders of incompetent people, he never liked to be under the direct command of Washington, and, if it were possible to do so, he managed to be concerned in operations not under the immediate eye of the commander in chief. In fact, he was very jealous indeed of Washington, and ...
— Stories of New Jersey • Frank Richard Stockton

... if the result be regarded, utterly in vain: a thousand artists, and never one work of art. But the vast mass of mankind are incapable of doing anything reasonably well, art among the rest. The worthless artist would not improbably have been a quite incompetent baker. And the artist, even if he does not amuse the public, amuses himself; so that there will always be one man the happier for his vigils. This is the practical side of art: its inexpugnable fortress for the true practitioner. The direct returns - the wages of the trade are small, but the indirect ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson

... in turn. Mabel, rouged and befrilled, still made an attractive foil for Wallace as the hero. Martie liked them all; their chatter of the fairyland of the stage, their trunks plastered with labels, their fine voices, their general air of being incompetent children adrift in a puzzling world. Deep laughter stirred within her when they spoke ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris

... Fenger had made it a slogan in the Haynes-Cooper plant long before the German nation forced it into our everyday vocabulary. Michael Fenger was System. He could take a muddle of orders, a jungle of unfilled contracts, a horde of incompetent workers, and of them make a smooth-running and effective unit. Untangling snarls was his pastime. Esprit de corps was his shibboleth. Order and management his idols. ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber

... remain to us of the Ancients, and this appears somewhat remarkable, are, with the exception of those by incompetent artists, universally admitted to be 'High Art.' Now do we afford them this high title, because all remnants of the antique world, by tempting a comparison between what was, and is, will set the mental faculties at work, and thus address the highest attributes ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various

... collection of prodigious wasps' nests. The huts are squat and brown and chimneyless, facing east, and the inhabitants have the faculty of quail for making themselves scarce in the underbrush at the approach of strangers. But they are really not often at home during midday, only the blind and incompetent left to keep the camp. These are working hours, and all across the mesa one sees the women whisking seeds of chia into their spoon-shaped baskets, these emptied again into the huge conical carriers, supported on the shoulders by a leather ...
— The Land Of Little Rain • Mary Hunter Austin

... however excellent, could the benefits be extended, were individuals either ignorant of its nature or opposed to its precepts engaged in its administration. While an irreligious or immoral governor would pervert the course of justice in the administration of laws truly excellent, he would be utterly incompetent to the improvement of those that might be defective. The acts of the best of civil governments—even those founded upon the statutes of Divine truth—from the very nature of society, require frequently to be modified. And, since the modelling and increase of laws, as well as their dispensation, ...
— The Ordinance of Covenanting • John Cunningham

... had just suffered a surprising defeat at home. It became evident to Democratic leaders in the early Fall of 1918 that they were likely to lose the Congressional elections. Democratic leadership in the House of Representatives had been so notoriously incompetent that most of the war measures had had to be carried through under the leadership of Republicans, and there was grave dissatisfaction with some of the members of the Cabinet. The appeals of Democrats in danger were heard sympathetically at the ...
— Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements • Frank B. Lord and James William Bryan

... advance our knowledge, ever willing to own to a mistake and give up even his most cherished ideas if truth required them at his hands. No conception can be more wantonly inexact. I grant that if a writer was sufficiently at once incompetent and obsequious Mr. Darwin was "ever ready," &c. So the Emperors of Austria wash a few poor people's feet on some one of the festivals of the Church, but it would not be safe to generalise from this yearly ceremony, and conclude that the Emperors of Austria are ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler

... one after consultation with the Belize Advisory Council (this council serves as an independent body to advise the governor general with respect to difficult decisions such as granting pardons, commutations, stays of execution, the removal of justices of appeal who appear to be incompetent, etc.) National Assembly: elections last held 30 June 1993 (next to be held NA June 1998); results - percent of vote by party NA; seats - (28 ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... If there be a vortex around the sun, it is of finite extent; for if the ether be co-extensive with space, and the stars likewise suns with surrounding vortices, the solar vortex cannot be infinite. That there is an activity in the heavens which the mere law of attraction is incompetent to account for, is an admitted fact. The proper motions of the fixed stars have occupied the attention of the greatest names in astronomy, and motions have been detected, which according to the theory of gravity, requires the admission of invisible masses of matter ...
— Outlines of a Mechanical Theory of Storms - Containing the True Law of Lunar Influence • T. Bassnett

... really wants even for himself. In a matter-of-fact civilization like ours, he cannot hope to keep up. If a man can be cheated, even by himself—of course other people can cheat him and everybody can take advantage of him. He naturally grows more incompetent every day he lives. The men who are slow or inefficient in finding out what they really want and slow in dealing with themselves are necessarily inefficient and behind hand in dealing with other people. They cannot be men who determine ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee

... all. There is some malformation or defect of the vocal organs, which either prevents our uttering it at all, or gives it so thick a pronunciation as to be unintelligible. A mouth filled with the national pudding, or watering in expectation thereof, is wholly incompetent to this refractory monosyllable. An abject and herpetic Public Opinion is the Pope, the Anti-Christ, for us to protest against e corde cordium. And by what College of Cardinals is this our God's-vicar, our binder and looser, elected? Very like, by the sacred conclave of Tag, Rag, and ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell

... it be nevertheless pretended that my information and knowledge of mankind, however extensive, and however painfully acquired, by constant domestic enquiry, and by foreign travel, is, natheless, incompetent to the task of recording the pleasant narratives of my Landlord, I will let these critics know, to their own eternal shame and confusion, as well as to the abashment and discomfiture of all who shall rashly take up a song against me, that I am NOT the writer, redacter, or compiler, of the ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... hopelessly shattered the fair fabric of impressions of him that Lady Harman had been building up, that image of a wise humane capable man to whom a woman would gladly turn; he had been flurried, he had been incompetent, he had been ridiculously incompetent, and it seemed to him that life was a string of desolating inadequacies and that he would never ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells

... formed, not as a result of observation, or logic and reasoning, but as a result of an emotion, a mere feeling that this or that proposition is true. In every adverse decision of the court he sees a deep-laid conspiracy to deprive him of his rights. His lawyers are incompetent and in collusion with his persecutors; the judge is corrupt or ignorant of the law, and the legislators negligent in their duties in not writing into the statutes laws which would take care of his grievance. He constantly harps upon what he ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck

... system in many of such patients—I mean in ever-weary, thin and thin-blooded persons—is doing its work with constant difficulty. As a result, fatigue comes early, is extreme, and lasts long. The demand for nutritive aid is ahead of the supply, or else the supply is incompetent as to quality, and before the tissues are rebuilded a new demand is made, so that the materials of disintegration accumulate, and do this the more easily because the eliminative organs share in the general defects. ...
— Fat and Blood - An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria • S. Weir Mitchell

... She never heard the drum of an airplane without getting a sick, gone feeling at the pit of her stomach. She knew, now, that there was more to the air service than a becoming uniform. She was doing some war work herself in an incompetent, frenzied sort of way. With Giddy soaring high and her foreign stocks and bonds falling low she might well be excused for the panic that shook her from the time she opened her eyes in the morning until she tardily closed them ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber

... business enterprise can be put aside by sufficiently heroic measures. And they are also showing that they are all aware, and have always been aware, that the conduct of industry on business principles is incompetent to bring the largest practicable output of goods and services; incompetent to such a degree, indeed, as not to be tolerable in a season of desperate need, when the nation requires the full use of its productive forces, equipment ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen

... is sadly incompetent in the organization of its welfare and community work. As a matter of fact, social supervision is often so lax that obscene moving pictures and cards that are driven out of the large cities are exhibited without protest in the small towns. Usually the village is overchurched, ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben

... Polder's bedroom. Polder behaves as though he had been placed under eternal obligation by Rickett, and yearly sends the little Ricketts a box of presents and toys. It is the same everywhere. The men who do not take the trouble to conceal from you their opinion that you are an incompetent ass, and the women who blacken your character and misunderstand your wife's amusements, will work themselves to the bone in your behalf if you fall sick or ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling

... Government in power wait to see if the agitation dies a natural death; and if it is successfully kept up, a sort of pretence at reform takes place. There is a re-shuffle. Fresh names are given to old abuses; incompetent officials exchange posts; and a new building is erected at the public expense. Then ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst

... the horse is stolen; we are continually allowing things to go wrong, and then making superhuman efforts to right them, not remembering that it is far easier to keep out of trouble than to get out of it. If a girl must be trusted to incompetent, or, at the best, doubtful, teachers during half her school life, let that half be the last, and not the first, and incompetency will be shorn of half its power to injure. Not only directly in the interest of ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett

... organization of our army was that too many old and incompetent officers of the old regular army commanded it. And the one idea that seemed to haunt the President was that none but those who had passed through the great corridors and halls of West Point could command armies or men—that civilians without ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert

... were conscious, too, that the North, the sluggish North, which had been so long in putting forth its full strength, was now preparing for an effort far greater than any that had gone before. The incompetent generals, the tricksters and the sluggards were gone, and battle-tried armies led by real generals were coming in numbers ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler

... her lace parasol had a knot of yellow ribbon at one side, to match the tint of her sash. Her long tan gloves and the Marechal Niel roses at her neck were finishing touches of the picture which Sydney was incompetent to grasp in detail, although he felt its charm on a whole. The sweet, delicate face, with its refined features and great dark eyes, was one which might well cause a man to barter all the world for love; and, in Sydney's case, it happened that to gain its ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant

... invasion on the East by throwing the Scots across the Borders on the West. The Warden was warned by his spies, but he had only a few hundreds to meet the thousands of Scots. But, if Norfolk's invasion was an empty parade, the Scots attempt was a fearful rout. Under their incompetent leader, Oliver Sinclair, they got entangled in Solway Moss; enormous numbers were slain or taken prisoners, and among them were some of the greatest men in Scotland. James died broken-hearted at the news, leaving ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard

... Another thoroughly incompetent man was one employed to take charge of the negro carpenters, of whom his employer wrote, "I am apprehensive ... that Green never will overcome his propensity to drink; that it is this which occasions his frequent sickness, absences from work and poverty. And I am convinced, ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford

... the corners of black glazed boxes and swaying pyramids of pasteboard; always lifting his hat to sidling milliners' girls, or effacing himself before slender vendeuses floating by in a mist of opopanax. He felt incompetent to pronounce on the needs to which these visitors ministered; but the reappearance among them of the blond-bearded jeweller gave him ground for fresh fears. Undine had assured him that she had given up the idea of having her ornaments reset, and there had been ample time for their return; ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton

... not merely the obscure passages in the text, but also the subsequent experience of the United States and other countries where they relate to the views expressed by the authors. The most authentic text has been used; the antiquated and often absurd punctuation—largely due to incompetent early printers—has been rationalized; and an introduction, abundant cross-references, and a full index materially increase the value of this edition for both students and lawyers. Matter of obsolete or minor interest has been put in distinctive type. An appendix of 149 ...
— The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens • Georg Jellinek

... amending by every one indiscriminately according to his own liking, so that the earliest of our hymns are more perverted the more they are printed, I am fearful that it will fare with this little book as it has ever fared with good books, that through tampering by incompetent hands it may get to be so overlaid and spoiled that the good will be lost out of it, and nothing be kept in use ...
— The Hymns of Martin Luther • Martin Luther

... best of schools, they may also be the worst. Between childhood and manhood how incalculable is the mischief which ignorance in the home has the power to cause! Between the drawing of the first breath and the last, how vast is the moral suffering and disease occasioned by incompetent mothers and nurses! Commit a child to the care of a worthless ignorant woman, and no culture in after-life will remedy the evil you have done. Let the mother be idle, vicious, and a slattern; let her home be ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles

... Rajah's people; or whether, by means of the Rajah's refusal so to do, or from any other circumstance, any of the persons dispossessed of their grain may have had recourse to the Nabob for satisfaction: we are, for these reasons, incompetent to form a proper judgment what disposition ought in justice to be made of the one lac of pagodas deposited by the Rajah. But as our sentiments and intentions are so fully expressed upon the whole subject, we presume you, who are upon the spot, can have no doubt or difficulty ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... palmilla, and the mescal, supplying the principal vegetable food of the Apaches. Never in Texas, Arizona, or even Old Mexico, have I seen such a combination of varieties of such plants growing in such profusion and perfection; but being no botanist, and quite incompetent to give a proper appreciation of these wonders, we will return ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson

... have the function of guiding conduct better than instinct can, in the beginning it would be most incompetent for that office. Only the routine and equilibrium which healthy instinct involves keep thought and will at all within the limits of sanity. The predetermined interests we have as animals fortunately focus our attention ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... thin and thin-blooded persons—is doing its work with constant difficulty. As a result, fatigue comes early, is extreme, and lasts long. The demand for nutritive aid is ahead of the supply, or else the supply is incompetent as to quality, and before the tissues are rebuilded a new demand is made, so that the materials of disintegration accumulate, and do this the more easily because the eliminative organs share in the general defects. And these are some of the reasons why anaemic people are ...
— Fat and Blood - An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria • S. Weir Mitchell

... Majendie's drawing-room, she had no impulse to wound her mortally. Her instinct was rather to patronise and pity, to unfold the long result of a superior experience, to instruct this woman who was so incompetent to deal with men, who had spoiled, stupidly, her husband's life and her own. In that moment Sarah contemplated nothing more outrageous than a little ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair

... one engaged a detective for his or her shrewdness and efficiency, not for suavity and polish. A detective who hurls speech at you through clenched teeth and yet detects is better value for the money than one who, though an ideal companion for the drawing-room, is incompetent: and Mrs. Pett, like most other people, subconsciously held the view that the ruder a person is the more efficient he must be. It is but rarely that any one is found who is not dazzled by the glamour of incivility. She crushed down her resentment at her visitor's tone, and tried to concentrate ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

... or had not seen, or whether even he had his faculty of hearing in present exercise, a glance at his face was incompetent to discover. ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner

... matter will be cleared up, and if you ask me what I think, I should say it is most probable that we shall be made into a Ministry. How very strange and incomprehensible it seems; and much as I have had to do with public affairs, I feel now as if I knew nothing about them, and was quite incompetent to so great an office—to rule over such vast concerns, with such parties. With so many great things and so many little things to decide it is ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell

... as this fact or that principle would. He trusts his temperament. Wanting a universe that suits it, he believes in any representation of the universe that does suit it. He feels men of opposite temper to be out of key with the world's character, and in his heart considers them incompetent and 'not in it,' in the philosophic business, even tho they may far excel him ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James

... were back at school in Constantinople, shuffling their feet and throwing ink pellets at one another; Raisuli, home again in the old mountains, was working up the kidnapping business, which had fallen off sadly in his absence under the charge of an incompetent locum tenens; and the Chinese, the Bollygollans, and the troops of the Mad Mullah were enduring the miseries of ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse

... must apply to Tabor, the only insulated and solitary hill in the neighbourhood. We may remark, with the traveller just named, that the conclusion may possibly be true, but that the argument used to prove it seems incompetent; because the term "apart" most likely relates to the withdrawing and retirement of the persons here spoken of, and not to the situation of the mountain. In fact, it means nothing more than that our Lord and his three disciples ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell

... bad banking situation. Some of our bankers had shown themselves either incompetent or dishonest in their handling of the people's funds. They had used the money entrusted to them in speculations and unwise loans. This was, of course, not true in the vast majority of our banks, but it was true ...
— The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt • Franklin Delano Roosevelt

... two assays by the assayers of the Bank of England average 9% copper; that the copper can be produced at five cents per pound; that there is thus a profit of $10,000,000 in sight. The evidences are wholly incompetent. It is a gamble on statements of persons who have not the remotest idea of ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover

... crossing. He also ordered the Seventeenth Ohio with three pieces of artillery and another company of cavalry, all under the command of Colonel Connell, to support the cavalry under Dillon. The latter proved wholly incompetent, and failed to comply with his orders in any particular. He went into camp two miles in the rear from where he was ordered, and neglected even to post his men to guard the ford, whereby Zollicoffer was enabled to ...
— The Army of the Cumberland • Henry M. Cist

... Earth has been getting heavier and heavier. Jupiter Equilateral won the greatest fight in its history when they limited U.N. jurisdiction to Mars, and kept us out of the Belt. And now they hope to convince the lawmakers that we're incompetent to administer the Martian colonies and keep peace out here. If they succeed, we'll be called home in nothing flat; we've had to fight just ...
— Gold in the Sky • Alan Edward Nourse

... asserted over and over again that in no other civilised country in the world could so great an amount of property have passed through the hands of thieves without leaving some clue by which the police would have made their way to the truth. Major Mackintosh had been declared to be altogether incompetent, and all the Bunfits and Gagers of the force had been spoken of as drones and moles and ostriches. They were idle and blind, and so stupid as to think that, when they saw nothing, others saw less. The major, who was a broad-shouldered, ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope

... government in the enactment of legislation where the ending of abuses and the steady functioning of our economic system calls for government assistance. The Nation has no obligation to make America safe either for incompetent business men or for business men who fail to note the trend of the times and continue the use of machinery of economics and practices of finance as outworn as the cotton ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt • Franklin D. Roosevelt

... point upon which to fix the attention is this. The Chinese nucleus was very small, and only by rudely thrusting aside incompetent emperors and fussy ritual did it succeed in emancipating itself from Tartar bondage. That this is not an exaggerated view is additionally plain from the fact that Tartars have, even since Confucian times, ruled more and longer than have Chinese over North China; the Mongols (1260-1368) ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker

... mention that for the first time in Russia, purposeless rudeness and insolence came to my notice on the part of the ticket officials of the Mercury line. They behaved like stupid children, and were absolutely incompetent to do the work which had been entrusted to them. They were somewhat surprised when I took them to task and made them "sit up." Having found that they had played the fool with the wrong man they instantly became very meek and obliging. It is nevertheless a great pity that the Mercury Company should ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor

... agitation and disaffection throughout all France by the still more bewildered Lomenie de Brienne, who was trying his hand at the impossible finances of France after the fall of that magnificent spendthrift, Monsieur Colonne. He, in turn, had been swept from his office and replaced by the pompous and incompetent Necker. Lafayette, the deus ex machina of the times, had asked for his States-General, and now in this never-sufficiently-to-be-remembered year of 1789 they were to ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe

... also carry with me the hope, that my country will never cease to view them with indulgence; and that, after forty-five years of my life dedicated to its service with an upright zeal, the faults of incompetent abilities will be consigned to oblivion, as myself must soon be to ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck

... products of Reason, the mere personifications of our own modes of thinking, and have no objective reality, at least none that can be scientifically demonstrated. But, while "the Speculative Reason" is held to be incompetent to prove the existence of God, "the Practical Reason" is appealed to; and in the conscious liberty of the soul, and its sense of incumbent moral duty,—"the Categorical Imperative,"—Kant finds materials for reconstructing the basis and fabric of a true Theology, ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan

... is it?" he demanded. "Friends of Little Fuzzy versus The chartered Zarathustra Company; I'm bringing action as friend of incompetent aborigines for recognition of sapience, and Mr. Coombes, on behalf of the Zarathustra Company, is contesting to preserve the Company's charter, and that's all there is or ever was to ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper

... exclusively a critique of the faculty of pure reason itself. Only when we make this critique our foundation, do we possess a pure touchstone for estimating the philosophical value of ancient and modern writings on this subject; and without this criterion, the incompetent historian or judge decides upon and corrects the groundless assertions of others with his own, which have themselves just as ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant

... earliest asserted origin of our four Gospels could be established upon the most irrefragable grounds, the testimony of the writers—men of like ignorance with their contemporaries, men of like passions with ourselves—would be utterly incompetent to prove the reality ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot

... having a Portuguese pass, which he sunk with all her moorish crew sewed up in a sail that they might never be seen. But this wicked action was afterwards discovered, for which Vaz was broke; a very incompetent punishment for so great a crime, owing to which the Portuguese afterwards suffered severe calamities, as will ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr

... never dare admit to them—or to the professor if he asked my opinion on that sort of thing and it had to come out—that I was too lazy and too incompetent to manage my own little fortune. So I went down first thing Monday morning and revoked my power of attorney. I simply couldn't wait. When the estate is settled and turned over to me I shall attend to everything and ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton

... as she had been able to conjure up; and besides all that, notwithstanding the sighs and the reading, her father always noticed and knew what she was doing. Now it is needless to say that Colonel Gainsborough had forgotten what it was to be a child; he was therefore an incompetent critic of a child's doings or judge of a child's wants. He had an impatience for what he called a 'waste of time;' but Esther was hardly old enough to busy herself exclusively with history and geography; and the little innocent amusements to which she had recourse ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner

... afterward she button-holed people in the street to tell them about Mary, or to read them scraps of her letters. If they had said she was vain and idle, and selfish and incompetent, just like the half of their own daughters, Belle could have forgiven them. It was their determination to shove her into the gutter which made my ...
— The Making of Mary • Jean Forsyth

... Dumanoir's incompetent selfishness left the centre and rear to be crushed by equal numbers and far superior fighting power. But it was no easy victory. Outmatched as they were, Frenchmen and Spaniards fought with desperate courage and heroic determination. ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale

... more careful thinking ought to convince the most eager of the advance-agents of physical science that the discipline they serve so loyally is altogether unconcerned with the moral life, and wholly incompetent to deal with its problems. Mr. Frederic Harrison once asked, and with extreme pertinence, what the mere dissector of frogs could claim to know of the facts of morality and religion? Positively nothing, as such, and in their more sober moments "the ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan

... hotel and sat there most of the day, the mere pulp of a man. His one desire now was to escape from the eyes of his fellow-men. He felt that he bore the marks of his disgrace, obvious at a glance. He had been turned out of the army as a hopeless incompetent; he was worse than a slacker, for the slacker might have latent qualities ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various

... axiom never to post a small body of troops in a way to hamper the action of the main body was directly responsible for the unnecessary loss of more than two thousand of our soldiers. That was the frightful butchers' bill our army had to pay for a bit of incompetent generalship. ...
— The Battle of Franklin, Tennessee • John K. Shellenberger

... degrees I have been forced to regard as being within the exceptions of the Constitution, and as indispensable to the public safety. Nothing is better known to history than that courts of justice are utterly incompetent to such cases. Civil courts are organized chiefly for trials of individuals—or, at most, a few individuals acting in concert, and this in quiet times, and on charges of crimes well defined in the law. Even in times of peace bands of horse-thieves and robbers ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln

... explorer has said that having an adventure means that something unexpected or unforeseen has happened; that some one has been incompetent. I had the satisfaction of knowing that the fault of this adventure, if such it could be called, was mine. Here we were, at our goal in Mexico, supposed to be a hostile land, with scant provisions for one day. It was a hundred miles along ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb

... the party of gay liberality with other people's money. In the matter of directing the destinies of this country towards a higher and better national existence, there is really nothing to choose between Republicanism and Democracy. Both are equally unwilling and incompetent, both, despite the prating of civil service snobs and snivellers are dominated by spoils, and the managers of both regard a campaign not as a battle for the betterment of America but as a battle for boodle. The McKinley ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... significance of tragedies. Thus it was only now, when I found myself involved in the rout, that I began to appreciate how sharp had been the battle. We were a company of the rejected; the drunken, the incompetent, the weak, the prodigal, all who had been unable to prevail against circumstances in the one land, were now fleeing pitifully to another; and though one or two might still succeed, all had already failed. We were a shipful of failures, the broken men ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson

... bit that way, myself; and I think,' said poor Milly, making an effort, and growing very red; she quite lost her head at that point, and was incompetent to finish the sentiment she ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu

... don't trust you," Lord Henry replied. "That must be the reason. They have learned not to trust the mature adult. British parents are either too indolent, or too incompetent to do the thing properly. And the consequence is young people have been trained by tradition to believe that, in the matter of choosing their mates, concerning which they know literally nothing, and are taught ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici

... was not only a good navigator, for on many occasions he showed a remarkable gift for commanding mutinous crews in spite of having many officers on whom he could place little reliance. On leaving Cork in 1708, after an incompetent pilot had almost run his ship on two rocks off Kinsale called "The Sovereigne's Bollacks," Rogers describes his crew thus: "A third were foreigners, while of Her Majestie's subjects many were taylors, tinkers, pedlars, fiddlers, and hay-makers, with ten boys and one negro." It was with crews ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse

... judicious part of the community that some of the objections which have been most strenuously urged against the Constitution, and which were most formidable in their first appearance, are not only destitute of substance, but if they had operated in the formation of the plan, would have rendered it incompetent to the great ends of public happiness and national prosperity. I equally flatter myself that a further and more critical investigation of the system will serve to recommend it still more to every sincere and disinterested advocate for good government and will leave no doubt with men of this ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison

... a Committee of Public Safety for fun. It will enquire into Custine's conduct. Incompetent or traitor, he will be superseded by a General resolved to ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France

... opened a school nearer us than the one I had been attending, but the teachers were usually very incompetent and my progress ...
— Tuskegee & Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements • Various

... her lot, because of the error of her incompetent heart, to take charge of this flotsam. That was so evident that she had given ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick

... doctrine, so much as with the discipline of the Church. The Bishops of Numidia were angered by not having been called to the consecration of Caecilianus Bishop of Carthage, and, assembling together, they elected and consecrated a rival bishop to that see, and declared Caecilianus incompetent for the episcopal office. Donatus, Bishop of Casa Nigra, was the foremost of these Numidian malcontents, and from him the sect of Donatists took its name; they denied the orders of those ordained by Caecilianus, and hence the validity of the Sacraments administered by them. Excommunicated themselves, ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant

... much more might have been done to augment these comforts. Instead of now being the object of matured and wise regulations, the captive is exposed to the rapacity of our enemies, who will derive great advantages from our abandonment of the trade, and those who are incompetent, from the want of local knowledge, to ease his shackles, and sooth him in his state of bondage. The magnitude and nature of the disease, required a comprehensive system of policy to eradicate it; and although in its nature and tendency of great moral turpitude, alteratives were required calculated ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry

... rude to his employers. Yet he was everywhere discharged. Bringing no interest to his duties, he brought no attention. His day was a tissue of things neglected and things done amiss. And from place to place and from town to town he carried the character of one thoroughly incompetent." ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense

... well-equipped army of three hundred men and forty horses, just half the force he sailed with from Spain the previous June, and of the three hundred men whom he led into Florida, only four lived to reach civilization - the rest perished. That is but one example of incompetent leadership. When Portola organized his expedition for the march from San Diego Bay to Monterey, many of his soldiers were ill from scurvy, and at one time on the march the sick list numbered nineteen men, including the governor and Rivera, his chief officer. ...
— The March of Portola • Zoeth S. Eldredge

... it is hardly believable that such an incompetent judge as the directress should herself assign the roles for all our plays!" she once remarked to Wladek greatly embittered by the fact that she had been ignored in the selection of the cast for an old melodramatic caricature entitled ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont

... saw incompetent men advanced to positions of importance, his anger was unrestrainable, "Why," he asked bitterly, "are the Egyptian donkey-boys so favourable to the English?" Answer, "Because we hire more asses ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright

... seemed to grow in an instant several feet in their estimation: but he shrunk again when he acknowledged that he had merely met Count Altenberg accidentally at Greenwich—that he knew nothing of the count's estate in Yorkshire, or of his foreign possessions, and was utterly incompetent to decide whether he had 10,000l. ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth

... at the beginning of the tenth year of the war, the truce having now expired, Cleon was sent with a fleet of thirty ships to conduct the siege of this important place. That so weighty a charge should have been entrusted to hands so incompetent argues a degree of infatuation in the Athenians which is very hard to understand. On his voyage Cleon succeeded in retaking Torone by a sudden assault, and then proceeding northwards dropped anchor at Eion, where he remained ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell

... Englishman with his clean clear face, his springy limbs, his faultless habiliments is about as pleasant as anything can be to a discerning man. Moreover, it is by no means true that the dandy is necessarily incompetent when he comes to engage in the severe work of life. Our hero, our Nelson, kept his nautical dandyism until he was middle-aged. Who ever accused him of incompetence? Think of his going at Trafalgar into that pouring Inferno of lead and iron with all his decorations blazing on him! "In honour I ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman

... the same time a Mesopotamian. chieftain, called Tayer or Thair, made an attack upon Otesiphon, took the city by storm, and captured a sister or aunt of the Persian monarch. The nobles, who, during Sapor's minority, guided the helm of the State, were quite incompetent to make head against these numerous enemies. For sixteen years the marauding bands had the advantage, and Persia found herself continually weaker, more impoverished, and less able to recover herself. The young prince is said to have shown extraordinary discretion and intelligence. He diligently ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson

... could never, unaided, have set up their sway in these southern regions. But should they succeed in establishing good government over the entire archipelago, clearly they must be for an indefinite period incompetent to take over the international responsibilities connected with the islands. To have at once conceded their sovereignty could have subserved no end that would have been from any point ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews

... convince myself sufficiently to openly recommend war to be undertaken against the Moros and pushed with the utmost vigor, and more particularly commencing the work by a formal invasion of Jolo; still, as I feel myself incompetent to trace a precise plan, or to discuss the minute details more immediately connected with the object, I feel it necessary to confine myself to the pointing out, in general terms, of the means I judge most conducive to the happy issue of so arduous but important ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.

... few weeks, but the decline of his health, which was attributed to his rapid growth, dates from that period. He died prematurely on July 22, 1832, at Schoenbrunn, and the accounts which may be relied upon indicate either wilfully careless or incompetent medical treatment. It is even asserted that this heir to the throne of France, ushered in twenty-one years before as the herald of Peace, was to be regarded as a source of infinite danger, and for that barbaric reason his health was allowed to be slowly ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman

... luck with two boys that he used to tell of, to whom he had taught the classics, "so that," he said, "they were no incompetent or mean scholars." It was necessary, however, that something more familiar should be known, and he bid them read the History of England. After a few months had elapsed he asked them, "If they could recollect ...
— Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. - during the last twenty years of his life • Hester Lynch Piozzi

... never have done. From Aden to Cochin blood flowed beneath his blows, but peace followed; and though he was termed "the Portuguese Mars," his justice became traditional, and his sagacity was shown in the permanence of the settlements he made, even under the incompetent viceroys who ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various

... undertaking not to conclude peace until the colonies were free. The success of the revolted colonies made the Revolution in France a certainty. The fall of Neckar and the setting up of the reckless and incompetent Calonne over the destinies of France brought the shout of the Democracy to the gardens of the king. Vigee Le Brun's picture of the dandified man certainly does not show him a leader of great enterprises. His reckless extravagance satisfied the nobles; it brought bankruptcy stalking to the ...
— Vigee Le Brun • Haldane MacFall

... Deft. by Joseph Heathfield his attorney says he is not guilty. 2. And for a further Plea the Deft, says that before and at the time of the alleged imprisonment Plt, was a person of unsound mind and incompetent to take care of himself and a proper person to be taken care of and detained and it was unfit unsafe improper and dangerous that he should be at large thereupon the Deft, being the uncle of the Plt. and a proper person to cause the ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade

... it, and that the human intellect was no measure of the power of God. Yet the Reformers somehow believed, and Mr. Mansell by his place in the Church of England seems to agree with them, that the human intellect was not so wholly incompetent. It might be a weak guide, but it was better than none; and they declared on grounds of mere reason, that Christ being in heaven and not on earth, 'it was contrary to the truth for a natural body to be in two places at once.' The common sense of the country was ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude

... For some time the history of the gaekwars was very much the same as that of most territorial houses in India: an occasional able minister, more rarely an able prince; but, on the other hand, a long dreary list of incompetent heads, venal advisers and taskmasters oppressive to the people. At last a fierce family feud came to a climax. In 1873 an English committee of inquiry was appointed to investigate various complaints of oppression against the gaekwar, Malhar Rao, who had recently ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various

... opinions Akin to his, and thereby helped to scathe As stably based a project as this age Has sunned to ripeness. Ever the French Marine Have you decried, ever contrived to bring Despair into the fleet! Why, this Villeneuve, Your man, this rank incompetent, this traitor— Of whom I asked no more than fight and lose, Provided he detain the enemy— A frigate is too great for his command! what shall be said of one who, at a breath, When a few casual sailors find them sick, When falls a broken boom or slitten ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy

... and subject to an accounting the property of the indolent, the incompetent, the unthrifty, the envious and the luckless. That is the view that prevails in the underworld, where the Brotherhood of Man finds its most logical development and candid advocacy. To denizens of the midworld the ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce

... may be—the fault does not, certainly, indicate any thing at all wrong in him. The fault is in his training. In witnessing his disobedience, our reflection should be, not "What a bad boy!" but "What an unfaithful or incompetent mother!" ...
— Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young • Jacob Abbott

... is thine. Unsearchable are thy purposes! mysterious thy movements! inscrutable thy operations! An atom of thy creation, wildered in the mazes of ignorance and woe, would bow to thy decrees. Surrounded with impenetrable gloom, unable to scrutinize the past, incompetent to explore the future——fain would he say, THY WILL BE DONE! And Oh, that it might be consistent with that HIGH WILL to call this atom from a dungeon of wretchedness, to worlds of light and glory, where ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.

... hold Newport News on the Peninsula. There are rumors of a fight at Philippi. One Col. Potterfield was surprised. If this be so, there is no excuse for him. I think the President will make short work of incompetent commanders. Now a blunder is ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones

... mighty soldier was so unwilling to submit to the orders of incompetent people, he never liked to be under the direct command of Washington, and, if it were possible to do so, he managed to be concerned in operations not under the immediate eye of the commander in chief. In fact, he was very jealous indeed of Washington, and did not hesitate to express ...
— The Junior Classics • Various

... excitement that some of the ambitious ones had to be compelled to leave the field at night, wishing to sleep at the end of their row. The inefficient were gently tolerated; severe punishment was held to be alike cruel and useless; an incompetent servant was carried as a burden from which there was no escape. Such endurance was the way of all good masters and mistresses at the South,—"and I have known very few who were not good," adds the writer. The plantation ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam

... firmly maintained in this chapter that men are incompetent to judge themselves, and need a scientific monitor of unquestionable authority, has long been recognized. The Catholic confessional is a recognition and application of the principles of great value. But the confessional of the narrow-minded ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various

... not overdrawn, as the writer has reason to know; it existed in London in the days of Dickens, and it exists to-day, with the qualification that many who ought, perforce of their instincts, to be classed therewith do just enough work of an incompetent kind to keep them well out from under the shadow of the law; these are the "Sykeses" of a former day, not the "Fagins", who are possessed of a certain amount of natural wit, if it be of a ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun

... in possession of London bureau are incompetent to establish guilty connivance of either Lanier in any crime except those assaults on ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee

... It is rather that which is derived indirectly from the atmosphere, example, and ideals by which the child is surrounded in his home. If I could determine those for a child I should dread very little any malign force in the shape of an incompetent teacher. Schools, in reality, are only for the unfinished work of the homes. They may make the child better than his home, and they may undo the good work which it has done; but, usually, what the home is the child will be ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford

... useless to enumerate instances; people have suffered too severely at the hands of careless and incompetent hosts not to know pretty well what the title of this paper means. So many of us have come away from fruitless evenings, grinding our teeth, and vowing never to enter those doors again while life lasts, that the time ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory

... Miss Thackeray. She was by no means dressed as a chambermaid should be, nor was she as dumb. On the contrary, she confronted him in the choicest raiment that her wardrobe contained, and she was bright and cheery and exceedingly incompetent. It was her costume that shocked him. Not only was she attired in a low-necked, rose-coloured evening gown, liberally bespangled with tinsel, but she wore a vast top-heavy picture-hat whose crown of black ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon

... family doctor in turn. Mabel, rouged and befrilled, still made an attractive foil for Wallace as the hero. Martie liked them all; their chatter of the fairyland of the stage, their trunks plastered with labels, their fine voices, their general air of being incompetent children adrift in a puzzling world. Deep laughter stirred within her when they spoke of ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris

... are carrying on scientific research and the public, in order to explain and justify their work." Probably everyone will agree with the Lord Justice: but what are we to say of those responsible owners of great journals who not only abstain from providing such interpretation but allow anonymous and incompetent writers to mislead the public? Is the literary critic of a prosperous journal employed to write the ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester

... in the extreme south end of the house, if there is any such thing as a south end to a house, whose orientation cannot be determined by me, because I am incompetent in all cases where an object does not point directly north & south. This one slants across between, & is therefore a confusion. This little private parlor is in one of the two corners of what I call the ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... disillusionment caused by the events at Plevna came the more cruelly. One general after another became the scapegoat for the popular indignation. Then the General Staff was freely censured, and whispers went round that the Grand Duke Nicholas, brother of the Czar, was not only incompetent to conduct a great war, but guilty of underhand dealings with the contractors who defrauded the troops and battened on the public funds. Letters from the rank and file showed that the bread was bad, the ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose

... of the emperor had come into the hands of one man simply because the republic had been found incompetent to handle its empire, whether from a military or a financial point of view. It managed neither so consistently nor so honestly as ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker

... do it regularly, only when I take a notion to do so at home; but I think it is every woman's duty to learn such things, so that if she gets hold of an incompetent servant ...
— Fred Fearnot's New Ranch - and How He and Terry Managed It • Hal Standish

... nation, an incompetent person, known to loud Trenck during his detention here] was Commandant of Glatz, and had the principal Fortress,—for there are two, one on each side the Neisse River;—his Second was a Colonel Quadt, by birth Prussian, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... open the campaign till the month of June. It consisted of fourteen thousand men; and never was an army so badly conducted. Without money, artillery, provisions, or discipline, it was at any moment ready to break up and abandon its incompetent general; and on the very first encounter with the enemy, and after a loss of a couple of hundred men, it became self-disbanded; and, flying in every direction, not a single man could be rallied ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan

... transmission of property. Imprisonment for debt has been abolished. Exemptions from executions have been largely added to, and in most of the states homesteads are rendered incapable of seizure and sale upon forced process. Witnesses are no longer incompetent by reason of interest, even though they be parties to the litigation. Indictments have been simplified, and an indictment for the most serious of crimes is now the simplest of all. in several of the states ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... is thrillingly unpleasant to find yourself an incompetent in the routine of an office when you could with ease recite Hugo's verses in French and write a long treatise on the Punic Wars. Evan inwardly shuddered. Perry stood beside him grinning and muttering imprecations ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen

... ended in real quarrels, and following in the footsteps of the little Russians was becoming irksome—(especially to Fatima, whose predecessor—Peter—had been of a military turn, and had begun fortifications near the kitchen garden which she was incompetent to carry out) a new idea struck me. I announced that letters properly written and addressed to the little Russians, 'Reka Dom, Russia,' and posted in the old rhubarb-pot by the tool-house, would be duly answered. The replies to be found ...
— Mrs. Overtheway's Remembrances • Juliana Horatia Ewing

... old regiments by injudicious promotions. He does in some instances, it is true, reward faithful soldiers; but often complaining, unwilling, incompetent fellows are promoted, who get upon the sick list to avoid duty; lay upon their backs when they should be on their feet, and are carousing when they should be asleep. On the march, instead of pushing along resolutely at the head of their command, they fall back and get into ...
— The Citizen-Soldier - or, Memoirs of a Volunteer • John Beatty

... matter, viewed in other ways than as obstructing movement, has the same property of the extended belonging to the empty void. The inference is, that the limitation of our means of knowledge renders altogether incompetent the imagination of an end to either Time or Space. The greatest efforts of our combining faculty cannot exceed the elements presented to it, and these elements contain nothing that would set forth the situation of space ending, ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain

... had taken proceedings against Abbe Peyramale's heir-at-law, the vestry, and the town, for the last still refused to pay over the amount which it had voted. At first the Prefect's Council declared itself incompetent to deal with the case, and when it was sent back to it by the Council of State, it rendered a judgment by which the town was condemned to pay the hundred thousand francs and the heir-at-law to finish ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... same whole-hearted regard for the cause; the same disregard for the individual. He was just as ready as Jackson to place a recalcitrant subordinate, no matter how high his rank, under instant arrest, and towards the incompetent and unsuccessful he was just as pitiless. Jackson, however, had the finer intellect. The Federal Commander-in-Chief was unquestionably a great soldier, greater than those who overlook his difficulties in the '64 campaign are disposed to admit. As a strategist he ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson

... competent, qualified, capable, talented, clever, gifted, efficient; effective, cogent, telling, potent. Antonyms: unable, incompetent, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... nevertheless pretended that my information and knowledge of mankind, however extensive, and however painfully acquired, by constant domestic enquiry, and by foreign travel, is, natheless, incompetent to the task of recording the pleasant narratives of my Landlord, I will let these critics know, to their own eternal shame and confusion as well as to the abashment and discomfiture of all who shall rashly take up ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott

... a blind confusion. She did not know how to teach, and she felt she never would know. Mr. Harby came down every now and then to her class, to see what she was doing. She felt so incompetent as he stood by, bullying and threatening, so unreal, that she wavered, became neutral and non-existent. But he stood there watching with the listening-genial smile of the eyes, that was really threatening; he said nothing, he made her go on teaching, ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

... good sense and judgment, or perhaps it may have been that some incompetent officers gave senseless orders,—for instance, the people occupying the stores on Polk Street, between Clay and Pacific, and the apartments above, were driven out at 8 A. M. of Thursday, and not permitted to re-enter. As the fire did not reach this ...
— San Francisco During the Eventful Days of April, 1906 • James B. Stetson

... invited by Philip to make ready to take in hand the affairs of Flanders, sadly disorganized under the incompetent rule of Alva. It occurred to him that if he were to issue victoriously from that enterprise—and so far victory had waited upon his every venture—if he were to succeed in restoring peace and Spanish order in rebellious Flanders, he would then ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini

... the interests of law and order, I suppose," said Patsy; "but the law seems dreadfully inadequate to protect the innocent. I suppose it's because the courts are run by cheap and incompetent people who couldn't earn a salary in any ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Out West • Edith Van Dyne

... for a moment. He was opposed to the use of force. Force, he believed, was the last resort of incompetence; he had said so frequently enough since this operation had begun. Of course, he was absolutely right, though not in the way he meant. Only the incompetent wait until the last extremity to use force, and by then, it is usually too late to use anything, ...
— A Slave is a Slave • Henry Beam Piper

... degeneracy of these Rois Faineants the kingdom of Clovis was gradually shrinking, and men were already waiting to seize the power as it fell from incompetent hands. When Clovis made gifts of large estates to reward, or to purchase, followers, Roman or Gallic, he laid the foundations of a system which would prove fatal to his successors. With these estates came titles and authority, multiplying and growing with each succeeding reign. A count, who was ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele

... permitted your visiting Oxford last week, so that you might have heard our debate, for certainly there had never been anything like it known here before and will scarcely be again. The discussion on the question that the ministers were incompetent to carry on the government of the country was of a miscellaneous character, and I moved what they called a 'rider' to the effect that the Reform bill threatened to change the form of the British government, ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley

... his life, suddenly assert her starved abilities, and make him become far greater than anything Trudy had ever been able to do! It would cause such a jolly row and excitement and pep everyone up. Pet and flatter him and show Trudy that after all she had only been an incompetent clerk in ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley

... of Luciferian Freemasonry himself passed on to the higher life of fire, which is the Palladian notion of beatitude, and in the peace and joy of Lucifer, the sovereign pontificate itself, after resting for a short period upon incompetent shoulders in the person of Albert George Mackey, was transferred to the Italian; the seat of the Dogmatic Directory was removed to Rome; a split in the camp ensued, inspired by a lady initiate, since famous under the name of Diana Vaughan, and to this ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite

... of something which to us was merely alluring or dull or revolting? The question whether, having done so, he ought to publish his poem; whether the thing in the poet's work will not be still confused by the incompetent Puritan or the incompetent sensualist with the thing in his mind, does not touch this point; it is a further question, one of ethics, not of art. No doubt the upholders of 'Art for art's sake' will generally be in favour of the courageous course, of refusing ...
— Poetry for Poetry's Sake - An Inaugural Lecture Delivered on June 5, 1901 • A. C. Bradley

... an English butler, and as many strapping indoor men—some of them much better fitted for manual labor—as he liked, and find it a social glory; while a family of moderate means were obliged to pay high wages to crude incompetent women from the darkest backwaters of European life, ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King

... time they had met. She had a little money of her own. If the old fox would only take it and roll it up into a big snowball! Isabelle, now, with all that wealth! Conny pursed her lips in disgust to think that so much of the ammunition of war had fallen into such incompetent hands. "Yes," she said to herself, "the Senator must show me how to do it." Perhaps it flitted vaguely through her mind that Percy might object to using stock market tips from the Senator. But Percy must accept her judgment on this matter. They could not ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)

... own coadjutor. There is a temptation to do wrong, but I resist it. What would it not be to me were the whole Fleet to attack as we land at Suvla! But obviously I cannot go out of my own element to urge the Fleet to actions, the perils of which I am professionally incompetent to gauge. ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton

... dearly loved; but I found it necessary to stifle my own feelings, and exert all my soothing aid and persuasive powers, to calm her agonized mind. At first I was but a poor comforter. I had never thought at all of these weighty matters, and therefore I felt myself very incompetent to reason upon them in such a way as was likely to convince and console her. I had been taught, by my excellent mother, to lisp the Lord's Prayer, the Belief, and the Catechism, before I at all knew the meaning of it, and ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt

... reliable. Each, however, usually has her favorite method of procedure which it is perhaps as well to allow her to follow. Pity 'tis, 'tis true, that many housekeepers are so ignorant of how the wash-day programme should really be conducted that they are incapable of directing the incompetent laundress. The mistress of the house needs also to be mistress of the laundry, guiding operations there as elsewhere, seeing to it that body and table linens are not washed together, flannels boiled, clothing rotted by overindulgence ...
— The Complete Home • Various

... my Mongol, and my earnest prayer is that I may be able to stand it all, and not get soured in temper and feeling against the Mongols. I must have patience. Some knowledge of camel's flesh also would help me not a little. As it stands, I feel an incompetent "duffer."' ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour

... E., a woman who lived years ago in Great Britain and the United States, who believed that noble man was incompetent, incomplete, incompatible, incongruent, inconsistent, and an incubus in his incurious incumbency. She was the daughter of Too Much Time and Too Much Money. Early days spent at home. She married and began her career. S.'s first weakness was a club. Then ...
— Who Was Who: 5000 B. C. to Date - Biographical Dictionary of the Famous and Those Who Wanted to Be • Anonymous

... officers set about their work, they are disagreeably impressed by a general want of sedulousness and close method in our leading. They think we economise brains and waste blood. They are shocked at the way in which obviously incompetent or inefficient men of the old army class are retained in their positions even after serious failures, and they were profoundly moved by the bad staff work and needlessly heavy losses of our opening ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells

... home. Speaking about this, some said, Well enough—he has become quite incompetent of late. Getting stale, probably. Unable to discover the obvious, losing his keenness. Ten years in the Far East about does for one. But with Lawson, the situation was different. He had become so tired of boundary lines, of perpetual swaying back and forth from one side to the ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte

... of Borrow has ever been published: a few dates, and some more or less intelligent opinions about his character and work, are the sum of what we know of him—outside his own books. Some of the dates are probably guess-work; most of the opinions are incompetent: it is time that some adequate mind assembled all available materials and digested them into a satisfactory book. It is hardly worth while to review the few meagre details. Borrow was born in 1803 and died in 1881; his father, a soldier, failed to make a solicitor of him, and the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various

... established, the Empire solidified, the administration purified and the frontiers defended. Everything that had happened in the past five years he blamed on Commodus. It was the indifference of Commodus which had ruined the administration of the army, so that incompetent, dishonest, and tyrannical under-officers drove young patriots like himself into mutiny, outlawry and their consequences. Had Commodus been a capable ruler he and his fellow malcontents would have been listened ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White

... scheme of optimism on a priori grounds which shall embrace a universe the larger portion of which is virtually beyond the field of observation. We are conscious of possessing some rational data and some mental equipment for the former task, but for the latter we feel utterly incompetent.[261] ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... although I was quite alone, of the nonsense I was uttering.' 'It is not a speech that I want,' said my friend, 'I can talk for three hours without hesitating, but I want an address to circulate through the county, and I find myself utterly incompetent to put one together; do oblige me by writing one for me, I know you can; and, if at any time you want a person to speak for you, you may command me not for three but for six hours. Good morning; to-morrow I will breakfast with you.' In the morning he came again. 'Well,' said he, 'what ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow

... qualities of mind, such grasp of reason, such continuity of induction, as to entitle him to underrate the intelligence of so large a number of his fellow-citizens by accusing them of being incapable of a generalization and incompetent to apprehend ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various

... body, and disposition, and had perfect teaching from infancy, that person could do nothing more than keep the moral law perfectly. But supposing that the Creator allows a person to be born with an hereditary or ingrafted organic tendency, and then puts this person into the hands of teachers incompetent or positively bad, is not what is called sin or transgression of the law necessarily involved in the premises? Is not a Creator bound to guard his children against the ruin which inherited ignorance might ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... expressed surprise and asked her why. "When our daughters are taken into the palace," answered the mother, "they are dead to us until they are twenty-five, when they are allowed to return home. If they are incompetent or dull they are often severely punished. They may contract disease and die, and their death is not even announced to us; while if they prove themselves efficient and win the approval of the authorities they are retained in the ...
— Court Life in China • Isaac Taylor Headland

... important Situations under the Russian Government, and who is far advanced in years, has neither time, inclination, nor eyesight for the task, and I am apprehensive that my strength and powers unassisted are incompetent to it' (praised be the Lord, they were not!), 'therefore I should be glad to return home. Moreover, the compositors say they are unaccustomed to compose in an unknown tongue from such scribbled and illegible copy, and they will scarcely assist me to compose. Moreover, ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins

... and the establishment of a line of forts and block-houses, dispersed along a considerable extent of country, and occupied by detachments of British colonial troops, or by militiamen. All these were utterly incompetent to effect security; partly from the circumstances of the case, and somewhat from the entire want of discipline, and the absence of that subordination which is absolutely necessary ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers

... were discharged because you were incompetent, because you were getting money you didn't earn and because you were trying to persuade others to be as worthless and useless as yourselves. You were ordered ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs

... was successful, and the Emperor Maurice was murdered, together with his sons. Maurice had been unsuccessful in war, unpopular with the army, and his financial measures had been oppressive. Phocas was utterly incompetent as a ruler, licentious and sanguinary as a man. His reign was a period ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.

... first cause of injury which at first presented itself. Mr. Lincoln had cause to know that in the beginning, even in the South itself, secession was only the work of a turbulent minority. 'To have yielded would have been to have written himself down before the world as incompetent—nay, as a traitor to the cause which he had just sworn to defend.' In short, we were misunderstood—painfully so—and it is not a matter of indifference to learn that at last there is a reaction of intelligence in our favor, and that light is breaking through the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... expertness, perhaps, never reached a high level, but at all events she made a gallant effort. But that was long, long ago, before the new enlightenment rescued her. Today, in her average incarnation, she is not only incompetent (alack, as I have argued, rather beyond her control); she is also filled with the notion that a conscientious discharge of her few remaining duties is, in some vague way, discreditable and degrading. To call ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken

... upon false principles, upheld by obstinacy, folly, and error, and tending to inevitable ruin; that new men and new measures must be adopted before we could hope for success in war, or honour and security in peace; that as ministers had shown themselves incompetent to the management of the war when they only had the Americans to contend with, it was not to be expected that they would be able to contend with the united arms of France and America; and that they would ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... bought a certain quantity of reprints from a bookseller in Chancery Lane, Pickering by name. I urged him to print the controversy between Greene and the Harveys. He wished me to write a third part to a fine edition of Cotton's Angler, for which I am quite incompetent.[212] ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott

... better than any one else in the world, noted her afresh, inwardly and outwardly, with the result that she desired more than ever to know the man who had been hardy enough to place his life's happiness in the hollow of Evelyn's clinging, incompetent hands. ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver

... competent to bear, and as the engines ran at a slow speed, they developed but a small amount of horse-power in relation to their size. Moreover, as in the land engine, the connection between the parts of the marine engine was such as to be incompetent to stand the strain that would come upon it if a higher pressure, with a considerable expansion, were used, and thus the consumption of coal was very heavy; and we know that, having regard to the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 312, December 24, 1881 • Various

... the sophistry of the presumptuous sciolist. Is it true, that this notion prevails universally among the human race? Let him answer to this. He must admit it;—let him then explain it, if he can. Reason, he will say, is incompetent to the task.—Admitted. But so is it to many other tasks—it cannot, for instance, solve the question, why we believe the sun will rise to-morrow and dispel the darkness now cloaking over the horizon? The hope that it will do so, is nevertheless very natural. Who shall say ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr

... people into waiting expectantly any longer. While I was under age they trustfully gave me credit; it is sad to disappoint them now that I am on the verge of thirty. But what am I to do? Words of wisdom will not come! I am utterly incompetent to provide things that may profit the multitude. Beyond a snatch of song, some tittle-tattle, a little merry fooling, I have been unable to advance. And as the result, those who held high hopes will ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore

... for one, am not afraid to be open and speak my mind. If the place is going to the dogs because of it's being continually in a state of disorder, then the fault lies with the prefects." (Sensation.) "They're the ones who ought to check it, and if they are incompetent, and can't do their duty, it's no excuse for their trying to shift the blame on to fellows who are innocent, but who happen to stand ...
— The Triple Alliance • Harold Avery

... his eyes closed in pain. All they felt he felt. What their homes were to them, these fellaheen, dragged forth to defend their country, to go into the desert and waste their lives under leaders tyrannous, cruel, and incompetent, his old open life, his innocence, his integrity, his truthfulness and character, were to him. By an impulsive act, by a rash blow, he had asserted his humanity; but he had killed his fellow-man in anger. He knew that as that fatal blow had been delivered, there was ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... the mark and oscillate beyond its place of equilibrium to and fro. Any medium possessing these two properties can transmit waves, and unless a medium possesses these properties in some form or other, or some equivalent for them, it may be said with moderate security to be incompetent to transmit waves. But if we make this latter statement, one must be prepared to extend to the terms elasticity and inertia their very largest and broadest signification, so as to include any possible kind of restoring force and any possible kind ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 717, September 28, 1889 • Various

... the war, the truce having now expired, Cleon was sent with a fleet of thirty ships to conduct the siege of this important place. That so weighty a charge should have been entrusted to hands so incompetent argues a degree of infatuation in the Athenians which is very hard to understand. On his voyage Cleon succeeded in retaking Torone by a sudden assault, and then proceeding northwards dropped anchor at Eion, where he remained inactive, after despatching messengers to Perdiccas, and to a friendly ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell

... from George—to be breaking in on that imaginative vision of him, and his life in the trenches, which while it tortured her, yet filled the blank of his absence. So Bridget did it all—corresponded peremptorily with their rather old and incompetent trustee, got all the signatures necessary out of Nelly, and carried the thing through. Again, on another and smaller occasion, Miss Martin had seen the two sisters confronted with a scandalous overcharge for the carriage of some heavy luggage from Manchester. Nelly was aghast; but ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... of immorality, should forfeit their privileges. The power of selection of inmates was vested in the trustees, assisted by the vicar and churchwardens of the parish; a clause being added, that, in case of the trustees being incompetent, by reason of infancy or idiocy, the vicar and churchwardens should select. The weekly allowance to the inmates ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter

... are told that 13 per cent. of all men examined were excluded as unfit for military service. We are now told that 31 per cent. are found to be unfit. Nearly one-third of the young men found physically incompetent to be soldiers! From what cause? Certainly tobacco must bear a large share ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen

... or of a bustling, energetic Jenny wren, that "looketh well to the ways of her household and eateth not the bread of idleness." She is a flabby, spineless bundle of flesh and pretty feathers, gentle and refined in manners, but slack and incompetent in all she does. Her nest consists of few loose sticks. without rim or lining; and when her two babies emerge from the white eggs, that somehow do not fall through or roll out of the rickety lattice, their tender little naked bodies must suffer from many bruises. We are almost inclined to ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan

... voyage and journal: Our pilot proved incompetent, and we narrowly escaped shipwreck in consequence at Martin Garcia Bar, a bad spot in the River Plate. A small schooner captain, observing that we needlessly followed in his track, and being anything but a sailor in principle, wantonly meditated mischief ...
— Voyage of the Liberdade • Captain Joshua Slocum

... came next morning with a black, extravasated eye, which he bathed at intervals with a rag, he was regarded by most of us as absolute scum. The German master, a tall, good-looking man, was treated as utterly incompetent because, when he asked a question in grammar or syntax, he walked up and down with the book in front of him, and quite plainly compared the answer with the book. We boys thought that anyone could be a master, with ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes

... Universe, and in the harmony and fitness of all its parts, the hand of a great contriver. It may conclude upon attributes, as belonging to the same. It may see the fitness of virtue, and deduce from thence a speculative morality. They only say that it, is incompetent to spiritual discernment. But though they believe the two spirits to be thus distinct in their powers, they believe them, I apprehend, to be so far connected in religion that the spirit of God can only act upon a reasonable being. Thus light ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume II (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson

... the war in Africa; Solomon is slain in battle against them; Sergius, his successor, is incompetent. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various

... stranger. In his first year at Trinity, he had been brutally contemptuous of the city and its inhabitants. "They can't even put up the names of the streets so that people can read them," he said to John Marsh soon after he arrived in Dublin. "They're so damned incompetent!" And Marsh had told him to control his Ulster blood. "You're right to be proud of Ulster," he had said, "but you oughtn't to go about talking as if the rest of Ireland ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine

... while at the same time the armies of Radetzky and Windischgraetz were stamping out every trace of (p. 455) insurrection in Lombardo-Venetia, in Bohemia, and eventually in Vienna itself. December 2, 1848, the easy-going, incompetent Emperor Ferdinand was induced by the reactionaries to abdicate. His brother, Francis Charles, the heir-presumptive, renounced his claim to the throne, and the crown devolved upon the late Emperor's youthful ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg

... espoused her cause, and a conspiracy was formed to deliver her, assassinate Elizabeth, and restore the Catholic religion. From the fact that Mary was privy to that part of it which concerned her own deliverance, she was brought to trial as a criminal, found guilty by a court incompetent to sit on her case, and executed ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord

... him upon some subject, and feeling himself as yet incompetent to carry into practice what he had heard, used to be apprehensive only lest he ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous

... either method may fail in the hands of incompetent or indolent men, and either may be thought to succeed by those whose taste or prejudices are obstinate in its favor. All that I contend for, in advocating unwritten discourse, is, that this method claims a decided superiority over the others in some ...
— Hints on Extemporaneous Preaching • Henry Ware

... despises the man to whose merry insolence he submits. But the young Repentigny felt for Vergor such contempt as only an incompetent officer inspires. ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood

... in Mrs. Majendie's drawing-room, she had no impulse to wound her mortally. Her instinct was rather to patronise and pity, to unfold the long result of a superior experience, to instruct this woman who was so incompetent to deal with men, who had spoiled, stupidly, her husband's life and her own. In that moment Sarah contemplated nothing more outrageous than a little straight talk ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair

... in, the seaman himself. It is a defect of the system they live under, the responsibility for which must rest with those whose duty it is to train them. It often happens that those who declaim so cynically against the shortcomings of the present-day sailor are incompetent to make a suitable selection of captains and officers who may be entrusted with the task of establishing proper discipline and training aboard their vessels. Very frequently the seamen are blamed when the captain and officers ought to be held responsible. If ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman

... Wilfrid was perhaps incompetent to test the truth of this profound aphoristic remark, delivered with the simplicity of natural conviction. The narrative had, to his thinking, quite released from him his temporary subjection to this little lady's sway. All that he ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... of children rests squarely upon those who have assumed the responsibility of bringing them into the world, and it cannot be rightly pushed off on to some one else. To the protest of parents that they are incompetent to conduct such training, the only possible reply is a blunt, "Whose fault is that?" If you have been so careless of the fundamental responsibilities of life, you are incompetent to assume a relation which of necessity carries such responsibility with it. It is no ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry

... This passed away in a few weeks, but the decline of his health, which was attributed to his rapid growth, dates from that period. He died prematurely on July 22, 1832, at Schoenbrunn, and the accounts which may be relied upon indicate either wilfully careless or incompetent medical treatment. It is even asserted that this heir to the throne of France, ushered in twenty-one years before as the herald of Peace, was to be regarded as a source of infinite danger, and for that barbaric reason his health ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman

... Holland, commanding the Royalist troops, conceived the idea of a rising near London. There was to be a horse-race on Banstead Downs, to draw the people together, and he was to lead them. Unhappily for his followers, he was a thoroughly incompetent soldier. He hoisted his standard at Kingston, and marched through Dorking to Reigate, where he held the castle and posted his vedettes on Red Hill. Sir Michael Livesey, commanding some Kentish horse for the ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker

... tide of the Delaware produced heavy crops of grain, as well as pasture for cattle and valuable lumber from its forests. The Pennsylvania settlers were of a class particularly skilled in dealing with the soil. They apparently encountered none of the difficulties, due probably to incompetent farming, which beset the settlers of Delaware, whose land was as good as that ...
— The Quaker Colonies - A Chronicle of the Proprietors of the Delaware, Volume 8 - in The Chronicles Of America Series • Sydney G. Fisher

... a failure. Never was the lot of the workers worse than it is now. "Your legislation for the past hundred years is a perpetual and fruitless effort to regulate the disorders of your economic system. Your poor, your drunken, your incompetent, your sick, your aged, ride you like a nightmare. You have dissolved all human and personal ties. The salient characteristic of your civilisation is its irresponsibility. The making of dividends is the universal preoccupation; ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker

... mysterious affairs of Monday night, including the views and theories of well-known citizens. It also took occasion to "lambast" Constable Foss with great severity. The Constable, being a Republican, (and not a subscriber to the Sun), was described as about the most incompetent official Windomville had ever known, and that it would have been quite possible for the miscreant or miscreants to have poisoned every dog in town, in broad daylight, accompanied by a brass band, without ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon

... madam, you are Lady Camper, and you command me. I cannot be more precise. In fact, it is the feeling of the necessity for keeping close to the business that destroys what I would say. I am in fact lamentably incompetent to conduct my ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... and gradual, but perceptible improvement in species, especially marked in those whose generations succeed each other rapidly. But we see nothing of the kind. But did selection really exist, it would be incompetent to account for a multitude of structures and functions to which any efficient cause should be applicable, notably to the earliest rudiments of useful organs. Such organs as the eye and the internal ear are quite out of reach of any explanation by natural selection. Since the development ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 8, August, 1880 • Various

... and I think I can say that if she judges the match in question opposed to the pride inspired by the first ideas of her education, no persuasion can move her. She possesses to a very marked degree the confident obstinacy of feeble and timid spirits. She does not dare to dismiss an incompetent footman; and when she has once made up her mind, which is only possible in matters about which her opinions are rigidly formed, neither force nor persuasion can modify her. That is my reading of her character, and I think it the ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand

... week passed in a blind confusion. She did not know how to teach, and she felt she never would know. Mr. Harby came down every now and then to her class, to see what she was doing. She felt so incompetent as he stood by, bullying and threatening, so unreal, that she wavered, became neutral and non-existent. But he stood there watching with the listening-genial smile of the eyes, that was really threatening; he said nothing, he made her go on teaching, she felt she ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

... there among men, there are those who pause in the hurried rush to listen to the call of a life that is more real. How often have we seen them, David, jostled and ridiculed by their fellows, pushed aside and forgotten, as incompetent or unworthy. He who sees and hears too much is cursed for a dreamer, a fanatic, or a fool, by the mad mob, who, having eyes, see not, ears and hear not, ...
— The Shepherd of the Hills • Harold Bell Wright

... hundredweight of pork, pasture for a cow, and two hundred pounds of common flour. He also had the right to be absent from the plantation half a day in every month. He did not use these vacations to good advantage, for he was a drunken incompetent and tried Washington's patience sorely. Washington frequently threatened to dismiss him and as often relented and Green finally, in 1794, quit of his own accord, though Washington thereafter had ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth

... opinion the present Legislature will go down in history as the most incompetent body of lawmakers that ever sat in the ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs

... teacher say that a child is stupid, my first instinctive conclusion is either that the child has adenoids, or that the teacher is incompetent." ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson

... samples, it is proper to conclude that the causes commonly to be assigned to poverty are both subjective and objective, or individual and social. It was formerly customary to throw most of the blame on the poor themselves, to charge them with being lazy, intemperate, vicious, and generally incompetent, and it is useless to deny that these appear to be the direct causes in great numbers of instances, but as much of the negro and poor white trash in the South was found to be due to hookworm infection, ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe

... responsibility.] Now this system, in depriving the mayor of power, deprived him of responsibility, and left the responsibility nowhere in particular. In making appointments the mayor and council would come to some sort of compromise with each other and exchange favours. Perhaps for private reasons incompetent or dishonest officers would get appointed, and if the citizens ventured to complain the mayor would say that he appointed as good men as the council could be induced to confirm, and the council would declare their willingness to confirm good appointments if the ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske

... Works build several bridges of insufficient capacity in order to find out the necessary dimensions and strength of one which will serve their purpose, we should at once regard them incompetent and wasteful. I know of tile which have been taken up at three different times, larger tile being used each time. This farmer discards the use of lateral drains and rests his success upon single lines of large tile. He will probably be disappointed ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 3, January 19, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various

... she said. "I see no cause to be ashamed. If my husband is mad I shall at least do my utmost to prevent the consequences. Picture to yourself, Monsieur and Madame," she went on, for she passed Stubbs over, "that this wretched person - a dauber, an incompetent, not fit to be a sign-painter - receives this morning an admirable offer from an uncle - an uncle of my own, my mother's brother, and tenderly beloved - of a clerkship with nearly a hundred and fifty pounds a year, and that ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson

... of view. If we were considering the life of some commercial or industrial community and trying to forecast its future development, one of the first things we should note would be its general business methods. No manufacturing concern with a defective office administration and incompetent travellers could survive, even if it had an Archimedes or an Edison in supreme control. I cannot see any reason why an agricultural community should expect to prosper while the industry by which ...
— The Rural Life Problem of the United States - Notes of an Irish Observer • Horace Curzon Plunkett

... followed me, and I supposed that as her aunt had neglected to suggest that I should take a look at my quarters it was her purpose to repair the omission. But she made no such suggestion; she only stood there with a dim, though not a languid smile, and with an effect of irresponsible, incompetent youth which was almost comically at variance with the faded facts of her person. She was not infirm, like her aunt, but she struck me as still more helpless, because her inefficiency was spiritual, which was not the case with Miss Bordereau's. I waited to see ...
— The Aspern Papers • Henry James

... of Peers is occupied with the trial of Marshall Ney, the Conseil de Guerre, which was ordered to assemble for that purpose having declared itself incompetent. The friends of Ney advised him to claim the protection of the 12th Article of the Capitulation of Paris, and Madame Ney, it is said, applied both to the Duke of Wellington and to the Emperor of Russia; both ungenerously refused; to the former Nature has not given a heart ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye

... a chair and struck a bell. A tall, slightly stooped English servant, with correct side whiskers and incompetent, watery blue eyes, answered. ...
— Conjuror's House - A Romance of the Free Forest • Stewart Edward White

... anxious to find something "worth doing," therefore had settled on this one definite duty. She had wrestled in a determined silence with the many incompetent and degenerate negresses, with the few impertinent Americans, with the drunken Irish and insolent Swedes, who had filed in and out of her kitchen ever since her marriage. Suburban life was a new thing in Endbury, and "help" could see no advantages ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield

... on the average will be sufficiently burdensome to seriously threaten the permanence of the institution. Where disaster has been visited upon assessment companies, the cause has been easily traceable to incompetent or dishonest conduct of the business, and utter disregard of the foundation principles of all insurance. It has in no instance been fairly chargeable to defects in the system. With the record before us of our best assessment companies, faithfully and competently administered, ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 5 • Various

... add that the injured husband has been married before and that his first wife, honestly supposed to be dead, returns to threaten his happiness, you will see that Mrs. Woods sets forth upon a path trodden by many hundreds of thousands of incompetent feet. To start with such a situation almost suggests bravado. If it be bravado, it is entirely justified as the tale proceeds: for amid the crowd of failures Mrs. Woods's solution wears the singular distinction of truth. That the book is written in restrained ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... expect aid from me, or from any one," said Madame. "That would at once set you down as incompetent for your office." ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte

... are used by an incompetent person. I am surprised that you, sir, assistant professor of astronomy in a great institution of learning, should assert that any mathematical fact is not an actual one. Prove to me that figures lie, and you can have my daughter! But this is only nonsense. You are presumptuous and something of ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo

... the sphere of industrial machinery, have made it possible for every human being to have sufficient food, clothing, shelter, leisure and solitude. Man, in this sense, has already conquered Nature; and has secured for his progeny however indefinitely increased, and for the frail and incompetent ones of his race, however indefinitely increased, a more than sufficient supply ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys

... every class in life; and although of late years one sees the same sort of writings advertised in England, they have certainly not as yet produced any apparent effect upon us—perhaps from being written by incompetent people, or perhaps from the author dwelling too exclusively upon usages which change with the fashion of the day, instead of being based upon right and kind feelings, or, at anyrate, the appearance of them. I have lately met with a little French book, entitled Manuel Complet de ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 462 - Volume 18, New Series, November 6, 1852 • Various

... man, beating him with the butt of his revolver. Friends of the foreman claim that the ranger is a drunken bully, and should have been discharged long ago. The Supervisor for some mysterious reason retains this man, although he is an incompetent. It is also claimed that McFarlane put a man on the roll without examination." The Supervisor was the protagonist of the play, which was plainly political. The attack upon him was bitter and unjust, ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland

... remarkable insight into men, promptly estimating character with an accuracy that makes it a difficult matter to deceive him, or to win his favor either for visionary schemes, corrupt attacks upon the treasury, or incompetent place-hunters. He has shown that he has been guided by a wise experience of the past, and a sagacious foresight of the future, exhibiting sacrifices of individual friendship to a ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 5, May, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various

... that the sabotage of business enterprise can be put aside by sufficiently heroic measures. And they are also showing that they are all aware, and have always been aware, that the conduct of industry on business principles is incompetent to bring the largest practicable output of goods and services; incompetent to such a degree, indeed, as not to be tolerable in a season of desperate need, when the nation requires the full use of its ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen

... some weeks, but her mother, fussily incompetent at most times, was always at her best when sickness came, and she had nursed her daughter devotedly ...
— The Bittermeads Mystery • E. R. Punshon

... little cottage in such disorder," said Mr. Maddison. "The contractor for the conservatory undertook to erect it in a week, and my only satisfaction is that he is now paying me a forfeit of 500 dollars a day. As for the electricians in this country, sir, they are not incompetent men, but they must be taught to hustle if they are to work under American orders; and I don't quite see how they are to find a ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston

... make a true poem out of something which to us was merely alluring or dull or revolting? The question whether, having done so, he ought to publish his poem; whether the thing in the poet's work will not be still confused by the incompetent Puritan or the incompetent sensualist with the thing in his mind, does not touch this point; it is a further question, one of ethics, not of art. No doubt the upholders of 'Art for art's sake' will generally be in favour of the courageous course, of refusing to sacrifice ...
— Poetry for Poetry's Sake - An Inaugural Lecture Delivered on June 5, 1901 • A. C. Bradley

... condemns Jerome Morel to pay to Pierre Petit-Jean, merchant,[Footnote: The crafty notary incompetent to proceed in his own name, had got from the unfortunate Morel a blank acceptance, and had introduced a third party's name.] by all his goods, and even with his body, the sum of thirteen hundred francs, with lawful interest, ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue

... among the doctors shall keep the commanding officers in the dark as to the needs—of their men, and that no self-will or ignorance in commanding officers shall neutralize the counsels of the medical men. The military authorities must not depend on the report of any doctor who may be incompetent as to the provision made for the men's health, and the doctor must be authorized to represent the dangers of a bad encampment without being liable to a recommendation to keep his opinion to himself till ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various

... Presidents' messages, and Congress for the last dozen years, lest we endanger the safety of the Union. The true danger to popular forms of government begins when public opinion ceases because the people are incompetent or unwilling to think. In a democracy it is the duty of every citizen to think; but unless the thinking result in a definite opinion, and the opinion lead to considerate action, they are nothing. If the people are assumed to be incapable of forming ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell

... same. He has merely exchanged several excellent tones below for some very poor ones above. I repeat, one who aspires to be a lyric artist requires the best possible teacher to guide his first steps; he may consult an inferior or incompetent professor, when so firmly established in the right path that he cannot ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam

... and wept, her head on my chest. I patted her head, feeling entirely incompetent to console her for what ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell

... form, color, and sound. Soyaux says of African industry, "Whoever denies to them independent invention and individual taste in their work either shuts his eyes intentionally before perfectly evident facts, or lack of knowledge renders him an incompetent judge."[62] M. Rutot had lately told us how the Negro race brought art and sculpture to pre-historic Europe. The bones of the European Negroids are almost without exception found in company with drawings and sculpture in high and low ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois

... acquaintances say that in their country it was not always qualifications that get a candidate into office. Some of the ways were devious and not suitable for publicity. Offices were frequently filled by incompetent men. There had been congressmen and other offices of higher and more responsible duties, filled by persons who could not correctly frame a sentence in their native language, who could not spell the simplest words as they were spelled in the dictionary, ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley

... Italian saying which identifies the translator with the traitor ought to give way to a more grateful and hopeful modern recognition of the services done by conscientious translations. We have undoubtedly suffered in England in the past by well-meaning but incompetent translators, especially of spiritual books, who have given us such impressions as to mislead us about the minds of the writers or even turned us against them altogether, to our own great loss. But at present more care is exercised, and conscientious critical exactitude in translating ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart

... municipal government being, in its personnel, at the moment, incompetent to preserve the fundamental principles on which it was established, permitted a strike of railroad employees to grow without restriction as to the observance of law and order until it became an insurrection. Four ...
— A Short History of Pittsburgh • Samuel Harden Church

... choose to do it. I refuse to force your confessedly inexperienced and incompetent services upon my men. What ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart

... known wagon-masters who really did not know how to straighten out a six-mule team, or, indeed, put the harness on them properly. And yet the wagon-master has almost complete power over the train. It will be readily seen from this, how much valuable property may be destroyed by placing incompetent men in such places. Wagon-masters, it seems to me, should not be allowed, under any circumstances, to have or take charge of a train of animals of any kind until they are thoroughly competent to handle, harness, ...
— The Mule - A Treatise On The Breeding, Training, - And Uses To Which He May Be Put • Harvey Riley

... faculties; and that termination is not an end of extension; for we know that solid matter, viewed in other ways than as obstructing movement, has the same property of the extended belonging to the empty void. The inference is, that the limitation of our means of knowledge renders altogether incompetent the imagination of an end to either Time or Space. The greatest efforts of our combining faculty cannot exceed the elements presented to it, and these elements contain nothing that would set forth the situation of space ending, and obstruction ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain

... mental disorder most of us have. We believe everybody above us is incompetent, and everybody below us is after our jobs. You'll get it in time—even some of the ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach

... not always. There were no provision shops on Lochaweside; Inverary was at some distance in one direction and Oban in the other, and as I had never given a thought to feeding before, I was an utterly incompetent provider. The consequence was that we fasted like monks, except that our abstinence was not on any regular principle; in fact, sometimes we had so little to eat for days together that we began to feel quite weak. This gave us no anxiety, and ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al

... Government, must show, in addition to sound principles, that it possessed sufficient practical statesmanship to solve wisely any question relative to the development of the material resources of the country, or it would prove itself incompetent to the trust ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine

... negotiator plenipotentiary with the Ottoman Porte, on behalf of the Republic of Florence; and the Turkish reis-effendi, or minister of foreign affairs, soon perceived that the Christian embassador was quite incompetent to enter into the intricacies of treaties and the complex machinery of diplomacy. But suddenly the official notes which the envoy addressed to the reis-effendi began to exhibit a sagacity and an evidence of far-sighted policy which contrasted strongly with the imbecility which had previously characterized ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds

... in which all the articles are negative. I? we turn from politics to what should be humaner literature, and look at the self-constituted censors of whatever has passed the press, there also we shall find that they who are the most incompetent assume the most authority, and that the public favour such pretensions; for in quackery of every kind, whether medical, political, critical, or hypocritical, quo quis impudentior eo ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey

... emotions so rigidly reject critical restraints, and disdain to be bound by rule, as those excited by the fine arts. A man unimpressible and incapable of moods and tenses, is for that reason an incompetent critic; and the sensitive, excitable man, how can he know that he does not impose his peculiar mood as a ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... its expression may wound the feelings of public men, whose official acts have subjected them to public censure. If it were, history and biography would cease to be guiding stars, and, above all, would offer no wholesome restraint to the cruel, or corrupt, or incompetent exercise of authority."—Tupper's Life and Correspondence of ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent

... proves, then it is still only one and the same reason which, whether in a theoretical or a practical point of view, judges according to a priori principles; and then it is clear that although it is in the first point of view incompetent to establish certain propositions positively, which, however, do not contradict it, then, as soon as these propositions are inseparably attached to the practical interest of pure reason, it must accept them, though it be as something offered to it from a foreign source, something that has not grown ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant

... Let not incompetent elocutionists or the barbarisms of custom give you tones or enunciations at war with those that God implanted. Study the vocal instrument and then play the best tune on it possible, but do not try to make a flute ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage

... landed. Many cheered, no doubt, to think of the strong hearts and invincible courage that dwelt in the breasts of Britain's sons; while others,—tracing things at once to their true source,—cheered in broken tones, or were incompetent to cheer at all, when they thought with thankfulness of Britain's faith in the Word of God, which, directly or indirectly, had given that courage its inspiration, and filled those ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne

... walked straight at it, not minding what or whom he trod upon on the way. His purpose was the mass-production of crises, and he created crises as rabbits create their young, nine at a time. In those fuddled incompetent days before the Great War the crisis was a little-known phenomenon. Here and there in the drab routine of peaceful corpulent years there flashed in the prosperous firmament the baleful light of a great anxiety. Agadir was one; CARSON and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 19, 1920 • Various

... by favour, by that sort of favour which is as likely to come to you as to another. Such places are not given to incompetent young men because their fathers and mothers ask for them. But won't you ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope

... weak, and he was qualified neither for the ordinary administration, of public business nor for the higher sphere of statesmanship, and was entirely destitute of that experience which sometimes fills the place of natural aptitude. His short administration was one of the most disgraceful and incompetent in English history, originating in an accident, supported only by the will of the sovereign, by gross corruption and intimidation, the precursor of the disintegration of political life and of a whole series of national disasters. Yet Bute had good principles and intentions, was inspired by feelings ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... Campbell (Lives of the Chancellors, v. 449) points out that this conversation followed close on the appointment of 'the incompetent Bathurst' as Chancellor. 'Such a conversation,' he adds, 'would not have occurred during the chancellorship of ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill

... April, the very day on which the writs were returnable, Gaspe only excepted. He opened the House with a speech remarkable for nothing but its brevity. Mr. Papineau was re-elected Speaker and the choice approved of. But this was no sooner done than the Assembly found themselves incompetent for the transaction of business. The House must, by law, consist of fifty members, and only forty-nine had been returned. The Gaspe writ was not returnable until the 1st of June. There was no House. Business could not legally be carried on. A ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger

... difficulty in rigging up from the old clothes of London, and it will go hardly with us, and we shall have worse luck than the ordinary market gardener, if we do not succeed in making sufficient profit to pay all the expenses of the concern, and leave something over for the maintenance of the hopelessly incompetent, and those who, to put it roughly, are not ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth

... only narrowed his lids when the Colonel pensioned Mr. Hood. But the Colonel had a will before which, when roused, even Mr. Hopper trembled. So that Eliphalet was always polite to Ephum, and careful never to say anything in the darkey's presence against incompetent clerks or favorite customers, who, by the charity of the Colonel, remained on ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... schools, though properly excluding sectarian influence, are yet indirectly and not improperly affected by the religious character of the community. Not only does the man who undertakes to write history, while ignoring the religious element, give us an incompetent and false representation, but no one can become a respectable student of history who does not carefully consider the religious development of society as proceeding under the guidance of the several ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various

... order to get rid of so incompetent an officer, and at the same time punish the insubordination of the men, it was resolved to disband the company. Thus was afforded to Frank the opportunity, which seemed to him almost providential, of joining Captain Edney's ...
— The Drummer Boy • John Trowbridge

... in the past. We are not a people which has accomplished much, but one on the way to accomplishment. The achievements of which we can boast are relatively like those of a child of five who boasts that he can count. Our whole world-condition shows us to be racially incompetent, and able to produce no more than incompetent leaders. That is our present high-water mark, and with our high-water mark we ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King

... Brunswick, well known for his failure at Valmy in 1792 and his recent support to the policy of complaisance to France. His appointment aroused anger and consternation; and General Kalckreuth expressed to Gentz the general opinion when he said that the Duke was quite incompetent for such a command: "His character is not strong enough, his mediocrity, irresolution, and untrustworthiness would ruin the best undertaking." The Duke himself was aware of his incompetence. Why then, we ask, did he accept the command? The answer is startling; but it rests ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose

... for taking my troublesomeness in good part. My friend will be greatly consoled to know that you have the poor man "in your eye." Schoolmaster, naturalist, and coal merchant used to be the three refuges for the incompetent. Schoolmaster is rapidly being eliminated, so I suppose the pressure on Natural History ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley

... voice whatever in the discussion which followed, for they were regarded as incompetent judges, under the circumstances. It was finally decreed by the council that the man's life should be spared, but that he must be exposed to the indignity of a public whipping, and resign all his earthly possessions to the parents of his victim. This sentence was ...
— Indian Boyhood • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman

... We wish only to "get the best." The needy people for whom we labor have suffered such privations, and such absolute destitution of all adequate religious instruction, that we feel they are now entitled to as good as can be given them. We send no teachers to the field that are incompetent and without adequate experience. We do not believe that everybody is qualified to teach the Negroes, at least it is not fair to them, that we should employ those who cannot find occupation anywhere else. Good health, ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 3, March, 1889 • Various

... city has been drained of its wealth and its embellishments. Scarce anything is left but the walls and buildings, which are uninjured, the lives and the industry of the inhabitants. Sandarion is made Governor of the city and province, with, as it seems to me, a very incompetent force to support his authority. Yet the citizens are, as they have been since the day the contest was decided, perfectly peaceable—nay, I rather should say, stupid and lethargic. There appear to be on the part of Aurelian no ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware

... were combined to ruin him,—the most powerful coalition of the European powers seen since the Thirty Years' War. His only ally was England,—an ally not so much to succor him as to humble France, and hence her aid was timid and incompetent. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord

... the character of the princess, and the assertion seems to have been a malicious scandal. George liked him, and when he was provided with a household of his own in 1756, he persuaded the king to put the earl at the head of it as his groom of the stole. Though utterly incompetent for the task, Bute instructed the prince in the duties of kingship; he encouraged him in the idea that a king should exercise a direct control over public affairs, and is said to have borrowed for him a portion of Blackstone's ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt

... up the country house and, with her daughter, settled in one of the suburbs of Montpellier. In the January of 1876 a theft occurred in her household which obliged Madame Boyer to communicate with the police. Spendthrift and incompetent in the management of her affairs, she was hoarding and suspicious about money itself. Cash and bonds she would hide away in unexpected places, such as books, dresses, even a soup tureen. One of her most ingenious hiding places was a portrait of her late ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving

... which might have saved Ireland never came into being. The Volunteers were in weak and incompetent hands. The metamorphosis they had undergone from a body formed for home defence into a militant political organization found them at the critical moment unprovided with the right stamp of leader. Flood, who helped ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers

... part of it. But my beastly owners and their beastly lawyers won't relinquish a scrap of what they call their freedom of action. And my labour men, because I'm a fairly big coal owner myself, sit and watch and suspect me, too stupid to grasp what I am driving at and too incompetent to get out a scheme of their own. They want a world control on scientific lines even less than the owners. They try to think that fuel production can carry an unlimited wages bill and the owners try to think that it can pay unlimited ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells

... photography; but, from my acquaintance with the modern achromatic microscope, I venture to say that photography applied to this instrument will be of no farther use than as an assistant to the draughtsman. A reference to the plates alluded to will show how incompetent it is to produce pictures of microscopic objects: any one who has seen these objects under a good instrument will acknowledge that these specimens give but a very faint idea of what the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 188, June 4, 1853 • Various

... Khoja was shaved by a most incompetent barber. At every stroke the man cut his head with the razor, and kept sticking on bits of cotton to stop ...
— Miscellanea • Juliana Horatia Ewing

... She was libelled in San Francisco, had her cheques protested as fraudulent in Hawaii, and was fined for breach of quarantine in the Solomons. To save themselves, the newspapers could not tell the truth about her. When I discharged an incompetent captain, they said I had beaten him to a pulp. When one young man returned home to continue at college, it was reported that I was a regular Wolf Larsen, and that my whole crew had deserted because I had beaten it to a pulp. In fact the only blow struck on the Snark was when the cook was manhandled ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London

... relations arose between them. A fight for place began, a struggle for dominion, a fierce and incessant contest for supremacy, and for ages men locked arms in a terrible and merciless strife, in which the weak and incompetent steadily went to the wall, the strong, daring, and aggressive rose ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris

... believed, to do justice, and partly to punish the Southerners, the Northern Republicans gave the Southern negroes equal political rights with the whites. They even handed over the government of some of the States to wholly incompetent blacks. In self-defense the whites terrorized the blacks through such secret organizations as the Ku-Klux Klan, and recovered their ascendancy in governing. Later, by such specious devices as the Grandfathers' Law, they prevented most of the blacks from ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer

... be necessary for the long extract which we are about to give, to any person who will read it with attention. It is from a lecture on Agricultural Science, by Dr. Madden, and we confess ourselves incompetent to condense or improve the language ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French

... continues, that it is not within the province of the Chamber of Mines to provide work for incompetent workmen. It was, no doubt, from among these men that Mr. Krueger had raised the signatures of the counter-petition which so "emphatically" declared the administration of the South African Republic "to be all that ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot

... suddenly, utterly ashamed, although I was quite alone, of the nonsense I was uttering.' 'It is not a speech that I want,' said my friend, 'I can talk for three hours without hesitating, but I want an address to circulate through the county, and I find myself utterly incompetent to put one together; do oblige me by writing one for me, I know you can; and, if at any time you want a person to speak for you, you may command me not for three but for six hours. Good morning; to-morrow I will breakfast with you.' In the ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow

... that all the parties summoned in any cases tried here belonged to the Thing-district; but in this case the deed and the parties belonged to Halogaland. The Thing accordingly ended in doing nothing, as King Eystein had thus made it incompetent. The kings parted in great wrath; and King Eystein went north to Throndhjem. King Sigurd, on the other hand, summoned to him all lendermen, and also the house-servants of the lendermen, and named out of every district a number of the bondes ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson

... virtue. The Master said, 'Let him preside over them with gravity;— then they will reverence him. Let him be filial and kind to all;— then they will be faithful to him. Let him advance the good and teach the incompetent;— then they will eagerly seek to be virtuous.' CHAP. XXI. 1. Some one addressed Confucius, saying, 'Sir, why are you ...
— The Chinese Classics—Volume 1: Confucian Analects • James Legge

... should like to know why I, as one of a small party, am to be set down as teaching some new doctrine which it is not fit for my countrymen to hear, and why I am to be assailed in every form of language, as if there was one great department of governmental affairs in which I was incompetent to offer any opinion to my countrymen. But leaving the opinions of individuals, I appeal to this audience, to every man who knows anything of the views and policy of the Liberal party in past years, whether it is not the fact that up to 1832 and ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones

... shaken beauty from that first unlovely "by- the-day"? Seamstress after seamstress had come and gone in that impossibly selfish household, the meek ones enduring it until they could endure no more, the proud ones hurrying angrily away; competent or incompetent, not one of them had ever been able to please her exacting employer, yet Felicia, mercifully unaware of the heart aches she would endure within, walked staunchly through the iron gates, with "440 Linton Avenue" boldly wrought in filagree upon their ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke

... to them—or to the professor if he asked my opinion on that sort of thing and it had to come out—that I was too lazy and too incompetent to manage my own little fortune. So I went down first thing Monday morning and revoked my power of attorney. I simply couldn't wait. When the estate is settled and turned over to me I shall attend to everything and not ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton

... antiquity of roads, and the wide arc of generations comprised in the subject, have deterred competent persons from attempting it; yet therefore is it only the more strange that incompetent persons have not essayed "this great argument," since they generally rush in, where their betters fear to tread. A history of roads is, in great measure indeed, a history of civilization itself. For ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne

... lounge in front of the Luxembourg? That will make a contrast that can't help affect the populace. You, the conqueror, ill-clad, unshaven, and with a hat full of bullet-holes, walking outside the palace, with the incompetent Directors lodged comfortably inside, will make a scene that is bound to give the people ...
— Mr. Bonaparte of Corsica • John Kendrick Bangs

... but who, by the cabals of his enemies, had been forced to resign the great operations of statesmanship which he had been directing, and who now stood, with a quite resigned air, pointing out to the populace the futile and disastrous efforts of the incompetent one who was endeavoring to fill his place. The Clerk of Shipwrecks had never fallen from such a position, having never occupied one, but he had acquired the demeanor referred to without going ...
— A Chosen Few - Short Stories • Frank R. Stockton

... According to the established rules of war, those three commanders ought to have been tried by court- martial, and, if found guilty, shot or cashiered, for sacrificing their own men and endangering the army. One example of such punishment would do much to deter ignorant and incompetent men from seeking high commands in the field. But the discipline of the volunteer army of a republic must, it appears, inevitably be, especially in respect to officers of high rank, quite imperfect, although it may become ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield

... representatives. We have suffered in times past from sad mismanagement abroad, and intelligent Americans have too often been compelled to hang their heads with shame to see the flag of their country floating over the consular offices of worthless, incompetent agents. There can be no question that so far as they are entrusted to Senator Sumner's hands, the interest, honor, and dignity of ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... this fiction to point out how absurd it is to represent the brave men who man our lifeboats of the Goodwin Sands and Downs as ever needing to be roused to action by passing and incompetent strangers, who must be as ignorant of the perils to be faced as of the work to be done. When the boatmen of Deal hang back in the storm-blast, ...
— Heroes of the Goodwin Sands • Thomas Stanley Treanor

... you that he is full of admiration of the Serbian army, and the Serbs will speak in a similar strain of the Bulgars. Also the Serbs will tell you that, no matter what else they may be able to do, they are, as compared with the Bulgars, quite incompetent in the diffusion of propaganda; while the Bulgars will explain to you that in propaganda the Serbs are immensely their superiors. (Balkan propaganda does not confine itself to using, with violence, the sword and the ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein

... I am equally incompetent to pass sentence on the state of learning, and the fine arts, in Vienna. I found, indeed, that it was fashionable to pay court to men of acknowledged talent and genius, and that to music and dancing the Viennese are ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig

... to impel him, by suggestion, to suicide or to revert to the headache powders, which would have meant the asylum again. Anything to put him out of the way, or to make his testimony incompetent for the will contest. So, when the ex-lunatic returned from Europe a year ago, our friend Honeywell here, in some way located him at the Caronia. He matured his little scheme. Through a letter broker who deals with the rag and refuse collectors, he ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... war had offered me,' he says, 'th' command of a rig'mint,' he says, 'but I cud not consint to remain in Tampa while perhaps less audacious heroes was at th' front,' he says. 'Besides,' he says, 'I felt I was incompetent f'r to command a rig'mint raised be another,' he says. 'I detarmined to raise wan iv me own,' he says. 'I selected fr'm me acquaintances in th' West,' he says, 'men that had thravelled with me acrost th' desert an' th' storm-wreathed ...
— Mr. Dooley's Philosophy • Finley Peter Dunne

... honourable and gallant man, who had served with much distinction upon the Continent, landed in Donegal, accompanied by about a hundred French-Irish officers. He instantly took the command of the disorganized and fast-dissolving northern levies; superseded the incompetent Sir Phelim, who from that moment fell away into contempt and impotence; suppressed all disorders, and punished, as far as possible, those who had been foremost in the work of blood, expressing at the same time his utter detestation ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless

... one of a class, not very small in numbers, who, from cultivating within their bosom a certain tendency towards suspicion, have come to think that all Government servants are idle, dilatory, supercilious and incompetent. That some of these faults may have existed among those who took wages from the Crown in the time of George III. is perhaps true. And the memory of those times has kept alive the accusation. The vitality of these prejudices calls to mind ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope

... stress of pain, even to the point of complete exhaustion and sudden death, should win for these willing servants a deeper consideration of their welfare. Too frequently are their manifestations of discomfort allowed to pass unheeded by careless, incompetent drivers lacking in a sense of compassion. Symptoms of malaise should never be ignored in any case; the humane and economic features should be realized ...
— Lameness of the Horse - Veterinary Practitioners' Series, No. 1 • John Victor Lacroix

... times on the ranch, just then, and Sam was too busy to go to town often. As an incompetent and generally worthless guest, it devolved upon me to ride in for little things such as post cards, barrels of flour, ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry

... If it be nevertheless pretended that my information and knowledge of mankind, however extensive, and however painfully acquired, by constant domestic enquiry, and by foreign travel, is, natheless, incompetent to the task of recording the pleasant narratives of my Landlord, I will let these critics know, to their own eternal shame and confusion, as well as to the abashment and discomfiture of all who shall rashly take up a song against me, that I am ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... virtue is destroyed by "too much" and "too little," so does a person become incompetent by "more" and "less." For this reason some, like religious and clerics, are debarred from pleading in causes, because they are above such an office; and others because they are less than competent to exercise it, such as ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas

... there are 6,000,000 tons of "ore blocked out"; that two assays by the assayers of the Bank of England average 9% copper; that the copper can be produced at five cents per pound; that there is thus a profit of $10,000,000 in sight. The evidences are wholly incompetent. It is a gamble on statements of persons who have not the remotest ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover

... the representation of miracles, therefore, which Divines themselves give, they are utterly incompetent to perform their contemplated functions. If they are super-human, they are not super-Satanic, and there is no sense in which they can be considered miraculously evidential of anything." (Vol. i. ...
— The Lost Gospel and Its Contents - Or, The Author of "Supernatural Religion" Refuted by Himself • Michael F. Sadler

... Baboo JALPANYBHOY and Baboo CHUCKERBUTTY RAM attended for the purpose of arranging their evidence, when I regret to say the former made a rather paltry exhibition of himself, being declared by Mr SMARTLE himself to be totally incompetent to prove anything whatever material to the case, and I am therefore resolved to refuse him admission to ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey

... as he could never have done. From Aden to Cochin blood flowed beneath his blows, but peace followed; and though he was termed "the Portuguese Mars," his justice became traditional, and his sagacity was shown in the permanence of the settlements he made, even under the incompetent viceroys who ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various

... up, and if you ask me what I think, I should say it is most probable that we shall be made into a Ministry. How very strange and incomprehensible it seems; and much as I have had to do with public affairs, I feel now as if I knew nothing about them, and was quite incompetent to so great an office—to rule over such vast concerns, with such parties. With so many great things and so many little things to ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell









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