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More "Precedent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... religion with the celestials, to subvert which requires great caution, persistency and strength. If anything can be justified by old custom, or even precedent, it is considered to be unassailable, no matter how harmful ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... image of a saint expired that ever painter drew; and it would be the greatest obligation which even that obliging art could ever bestow on a friend, if you could come and sketch it for me. I am sure, if there be no very precedent obstacle, you will leave any common business to do this; and I hope to see you this evening, or to-morrow morning as early, before this winter flower is faded. I will defer her interment till to-morrow ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... English people do, that you cannot travel in Germany without having your luggage weighed and receiving the Schein for it. If you lose the Schein you are undone. I cannot tell you exactly what would happen, because it would be a tragedy without precedent, but it is impossible that German officials would surrender a trunk without receiving a Schein in exchange; at least, not without months of rigmarole and delay. Even when it is the official who blunders the public suffers for it. We were travelling some years ago from ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... larger part of the problem as a whole. Or, more correctly, by thus generalizing, in a merely verbal form, all the unknown causes which are concerned in these two great factors of the process in question, we are not so much as attempting to explain the precedent causation which serves as a condition to the process. Much more than half the battle would already have been won, had Darwin's predecessors been able to explain the causes of Heredity and Variation; hence it is but a very partial victory which we have hitherto gained in our recent discovery of the ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... some prisoners, in which it was stated that this attack was the supreme offensive to secure peace. Skilfully used, all this was to demonstrate that Germany was letting loose a gigantic effort, an effort without precedent, and that from its success she hoped for the end of the war. The logic of this was that nobody need be surprised at our withdrawal. When, a half hour later, I went down with my manuscript, I found gathered together in Colonel Claudel's ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... account was a Theocracy—that is, "the government of God." He was the only King. He revealed the law, appointed leaders, gave rules for worship, instruction and warfare. Thus in the outset did he set up his claims among men. He established the great precedent, which men ought to have followed, which the world has ignored; but to which the thoughts and the will of the race shall ultimately return. It is true now that government, as such, is ordained of God. All government, in its ...
— Government and Rebellion • E. E. Adams
... letter k. The Maya sign for k is . This does not look much like our letter K; but let us examine it. Following the precedent established for us by the Mayas in the case of the letter m, let us see what is the distinguishing feature here; it is clearly the figure of a serpent standing erect, with its tail doubled around ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... sold and published in a very unfinished state (which I have since regretted), to enable me to extricate myself from some engagements which fell suddenly upon me by the unexpected misfortunes of a very near relation. So that, to quote statute and precedent, I really come under the case cited by Juvenal, though not quite in the extremity of ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... Federalist party in this country naturally sympathized with England, and the Jeffersonian Democracy with France. The Federalists, who distrusted the sweeping abstractions of the French Revolution, and clung to the conservative notions of a checked and balanced freedom, inherited from English precedent, were accused of monarchical and aristocratic leanings. On their side they were not slow to accuse their adversaries of French atheism and French Jacobinism. By a singular reversal of the natural order of things the strength of the Federalist ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... his defence at the bar of the House of Commons, (Feb. 4th, 1788) Sir Elijah Impey attempted to justify his conduct by precedent, but the single precedent on which he relied does not prove much in his favour. A Hindoo, named Radachund Metre, was condemned to death for forgery in 1765, but was pardoned on this very ground, that capital punishment ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... to volunteer and offered himself in large numbers at every recruiting station, without avail. True, he was accepted in numerous instances, but the condition precedent, that of filling up and rounding out the few Negro Regular and National Guard organizations below war strength, was chafing and humiliating. Had the response to the call for volunteers been as ardent among all classes ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... his claim for damages, and it will have attention. The contingent fee will yet be a misdemeanor. Also, it will be possible for plain citizens to be able to go before a Court of Equity and be heard without regard to law and precedent and attorney's quillets and quibbles, which so often hamper justice. Justice should be cheap and easy, instead of costly ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... before, the pole-star toward which this earnest and clever woman aimed. With such a mind as hers the topic under consideration becomes for the time supreme. Solemnly insisting on a renunciation of all possibility of merit as a condition precedent to faith, she proceeded to exalt belief itself into the most meritorious of acts. This sort of paradox is common to ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... explain," said the elder sister. "The ancient custom and precedent of our family have always transmitted the estates to the male heir. But when Charles II. granted the patent of nobility to the first Baron Delavie, the barony was limited to the heirs male of his body, and out grandfather was only his brother. ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... exploration, experiment, consideration of possibilities. Putting too high a value on originality other than this is to restrict natural growth from vital roots, in which true originality consists. To take design in architecture as an example, we have rested too much on definite precedent (a different thing from living tradition) and, on the other hand, hoped too much from newness. Exploration of the possibilities in arches, vaults, domes and the like, as a chemist or a mathematician explores, is little accepted as a method in architecture at this time, although in antiquity ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... of the Ladies' Aid, called for the purpose, it was decided to give the bride a present. They had not intended to do it for fear of establishing a precedent. But when it came out who Dr. Callandar was, it hardly seemed right to let one of their best known members go from them to a more exalted sphere in a city (which many of them might, from time to time, ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... nuns in a scene of a foreign cathedral. It was too profane. What about the singing of "God save the King" upon the stage? That had been sanctioned by custom, Colman maintained; but he could not regard it as a precedent. Was he prepared to mutilate Portia's great speech in the "Merchant of Venice?" Certainly he was; but then custom had sanctioned it, and playgoers were not prepared for any meddling with the text of Shakespeare. He admitted, however, that he did not trouble ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... fullest power of the Executive, subject only to law and existing orders. The more simple the principle, the greater the likelihood of determined action; and the less a commanding officer is circumscribed by bounds or by precedent, the greater is the probability that he will make the best use of his command and achieve the ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... Jerusalem. But in the case before us, some Cypriote and African Jews—men of no note in the Church, whose very names have perished, with no official among them, with no vision nor command to impel them, with no precedent to encourage them, with nothing but the truth in their minds and the impulses of Christ's love in their hearts—solve the problem of the extension of Christ's message to the heathen, and, quite unconscious of the greatness of their act, do the thing about ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... time a hard one. He was often stinted in rations, and of necessity deprived of all rational recreation, while punishment for offences was prompt and severe. The companies drafted to the penal settlements were not composed of the best material, and the pair had good precedent for the course they were ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... supremacy of justice, in its methods of procedure, in the grounds and reasons of its conclusion. That his authority was greatly influential in fixing the true constitutional relations of the Chief-Justice to the Senate, and establishing a precedent of procedure not easily to be subverted; that it was felt, throughout the trial, with persuasive force, in the maintenance of the judicial nature of the transaction; and that it never went a step beyond the office which belonged to him—of presiding over the Senate trying an impeachment—is ...
— Eulogy on Chief-Justice Chase - Delivered by William M. Evarts before the Alumni of - Dartmouth College, at Hanover • William M. Evarts
... the most. The inspection occupied at least an hour and a half; and when it was over, we had a long chat on deck on various subjects. The Prince of Wales's visit to India, and the Duke of Edinburgh's voyage round the world, were much discussed, I think the King would like to use them as a precedent, and see a little more of the world himself. His voyage to, and stay in ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... was nevertheless very great when she told me that you had offered her your hand, and that she, young and inexperienced as she is, had, without consulting me, ventured to accept you. Such a thing, my dear sir, is against all precedent. The whole of society would be subverted, and all parental authority destroyed, were I as a father to allow what you do me the honour of proposing to take place. I am, I repeat, deeply grateful to ...
— Charley Laurel - A Story of Adventure by Sea and Land • W. H. G. Kingston
... well-to-do, conventional English society. As Frederic Taber Cooper well says, "British stolidity, British conservatism, the unvarying fixity of the social system, the sacrifice of individual needs and cravings to caste and precedent and public opinion,—these are the themes which Mr. Galsworthy never wearies of satirizing with ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... suggested that the only method of withdrawing money from a banker is by cheque, that the presentation of a cheque is a condition precedent to the liability of the banker to repay. This is not so; such view being inconsistent with the cases establishing the effect of the Statute of Limitations on money left in a banker's hands, and with the numerous cases in which a balance at a bank has ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... pulpit constituted undue influence of the clearest kind. Accordingly they voided the election. Their action met with violent protests from some of the bishops, who, when Judge Casault in the Bonaventure case followed this precedent, sought, but in vain, to have him removed by the Sacred Congregation from his chair in the law faculty of Laval. But in spite of protests the lesson had been learned, and the sturdy fight of the Liberals of Quebec for the most elementary rights of a ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton
... though rarely among the Hebrews, we may study custom in the making, as when in a new situation a ruler renders a decision which henceforth becomes a law. Thus David, dividing the spoil after his victory over the Amalekites, established a precedent that henceforth had binding force upon his followers (I Sam. 30); but in the majority of such cases the ruler, even when be establishes new precedents, represents himself as simply ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... precedent for the matter on hand now. Cochrane happened to know the details about Columbus because he'd checked over the research when he did a show on the Dikkipatti Hour dealing with him. There were more precedents. The elaborate ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... Soviet, German, and US systems that combine "continental" or "civil" code and case-precedent; constitution ambiguous on judicial review of legislative acts; has ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... George Murray and the Duke of Perth had had separate commands, and had not interfered with each other until the siege of Carlisle. Here the Duke had acted as the chief in command; he had directed the attack, signed the capitulation, and given orders in the town until the Prince arrived. This was a precedent for the whole campaign, and it ill-suited the fiery temper of Lord George Murray to brook it tamely. There was, indeed, much to be said in favour of Lord George's alleged wrongs, in this preference of one so young and inexperienced as the Duke of ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... the Notes that afforded me the precedent Narrative, I confess I suspected this man might have thus discriminated Colours, rather by the Smell than by the Touch; for some of the Ingredients imployed by Dyers to Colour things, have Sents, ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... definite arrangements with him for compensation. But here was the drawback. Don Quixote could recall no incident in any of the many books he had read, when a knight errant had given his squire fixed wages. How could he possibly establish a precedent now? And so it became his sad and solemn duty to refuse his squire's miserly request, and inform him that his services were no longer wanted. Not only that, but our valiant hero was cruel enough to remark that there would be any number of ...
— The Story of Don Quixote • Arvid Paulson, Clayton Edwards, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... questionable policy. If followed up it will result in a saturnalia of crime in this community. Already several of our young men are reading dime novels and taking lessons in banditry; but the sheriff has stated that this parole will not be considered a precedent. The affair has resulted in some good, however. In addition to placing the young man under Christian influences, and others, it has unearthed a patch of the biggest, best, ripest and sweetest wild strawberries in Monterey County on the ancestral estate ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... still arising, and in the increase of our own knowledge and mechanical inventions. But it is only a very little new that is added at a time, and that little is generally due to the desire to attain an end which cannot be attained by any of the means for which there exists a perceived precedent in the memory. When this is the case, either the memory is further ransacked for any forgotten shreds of details, a combination of which may serve the desired purpose; or action is taken in the dark, ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... reasons, and in accordance with the precedent of the edition of 1832, a third poem, Stanzas to Augusta, has been included in ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... not lodged in the Castle itself, a house in the cloisters being thought more suitable, and here the Queen visited her child daily, for since that last alarm she could not bear to be long absent from him. Such emissaries as Colonel Sands did not again appear, but after that precedent Lady Strickland had become much more unwilling to allow any of those under her authority to go out into any public place, and the rockers seldom got any exercise except as swelling the Prince's train when he was carried out to take ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... civil and religious rights of a people trampled on! But his praaetorship in Sicily has crowned his career of wickedness, and completed the lasting monument of his infamy. His decisions have violated all law, all precedent, all right. His extortions from the industrious poor have been beyond computation. Our most faithful allies have been treated as enemies. Roman citizens have, like slaves, been put to death with tortures. Men the most worthy have been condemned ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... to pick onions. If she had done her duty by him then, he would not have been now in his present most unsatisfactory position, and she would still have had her nose. The fathers and mothers in the audience applauded, but the children, scenting addition to precedent, looked glum. ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... in our happy land, How with this woman will you make account, How answer her shrill question in that hour When whirlwinds of such women shake the polls, Heedless of every precedent and creed, Straight in hysteric haste to right all wrongs? How will it be with cant of politics, With king of trade and legislative boss, With cobwebs of hypocrisy and greed, When she shall take the ballot for her broom And sweep ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... been mounted with black soldiers. In two wars in North America Negro soldiers had followed the fortunes of military life, and won the applause of white patriots on two continents. So then all history furnished a precedent for the guidance of the United States Government in the ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... Reproach me, as Mr. Corneille did all the precedent Commentators. They have Explain'd Aristotle (says that great Man) as Grammarians, or Philosophers, and not as Poets; because they had more of the Study, and Speculation, than Experience of the Theatre. ...
— The Preface to Aristotle's Art of Poetry • Andre Dacier
... a cruiser's guns, the aviator closing in on an enemy's plane, have the delirium of purpose excited by speed. But the tanks are not rapid. They are ponderous and relatively slow. Columbus had already been to sea in ships. The aviator and the commander of a destroyer know their steeds and have precedent to go by, while the skippers of the tanks had none. They went forth with a new kind of ship on a new kind of sea, whose waves were shell-craters, whose tempests sudden concentrations ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... the sight of which we are mercifully protected by a painted vapour, by an illusion that unspeakable darkness which we all of us know to exist, but which we hypocritically deny, and determine never to confess to one another? Here again, however, Zachariah had his advantage over others. He had his precedent. He remembered that quagmire in the immortal Progress into which, if even a good man falls, he can find no bottom; he remembered that gloom so profound "that ofttimes, when he lifted up his foot to set forward, he knew not where or upon ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... expect the Lords to sign their own death warrant. It was settled between Lloyd George and Mr. Asquith to take the House of Lords by the throat. Lloyd George was prepared for extreme measures, and Mr. Asquith, a student of English history, found out a way by means of ancient precedent. Twice before in the story of the British Parliament there had been similar episodes. In the reign of Queen Anne and in the reign of William IV. the Prime Minister of the day, encountering opposition from the House of Lords, ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... of the thousand and one little matters that supplied their daily lives with interest, and nothing must have been further from their thoughts than what actually occurred. The bank that had sent them had departed from all precedent in parcelling out the gold amongst the messengers. It was certainly against the rather strict regulations of the bank, but the man who had instructed them had that contempt for rules and regulations which is the mark of a man destined to rise in ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... Longitude 51 W. and 51.10 W., so near as could be made out, the captain of the steamboat "Glory of the Morning Star" (chartered for this occasion only by the Government of the Republic, without any damage, precedent or future lien whatsoever), by name James Murphy, of Cork, Ireland, and domiciled within the aforesaid terms, boundaries, etc., did in a loud voice at about 4.33 a.m., when it was already light, cry out "That's Hur," or words to that effect. Your three Commissioners being at that moment ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... ship's protection—that "sweet little cherub" which, contrary to all Dibdinic precedent, lay down below—had spread its kindly aegis over him, and, generally speaking, saved him harmless from the warrant and the hanger. But now the run for which he has signed on is almost finished, and as the ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... money may be transmitted to Peters in Leipzig, to whom, however, you must on no account allude. Schlesinger scarcely expects to be still in Vienna on Sunday; haste is therefore necessary. The ducats must be in gold; mention, as a precedent, that others ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826 Vol. 2 • Lady Wallace
... of the author to take part in a movement without precedent in the history of the world, and the incidents concurrent with, together with those subsequent to that movement, have furnished the material for this book. It has been the object of the writer to weave into the story of his actual experiences an account of those ...
— An Epoch in History • P. H. Eley
... world is coming to. But, after all, it is only the chrysalis stage of a new system. The old social order must grow disjointed and chaotic before the new social order can begin to evolve from it. The establishment of a plastic consistency in the mass is the condition precedent of the higher development. ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... displayed any mark of distinction on his house, and never has a French minister yet decorated his hotel in such a manner as you now propose to do. That banner of yours would therefore be without any precedent in the history of ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... of a copyist he may be by nature, comes down to simple originality, unless he blindly follows the advice of some friend; for there is no precedent in anything exactly like his case; he must decide for himself, and must take the step alone; and fearfully, cautiously, and distrustingly must we all take many of our steps, for we see but a little way at best, and we can foresee nothing ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... somewhat in specialty assignments and a certain amount of separate quartering within integrated barracks prevailed at some duty stations, the Special Programs Unit came to consider the WAVE program, which established a forceful precedent for the integration of male recruit training, its most important wartime breakthrough, crediting Captain McAfee and her unbending insistence on equal treatment ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... amendment, in a way which the Constitution designates; but let there be no change by usurpation: for though this, in one instance, may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed. The precedent must always greatly overbalance in permanent evil any partial or transient benefit which the use can ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... of September we face once more the month of October, with its falling leaves and autumn gales," states a writer in a daily paper. This, we understand, is according to precedent. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 13, 1920 • Various
... command laid upon him,—"the certain capture of the city of New Orleans." The victory was accomplished with the loss of but one ship, and 184 men killed and wounded,—"a feat in naval warfare," says his son and biographer, "which has no precedent, and which is still without a parallel, except the one furnished by Farragut himself, ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... There is ample precedent, in this election year, for me to present you with a huge list of new proposals, knowing full well that there would not be any possibility of your passing them if you worked ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Richard Nixon • Richard Nixon
... I may plead precedent for taking a liberty with the orthography of Jem. An instructor of youth was scandalized at the abrupt and irregular—but very effective—opening ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... loiall subiects. [Sidenote: 1133. An. Reg. 34.] After this king Henrie kept his Christmasse at Dunstable, and his Easter at Woodstocke. In the same yeare, or (as some haue) in the beginning of the yeare precedent, or (as other haue) in the yeare following, king Henrie erected a bishops se at Carleil, [Sidenote: Matth. Paris. Prior of L. Oswald as Wil. Thorne. hath, and likewise Matth. Paris. and Matt. Westm.] in which one Arnulfe or rather Athelwoolfe, who before was abbat of S. Bothoulfs, and ...
— Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (2 of 6): England (3 of 12) - Henrie I. • Raphael Holinshed
... That no precedent shall be established to the prejudice of either the human or the monikin dialect, by the adoption of the Latin language on ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... or cut down living trees, a person should publish his sin and fast for three nights. By having intercourse with one with whom intercourse is prohibited, the expiation for one is wandering in wet clothes and sleeping on a bed of ashes. These, O king, are the expiations for sinful acts, according to precedent and reason and scriptures and the ordinances. A Brahmana may be cleansed of all sins by reciting the Gayatri in a sacred place, all the while living upon frugal fare, casting off malice, abandoning wrath and hate, unmoved by praise and blame, and abstaining ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... patrons, was more likely to excite the jealousy of the people than to reconcile them to a similar practice in their civil government. Roger de Thurkesby, one of the king's justices, was so displeased with the precedent, that he exclaimed, "Alas! what times are we fallen into? Behold, the civil court is corrupted in imitation of the ecclesiastical, and the river is ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... win fairy brides, by clinging to them through all transformations. A classical example is the seizure of Thetis by Peleus, and Child quotes a modern Cretan example. The dipping in milk and water, I may add, has precedent in ancient Egypt (in The Two Brothers), and in modern Senegambia. The fairy tax, tithe, or teind, paid to Hell, is illustrated by old trials for witchcraft, in Scotland. {1} Now, in literary forms and romance, as in Ogier le Danois, persons are carried away by the Fairy ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... to whom the little volumes will we doubt not, be as attractive as the larger originals have so long proved to the general public. We have brought down these famous stories from the library to the nursery—the parlor table to the child's hands—having a precedent for the proceeding, if one be needed, in the somewhat similar work, the Tales from Shakespeare, by one of the choicest of English authors and most reverential of scholars, ...
— From Canal Boy to President - Or The Boyhood and Manhood of James A. Garfield • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... absolute majority in the Junior class, only to have a snap meeting called on us over in Browning Hall, in which three middle-aged young ladies who had never danced a step were named. The roar we raised was terrific, but the president sweetly informed us that they had only followed precedent—we'd had to do the same thing the year before to keep out the Mu Kow Moos. We appealed to the Faculty, and it laughed at us. Unfortunately, we didn't stand any too well there anyway, while most of ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... not having subdued Argos, after an opportunity such as they thought they had never had before; for it was no easy matter to bring so many and so good allies together. But when the news arrived of the capture of Orchomenos, they became more angry than ever, and, departing from all precedent, in the heat of the moment had almost decided to raze his house, and to fine him ten thousand drachmae. Agis however entreated them to do none of these things, promising to atone for his fault by good service in the field, failing which they might then do to him whatever ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... Louis meeting was notable in violating association precedent by unanimously electing Carl W. Brand president for the third consecutive term. Other officers were: J.A. Folger, San Francisco, first vice-president, R.O. Miller, Chicago, second vice-president; Charles A. Clark, ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... three committee-men; the fundamental law of England knowing no such constitution, abhorring such administrations: and that the Hon. Court would release your petitioner from the injurious effects of the said committee's act, and explode so pernicious a precedent." ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... political method, in her maritime and commercial ascendancy. But she repeated no previous state at all in the lax disorder of her internal administration, a laxity that made vast sections of her area lawless beyond precedent, so that it was possible for whole districts to be impassable, while civil war raged between street and street, and for Alsatias to exist in her midst in which the official police never set foot. She was an ethnic whirlpool. The flags of all nations flew in her ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... emperor alone represented any synthesis of the various departments of the administration. The jurisdiction of the heads of departments, moreover, was strictly defined, and all that lay outside this was reserved for the imperial decision. Whatever was covered by established precedent could be settled by the department at once; but matters falling outside such precedent, however insignificant, had to be referred to the throne.[2] A system so inelastic, and so deadening to all initiative, could have but ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... and enim introduces an explanation of it. See Zumpt, S 349. [264] Caesar means to say that the present senate, which, as he flatteringly says, consists of worthy men, will not abuse the power of putting Roman citizens to death; but that a subsequent senate, taking such an example as a precedent, might abuse its power. It must be observed that the Roman senate possessed the power over the life and death of citizens, not by virtue of legal enactments, but only by ancient custom. This power legally belonged ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)
... Privy Council had summarily forbidden the use of Blackfriars as a "public" playhouse. Its proprietor, however, Richard Burbage, might take advantage of the precedent established in the days of Farrant, and let the building for use as a "private" theatre.[310] Exactly when he was first able to lease the building as a "private" house we do not know, for the history of the building between 1597 (when ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... thee free, swor'st thou not then To do this when I bade thee? Do it at once; Or thy precedent services are all But accidents unpurpos'd. Draw, ...
— Antony and Cleopatra • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... But, the tale runs, the Governor looked——He certainly did establish a precedent at that dinner. Mockers say that Judge Pat McCarran ran a close second, because his Excellency is lean and lank, while Judge McCarran would make two of him one way, and almost half of him the other, and because what happened ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... visited the river that the very tradition had been lost. The appearance of the being that descended upon them and demanded inflexibly to be taken up to Patusan was discomposing; his insistence was alarming; his generosity more than suspicious. It was an unheard-of request. There was no precedent. What would the Rajah say to this? What would he do to them? The best part of the night was spent in consultation; but the immediate risk from the anger of that strange man seemed so great that at last a cranky dug-out was got ready. The women shrieked with grief as it ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... said because the statements of the writer have already been questioned in one or two details. He says that the party experienced such cold weather as was almost without precedent in Arctic travel, the temperature falling to seventy-one degrees below zero. He says that the party killed more than five hundred reindeer, besides musk-oxen, bears, walrus, and seal, in regions where Rae and McClintock could scarcely ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... Your majesty, I am bidden to tell you that the Royal Archivist, whom you bade to search through the histories of your royal ancestors for some precedent to guide you in this matter, has locked himself with his forty assistants in the royal library, and cannot be ...
— King Arthur's Socks and Other Village Plays • Floyd Dell
... understood was not adapted to slave labor. It raised no such question, as would have been raised, if it had been applied to territory where slavery then largely existed, or which was adapted to negro slave labor. It is, therefore, no precedent for Congressional action in such a case. The precedent of one case is not a rule of decision for another, unless the two are substantially alike. This noble ordinance of 1787, then rather affirmed a principle of freedom, than imposed a necessary practical prohibition, for it may be well to ...
— The Relations of the Federal Government to Slavery - Delivered at Fort Wayne, Ind., October 30th 1860 • Joseph Ketchum Edgerton
... he replied:—"Why, it would not do to hang men limply for being guilty of a little piracy. Some of our leading chiefs might object to the precedent. But I will gladly aid you in looking for Signor Zappa; and if you catch him, of course you will be at liberty to treat him as you think fit. To be frank with you, I do not think you will find him unprepared in his strong-hold, ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... placing her two hands on the knobs of the chair in which she sat, leaned passionately forward. Who could say she was cold now? Who could see anything but a feeling heart in this woman, beautiful beyond all precedent in her passion and ...
— The Millionaire Baby • Anna Katharine Green
... no time "looked favorably" on the right up to ten o'clock. The condition, therefore, which was assumed as precedent to Burnside's movement, never existed; and this was better known to McClellan than to any one else, for he received the first discouraging reports after Mansfield fell, and the subsequent alarming ones when Sedgwick was routed. Burnside's report was dated on the 30th ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... insufficient data; but humour abhors logic, and cannot pin its faith on insecure deductions. The heaviest burden which religion can have to bear is the burden of tradition, and humour is the determined foe of everything that is conventional and traditional. The Pharisaical spirit loves precedent and authority; the humorous spirit loves all that is swift and shifting and subversive and fresh. One of the reasons why the orthodox heaven is so depressing a place is that there seems to be no room in it for laughter; it is all harmony and meekness, ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... communicated to the Press a scheme for solving the Irish problem. This is regarded by Irish politicians generally as a dangerous precedent. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • Various
... opposed to precedent," said Colonel Ducroix, looking wistfully at his principal. "There is, I think, one case on record (Captain Bellegarde and the Baron Zumpt) in which the weapons were changed in the middle of the encounter at the request of ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... the Faith?' (A.) 'Prayer, almsgiving, fasting, pilgrimage, fighting for the Faith and abstinence from what is forbidden.' (Q.) 'Why dost thou stand up to pray?' (A.) 'To express the devout intent of the slave submitting himself to [or acknowledging] the Divinity.' (Q.) 'What are the conditions precedent of standing up to pray?' (A.) 'Purification, covering the privy parts, the avoidance of soiled clothes, standing on a clean place, fronting [the Kaabeh,] a standing posture, the intent[FN212] and the magnification of prohibition.'[FN213] (Q.) 'With what shouldest thou go forth thy house to ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume IV • Anonymous
... below their summer homes, and to make it a private beach. But even the most acquisitive of the town councilmen (and there were several of the fraternity of the Itching Palm in the council) dared not establish such a precedent. The right of the public to the shore at tide-water could not safely be ignored in a community of fishermen ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... Lord Tho[mon]d(66) and Will: all [the] party is so broke up at present that they are au desespoir. The Bedfords are in extraordinary good humour; that elevation of spirit does them no more credit than their precedent abasement; the equus animus seems a stranger to them. G. Greenv.(67) is certainly [befouled] as a Minister, but he is so well manured in other respects that he cannot be an object ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... unusual old chap," said Shepler. "I had occasion not long since to tell him that a certain business plan he proposed was entirely without precedent. His answer was characteristic. He said, 'We make precedents in the West when we can't find one to suit us.' It seemed so typical of the people to me. You never can tell what they may do. You see they were started out ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... prophecy, spoken from the oldest reasoning in the world, that of established sequence and precedent, did not recur to Charlotte, but ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Canadian Dominion. Many earnest minds are approaching the study of the subject from various standpoints, each worthy of attentive consideration. One regards it from the dogmatic position of scriptural precedent, or from the larger one of Christian principle; the aesthetic mind comes to it with visions of order and beauty; the practical, with his view of the Church's needs in mission fields and in mixed congregations. There is room in the discussion for the largest statement of lawful opinion, ...
— Presbyterian Worship - Its Spirit, Method and History • Robert Johnston
... revenues. The reply of His Excellency to the request for more detailed accounts was a courteous one; but while he consented to furnish the accounts requested in detail, it was with the understanding that his compliance was not to be considered as a precedent. He declined, however, to give the names of the parties who had their timber seized or forfeited, or the names of the petitioners for Crown land. He also refused to furnish the accounts of the receiver-general and commissioner of ...
— Wilmot and Tilley • James Hannay
... said: "With the coming of the lawyer came a new power in the world. The steel-clad baron and his retainers were awed by terms they had never before heard and did not understand, such as precedent, principle, and the like. The great and real pacifier of the world was the lawyer. His parchment took the place of the battle-field. The flow of his ink checked the flow of blood. His quill usurped the place ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... love, you are not yet acquainted with the little god. If your lover consents to the sacrifice you have demanded, he will indicate a weakness of character which augurs ill for the future: and if you insist upon the sacrifice, you will establish a selfish precedent which can only make you a tyrant in your own domain, and at the same time belittle your ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... have a way of defying military precedent. The ragged armies of the French Revolution are not forgotten-Valmy and the Lines of Weissembourg. Massed against the Soviet forces were yunkers, Cossacks, land-owners, nobility, Black Hundreds-the Tsar come again, Okhrana and Siberian chains; and the vast and terrible ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... is no Salic law amongst Moslems; but the Rasm or custom of AlIslam, established by the succession of the four first Caliphs, to the prejudice of Ayishah and other masterful women would be a strong precedent against queenly rule. It is the reverse with the Hindus who accept a Rani as willingly as a Rajah and who believe with Europeans that when kings reign women rule, and vice versa. To the vulgar Moslem feminine ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... in this connection that the automobile was a new thing with absolutely no precedent. The makers groped in the dark, and every step cost something. New steels had to be welded; new machinery made; a whole new engineering system had to be created. The model of to-day was in the junk heap to-morrow. But just as curious instinct ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... said. "The precedent once established, all must perish by its edict—even those which may not be grotesque or bestial—even this perfect one," and he touched again the vat, "and thus you would rid yourself of rival suitors. But no!" he went on in a high, trembling voice. "I shall not be led ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the opinion of such statesmen as have advocated the doctrine of the Virginia Resolutions of State sovereignty; for they notoriously disregarded the paramount supremacy of the Constitution. The conscientious doubt of others as to making the exclusion of slavery a condition precedent to admission into the Union, proves not the incorrectness of this position, but strengthens it, by showing that only a controlling love of the Union caused the doubt, which originated in a policy that would not even seem to do injustice to ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... cautious warfare between the tribes, fighting with arrows from behind trees, the loss of fifteen or twenty warriors was deemed a great calamity. Now, to find hundreds of their braves weltering in blood, was awful beyond precedent, and gave them new ideas of the prowess of the white man. In this conflict the Indians manifested a very considerable degree of military ability. Having constructed a breastwork of logs, behind which they could retreat in case of a repulse, they formed in a long ...
— Daniel Boone - The Pioneer of Kentucky • John S. C. Abbott
... note ascendeth a little higher than the precedent. For as the proficience of learning consisteth much in the orders and institutions of universities in the same states and kingdoms, so it would be yet more advanced, if there were more intelligence mutual between ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... drawn," as it is called. The story went, as told, I think, by Browning, who would begin: "I grew tired of Forster's always wiping his shoes on me." He was fond of telling his friend about "dear, sweet, charming Lady ——," &c. Forster, following the exact precedent of Mrs. Prig in the quarrel with her friend, would break into a scornful laugh, and, though he did not say "drat Lady ——," he insisted she was a foolish, empty-headed creature, and that Browning praised her because she had a title. This was taken seriously, and the Poet requested that no disparaging ...
— John Forster • Percy Hethrington Fitzgerald
... having a husband and also a lover is not entirely without precedent," said Disraeli in mock apology, and took snuff solemnly. Meantime manuscripts were traveling back and forth between the East ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... husband," thought old Grammont, "when I am gone, as one takes a butler, to make the household complete." In previous meditations on his daughter's outlook old Grammont had found much that was very suggestive in the precedent of Queen Victoria. She had had no husband of the lord and master type, so to speak, but only a Prince Consort, well in hand. Why shouldn't the Grammont heiress dominate her male belonging, if it came to that, in the same fashion? Why shouldn't one tie her up and ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... Guiana. Most of the articles are in the nature of 'Articles of War' and 'Sailing Instructions' rather than 'Fighting Instructions,' but the whole are printed below for their general interest. A contemporary writer, quoted by Edwards in his Life of Ralegh, says of them: 'There is no precedent of so godly, severe, and martial government, fit to be written and engraven in every man's soul that covets to do honour to his king and country in this or like attempts.' But this cannot be taken quite literally. So far at least as they relate ...
— Fighting Instructions, 1530-1816 - Publications Of The Navy Records Society Vol. XXIX. • Julian S. Corbett
... and threats of banishment and fines were tried. But on this occasion, the good cause prevailed, and the bold resistance of this small district compelled the Emperor disgracefully to recall his mandate of conversion. The example of the court had, however, afforded a precedent to the Roman Catholics of the Empire, and seemed to justify every act of oppression which their insolence tempted them to wreak upon the Protestants. It is not surprising, then, if this persecuted party was favorable to a revolution and ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... unnecessary delay. They oppose the bishop's desire to permit the collection of a larger part of the tributes from small encomiendas than from large ones, because this would be not only unjust, but a dangerous precedent and a source of intolerable confusion and uncertainty. The tributes should be considered not as the means of support for the encomendero, but as the right and revenue of the king—a consideration which must shape all conclusions reached upon this subject. The Indians are not bound to support ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, V7, 1588-1591 • Emma Helen Blair
... sometimes said that Gordon used to "toss up" when he was in any doubt, and that such a step indicates want of faith in prayer. As a matter of fact, he did appeal two or three times to lot in this way, and he used to quote Acts i. 26 as a precedent; but it is not true that he often decided questions thus, nor is it true that he resorted to an appeal to lot instead of seeking guidance in prayer. He would pray first, and ask God to indicate His mind in this modern ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... rights, by virtue of which, in cases determined by himself, he provided in a discretionary way for all Catholic interests, of which he thus becomes the supreme judge, the sole interpreter and the court of last appeal. An indestructible precedent was set up; it was the great corner-stone in the support of the modern Church edifice; on this definitive foundation all other stones were to be superposed, one by one. In 1801, Pius VII., under the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... all right of succession to any part of her mother's dominions which might at any time devolve on her; though the number of her brothers and elder sisters rendered any such occurrence in the highest degree improbable, and though one conspicuous precedent in the history of both countries had, within the memory of persons still living, proved the worthlessness of such renunciations.[1] A few days were then devoted to appropriate festivities. That ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... begin laughing about it. A man never ought to have to write such letters twice in his life. If he has, why, he may get a good enough precedent for the second out ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... intention at first of stopping his crying, and should yield to the temptingness of him just as Bud bad yielded, would have seemed to Alpine still more unlikely; because no Indian had ever kidnapped a white child in that neighborhood. So much for the habit of thinking along grooves established by precedent ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... and Saint-Pierre. General Marmont, commanding the artillery, had already been sent forward to find a means of transporting cannon over the Alps. It was almost an impracticable thing to do; and yet it must be achieved. No precedent existed as a guide. Hannibal with his elephants, Numidians, and Gauls; Charlemagne with his Franks, had no such obstacles ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... sake of precedent," said Law, "let me see. Well, then, I will take one gem, only one. Here, Henri, is the diamond which I brought with me when I came to Paris years ago. It was the sole jewel owned then by my brother and myself, though we had somewhat of gold between us, thanks to this same diamond. It was ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... of one of our early sovereigns seems to afford a precedent for the mode in which divers gentlemen and persons of quality voluntarily showed civility towards Richard Evelyn, and for that in which several gentlemen of birth and estate testified their respect and affection for Humphrey ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 211, November 12, 1853 • Various
... had examined carefully into the factors likely to govern a disembarkation in force in face of an enemy who was fully prepared, were unanimous in viewing such an operation as a somewhat desperate enterprise. There was no modern precedent for an undertaking of the kind. One dreaded some grave disaster, feared that the troops might entirely fail to gain a footing on shore, and pictured them as driven off after suffering overwhelming losses. The message announcing that a large part of the army ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... original as well as from actual sin? What is the meaning of the Angelic Salutation, "Hail, thou that art full of grace," unless it refer to a superadded grace, to such donum supernaturale as the first Eve received? There is indeed no precedent to guide in the case: the prophet Jeremiah and S. John Baptist had been preserved from sin from the womb, but this did not involve freedom from original sin. Still the fact that there was no precedent was not in anywise fatal; the point of the situation was just that there was no precedent for ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... Hanoverian period, just as that system had been a step from the kingly power of the Tudors and the Stuarts, which, in turn, had arisen upon the ruins of feudalism and military monarchical power. It is this gradual growth, this "gently broadening down from precedent to precedent," which makes the British constitution of to-day the more or less perfected result of centuries of experience and struggle. But that result has only been made possible by a peculiar series of national adjustments in which the power ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... the 'Rites and Ceremonies,' 'is divided into twelve lunar months, some of which consist of twenty-nine, others of thirty days, which difference is occasioned by the various appearance of the new moon, in point of time: for if it appeared on the 30th day, the 29th was the last day of the precedent month; but if it did not appear till the 31st day, the 30th was the last day, and the 31st the first of the subsequent month; and that was an intercalary moon, of all which take ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... another's heels. Though Penton had gone on frequent walks with Darrie, after his day's work,—chiefly because Hildreth had not wanted to go on walks with him herself, or had not wanted to accompany them both—yet she and I seized on the precedent Penton and Darrie had set, and we were abroad most of the time ... roaming idyllically in the fields, the woods ... passionate ... mad with the new love that had come to us ... unseeing, in our absorption in each other's arms ... praying with ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... Han dynasty was in search of the secret of immortality, and various suggestions had proved unsatisfactory, a Taoist priest, Miao Chi, told the Emperor that his want of success was due to his omission to sacrifice to T'ai I, the first of the celestial spirits, quoting the classical precedent of antiquity found in the Book of History. The Emperor, believing his word, ordered the Grand Master of Sacrifices to re-establish this worship at the capital. He followed carefully the prescriptions of Miao Chi. This enraged the literati, who resolved to ruin him. One day, when the Emperor ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... the original charter.' 'Campbell v. Union Bank (6 Howard 625) cited and confirmed.' 'The liability of the State, under the operation of the charter of the bank, attached so soon or whenever the bonds were legally executed to the bank, and the execution of the mortgages was neither a condition precedent to the pledge of the faith of the State, nor the condition on which the State bonds were to be executed and delivered.' 'It does not appear from the facts that the bonds were sold for less than their ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Lincoln's contention that the government of the United States could not treat with rebels (or, dropping the word "rebels," with its own citizens) in arms. "The first step in negotiations, must," said Lincoln, "be the laying down of arms. There is no precedent in history for a government entering into negotiations with its ...
— Abraham Lincoln • George Haven Putnam
... particular notice, inasmuch as in its chief outlines it has served for the precedent to all succeeding inaugurations. Congress had determined that the ceremony of taking the oath of office should be performed in public and in the open air. It took place on the 30th of April, 1789. In the morning religious services were performed in all the churches of the city. At 12 o'clock ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... recollections may perhaps go back as far as the Restoration, will be surprised at the size of the frame required for the picture we are about to bring before him, embracing as it does two centuries and a half; but as everything, has its precedent, every river its source, every volcano its central fire, so it is that the spot of earth on which we are going to fix our eyes has been the scene of action and reaction, revenge and retaliation, till the religious annals of the South resemble an account-book kept by double entry, in which ...
— Massacres Of The South (1551-1815) - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... have also been sent to the second part of the question, and all agree that the gentleman on the left had no shadow of excuse for causing the lady's nose to rest in the jelly. Such a proceeding is totally without precedent ...
— Argentina From A British Point Of View • Various
... decide altogether according to their own caprice; they were bound to regard the principles that had been established by the decisions of former judges; and consequently, a system of law was formed similar to the common law of England, founded on precedent and analogy. In the later ages of the empire, the number of law-books and records became so enormous, that it was no longer possible to determine the law with accuracy, and the contradictory decisions made at different periods, greatly ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... in abundance of bad humours omitted, may be for the worst; so likewise as in the precedent, if overmuch, too frequent or violent, it [1504]weakeneth their strength, saith Fuchsius, l. 2. sect., 2 c. 17, or if they be strong or able to endure physic, yet it brings them to an ill habit, they make their bodies no better than apothecaries' ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... world calls 'educated,' but the world, the world of men, knows better. It laughs at me. It has cheated me because I am a woman. The world of men has fenced me in and hobbled me with convention, with precedent, with fictitious sentiment. If I pursue the business of men as they themselves would pursue it I am called an ungrateful daughter. If I should adopt the morals of men I would be called a fallen woman. If I adopted the religion of men I would have no religion at all. ...
— A Gentleman from Mississippi • Thomas A. Wise
... information against the writer on the strength of this document. Now this judge was justly punished by his superior, because confession is so sacred that even that which is destined to constitute the confession should be wrapped in eternal silence. In accordance with this precedent, the following judgment, reported in the 'Traite des Confesseurs', was given by Roderic Acugno. A Catalonian, native of Barcelona, who was condemned to death for homicide and owned his guilt, refused to confess when the hour of punishment arrived. However strongly ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... regulations were severe, but he was accustomed to exercise individual authority, and beyond an old order issued ten years before, regarding the American ship COLUMBIA, there was no precedent to guide him. The storm was severe, and a sentiment of humanity urged him to grant the stranger's request. It is but just to the Commander to say that his inability to enforce a refusal did not weigh with his decision. He would have denied with equal disregard of consequences that ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... mahogany and rose jars, with her black silk skirts spreading about her, and an Old Blue cup in her hand, and talk family,—how cousin this married a man whose people aren't anybody, and cousin that is outraging precedent by naming her child for her husband's side of the house. She's a funny, dear old lady! You know, Miss Paget," the professor went on, with his eager, impersonal air, "when I met you, I thought you didn't quite seem like a New Yorker and a Bar Harborer—if that's the word! Aunt Pam—you ...
— Mother • Kathleen Norris
... in the expansive power of God. I hate with a deep-seated hatred all such attempts to bind and confine the rising tide of thought. I want to see religion vital and not formal, elastic and not cramped by precedent and tradition. And thus I love to see worship enshrined in noble classical buildings, which seem to me to speak of a desire to infuse the intellectual spirit of Greece, the dignified imperialism of Rome into ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the Virginia Resolutions of State sovereignty; for they notoriously disregarded the paramount supremacy of the Constitution. The conscientious doubt of others as to making the exclusion of slavery a condition precedent to admission into the Union, proves not the incorrectness of this position, but strengthens it, by showing that only a controlling love of the Union caused the doubt, which originated in a policy that would not even seem to do ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... system under which he is brought up, rendered cruel, merciless, and deceitful. There may be, and probably are, hardships inflicted by some of the landlords; but they are produced in most instances by criminal and precedent acts on the part of the people. In no country in the world are the rights of property so ill understood or so recklessly violated: the industrious man fears to surround his cottage with a garden, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... many respects admirable, indeed without any precedent, we are bound to believe. The artists, great and little, had toiled for months to attain perfection. Most of the orchestra, headed by Wilhelmj, had slaved without payment that there might be no deficiencies in their ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... nose. He looked at one over the collar, so to speak. His regard was very assured, and his speech was that short bundle of monosyllables which the subaltern throws at the orderly. He had never been questioned, and, the precedent being absent, he had never questioned himself. Why should he? We live by question and answer, but we do not know the reply to anything until a puzzled comrade bothers us and initiates that divine curiosity which both humbles and ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... jurisdiction. At once he put into exercise the advantages and opportunities which were united in him so as never before in the promoter of a like enterprise, and achieved a success speedy and splendid beyond all precedent. ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... for a higher understanding of Nature's method and accomplishment as a precedent to study and observation of our national parks, I seek enormously to enrich the enjoyment not only of these supreme examples but of all examples of world making. The same readings which will prepare you to enjoy to the full the message ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... his safety exasperated Betty beyond measure. She scolded him vigorously. Charley accepted the scolding with humility, but his resolution was unshaken; he did not propose to vacate the public roads at any man's behest; that would be an unwise precedent to establish. ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... so useful nowadays as it had been in the past, and modern languages were gaining an importance which they had not had in his own youth. His own mind was divided, for a younger brother of his had been sent to Germany when he failed in some examination, thus creating a precedent but since he had there died of typhoid it was impossible to look upon the experiment as other than dangerous. The result of innumerable conversations was that Philip should go back to Tercanbury for another term, and then should leave. With this ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... to very vigorous action of a repressing, even of a punitive, description. It was not, in itself, a complicated situation, and no Governor, who was soldier too, need have hesitated for an instant. The various Stations, indeed, anticipating the usual course of action indicated by precedent, had automatically gone to their posts, prepared for the "official instructions" it was known that I should send, wondering impatiently (as I learned afterwards) at the slight delay. For delay there was, though of a few hours only; and this delay was caused by my uncomfortable new habit—pausing ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... decorated Market Square, including the Godbury School O.T.C. and the Wellingsford and Godbury Volunteers. I heard that the latter were very anxious to fire off a feu de joie, but were restrained owing to lack of precedent. The local fire-brigade in freshly burnished helmets were to follow the procession of motor cars, and behind them motor omnibuses with ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... with suspicion and disfavour. He is the type of them that prove in defiance of precept that the safest path is not always midway, and that the golden rule is sometimes unspeakably worthless: who set what seems a horrible example, create an apparently shameful precedent, and yet contrive to approve themselves an honour to their country and the race. To be a good Briton a man must trade profitably, marry respectably, live cleanly, avoid excess, revere the established order, and wear his heart in his breeches ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... make and frame of Turner's mind being not vulgar, but as nearly as possible a combination of the minds of Keats and Dante, joining capricious waywardness, and intense openness to every fine pleasure of sense, and hot defiance of formal precedent, with a quite infinite tenderness, generosity, and desire of justice and truth—this kind of mind did not become vulgar, but very tolerant of vulgarity, even fond of it in some forms; and on the outside, visibly infected by it, deeply enough; the curious ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... Constant's Memoirs, "used to say that a good man was to be known by the way he treated his wife, his children, and his servants. He added that immorality was the most dangerous vice a sovereign could have, because it established a precedent for his subjects. What he meant by immorality, was giving scandalous publicity to relations which should have been kept secret; these relations he was by no means disposed to refuse when they presented themselves before him." The faithful valet de chambre goes on in an attempt to defend his master: ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... class his orchids, he had ungraciously replied that he couldn't have a lot of school girls running over his place—if he let them come one year, he would have to let them come another, and he didn't wish to establish a precedent. ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... in a house which looked backwards into the garden of Leicester House. Newton lived in St. Martin's-street, on the south side of the square. Steele lived in Bury-street, St. James'; he furnishes an illustrious precedent for the loungers in St. James'-street, where scandal-mongers of those times delighted to detect Isaac Bickerstaff in the person of captain Steele, idling before the Coffee-house, and jerking his leg and stick alternately against the pavement. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 393, October 10, 1829 • Various
... little short of 2,000,000 of quarters. And what was the result? The exportation of 6,000,000 of sovereigns in a single year to buy grain; an unexampled pressure on the money market; commercial embarrassments, long-continued, and severe beyond all former precedent; the contraction of ten millions of additional debt in four years, and the creation of a deficit which at length rose to the formidable amount, in 1842, of L.4,000,000 sterling! And what first dispelled this distress, and arrested this downward and disastrous ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... small yells. We found, upon inquiry, that there was no ball, dinner, or other public demonstration; the reason was ascribed to the extreme violence of party politics, which at this period completely divided the community, and were carried out to an extent without precedent ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... princes, the king was warranted by all laws, divine and human, in laying under contribution every one of his subjects, of whatever rank or condition.[277] But, as the same ends might be attained by methods more agreeable to law and precedent, Francis preferred to have ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... respect for the refinements of speech or for literary polish. He could not endure Mr. Sumner's piling precedent upon precedent and quotation upon quotation, and disliked his lofty and somewhat pompous rhetoric. He used sometimes to leave his seat and make known his disgust in the cloak room, or in the rear of the desks, to visitors who happened to be in the Senate Chamber. ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... 756 in orig.], on November 23, there happened an exceedingly interesting event which stands, I think, without a precedent in the annals of science—an eclipse of the Moon contemporaneous with an occultation of a planet by the Moon. This singular combination is thus described in the annals of Roger de Hoveden[129]:—"On the ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers
... year; but my grapes, that used to be forward and good, are at present backward beyond all precedent; and this is not the worst of the story; for the same ungenial weather, the same black cold solstice, has injured the more necessary fruits of the earth, and discoloured and blighted our wheat. The crop of hops promises ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 2 • Gilbert White
... were abed. He set forth in haste, accompanied by two squires riding on one horse, a page and a few varlets running with torches. As he rode, he hummed to himself and trifled with his glove. And so riding, he was beset by the bravoes of his enemy and slain. My lord of Burgundy set an ill precedent in this deed, as he found some years after on the bridge of Montereau; and even in the meantime he did not profit quietly by his rival's death. The horror of the other princes seems to have perturbed himself; he avowed his ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... have been built, requiring the active use of capital to operate them. Millions of acres of land have been opened to cultivation, requiring capital to move the products. Manufactories have multiplied beyond all precedent in the same period of time, requiring capital weekly for the payment of wages and for the purchase of material; and probably the largest of all comparative contraction arises from the organizing of free labor in the South. Now every laborer there receives ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Ulysses S. Grant • Ulysses S. Grant
... on the way. The station is a stone building, strong enough almost for a fort. Military uniforms adorn every employee, from the supercilious station-master to the ill-paid wretch that handles our baggage. Mine is the first bicycle the Tiflis & Baku Railroad has ever carried. Having no precedent to govern themselves by, and, withal, ever eager to fleece and overcharge, the railway officials charge double rates for it; that is, twice as much as an ordinary package of the same weight. No baggage is carried free on the Tiflis & Baku Railroad except ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... place for luck; we do not mean that conscious attention and forethought shall have been bestowed upon the minutest details of action, and nothing been left to work itself out departmentally according to precedent, or as it otherwise best may according ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... invasion of our privileges may be easily supposed to have impaired. We shall give our sovereign an opportunity, by a gracious condescension to our desires, to recover those affections of which the pernicious advice of flatterers has deprived him; we shall obviate a precedent which threatens destruction to our liberties, and shall set the nation free from an universal alarm. Nor in our present state is it to be mentioned as a trifling consideration, that we shall hinder the wealth of the nation from being ravished ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 11. - Parlimentary Debates II. • Samuel Johnson
... other countries drew their supplies. All the products of the world found purchasers here, and a well-developed banking system greatly facilitated the exchange. The rapid accumulation of fortunes by the Dutch merchants and bankers was without precedent in Europe. Besides this, the progress which Holland made in ship-building and navigation and the advantages which she derived from her colonial trade placed her in a position to outstrip all other nations in the carrying ...
— The Railroad Question - A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and - remedies for their abuses • William Larrabee
... was perfectly comprehensible to him, but it was difficult for him to conceive of anybody indulging in it simply as a matter of sentiment. That April afternoon was so far away now that it had ceased to exist even as an historical precedent. ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... the battle were about equal, no less than 9000 having fallen upon each side—a proportion without precedent in any battle of modern times, and testifying to the obstinacy and valour with which on both sides the struggle was maintained from early morning until night ...
— The Lion of the North • G.A. Henty
... military dictatorship, which also had failed, to be replaced by the restored monarchy. And, last of all, eventual success had come from a bargain or compromise between the upper and middle class on the one hand and the King on the other. This was the historic precedent best known and generally uppermost in the minds of the men ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... feudal rights, and there was no reason which the state would consider valid why they should not be enforced in all fiefs alike. The case of the Bishop of Durham, in 1088, had already established a precedent for the forfeiture of an ecclesiastical barony for the treason of its holder, and in that case the king had granted fiefs within that barony to his own vassals. Still more clearly would such a fief return to the king's hands, if it were ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams
... once settled as a clergyman and president of the college at Hiram, Portage County. He here became very popular as an eloquent divine, as a lecturer before lyceums, and as a profound scholar. The success of his school was without a precedent. Two years ago he was elected, by an immense majority, as a member of the State Senate. At the first call for troops, he at once entered the field, and rallied round him some of the ablest boys to be ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett
... received as a recognition of his powers the titles of Prince of the Great Precious Law and Buddha of the Western Paradise.[693] His three principal disciples were styled Kuo Shih, and, agreeably to the precedent established under the Yuan dynasty, were made the chief prelates of the whole Buddhist Church. Since this time the Red or Tibetan Clergy have been recognized as having precedence ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... having in your minds the notable charges that the company have defrayed in advancing this voyage; and the great charges that they sustain daily in wages, victuals, and other things, all which must be requited by the wise handling of this voyage, which, being the first precedent shall be a perpetual precedent for ever; and therefore all circumspection is to be used; and foreseeing in this first enterprise, which God bless and prosper under you to His glory and the public ...
— The Discovery of Muscovy etc. • Richard Hakluyt
... throne. His father was evidently a difficult person to live with; not only his extravagance and erratic habits, but also a thoroughly unjustified suspicion of his elder son, must have caused the latter a great deal of misery. Instead of following the precedent of the P[vr]emysls in dynastic disputes, Charles wisely abstained from open opposition to John, although the people's affection had been transferred from father to son. Added to this there were the usual troubles caused by the German ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... be; there is no power in Venice Can alter a decree established: 'Twill be recorded for a precedent; And many an error, by the same example, Will rush into the state; ...
— The Merchant of Venice [liberally edited by Charles Kean] • William Shakespeare
... contrary to precedent," urged the Fairy. "You ought to express unbounded delight, and then depart in your carriage with the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., December 27, 1890 • Various
... action of the European governments was born of nothing more humane than a war expediency in order that more soldiers might be bred, yet the effect of such a course will benefit the human race. It has at least set a precedent, and will in time be extended to all children born out of wedlock and will wipe out forever the cruel and unjust stigma that has attached to the child of unmarried parents. Thus it will be seen that even war has its good results, and although it seems a terrible price to ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... you too well, to look for meanness in you. If from pure goodwill, John Ridd, and anxiety to relieve you, I made no condition precedent, you are not the man to take advantage, as a lawyer might. I do not even want your promise. As sure as I hold this glass, and drink your health and love in another drop (forced on me by pathetic words), so surely will you ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... herewith submitted is accepted, it would, I think, result in some cases, where there are large families of minor children, in excessive allotments to a single family. Whatever is done in this case will of course become in some sense a precedent in the cases ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume IX. • Benjamin Harrison
... and mine too, depended on the eccentricities of a jury, the chartered libertinism of an ermined judge, the humour of the law, on a series of points without precedent concerning which no monograph had as yet been written; and, as a last desperate resource, on the letters of a sympathetic British public in the penny papers. The penny papers, the criminal's latest broadsheet anchor! Under the exasperating circumstances, Philippa remained as ...
— Much Darker Days • Andrew Lang (AKA A. Huge Longway)
... Tho[mon]d(66) and Will: all [the] party is so broke up at present that they are au desespoir. The Bedfords are in extraordinary good humour; that elevation of spirit does them no more credit than their precedent abasement; the equus animus seems a stranger to them. G. Greenv.(67) is certainly [befouled] as a Minister, but he is so well manured in other respects that he cannot be an object ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... no other country than Cuba, where the Captain-General does not always act in accordance with law. Distinguished lawyers and judges of that city, in conversation with the Herald correspondent, denounced the act as being utterly illegal and without precedent." ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... time for discussion on questions of precedent, so we began to climb together, reaching a great branch about twenty feet from the ground, no easy task for me, encumbered as I was ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... for Fort Union in New Mexico, left Fort Leavenworth for the long and dangerous journey of more than seven hundred miles over the great plains, which that season were infested by Indians to a degree almost without precedent in the annals ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... his head, knowing now what Erickson was driving at. "Well, I may as well be frank. I'm—I committed suicide. That's how drunk I was. There hasn't been a suicide in the Miller family in centuries. It took a skinful of liquor to set the precedent." ...
— The Day Time Stopped Moving • Bradner Buckner
... proclamation there is one paragraph, of which I do not remember any precedent. He threatens, that, if any peasant should be found with arms, he shall be hanged without further inquiry; and that, if any lord shall connive at his vassals keeping arms in their custody, his village ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... a husband and also a lover is not entirely without precedent," said Disraeli in mock apology, and took snuff solemnly. Meantime manuscripts were traveling back and forth between the East India House and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... in the Castle itself, a house in the cloisters being thought more suitable, and here the Queen visited her child daily, for since that last alarm she could not bear to be long absent from him. Such emissaries as Colonel Sands did not again appear, but after that precedent Lady Strickland had become much more unwilling to allow any of those under her authority to go out into any public place, and the rockers seldom got any exercise except as swelling the Prince's train when he was carried ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... some disaffected persons, Peacham was interrogated, and after he had declined to give any information, was subjected to torture. Bacon, as one of the learned counsel, was ordered by the council to take part in this examination, which was undoubtedly warranted by precedent, whatever may now be thought of it. Nothing, however, was extracted from Peacham in this way, and it was resolved to proceed against him for treason. Now, in the excited state of popular feeling at that period, the failure of government to substantiate an ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... and cannot pin its faith on insecure deductions. The heaviest burden which religion can have to bear is the burden of tradition, and humour is the determined foe of everything that is conventional and traditional. The Pharisaical spirit loves precedent and authority; the humorous spirit loves all that is swift and shifting and subversive and fresh. One of the reasons why the orthodox heaven is so depressing a place is that there seems to be no room in it for laughter; it is ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... leisure for any other measure: but the jealousy of liberty was now roused, and the nation regarded these pretended benevolences as real extortions, contrary to law, and dangerous to freedom, however authorized by ancient precedent. A parliament was found to be the only resource which could furnish any large supplies; and writs were accordingly issued for summoning that great ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... and the badge of his superiority, self-importance. The captain and lieutenants exercised slight control over the men in the ranks, who conceived that the offices had gone to the wrong men. The Wood County militia regarded itself as an "army of occupation," by law and precedent warranted in abusing a brief authority. Instead of guarding and protecting property not their own, the men showed their patriotic zeal by mutilating or demolishing the results of Blennerhassett's labor. They took malicious pleasure in wantonly defacing ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... "The precedent once established, all must perish by its edict—even those which may not be grotesque or bestial—even this perfect one," and he touched again the vat, "and thus you would rid yourself of rival suitors. But no!" he went on in a high, trembling voice. "I shall not be led to thus compromise myself, ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... our readers informed as to the progress of this enterprise, which has no precedent in ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... days which are adjusted to the needs of the family and suited to its surroundings, because built honestly with due regard to the necessities, and even if, as Ruskin says, their detail is abominable and there is no precedent, no right nor reason in the square drip moulding over the windows, yet we love them as a whole, and cannot help feeling that they expressed truly the story they were intended to tell. But we do not feel the same instinctive attraction in the Palladian mansions of Jones, however accurately ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Vol. 01, No. 12, December 1895 - English Country Houses • Various
... conchology, especially if it had several brilliant colors, one would take off his coat, another his shirt, and insist that he should exchange the shell for the garment. When he declined the exchange, but on the contrary presented the coveted article, he soon found he had established a dangerous precedent. Immediately they all commenced to beg for everything in the vast collection which they happened to take a liking to. This cost Barnum many valuable specimens, and often "put him to his trumps" for an excuse ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... before brought to such a test. Unquestionably a main source of Webster's strength and success lay in this democratic instinct; it was not patriotism alone, it was the spirit which hailed the new democracy, and in its very contempt of precedent and historic authority ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... literary vanity, as because I fear it is better fitted to injure than to serve the sacred cause of freedom. I have directed my solicitor to apply to Chancery for an injunction to restrain the sale; but, after the precedent of Mr. Southey's "Wat Tyler" (a poem written, I believe, at the same age, and with the same unreflecting enthusiasm), ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... great battle, and thus executed the command laid upon him,—"the certain capture of the city of New Orleans." The victory was accomplished with the loss of but one ship, and 184 men killed and wounded,—"a feat in naval warfare," says his son and biographer, "which has no precedent, and which is still without a parallel, except the one furnished by Farragut himself, ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... Sand we name something more exceptional than even a great genius. Her rise to eminence in the literature of her century, is, if not without a parallel, yet absolutely without a precedent, in the annals of ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... for doubting the wonderful recovery of Mesknan, whose real name was Mapkla, nor do I see any improbability in the report that he fell suddenly under the influence of a spirit, for such an occurrence is not without precedent in Manboland. I will admit even that at the beginning belief in the revival was sincere, but as time went on and the reputation of the power of Mesknan's spirit became greater, abuses crept in, so that shortly ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... said to have admitted some Mohammedans as members of his sect. The precedent has not been followed among most branches of his later adherents but a curious half-secret sect, found throughout Bengal in considerable numbers and called Kartabhajas,[648] appears to represent an eccentric ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... kneeling to make a hasty examination. "Hope I haven't done for him.... It would be the first time.... Bad precedent!... So! He's all right—conscious within an hour.... Too soon!" he added, standing and looking down. "Well, ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... other forms suddenly created will not act, but rapidly retrograde to the old form. Moreover, such regulations as a despot makes, if really operative, are so because of their fitness to the social state. His acts being very much swayed by general opinion—by precedent, by the feeling of his nobles, his priesthood, his army—are in part immediate results of the national character; and when they are out of harmony with the national character, they are soon practically abrogated. The failure of Cromwell permanently to establish a new social condition, ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... Jim, "and some of them have been expensive ones in lives and money. Many of our engineering problems are entirely new and we have to solve them without precedent. The punishment for a bad guess in engineering is always sure and hard. One can make a bad political ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... should, however, on the other hand, have anticipated, that in proportion to the strength of character required for the effort, and to the absence of distracting sentiments, whether respect for precedent, or affection for ideal beauty, would be the energy exhibited in the pursuit of the special objects which the youths proposed to themselves, and ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... of the attack on M. CLEMENCEAU reaching the Commons there was a general desire that the House should pass a resolution of sympathy. But Mr. BONAR LAW deprecated the proposal as being, in his opinion, "against all precedent"—not a little to the surprise of some of the new Members, who thought that in a case like this the conseil du precedent might bow to the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 26, 1919 • Various
... who reigned for a short time (217-218), but perished in consequence of his attempts to reform the discipline of the army. Heliogabalus (218-222) was not more cruel than others had been, but his gross and shameless debauchery was without a precedent. ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... secede, concede, intercede, procedure, precedent, succeed, exceed, success, recess, concession, procession, intercession, abscess, ancestor, cease, decease; (2) ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... the Government and often on its most important measures. Those who might wish to defeat a measure proposed might construe the power relied on in support of it in a narrow and contracted manner, and in that way fix a precedent inconsistent with the true import of the grant. At other times those who favored a measure might give to the power relied on a forced or strained construction, and, succeeding in the object, fix a precedent in the opposite extreme. Thus it is manifest that if the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 3) of Volume 2: James Monroe • James D. Richardson
... here to accuse me or to ask me questions? If to accuse me, prove your charges yourself; if to ask questions, do not anticipate the truth by expressing opinions on that concerning which your ignorance compels you to inquire. If this precedent be followed, if there is no necessity for the accuser to prove anything, but on the contrary he is given every facility for asking questions of the accused, there is not a man in all the world but will be indicted on some charge or other. In fact, everything that he has ever done ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... virtues, that it is apt to determine a man's sudden adhesion to an opinion, whether on a personal or impersonal matter, without leaving him time to consider his grounds. The adhesion is sudden and momentary, but it either forms a precedent for his line of thought and action, or it is presently seen to have been inconsistent with his true mind. This determination of partisanship by temper has its worst effects in the career of the public man, who is always in danger of getting so enthralled by his own words that he looks into facts ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... under the most trying circumstances, accommodated herself to his wishes. He then reflected upon the fact of her maid having accompanied her, and concluded, very naturally, that if she had resolved to elope with this hateful stranger, she would have done so in pursuance of the precedent set by most young ladies who take such steps—that is, unaccompanied by any one but her lover. From this view of the case he gathered comfort, and was beginning to feel his mind somewhat more at ease, when a servant ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... of the marriage of Prithwi Raj, king of Delhi, that the bride's father emptied his coffers in gifts, but he filled them with the praises of mankind. A lakh of rupees [291] was given to the chief bard, and this became a precedent for similar occasions. "Until vanity suffers itself to be controlled," Colonel Tod wrote, [292] "and the aristocratic Rajputs submit to republican simplicity, the evils arising from nuptial profusion will not cease. Unfortunately ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... Their Councils were held along the southern shores of Lake Ontario, and upon the Niagara River, before the first adventurers, the Dutch, and French Jesuits appeared in the valley of the Mohawk; and there are evidences of a long precedent existence that corresponds with ...
— Birch Bark Legends of Niagara • Owahyah
... all bodies enter into account upon divers considerations, (which I have mentioned in the precedent chapter;) these considerations being diversly named, divers absurdities proceed from the confusion, and unfit connexion of their ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... Pleased, though I scarce know why, like some young child, Whose little senses each new toy turns wild, 40 How do I hold sweet dalliance with my crown, And wanton with dominion, how lay down, Without the sanction of a precedent, Rules of most large and absolute extent; Rules, which from sense of public virtue spring, And all at once commence a Patriot King! But, for the day of trial is at hand, And the whole fortunes of a mighty land Are staked on me, and all their weal ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... kindly slept for three nights on the parlour sofa, in order that Mrs. Baines might have his room. The funeral grew into an obsession, for multitudinous things had to be performed and done sumptuously and in strict accordance with precedent. There were the family mourning, the funeral repast, the choice of the text on the memorial card, the composition of the legend on the coffin, the legal arrangements, the letters to relations, the selection of guests, and the questions of bell-ringing, hearse, plumes, number of horses, and grave-digging. ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... for which above all others Mr. Mill's disciples will love his memory is his essay "On Liberty." In this undertaking Mr. Mill followed the noble precedent of Locke, with greater largeness of view and perfection of work. Locke's four letters "Concerning Toleration" constitute a splendid manifesto of the Liberals of the seventeenth century. The principle, that the ends of political society are ...
— John Stuart Mill; His Life and Works • Herbert Spencer, Henry Fawcett, Frederic Harrison and Other
... bellies, on make the voice seem to come from some other part of the room than that where they are. But these Ventriloqui speak very distinctly and intelligibly. The only thing, then, that I can find like a precedent for your way of speaking (and I would willingly help you to one if I could) is the modern art 'de persifler', practiced with great success by the 'Petits maitres' at Paris. This noble art consists in picking out ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... monsieur le consultant ne passe les nuits bien calmes, il prendra chaque soir a l'heure de sommeil six grains des pilules de cynoglosse, dent il augmentera la dose d'un grain de plus toutes les fois que la dose du jour precedent, n'aura pas ete suffisante pour lui faire ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... meaning or application designed for the act—in that case nothing has been done. But this is not so: Government is bound henceforwards by its own act. That proclamation as to one meeting establishes a precedent as to all. It is not within the power of Government, having done that act of suppression, and still more having spoken that language of proclamation, now to retreat from their own rule, and to apply any other rule to any subsequent ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... remaining with me. You remember you wanted to print it in the Cornhill, and I was obstinate: there is hardly any occasion on which I should be otherwise, if the printing any poem of mine in a magazine were purely for my own sake: so, any liberality you exercise will not be drawn into a precedent against you. I fancy this is a case in which one may handsomely puff one's own ware, and I venture to call my verses good for once. I send them to you directly, because expedition will render whatever I contribute more valuable: for when you make up your mind as to how liberally I shall ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... surprised and indignant at his recalcitrancy, raised a rebellion, but were defeated with great slaughter, and thus by his spirited conduct the king freed himself from the tyranny of his councillors and established a new precedent for the guidance of his successors. However, the old custom seems to have revived and persisted until late in the nineteenth century, for a Catholic missionary, writing in 1884, speaks of the practice as if ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... wonder for a few days at the strange haste, but my answer shall be that I am going to the front with my troops. The son and many of the high officials of the Kaiser have already established the precedent, marrying hurriedly upon the eve of ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... August morning when Paw died. This was an unexpected and unsettling contingency. One doesn't look for a "chronic's" doing anything so unscheduled and foreign to routine; but Paw spoiled all precedent. They found him that morning with his heart quite still, and Luke knew they stood in ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... not be established. But the time came that they have forsook it themselves. For a while after the Iroquoits came there, the number of seaven hundred, on the snow in the beginning of Spring, where they make a cruell slaughter as the precedent years, where some ghostly fathers or brothers or their servants weare consumed, taken or burnt, as their relation ...
— Voyages of Peter Esprit Radisson • Peter Esprit Radisson
... heartless starvation would be too sweeping an assertion to make. There always have been men who strove to act generously towards the people serving in their vessels, though these, I am persuaded, were in the minority, and it is to the credit of that minority that they had to struggle against precedent, example, and it may be the habitual conviction that it was part of the sailor's business to take whatever food was put aboard for him. Running short of provisions was to them only an incident natural to the sailor's ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... everything broke up into units. Later, I was told by my official friend that the King's last movement—the oath as he sank to his knees—was an innovation of his own. All I can say is, if, in the future, and for all time, it is not taken for a precedent, and made an important part of the Patriotic Coronation ceremony, the Blue Mountaineers will prove themselves to be a much more stupid people than they ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... income was then scarcely more than L500, while the salaries and fixed charges amounted annually to L730. The Board accused the Governors of having made "wasteful and extravagant expenditures without precedent or principle," some of which did not appear to have any connection with the opening or the carrying on of McGill; many of these, they said, were wholly unnecessary, and had never been authorised by the Board, whose consent had not ...
— McGill and its Story, 1821-1921 • Cyrus Macmillan
... lightly. It was "that fella along a mountain," who caused the trouble, or else "another boy alonga Hinchinbrook!" Having thus completely and satisfactorily settled the point, his face assumed a slow, wise smile, and his agitated mind rested. Was it not all another palpable proof, a precedent to be cited, of the manner in which a no-good-boy wantonly brought about ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... A little before his death, the chief priest of Eleusis, following the Socratic precedent, entered an indictment against him for impiety. This indictment was supported by citations of certain heretical doctrines from his published writings; on which Grote makes the significant remark, that his ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... in the Junior class, only to have a snap meeting called on us over in Browning Hall, in which three middle-aged young ladies who had never danced a step were named. The roar we raised was terrific, but the president sweetly informed us that they had only followed precedent—we'd had to do the same thing the year before to keep out the Mu Kow Moos. We appealed to the Faculty, and it laughed at us. Unfortunately, we didn't stand any too well there anyway, while most of the Blanks were the ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... as to this lonely prairie wilderness, and the red man its child. In a hazy way came the question whether after all it were not foolhardy to remain here now, to dare that invisible, intangible something before which, almost in panic, the others had fled. To be sure, precedent was with him, logic; but—of a sudden—but a minute had passed—his arms tightened; involuntarily he held his breath. Hans Mueller had been moving on and on; another half minute and he would have been behind the base of the hill out of sight; when, as from ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... as preserved by Sandford, and in which the precedent of Charles II.'s coronation was followed, we find both these ...
— Coronation Anecdotes • Giles Gossip
... evident enjoyment, was not wholly encouraging. It seemed darkly possible that she had cited a precedent applicable to every case where she was haled before a court. The chairs in Mrs. Owen's office were decidedly uncomfortable; Bassett crossed and recrossed his legs, and pressed his hand nervously to his pocket to make sure of his check-book; ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... instance of unwarrantable intervention. Kobo-Dogarque believes that this decision was afterward reversed by an appellate court of contrary political complexion and the companies were compelled to compromise, but of this there is no record. It is certain that in the San Francisco case the precedent was urged. ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... military science and precedent, he drew from them principles and suggestions, and so adapted them to novel conditions that his campaigns will continue to be the profitable study of the military profession throughout the world. His genial nature made him comrade to every soldier of the ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... the most far-reaching in importance of all those with which this government has to deal. The history of the world offers no precedent for our guidance, since no such peaceful invasion of alien peoples has ever before occurred. It must have great and largely unforeseen effects upon our form of civilization, our social and political institutions, and, ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... for which Richelieu is most generally condemned. But the state of anarchy which he removed was license, not liberty. The task of reconciling private independence with public peace, civil rights with the existence of justice,—and this without precedent or tradition, without that rooted stock on which freedom, in order to grow and bear fruit, must be grafted,—was a conception which, however familiar to our age, was utterly unknown, and impracticable to that of Richelieu. With the horrors of civil war fresh in the memory of all, the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 480, Saturday, March 12, 1831 • Various
... genius burnt that shock of hair away Which, elsewise, clogs one's keenness and activity of mind; And (barring present company, of course) I'm free to say That, after all, it's intellect that captures womankind. At any rate, since then (With a precedent in Ben), The women-folk have been in love with us ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... of that which was already established by moral proof. Leeds, now at ease as to the event of the impeachment, gave himself the airs of an injured man. "My Lords," he said, "the conduct of the Commons is without precedent. They impeach me of a high crime; they promise to prove it; then they find that they have not the means of proving it; and they revile me for not supplying them with the means. Surely they ought not to have brought a charge like this, without well considering whether they had or had not ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... down living trees, a person should publish his sin and fast for three nights. By having intercourse with one with whom intercourse is prohibited, the expiation for one is wandering in wet clothes and sleeping on a bed of ashes. These, O king, are the expiations for sinful acts, according to precedent and reason and scriptures and the ordinances. A Brahmana may be cleansed of all sins by reciting the Gayatri in a sacred place, all the while living upon frugal fare, casting off malice, abandoning wrath ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... suppose that there is a sick person whom an- other would heal mentally. The healer begins by mental [5] argument. He mentally says, "You are well, and you know it;" and he supports this silent mental force by audible explanation, attestation, and precedent. His mental and oral arguments aim to refute the sick man's thoughts, words, and actions, in certain directions, and [10] turn them into channels of Truth. He persists in this course until the patient's mind yields, and the harmonious thought has the full control over ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... it if I hadn't been there last night myself," said Bailey. "There was a pretty hot discussion. Some of us want to help you, but the majority want a precedent back of them. And there's no precedent for a woman-mayor, you know. Say, Gertie, are you fully determined to run?—because the Augean stables aren't exactly what you've been accustomed to,—and ...
— A Woman for Mayor - A Novel of To-day • Helen M. Winslow
... you have been uniformly successful with the cases he's put you on. I hope," the young father entreated, "that you'll follow your usual precedent." ...
— Old Mr. Wiley • Fanny Greye La Spina
... expressed it. And having taken measures for publishing their declaration to the world, the convention closed their proceedings by appointing a committee, selected as combining the most happily an acquaintance with form and precedent with a knowledge of the ways and wants of the people, to draft a constitution to be submitted to a new convention, which the people were invited to call for that purpose. In response to that call, a new convention assembled ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... very firmly, bent upon saving the meeting from any possibility of scandalising itself and the Wesleyan community. Bishop Colenso must not be approved beneath those roofs. Evidently Edwin had been more persuasive than he dreamt of; and daring beyond precedent. He had meant to carry his resolution if he could, whereas, it appeared, he ought to have meant to be defeated, in the true interests of revealed religion. The chairman kept referring to his young friend the proposer's ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... henceforth he must live by it or else begin life over again in another sphere. At all events, for a term of years, his personal prosperity depends upon the use he can make of his hold upon the public goods. He is not individually to be blamed, perhaps, for he follows a precedent as widely recognized as it is universally pernicious. It is the system that is to be blamed, the general belief that a man can, and justly may, support himself by clinging to a set of principles of which he does ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... over again? Whereas, one reason for our so vigorously opposing Mr. Wood's coinage, is, because we have always been imposed upon in our copper money, and we find he is treading exactly in the steps of his predecessors, and thinks he has a right to cheat us because he can shew a precedent for it.' In truth, there was a vast number of counterfeits of those coins, which had been imported, chiefly from Scotland, as appears from a proclamation prohibiting the Importation of them in 1697" ("History St. Patrick's Cathedral," ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift
... manner. If they wanted a porch over the door, or a bay window at a certain corner, or a turret to enjoy some favorite view—they made them, put them just where they were needed. Convenience was everything, and precedent nothing. ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... completion of the "big fence" unfortunately set a bad precedent. Major Bach, flushed with the success of his first speeding-up tactics, grew more and more inexorable in this connection. For every job a rigid time-limit was now set, and he did not hesitate to ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... so content, Or sick with false conceit of right, As not to know that the element And inmost warmth of love's delight Is honour? Who'd not rather kiss A duchess than a milkmaid, prank The two in equal grace, which is Precedent Nature's obvious rank? Much rather, then, a woman deck'd With saintly honours, chaste and good, Whose thoughts celestial things affect, Whose eyes express her heavenly mood! Those lesser vaunts are dimm'd or lost Which ...
— The Angel in the House • Coventry Patmore
... the point! Just as our brother's Seventeen Council Fires Unite for self-protection so do we. How can you blame us, since your own example Is but our model and fair precedent? The Long-Knife's craft has kept our tribes apart, Nourished dissensions, raised distinctions up, Forced us to injuries which, soon as done, Are made your vile pretexts for bloody war. But this ...
— Tecumseh: A Drama • Charles Mair
... vast herds and the problems they brought. It concerned the destinies of those who followed fast in the footsteps of the trailmakers and sought to establish a business where there was neither law nor precedent. Sordid days, these. The honest men were not yet organized; the dishonest and criminal were unrestrained by laws. Cattle and kine were taken furtively or openly to these very hills and vales where ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney
... the way grew wings, or if the deep sea rose and washed out the chaos of the land. I should not raise my eyebrows if the daily press became the Little Sunbeam of the Home, or if Cabinet Ministers struck for a decrease of wages. I feel no security in facts, precedent seems no protection to me. The wisdom you can find in an Encyclopedia, or in Selfridge's Information Bureau, seems to me just a ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... for more innocent kinds of food was equally excessive. He would eat seven or eight peaches before breakfast, and declared that he had only once in his life had as much wall-fruit as he wished. His consumption of tea was prodigious, beyond all precedent. Hawkins quotes Bishop Burnet as having drunk sixteen large cups every morning, a feat which would entitle him to be reckoned as a rival. "A hardened and shameless tea-drinker," Johnson called himself, who "with tea amuses the ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... could be prevented from being introduced by way of New Orleans, by persons who are not citizens of the United States." It was moved to strike out the excepting clause; but the motion received only twelve votes,—an apparent indication that Congress either did not appreciate the great precedent it was establishing, or was reprehensibly careless. Harper of South Carolina then succeeded in building up the Charleston slave-trade interest by a section forbidding the slave traffic from "without the limits of the United ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois
... During its course, the thermometer did not get below 90 deg. What it reached in the daytime it boots not to record—and signifies less, because when the sun is above us, we bargain for a hot day in summer. But oh! those nights, when by every precedent we should have had cooling dews, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... creature symbolizes some of our human arts and initiations. Once organized by genius and consecrated by precedent, they become mighty elements in history, revelling amid the wealthy energy of life, exhausting the forces of the intellect, clipping the tendrils of affection, becoming colossal in the architecture of society and dorsal in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... oligarchical government of the Hanoverian period, just as that system had been a step from the kingly power of the Tudors and the Stuarts, which, in turn, had arisen upon the ruins of feudalism and military monarchical power. It is this gradual growth, this "gently broadening down from precedent to precedent," which makes the British constitution of to-day the more or less perfected result of centuries of experience and struggle. But that result has only been made possible by a peculiar series of national adjustments in which the power of the Monarchs ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... to begin when I was unlacing your boots, but the idea struck me that to propose holding a lady's foot instead of her hand, would be too ludicrous a variation from all precedent. What a sensitive girl you are, Cecil! I am sure you knew what was coming, for I felt you drawing into a shell of consciousness, that would have made me nervous too, if I had ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... doctor said. He was a little ashamed of his weakness in the matter, knew it was a bad precedent, didn't wish to hear any more about it. "Haven't you got something warmer to put on?" he asked. "You're not going out into this pouring rain in that ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... the present tale, though it would have been far more convenient not to have spread the story over such a length of time, and to have made the catastrophe depend upon the heroes and heroines, instead of keeping them mere ineffective spectators, or only engaged in imaginary adventures for which a precedent can be found, it has been necessary to stretch out their narrative, so as to be at least consistent with the real history, at the entire sacrifice of the plot. And it may be feared that thus the story may partake ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... About Woman, and my belief in the favourable influence of mother-descent on the status of women, has been much questioned. I have been told that I "had quite deliberately gone back to our uncivilised ancestors to 'fish up' the precedent of the matriarchate;" that I "had allowed my prejudices to dictate my choice of material, and had thus brought forward examples explanatory of my own opinions;" that I "had fastened eagerly on these, without inquiring too carefully about other facts having ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... consider "the state of polite learning" among us, "You mustn't expect people to keep it up here as they do in England." But it appeared that his countrymen were only wanting the chance, and they kept it up in honor of him past all precedent. One does not go into a catalogue of dinners, receptions, meetings, speeches, and the like, when there are more vital things to speak of. He loved these obvious joys, and he eagerly strove with the occasions they gave him for the brilliancy which seemed ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... to appear before the Senate and receive the acknowledgment of the Serenissimo, who had already been informed by the Councillors that while the spontaneous offer of a galley so maintained had no precedent in the annals of Venice, the reward which the Senate proposed to bestow had, in fact, in early historic days been offered by the Republic as a stimulus to ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... that at a hunting seat they were roasting some game for Nushirowan, and as there was no salt they were despatching a servant to the village to fetch some. Nushirowan called to him, saying, "Take it at its fair price, and not by force, lest a bad precedent be established and the village desolated." They asked, "What damage can ensue from this trifle?" He answered, "Originally, the basis of oppression in this world was small, and every newcomer added to it, till it reached to its present extent:—Let the monarch eat but one apple from a peasant's orchard, ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... resumed the young man, 'my governor, who's the head of the firm, is all for doing things according to precedent. He loves red tape—wears it wrapped round him in winter instead of flannel. He's all for doing things in the proper legal way, which, as I dare say you know, takes months. And, meanwhile, everybody's wondering what's ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... being his candidate. He replied that I am very young, and after many circumlocutions he said flatly that he doesn't know if I would be accepted or not as a candidate by his followers; but in case I were, the conditions precedent would be: first, that I would not interfere in any way in the affairs of the district, which would be ventilated in the town, as previously; secondly, that I should bear the costs of the election, which would amount approximately to ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... the fiercest shock of arms it had yet experienced in the course of the Rising. "The enemy," wrote Kosciuszko in his report, "stood all night under arms. We awaited the dawn with the sweetest hope of victory." These hopes were founded on the precedent of Raclawice and on the battles in which Kosciuszko had fought in the United States, where he had seen British regulars routed by the American farmers. But as hostilities were about to begin with the morning, Wodzicki, examining the proceedings through his ...
— Kosciuszko - A Biography • Monica Mary Gardner
... in the earth: I too have my unbelief as well as you—I can not believe that a lie on the belief of which has depended our highest development. You may say you have a higher to bring in. But that higher you have become capable of by the precedent lie. Yet you vaunt truth! You would sink us low indeed, making out falsehood our best nourishment—at some period of our history at least. If, however, what I call true and high, you call false and low—my assertion ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... (my Lady) Polixenes for Leontes: O thou Thing, (Which Ile not call a Creature of thy place, Least Barbarisme (making me the precedent) Should a like Language vse to all degrees, And mannerly distinguishment leaue out, Betwixt the Prince and Begger:) I haue said Shee's an Adultresse, I haue said with whom: More; shee's a Traytor, and Camillo is A Federarie with her, and one that knowes What ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... as to His Excellency might seem fit. So far, however, from complying with a very reasonable request, Sir Robert regretted the absence of some observances, the nature of which was never ascertained, and felt compelled to resist a precedent which might lead to injurious consequences. The Assembly were staggered. With very considerable reason they were offended at the Executive, who pretended to the right of money grants in the Assembly. The House went into committee, by a majority of one, and ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... Spain's difficulty should be Cuba's opportunity, issued a Declaration of Independence. The document, dated from Manzanillo, thus stated the case: "In arming ourselves against the tyrannical government of Spain, we must, according to precedent in all civilized countries, proclaim before the world the cause that impels us to take this step, which, though likely to entail considerable disturbance now, will ensure future happiness. It is ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... clearly an intentional reduction in the burden of villain tenure. This fact makes emphasis upon the payment of money as the distinguishing feature of the changed relations between landlord and tenant in this period misleading. There was every precedent for requiring a money payment in the place of services not wanted. When, therefore, a great many services were simply allowed to lapse, it is an indication that it was impossible to exact the payment. It makes ...
— The Enclosures in England - An Economic Reconstruction • Harriett Bradley
... her deserts kind and hospitable, Lets her great destinies be waved aside By smooth, lip-reverent, formal infidels, Who weigh the God they not believe with gold, And find no spot in Judas, save that he, Driving a duller bargain than he ought, Saddled his guild with too cheap precedent. O Faith! if thou art strong, thine opposite Is mighty also, and the dull fool's sneer Hath ofttimes shot chill palsy through the arm 40 Just lifted to achieve its crowning deed, And made the firm-based heart, that would have quailed The rack or fagot, shudder like a leaf Wrinkled ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... with him; he tells me of the high vote of the Commons this afternoon, which I also heard at White Hall, that the proceedings of the Lords in the case of my Lord Clarendon are an obstruction to justice, and of ill precedent to future times. This makes every body wonder what will be the effect of it, most thinking that the King will try him by his own Commission. It seems they were mighty high to have remonstrated, but some said that was too great an appeale to the people. ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... its stead Shall keep us join'd." I then forthwith began "Yet in my mortal swathing, I ascend To higher regions, and am hither come Through the fearful agony of hell. And, if so largely God hath doled his grace, That, clean beside all modern precedent, He wills me to behold his kingly state, From me conceal not who thou wast, ere death Had loos'd thee; but instruct me: and instruct If rightly to the pass I tend; thy words The way directing ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... conceived there could be no function more honourable, more sacred, or more beneficial. An upright judge, with his own passions and prejudices subdued, attentive to the principles of justice by which alone the happiness of the world can be promoted, and by the rectitude of his decisions affording precedent and example to future generations, he considered as a character that must command the reverence and love ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... and, as we have abundant proof, other forms suddenly created will not act, but rapidly retrograde to the old form. Moreover, such regulations as a despot makes, if really operative, are so because of their fitness to the social state. His acts being very much swayed by general opinion—by precedent, by the feeling of his nobles, his priesthood, his army—are in part immediate results of the national character; and when they are out of harmony with the national character, they are soon practically abrogated. The failure of Cromwell permanently to establish a new social condition, and ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... since gone by—at any rate, no such luck was mine. My guardian angel was either woefully ignorant of metallurgy, or the stores had been surreptitiously ransacked; and as to the other expedient, I frankly confess I should have liked some better security for its result, than the precedent ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... be reflected only from what is most divine in man. It was a strange moment for it to appear, for at no time had Bressant's moral level been so low as now; but, happily, the phenomenon is by no means without precedent in human nature. God is never ashamed to declare the share He holds in a sinner's heart, however black ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... demands that our public schools shall not, by clinging to precedent and convention, fall notably behind industry and government in appropriating the fruits of modern scientific research. As the doctor varies the diet to the needs of each patient and each affliction, so must the school serve the intellectual and social ...
— The High School Failures - A Study of the School Records of Pupils Failing in Academic or - Commercial High School Subjects • Francis P. Obrien
... with deep reverence of the more ancient ancients of the ages, and revered all that they said and did. And the rural Chinese to-day says that what did for the sages of olden times must do for him to-day. The conservative instinct leads the Chinese to attach undue importance to precedent, and therefore the people at Hong-shih-ai, knowing that the village has been in the same pitiable condition for generations, live by conservatism, and make no effort ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... again Judge Maynard's measured progress was momentarily barred. Curiosity may have prompted it, and then again it may have been that he was betrayed by the very fury of his desperate, eleventh hour effort to assert his right to the center of that stage—the right of long-established precedent—yet even those two long files of old men gasped aloud their dismay at his temerity when Old Jerry thrust his way forward and planted himself for a second time squarely ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... a half-ruined, mouldering, mediaeval city. It is to be hoped that those who planted these luxuriant trees may have lived to enjoy their grace and beauty. Under Ferdinand and Isabella, Spain was a great and thriving nation, almost beyond precedent. Her colonial possessions rivaled those of the entire world; but her glory has vanished, and her decadence has been so rapid as to be phenomenal, until she is now so humbled there are very few to do ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... these is a haunting affair of body-snatching, or rather of an early escapade of the notorious BURKE, who was asked to supply a red-haired corpse, and not finding one produced instead a gentleman who had yet to fulfil the condition precedent to body-snatching, i.e. who had to be killed first and snatched afterwards. This is certainly as grim as anything I have met over the Castellated signature. Beside it, "The Smile on the Portrait," the tale of a jealous husband who becomes a maniac, is almost soothing. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug 8, 1917 • Various
... Francois should give up the duchy of Burgundy to Charles, and marry Eleanor of Portugal, Charles's sister; that Francois should also abandon his claims on Flanders, Milan, and Naples, and should place two sons in the Emperor's hands as hostages. Following the precedent of Louis XI. in the case of Normandy, he summoned an assembly of nobles and the Parliament of Paris to Cognac, where they declared the cession of Burgundy to be impossible. He refused to return to Spain, and made alliances ...
— Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois, Complete • Marguerite de Valois, Queen of Navarre
... he answered, "you will create a precedent. There is no recorded case of a laborer claiming what he calls his rights when his life is at stake. Even an American tramp has been known to work like ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... here; and for a long time I apprehend was sufficiently obscure, though doing they say a great deal in a small way; but the Mallory case made his fortune about ten years ago. That was a barony by writ of summons which had been claimed a century before, and failed. Hatton seated his man, and the precedent enabled three or four more gentlemen under his auspices to follow that example. They were Roman Catholics, which probably brought him the Mallory case, for Hatton is of the old church; better than that, they were all gentlemen of great estate, and there is no doubt their champion was ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... higher understanding of Nature's method and accomplishment as a precedent to study and observation of our national parks, I seek enormously to enrich the enjoyment not only of these supreme examples but of all examples of world making. The same readings which will prepare you ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... France the same honors that were paid to the Empress of Austria at the celebration of the last marriage. The canopy and all the paraphernalia of royalty will be assigned to the new Empress, and the Emperor will furthermore make a concession on this occasion which is without precedent in the annals of the realm: at table he will resign the first place to his daughter, and take the second place himself. Nothing will be left undone to give these ceremonies their full splendor and to show the interest with which these new ties are regarded here. ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... aid from man or circumstance to one who felt herself mastered. Victor could make her treacherous to her wishes, in revolt against them, though the heart protested. His first conquest of her was in her blood, to weaken a spirit of resistance. For the precedent of submission is a charm upon the faint-hearted through love: it unwinds, unwills them. Nataly resolved fixedly, that there must be a day for speaking; and she had her moral sustainment in the resolve; she had also a tormenting consciousness of material support ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... voice in determining what those terms shall be, but we shall, I feel sure, have a voice in determining whether they shall be made lasting or not by the guarantees of a universal covenant, and our judgment upon what is fundamental and essential as a condition precedent to permanency should be spoken now, not afterward, when ...
— Why We are at War • Woodrow Wilson
... and still continues, one of of the greatest mysteries in the English constitution; and in some respects, notwithstanding the accurate genius of that government, these privileges are at present as undetermined as were formerly the prerogatives of the crown. Such privileges as are founded on long precedent cannot be controverted: but though it were certain, that former kings had not in any instance taken notice of bills lying before the houses, (which yet appears to have been very common,) it follows not, merely from their never exerting such a power, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... condemned, let us suppose a case, which is not very uncommon. A young man, while preparing for college, takes a school. When he first enters upon the duties of his office, he is diffident and timid, and walks cautiously in the steps which precedent has marked out for him. Distrusting himself, he seeks guidance in the example which others have set for him, and very probably he imitates precisely, though it may be insensibly and involuntarily, the manners ...
— The Teacher - Or, Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and - Government of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... elapsed before Judge Parkman replied, and he gnawed the end of his grizzled mustache, debating the consequences of dishonoring precedent—that ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... lord, as your lordship will quickly apprehend when the new point is brought before your notice. A question of principle is here which may form a precedent for the guidance of future Judges, as did the famous case of Perryman v. Lister, which went to the House of Lords about prosecuting a man for stealing a gun. This is about a pig, my lord—a little pig, no doubt, and although there is not ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... to be no time for discussion on questions of precedent, so we began to climb together, reaching a great branch about twenty feet from the ground, no easy task for me, encumbered as I was ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... rule, apparently an invention of Collado's, has no precedent in Rodriguez or in linguistic derivation. The n in this construction is the contracted form of the classical mu, the source for what Collado ...
— Diego Collado's Grammar of the Japanese Language • Diego Collado
... send her priests to the altar in habiliments that were fashionable before the fall of the Roman Empire, in token of her immovable conservatism? And, lastly, does not the Law, lumbering on in the wake of progress, symbolise its subjection to precedent by head-gear reminiscent of the days ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... Madeline, "have you heard that this year's junior ushers are going to keep up the precedent, out of compliment ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... of people, under all kinds of conditions, had given him the experience which enabled him to be at his ease under any circumstances, even the most unfamiliar, and certainly talking to Helena Langley was an experience that had no precedent in the Dictator's life. But he talked to her readily, with great pleasure; he felt a little surprise at her obvious willingness to talk to him and accept his judgment upon many things; but he set this down as one of the few agreeable conditions ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... honorable part; the venerable and beautiful Lucretia Mott gave her benign presence to the gatherings; Lydia Maria Child made heavy sacrifices in the good cause. In the common ardor, and with a Quaker precedent, women took part as speakers. Women's rights was closely united with anti-slavery; and hence came a fresh odium from conservative quarters, while the admirable bearing of the leading women won growing favor for both lines of emancipation. The makers of ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... England. 'Terza rima,' attempted by Shelley, Byron, Morris, and Mrs. Browning, has not yet become acclimatised. Blank verse, although originally remodelled by Surrey upon the versi sciolti of the Italians, has departed widely from Italian precedent, first by its decasyllabic structure, whereas Italian verse consists of hendecasyllables; and, secondly, by its greater force, plasticity, and freedom. The Spenserian stanza, again, is a new and original ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... yet no precedent in Church history for a bastard's donning the scarlet, the pope hunted up four false witnesses who declared that Caesar was the son of Count Ferdinand of Castile; who was, as we know, that valuable person Don Manuel Melchior, and who played ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... senior (the father of the episcopal rector and honorary treasurer of the Plutoria University) and stated that he proposed to give his lectures for nothing. The trustees of the college protested; they urged that the case might set a dangerous precedent which other professors might follow. While fully admitting that Dr. McTeague's lectures were well worth giving for nothing, they begged him to reconsider his offer. But he refused; and from that day on, in spite of all offers that he should retire on double ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... answered, "I am sure I hope not, Edward; but are the qualifications we require in companions for our daughters, always such as are most reconcileable with our good sense or our consciences; a single communication with an objectionable character is a precedent, if known and unobserved, which will be offered to excuse acquaintances with worse persons: with the other sex, especially, their acquaintance should ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... snorting train continued to move round and round, but there was no onward progress. The engineer and passengers descended to the platform to view the phenomenon. An English railroad guard approached Abhoya and her husband. Contrary to all precedent, he volunteered his services. ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... be that we who live In this new land apart, beyond The hard old world grown fierce and fond And bound by precedent and bond, May read the riddle right and give New hope to those who dimly see That all things may be yet for good, And teach the world at length to be One ...
— Rio Grande's Last Race and Other Verses • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... freedom, our fathers left their sons a saving and excellent heritage. In the storm of war this institution was lost. I thank God as heartily as you do that human slavery is gone forever from American soil. But the freedman remains. With him, a problem without precedent or parallel. Note its appalling conditions. Two utterly dissimilar races on the same soil—with equal political and civil rights—almost equal in numbers, but terribly unequal in intelligence and responsibility—each pledged against fusion—one for a century in ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... old family servant, a coloured woman, a sort of half-housekeeper—half-friend. She resembled him so much, that it was generally believed she was his sister. Well, he tried to have her laid in their family vault, and it was refused; the directors thought it would be creating a bad precedent—they said, as they would not sell lots to coloured persons, they couldn't consistently permit them to be buried in those ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... Sometimes, though rarely, black men had come here, and from them they had heard of the existence of men much whiter than themselves, who sailed on the sea in ships, but for the arrival of such there was no precedent. We had, however, been seen dragging the boat up the canal, and he told us frankly that he had at once given orders for our destruction, seeing that it was unlawful for any stranger to enter here, when a message had come from "She-who-must-be-obeyed," saying that our lives were to be spared, and ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... upon hearing this remark, lowered his head and gave himself to protracted reflection. "You're indeed grown dull!" he cried; "why you've a precedent ready at hand to suit your case! Cousin Lin's birthday affords a precedent, and what you did in former years for cousin Lin, you can in this instance likewise do for cousin Hsueeh, and it ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... decide. Our situation is not without a precedent. A few months ago the Count de Lavalette was condemned to death. The King wished to pardon him, but his ministers and friends opposed it. Though the King was master, what did he do? He seemed to be deaf to all the supplications made in the prisoner's behalf. The scaffold was erected, and ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... pin its faith on insecure deductions. The heaviest burden which religion can have to bear is the burden of tradition, and humour is the determined foe of everything that is conventional and traditional. The Pharisaical spirit loves precedent and authority; the humorous spirit loves all that is swift and shifting and subversive and fresh. One of the reasons why the orthodox heaven is so depressing a place is that there seems to be no room in it for laughter; it is all harmony and meekness, sanctified by nothing but the gravest of ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Missourians; but if discipline and subordination be the criterion of merit, these soldiers were worthless indeed. Yet when their exploits have rung through all America, it would be absurd to deny that they were excellent irregular troops. Their victories were gained in the teeth of every established precedent of warfare; they were owing to a singular combination of military qualities in the men themselves. Without discipline or a spirit of subordination, they knew how to keep their ranks and act as one man. Doniphan's regiment marched through New Mexico more like a band of free ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... The women who are obliged to work are of the poorer classes, and have not that leisure and opportunity preliminary to any specialized acquirement; while those who have leisure are supported in that position both by money and by precedent and habit, and have no immediate stimulation to lift them out of it. They sometimes entertain ideas of freedom and plan occupational interests, but they have usually become thoroughly habituated to their unfreedom, and continue ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... love, From which may rude Death never startle them, But grow upon them like a glorious vision Of unconceived and awful happiness, Solemn but splendid, full of shapes and sounds, Swallowing its precedent in victory. Let them so love that men and boys may say, Lo! how they love each other! till their love Shall ripen to a proverb unto all, Known when their faces are forgot in the land. And as for me, Camilla, as for me, Think not thy tears will make my name grow green,— The dew ...
— The Suppressed Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... thing is without precedent, sir! These mitigating circumstances may be brought to bear on the Commander-in-Chief, and may be embodied in a recommendation to mercy! They should have no weight in the finding of the verdict," said the President, "which should be in accordance ...
— Capitola's Peril - A Sequel to 'The Hidden Hand' • Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth
... Almighty and his Saints, and more especially to Edward the Confessor, who lay interred at Westminster, for the joyful news which so unexpectedly had arrived. The journey on foot was not to be drawn into precedent when others succeeded to the mayoralty, nor supplant the riding in state which had been customary on such occasions.(771) The reception given to the king by the Londoners on his return from France, ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... solidly upon the laws of God. It has supplied Joseph Smith with a warrant for polygamy in the social usages of the Arab sheiks three thousand years ago. It has opened a sacred refuge for every lie and wrong; no wildest form of which could fail to find some precedent within these Hebrew histories, which tell the story of a people's upward growth from savagery. It has furnished an arsenal stocked with proof texts, from which, through many generations, priests and doctors have armed themselves to ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... Napoleon claimed a precedent in the history of the ancient Franks, was to have two objects: first, to make such alterations and reforms in the Constitution of the Empire as circumstances should render advisable; secondly, to assist at the coronation of the Empress Maria Louisa. Her ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... This would be, the newspaper stated, a magnificent musical solemnity, for the tenor Montrose, who had been absent six years from Paris, had just won, throughout Europe and America, a success without precedent; moreover, he would be supported by the illustrious Swedish singer, Helsson, who had not been heard in ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... genius of the Catholic Church," said White; "you will understand it better in time. No one is his own master; even the Pope cannot do as he will; he dines by himself, and speaks by precedent." ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... war? What has been the source of the spirit of self-immolation which has driven the intellectual and imaginative section of French youth to hold out both hands to catch the full downpour of the rain of death? There is no precedent for it in French history, and we may observe for ourselves how new a thing it was, and how unexpected, by comparing with the ardent and radiant letters and poems of the youngest generation the most patriotic expressions ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... by the regency of Canton, and would be insisted on previous to the granting a permission for victualling the ship for her future voyage, the commodore, who was resolved never to establish so dishonourable a precedent, took all possible precaution to prevent the Chinese from facilitating the success of their unreasonable pretensions, by having him in their power at Canton; and, therefore, for the security of his ship, and the great treasure ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... for our so vigorously opposing Mr. Wood's coinage, is, because we have always been imposed upon in our copper money, and we find he is treading exactly in the steps of his predecessors, and thinks he has a right to cheat us because he can shew a precedent for it.' In truth, there was a vast number of counterfeits of those coins, which had been imported, chiefly from Scotland, as appears from a proclamation prohibiting the Importation of them in 1697" ("History St. Patrick's Cathedral," p, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift
... of my freehold by the arbitrary act of two or three committee-men; the fundamental law of England knowing no such constitution, abhorring such administrations: and that the Hon. Court would release your petitioner from the injurious effects of the said committee's act, and explode so pernicious a precedent." ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... scurvy were such a customary accompaniment of long voyages in those days that the condition of Flinders' company at the termination of this protracted navigation was healthy almost beyond precedent. But this young captain had learnt how to manage a ship in Cook's school, and had profited from his master's admonitions. Cook, in his Endeavour voyage of 1770 and 1771, brought his people through a protracted period at sea with, "generally speaking," freedom from ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... is to be put away in the store containing other advertising material, that individual, local and parliamentary liberties are abolished, that the government is arbitrary and absolute, that no institution, law, dogma, or precedent affords any guarantee for it against the rights of the people, that property and lives are wholly at its mercy, that there are no longer any rights of man.—Six weeks later, when, through the protest ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... of suspense is not without precedent in archaeology. "Antiquarian lore," as Dr. Munro remarks by implication, can "distinguish between true and false antiquities." {5a} But time is needed for the verdict, as we see when Dr. Munro describes "the Breonio Controversy" about disputed stone objects, a controversy ...
— The Clyde Mystery - a Study in Forgeries and Folklore • Andrew Lang
... splendid robes of office, looked in amazement to see their Queen forget her state in such a presence, and outrage every precedent by crying out in the unlearned language of the people, before this stately company; and the face of the dignified Primate flamed with wrath at this unseemliness. But Caterina, noting nothing, turned to receive their homage ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... roused among Englishmen grew cooler in fact with every step which the Revolution took. While the Declaration of the Rights of Man roused France to a frenzy of enthusiasm, it was set aside as a dream by the practical islanders who based their rights on precedent and not on theory. The abolition of all social privileges on the 12th of August, the most characteristic step in the French Revolution, was met with grave disapproval by a people more alien from social equality than any people in Europe. Every ...
— History of the English People, Volume VIII (of 8) - Modern England, 1760-1815 • John Richard Green
... the minds of her girls to the extent of three full annual subscriptions for Josephine, Adelaide, and Madeline respectively; and that triplet of fair students, who, separately or conjointly, were at all times competent to the establishment of a precedent for the graceful charities of Hendrik good society, handsomely led off with a ten-dollar investment in "fountain" pens, "cream-laid assembly note," motto-wafers, Blessington envelopes "with crest and initial," ivory tablets, pencil-sharpeners, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... an excellent precedent for every other city and town in the Union. A few days ago the manager of a popular theatre there was fined $100 for advertising a spectacular exhibition by setting up indecent posters. It is high time ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... Do-funny, was unique as an individual, perhaps in the very fact of an individuality unembarrassed by the limitations of convention, of education and of precedent, he becomes in a sense typical of his ...
— Daddy Do-Funny's Wisdom Jingles • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... on to illustrate historically the separation of the sexes in places of public worship, from the time of the Jews and the primitive church down to the modern Greek Church, so that at least the early Methodists had good precedent for ...
— Neville Trueman the Pioneer Preacher • William Henry Withrow
... we suppose, whose nest-building we had watched with so much interest. She also had a youngster under her charge. But how was this! a brown baby clad like herself! Could it be that the sons and daughters of this warbler family outrage all precedent by wearing their grown-up dress in the cradle? We consulted the authorities and found our conclusion ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... at Christ Church was significant. Men felt that the days of monasteries were past, and the Church was ready to welcome and to extend the New Learning. But his changes were a dangerous precedent; as Fuller says with his usual quaintness: "All the forest of religious foundations in England did shake, justly fearing the King would finish to fell the oaks, seeing the Cardinal began to cut the underwood." Henry, however, when he swept away the monasteries, spared his great minister's ...
— The Charm of Oxford • J. Wells
... the Queen's resignation they had no precedent; for the solemnity of the King's coronation they had many; and the same is at large, with all the circumstances and ceremonies thereof, set down by one of their authors, Wexionius (Epit. Descriptionis Sueciae, lib. v. c. 6), from which the ceremonies of this Coronation were not much different, ...
— A Journal of the Swedish Embassy in the Years 1653 and 1654, Vol II. • Bulstrode Whitelocke
... law," said Madame Beattie. "They are very interesting personal questions, and I advise you to let them alone. You won't find any precedent for them ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... penalties, enforcing the most rigid etiquette. For he was one of those rare players who knew the game so thoroughly that while he, and the man he had taught, often ignored the classics of adversary play, the slightest relaxing of etiquette, rule, precept, or precedent, in his opponents, brought him out with a protest exacting the last item of ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... principle that there is an art or at least a craft of teaching is a condition precedent to any attempt to make teaching a profession in reality as ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... was a momentous one to Morse in more ways than one. The first of the historic lawsuits was to be begun at Frankfort, Kentucky,— lawsuits which were not only to establish this inventor's claims, but were to be used as a precedent in all future patent litigation. In his peaceful retreat on the banks of the Hudson he carefully and systematically prepared the evidence which should confound his enemies, and calmly awaited the verdict, firm in his faith that, however lowering the clouds, the sun would yet ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... have been still worse treated than the Arnolds!' And indeed, I have understood the Law-Courts, for some time after, found great difficulty to assert their authority: the parties against whom judgment went, taking refuge in the Arnold precedent, and appealing direct to ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... the past, it is strikingly original in presenting the ethics of the body as imperiously claiming recognition in the radical cure of inebriety. It forces attention to the physical and spiritual value of foods, and weaves precedent and precept into one of the most beguiling stories ...
— The Easiest Way in Housekeeping and Cooking - Adapted to Domestic Use or Study in Classes • Helen Campbell
... sowing and reaping. There is no dogma except belief in this extrahuman influence—no conception of moral effort as based on and sanctioned by a definite moral ideal, no struggle of the sort that we call spiritual. Religion consists of a body of practices whose authority rests on precedent; as it is supposed they have existed from time immemorial, they are held to be necessary to secure the well-being of the tribe (a sufficient supply of food, or victory over enemies); to the question why such ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... sole equipment for initiating the career of the human race was that peculiar faculty which made them human—the capacity of man for binding time; we know that they actually did that work of initiation, without any guidance or example, maxim or precedent; and we know that they were able to do it just because the power of initiation—the power to originate—is a ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... appears to have been one which has gone out of use, viz. right hands joined, such as is often observed on ancient coins. Tacitus (Hist. i. ll.) calls it absolutely dextras, right hands. Among us it was called a faith (una fede. Comp. Eng. "Plight my troth"), and not without precedent, for on the coins of Vitellius, &c. right hands thus joined bear the motto Fides. An esteemed writer (Nider), in his Formicarium, mentions a rustic virgin who desired to find a material ring as a token of her espousal ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 209, October 29 1853 • Various
... deputations of traitors for that direct purpose; 9. Their murder of their sovereign, declared by most of the members of the Convention, who spoke with their vote, (without a disavowal from any,) to be perpetrated as an example to all kings and a precedent for all subjects to follow. All these, and not the Scheldt alone, or the invasion of Holland, were urged by the minister, and by Mr. Windham, by myself, and by others who spoke in those debates, as causes for bringing France to a sense ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... captains watched Edwards' face as he pondered whether he should or should not permit them to remain in the game. He did, however, allow both to play. Of course, this ruling was establishing a dangerous precedent; therefore, the next year the Rules Committee incorporated a new rule to the effect that two captains of opposing teams could not by mutual agreement permit a player who ought to be removed for committing a foul ...
— Football Days - Memories of the Game and of the Men behind the Ball • William H. Edwards
... usual and the weather, but I only caught fragments of it. All the signs were propitious, and as it had been a fine harvest under similar conditions before, people said it would be fine this time. But, unlike the law, the weather acknowledged no precedent, and nobody could tell, though folk now thought they knew everything. How all things had changed since the Queen ascended the throne! Not long since Hilary was talking with a labourer, an elderly man, ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... Ireland; and here again his successor seems to think that even he, who had nothing whatever to do with it, can take shelter under the ample protection it affords to all shortcomings with respect to the Irish Famine. But however good and praiseworthy this purchase of Indian meal was, the precedent it afforded was not to be followed; for, says the First Minister, "if it were to be considered as establishing a principle, for the Government to apply the resources of the Treasury for the purchase of ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... agin international law an' all rule an' precedent—I'd tell 'im I was a British subject born in Australia, and wrap a Union Jack around me stummick, an' dare 'im to come on. How'd that be ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... it." (St. L. 16, 882; Plitt, Apologie, 18.) Father Aegidius, the Emperor's confessor, said to Melanchthon, "You have a theology which a person can understand only if he prays much." Campegius is reported to have said that for his part he might well permit such teaching; but it would be a precedent of no little consequence, as the same permission would then have to be given other nations and kingdoms, which could not be tolerated. (Zoeckler, ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... with Seor Posada, who observes that the vice-queens alone had the privilege of the entree, and seems to hesitate a good deal as to the advisableness of granting a permission which might be considered a precedent for others. However, I think he is too amiable to resist our united entreaties. I hold out as an argument, that C—-n, being the duplicado of the queen herself, my visit is equal to that of the vice-queen, which argument ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... can assure you it is," said Dunham, with a certain lady-like sweetness of manner which he had. "According to precedent, we ought to be ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... surcharge of the gloss or note of a later age, founded upon the fanciful traditions then prevailing with respect to the situation of the ancient Paradise." This certainly is cutting the knot; and, if erected into a precedent by the geologist, would no doubt greatly facilitate the labor of reconciliation. It would, however, be perilous work for him. "A wolf," says Plutarch, "peeping into a hut where a company of shepherds were assembled, saw them regaling themselves with a joint of mutton. 'Ye gods!' he exclaimed, ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... practice.[25] It is so apt, indeed, that one could almost suspect Pope himself of making the translation and submitting it to Harte or his publisher. Pope had already invoked Boileau's name and precedent in the letter from "William Cleland"; nothing could be more logical than for Pope to turn the esteemed Boileau's self-justification to his ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... and covenants, though made to your disadvantage, though afterward you perceive you might have done better; and let not any precedent act of yours be altered by any after-accident. Let nothing make you break your promise, unless it be unlawful or impossible; that is, either out of your nature or out of your civil power, yourself being under the power of another; or that it be intolerably inconvenient to yourself, and of ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... and tumbled for four hundred years without once touching them. Their ancestors had left France before Descartes or Newton had begun to teach the modern world to think. They knew no method of reasoning save by precedent, and had never caught the faintest reflection from the mind of that great, sweet thinker who said, "A stubborn retention of customs is a turbulent thing, no less than the introduction of new." To such ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... not, monsieur, if it is the law, and there is precedent for it, as I have shown you, and if it can be established that what I state is the truth—as established it can be ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... policeman across the way grew wings, or if the deep sea rose and washed out the chaos of the land. I should not raise my eyebrows if the daily press became the Little Sunbeam of the Home, or if Cabinet Ministers struck for a decrease of wages. I feel no security in facts, precedent seems no protection to me. The wisdom you can find in an Encyclopedia, or in Selfridge's Information Bureau, seems to me just a transitory ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... were justified by the neglect of the Valois; the princes of the blood, more recent and lofty, disdained the alliance of his humble kindred: the parliament, without denying their proofs, eluded a dangerous precedent by an arbitrary distinction, and established St. Louis as the first father of the royal line. [77] A repetition of complaints and protests was repeatedly disregarded; and the hopeless pursuit was terminated in the present century by the death of the last ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... the civil and religious rights of a people trampled on! But his praaetorship in Sicily has crowned his career of wickedness, and completed the lasting monument of his infamy. His decisions have violated all law, all precedent, all right. His extortions from the industrious poor have been beyond computation. Our most faithful allies have been treated as enemies. Roman citizens have, like slaves, been put to death with tortures. Men the most worthy have been ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... editor has been unable to find any precedent for Chapman's application of this name—which in the Book of Job denotes the whale or hippopotamus—to the chief of the ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... pages of the Folio as what they virtually are in so many cases—namely, as but little better than our modern proof-sheets. And they should be dealt with accordingly by a modern critic; but only on one condition precedent: he must be Shakespeare's peer. In default of this we can only humbly erase here, and reverently suggest there, summoning to our aid all possible knowledge, lest in plucking up the tares we pluck up ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... Wednesday, the 27th, I was again summoned below. I found Percy Anderson waiting there: he had obtained from the War Office an order to see me alone, without limitation of time. I understood that there was no precedent for such a concession; the general rule being that prisoners should only receive their friends in the presence of an officer, who is bound to watch and listen jealously, while no interview can be extended beyond fifteen minutes. Never, surely, was a call better timed. I was at my ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... fifty-dollar fine for any taxpayer, or tenant, who puts rubbish out on the curb on any other day save the two mentioned in the main ordinance," Janice whispered to the selectman; "otherwise you will set a bad precedent with your Clean-Up Day, instead of doing ...
— Janice Day at Poketown • Helen Beecher Long
... prevalence, observance; conventionalism, conventionality; mode, fashion, vogue; etiquette &c. (gentility) 852; order of the day, cry; conformity &c. 82; consuetude,.dustoor[obs3]. one's old way, old school, veteris vestigia flammae[Lat]; laudator temporis acti[Lat]. rule, standing order, precedent, routine; red-tape, red-tapism[obs3]; pipe clay; rut, groove. cacoethes[Lat]; bad habit, confirmed habit, inveterate habit, intrinsic habit &c.; addiction, trick. training &c. (education) 537; seasoning, second nature, acclimatization; knack &c. V. be wont &c. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... was against all precedent to hang an unconscious man and send him off to perdition without a chance to enter a plea for his soul, and he argued soberly, in the manner of a man who had a spirit of fairness in him, and a little gleam of reason and ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... he was under great obligations—'And Homer (damn him) calls'—it may be presumed that any body or any thing may be damned in verse by poetical license; and in case of accident, I beg leave to plead so illustrious a precedent."] ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... be dated from February 18, 1915, when Germany, citing as a precedent Great Britain's establishment of a military area in the North Sea, proclaimed a war zone "in the waters around Great Britain and Ireland, including the whole English Channel," within which enemy merchant vessels would be sunk without assurance of safety to passengers or crew. Furthermore, as ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... subject as a whole, its rhythmic and harmonic unity as opposed to the fragmentary manner of treatment of most of their contemporaries; the lyric passion in line and tint; the same originality which often became waywardness in the conception of subject in itself; the same revolt from all precedent; and the same passion for subtle gradation and infinite space, air, and light—and some of Rousseau's skies were the most vaporous I have ever seen. These are the fundamental agreements of the art of the two great masters, ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... Materiality and Death encourages in mankind the Hope of an existence beyond the impenetrable veil of physical limitation. And this at any rate may be admitted, namely, that that dynamic condition in which materiality arises is also the condition-precedent of Tridimensionality, of Force, of Time, and of Mutation. But we cannot thus account for the elan ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... Second had ordered it to be cancelled in his presence, and had, both by his own mouth and by a written message, assured the Houses that the step which had caused so much complaint should never be drawn into precedent. It would have been difficult to find in all the Inns of Court a barrister of reputation to argue in defence of a prerogative which the Sovereign, seated on his throne in full Parliament, had solemnly renounced a few years before. But ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... indeesputable fact. Toch!" No other combination of letters may convey the guttural, "Have I no' seen the lamps at warr'k mysel', after darr'k, at the end o' the roads that debouch upon the veld! The Dutchman would be able to plead precedent, I'm thinking." ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... Irish Executive and commanded by Irish officers, would be none the less formidable because it might in name be identified with an armed police, or, like the troops raised at the Cape or in Victoria, enjoy the ominous title of Volunteers. If the Colonial precedent were strictly carried out, British troops ought, from the time Ireland obtained an independent Parliament, to be withdrawn from the country. The acknowledged danger of foreign invasion, and the unavowed probability ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... a sin to save souls out of church? Don't you think the Sermon on the Mount a very fair precedent ...
— The Hallam Succession • Amelia Edith Barr
... honour, being considered in all cases as a protection. The chiefs agreed to confiscate the land of the aggressor to the King of England. The whole proceeding, however, in thus trying and punishing a chief was entirely without precedent. The aggressor, moreover, lost caste in the estimation of his equals and this was considered by the British as of more consequence than the confiscation ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... were celebrating. The day of our coming of age had thus arrived, if I may be allowed to say so. But instead of the Republics now attaining their majority—as they should have done, according to all precedent—minority would have been a more fitting word to describe the condition in which we now found ourselves—for, through the losses which we had just sustained, we were minus not only a large ...
— Three Years' War • Christiaan Rudolf de Wet
... chap," said Shepler. "I had occasion not long since to tell him that a certain business plan he proposed was entirely without precedent. His answer was characteristic. He said, 'We make precedents in the West when we can't find one to suit us.' It seemed so typical of the people to me. You never can tell what they may do. You see they were ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... heads this paper is intended to be Latin, and is modelled on the precedent of the De Amicitia, De Senectute, De Corona, and other time-honoured plagues of our innocent boyhood. It is meant to give dignity and authority to the subject with which it deals, as well as to rouse curiosity ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... all possibility of reunion. He referred to a late conversation with Peel, in which Peel had intimated his intention of remaining in parliament and acting for himself without party, to which Herbert replied that he knew of no minister who had done so except lord Bute, a bad precedent. Peel rejoined 'Lord Grenville,' showing that his mind had been at work upon the subject. He had heard him not long ago discussing his position with Lord Aberdeen and Sir James Graham, when he said, putting his hand ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... them, had we submitted to their dominion? Their perfidious conduct towards our king and his whole family, whom they deceived and decoyed into France under the promise of an eternal armistice, in order to chain them all, has no precedent in history. Their conduct towards the whole nation is more iniquitous, than we had the right to expect from a horde of Hottentots. They have profaned our temples; they have insulted our religion; they have assailed our wives; ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... massacred 220,000 Greeks; in Cyprus, 240,000; in Egypt, a very great multitude. Many of these unhappy victims were sawn asunder, according to a precedent to which David had given the sanction of his example. The victorious Jews devoured the flesh, licked up the blood, and twisted the entrails like a girdle round their bodies. See Dion Cassius, l. lxviii. p. 1145. * Note: Some commentators, among them Reimar, in his ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... stay in England with the nominal appointment as assistant surgeon to H.M.S. "Fisguard" at Woolwich, for "particular service," but with leave of absence from the ship so that he could live and pursue his avocations in London. There was a precedent for this course in the case of Dr. Hooker, when he had to work out the scientific results of the voyage of the ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... that descended upon them and demanded inflexibly to be taken up to Patusan was discomposing; his insistence was alarming; his generosity more than suspicious. It was an unheard-of request. There was no precedent. What would the Rajah say to this? What would he do to them? The best part of the night was spent in consultation; but the immediate risk from the anger of that strange man seemed so great that at last a cranky dug-out was got ready. The women shrieked with grief as it put off. ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... the soul of woman? As well essay to number the silk hairs on the moth's wing, or paint truly the hues in the blown bubble! The soul of woman dwells apart, subject to no laws, trammelled by no precedent; mysterious in its essence, strong in its very frailty, it passes through many phases to its ultimate end, working as all great agents work, silently and in ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... also as indicating that their activity to a good extent falls under that category of conspicuous leisure known as manners and breeding, that the learned class in all primitive communities are great sticklers for form, precedent, gradations of rank, ritual, ceremonial vestments, and learned paraphernalia generally. This is of course to be expected, and it goes to say that the higher learning, in its incipient phase, is a leisure-class occupation—more specifically ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... to take charge of their interests, and for this duty estates were set aside. This party or lineage was called ayllu If there was no second son, or if there was one who was incapable, the duty was to be passed on to the nearest and ablest relation. And that those to come might have a precedent or example, Manco Ccapac made the first ayllu and called it Chima Panaca Ayllu, which means the lineage descending from Chima, because the first to whom he left his ayllu or lineage in charge was named Chima, ...
— History of the Incas • Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa
... or praise; For so should I dishonour do To that sweet Power by which these Lays Alone are lovely, good, and true; Nor credence to the world's cries give, Which ever preach and still prevent Pure passion's high prerogative To make, not follow, precedent. From love's abysmal ether rare If I to men have here made known New truths, they, like new stars, were there Before, though not yet written down. Moving but as the feelings move, I run, or loiter with delight, Or pause to ...
— The Angel in the House • Coventry Patmore
... officer. If not an officer of the government, he is nothing. He is, at all events, deemed to be an officer of the government in foreign countries, and enjoys immunities as such. Besides, it is a dangerous precedent to name to any situation under a pretence like this, as the practice may become gradually enlarged. But I care nothing as to the legality of the common appointments of this nature, the question being as to the tone of the nominees. You may be assured that I shall ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... the devil vanished with great horrour; but Fryar Bacon comforted the gentleman, and sent him home with a quiet conscience, bidding him never to pay the devil's money back, as he tendred his own safety, which he promised for to observe." From these instances, Melanax might have quoted precedent for insisting on the literal execution of his stipulation with Malicorn, since, to give the devil his due, the strict legal interpretation appears always to have been applied to bargains ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... was modelled on the precedent of other royal funerals, but surely rarely was mourning so keen or sorrow ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... impossible. If the manager of a theatre saw fit to produce "adult" matter without excluding people under the age of eighteen, let us say, he would have to take his chance, and it would be a good one, of a prosecution. This latter expedient is less novel than the former, and it finds a sort of precedent in the legislative restriction of the sale of drink to children and the protection of children's morals ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... not the way, they said, to treat princes in their splendor and mysterious troubadours concealing kingly names; it was not in accordance with fable; myth had no precedent for it. She should have thrown her glove, they said, into some lion's den, she should have asked for a score of venomous heads of the serpents of Licantara, or demanded the death of any notable ...
— The Book of Wonder • Edward J. M. D. Plunkett, Lord Dunsany
... the forms of column sketched here have any existence in reality. They are purposely kept apart from imitation of accepted forms to get rid of the idea that architecture consists in the acceptance of any particular form sanctioned by precedent.] ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 633, February 18, 1888 • Various
... they were stern-faced and intense. They had made laws of their own, they had established a code. The violation of either was not to be countenanced. It was of no consequence to them that Judge Malone's methods were without precedent, that they were not even a travesty in the true ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... of one, that it was a love song, and of another, that it was a farewell composed by one of the Islanders that was going, in this epidemical fury of emigration, to seek his fortune in America. What sentiments would arise, on such an occasion, in the heart of one who had not been taught to lament by precedent, I should gladly have known; but the lady, by whom I sat, thought herself not equal to ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... Saint-Pierre. General Marmont, commanding the artillery, had already been sent forward to find a means of transporting cannon over the Alps. It was almost an impracticable thing to do; and yet it must be achieved. No precedent existed as a guide. Hannibal with his elephants, Numidians, and Gauls; Charlemagne with his Franks, had no such ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... post mortem it was found that his lungs were nearly gone.] Mr. Kermode endeavoured to prevail with Lord Bathurst, to authorise a grant of land; but Mr. Wilmot Horton, then Under Secretary, objected that there were millions of British subjects, whose claims were of the same kind, and that the precedent would be inconvenient. At the same time, men in chains were receiving grants of land, and emancipists as a matter of course; but the minister was opposed to admit a claim founded on birth, orphanage, and civilisation, lest it should multiply applicants. As if anything could have ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... and evening and noon as fitting hours of prayer, and one psalmist, in his enthusiasm, had even gone so far as to declare seven times a day to be not too often for giving God thanks. There was also the precedent of Daniel opening his windows toward Jerusalem three times a day. As the love for order and system grew year by year stronger in the Christian Church, the laws that govern ritual would be likely to become more stringent, and so very probably ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... was not pacified, and began to take counsel how they could turn Furetiere out of their body. There was no precedent for such a degradation, but a parallel was sought for in the fact that the Sorbonne had successfully ejected one of its most famous doctors, Arnauld. Meanwhile the suit went on, the Thirty-nine versus the One. Furetiere is said to have bowed for a moment ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... of Patricia Langdon, lest somehow what was said should get to her ears. She was one who knew how to retaliate, and to do so quickly. She was like a man in that she feared nothing, and hesitated at nothing, so long as she knew it to be right. A precedent had no force with her; if she desired to act, and there was no precedent for what she wished to ...
— The Last Woman • Ross Beeckman
... of this bill into a law will establish a precedent which will tend to destroy the equal independence of the several branches of the Government. Its principle places not merely the Senate and the Executive, but the judiciary also, under the coercive dictation of the House. The House alone will be the judge ...
— Messages and Papers of Rutherford B. Hayes - A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents • James D. Richardson
... formed a contrast so frightful with the heartless and cruel insensibility of the son, that the sight chilled their blood. The sentiment was only the more common, from the silent but general conviction, that the unfeeling criminal must be permitted to escape. There was, indeed, no precedent for leading the child of a prince to the block, unless it were for an offence which touched the preservation of the father's interests. Much was said in maxims and apophthegms of the purity and necessity of rigid impartiality in administering the affairs of life, but ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... reconciliation." Obviously the danger of an Apostle from a misinformed mob is no sort of evidence to divine approval or disapproval of his behaviour. {67} We shall later find that when Knox was urging on some English nonconformists the beauty of conformity (1568), he employed the very precedent of St. Paul's conduct at Jerusalem, which he rejected when it was urged ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... into Tidborough in the morning it was to know at once that this to-morrow gave no lie to its precedent day. It intensified it. The previous day foreshadowed war. The ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... Hunter, one of the commissioners, made a long reply to this, insisting that the recognition of Davis's power to make a treaty was the first and indispensable step to peace, and referred to the correspondence between King Charles I. and his Parliament as a trustworthy precedent of a constitutional ruler treating with rebels. Lincoln's face then wore that indescribable expression which generally preceded his hardest hits, as he remarked: 'Upon questions of history I must refer you to Mr. Seward, for he is posted in such ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... by a foreign state of any communication to a branch of the Government not contemplated by the Constitution for the reception of communications from foreign states might, if allowed to pass without notice, become a precedent for the address by foreigners or by foreign states of communications of a different nature ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Ulysses S. Grant • James D. Richardson
... preparation been free from a sort of noisy violence, a certain massive dullness of conception? Have we really made anything like a sane use of our resources? I do not mean of our resources in money or stuff. It is manifest that the next naval war will be beyond all precedent a war of mechanisms, giving such scope for invention and scientifically equipped wit and courage as the world has never had before. Now, have we really developed any considerable proportion of the potential human quality available to meet the demand for wits? What are ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... ourselves of provincialism. Society is far larger than America, or China, or Russia, or all the islands of the sea in combination. It may entail some straining at the mental leash to win this concept of society, but it must be won as a condition precedent to a fair and just estimate of what the function of education really is and what it is of which the schoolhouse must be an exponent. Society must be thought of as including all nations, tribes, and tongues. In our thinking, the word "society" ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... an old rule. Nobody knew when it first came into vogue. Mr. Eames, bibliographer of Nepenthe, had traced it down to the second Phoenician period, but saw no reason why the Phoenicians, more than anybody else, should have established the precedent. On the contrary, he was inclined to think that it dated from yet earlier days; days when the Troglodytes, Manigones, Septocardes, Merdones, Anthropophagoi and other hairy aboriginals used to paddle across, in crazy canoes, to barter the produce of their savage African glens-serpent-skins, ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... them.... But, the tale runs, the Governor looked——He certainly did establish a precedent at that dinner. Mockers say that Judge Pat McCarran ran a close second, because his Excellency is lean and lank, while Judge McCarran would make two of him one way, and almost half of him the other, and because what happened to Governor Boyle had also happened to ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... with obvious reluctance, but he made a condition precedent to his acceptance. "Le' 's see Hull first, just you 'n' me. I ain't strong for the police. We'll go to them when we've got an open ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine
... rigid tone, to put old wine into new bottles, which betrays a want of confidence in the expansive power of God. I hate with a deep-seated hatred all such attempts to bind and confine the rising tide of thought. I want to see religion vital and not formal, elastic and not cramped by precedent and tradition. And thus I love to see worship enshrined in noble classical buildings, which seem to me to speak of a desire to infuse the intellectual spirit of Greece, the dignified imperialism of Rome into the more timid and secluded ecclesiastical life, making it fuller, ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... finally agreed, then, that the Columbiad must be cast on the soil of either Texas or Florida. The result, however, of this decision was to create a rivalry entirely without precedent between the different towns of these ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... to decide justly with his people that he found himself swamped with cases of every sort and description. He tried to pass upon each case by its merits, regardless of law and precedent. Then other judges construed his decisions as law, and the lesser courts cited the upper ones, until Gibbon says, "There grew up such a mass of judge-made laws that a skilful lawyer could prove anything, and legal practise ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... now forever still; finding things to say that an assailed boy could not have found, simply because of the mysteriousness of his impulses to himself. I understood no more than the people who called upon me to explain myself. There was no precedent. I verily believe mine was the only case of a boy of my nationality and antecedents taking a, so to speak, standing jump out of his racial surroundings and associations. For you must understand that there was no idea of any sort of "career" in my call. Of Russia or Germany there could be no ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... done, or could do, anything different from other men; and, in spite of the mystery, one felt that he was transparently honest and sincere. He was always the same, always true to himself; but then, that 'self' was a something PER SE, which could not be categorically classed - precedent for guidance was lacking. There is little doubt Burton had gipsy blood in his veins; there was something Oriental in his temperament, and even in ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... his fiefs. In the war which followed and ended in 1204, Philip not only gained the great Norman dukedom, which gave him the command of Rouen and of the mouth of the Seine, as well as Anjou, Maine, and Poitou, the countries which held the Loire in their power, but established the precedent that a crown vassal was amenable to justice, and might be made to forfeit his lands. What he had won by the sword he held by wisdom and good government. Seeing that the cities were capable of being made to balance the power of the nobles, he granted them privileges which caused him to be esteemed ...
— History of France • Charlotte M. Yonge
... downfall of Iturbide, the malcontents in Central America bestirred themselves to throw off the Mexican yoke. On July 1,1823, a Congress declared the region an independent republic under the name of the "United Provinces of Central America." In November of the next year, following the precedent established in Mexico, and obedient also to local demand, the new republic issued a constitution, in accordance with which the five little divisions of Guatemala, Honduras, Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica were to become states of a federal union, ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... concerning the growth of the city of London was entitled "Another Essay," intimating that some other essay had preceded it, which was not to be found. I having been much importuned for that precedent essay, have found that the same was about the growth, increase, and multiplication of mankind, which subject should in order of nature precede that of the growth of the city of London, but am not able to procure the essay ...
— Essays on Mankind and Political Arithmetic • Sir William Petty
... all very well for a man to cling stubbornly to precedent, but if he clings long enough, there comes a time when to cling becomes akin to crime. Eagle Creek Smith still stubbornly held that rangecattle should be kept to the range. He waited until May was fast ...
— Rowdy of the Cross L • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B.M. Bower
... your Holiness, and even if it had been, as your Holiness knows better than we do, it would not be without precedent to reveal the facts which are necessary to be known in ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... leadership in the Commons, Graham had once thought that for Gladstone to sit on the treasury bench with Disraeli for his leader would be humiliation and dishonour. Later events had qualified this opinion. Of course, the abdication of Disraeli could not be made a condition precedent, but the concession would somehow be made, and in the Commons pre-eminence would be Gladstone's, be the conditions what they might. In fine, time was wearing fast away, Gladstone had reached the utmost vigour of his powers, and ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... to blame for this and how they first got in I do not know. But I understand that they first of all built a private college of their own close to Oxford, and then edged themselves in foot by foot. If this is so they only followed up the precedent of the recognised method in use in America. When an American college is established, the women go and build a college of their own overlooking the grounds. Then they put on becoming caps and gowns and stand and look over the fence at the college athletics. The male undergraduates, who ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... west comes the temple which bears a name not unlikely, but altogether impossible and unmeaning, the so-called temple of Concord. No reasonable guess can be made at its pagan dedication; in the fifteenth century of our era it followed the far earlier precedent of the temples in the akropolis. It became the church of Saint Gregory, not of any of the great pontiffs and doctors of the Church, but of the local bishop whose full description as Saint Gregory of the Turnips can hardly be written without ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... Paris when the Germans threatened the city and the French government moved to Bordeaux. He states that it was the duty of the diplomatic corps to go with the government and that it was according to diplomatic precedent. His own decision to remain in Paris was the result of a special permission from the United States government, authorizing him to use his own discretion. Under the circumstances he thought it best to remain in Paris, and to be represented at Bordeaux by Mr. Garret, with whom he was able ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood
... created band works featuring multiple melodies of multiple time signatures opposing and complimenting each other within the same piece. Ives was also a revolutionary atonal composer, who created, essentially without precedent, many atonal works that not only pre-date those of Schoenberg, but are just as sophisticated, and arguably even more so, than those of the ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... taste. The passage where Ardry and his French mistress talk to Borrow, she using her own language, is like "The Sentimental Journey." And, as Mr. Seccombe has suggested, Borrow found in Sterne's a precedent for the rate of ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... I shall know what concupiscence is working in her. She cannot come down to commit iniquity, there's my safety; but if she peep, if she put her nose abroad, there's demonstration of her pious will; and I'll not make the first precedent for a ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... treated when he was ordered to pitch his tent elsewhere, but the colonel never permitted any argument. I heard him tell Hollins that what was permissible while we were simply state troops was not to be considered precedent for his action when they were mustered into the national service. In his regiment, as in the well-disciplined regiments of any state, the officers and enlisted ...
— A War-Time Wooing - A Story • Charles King
... under which he is brought up, rendered cruel, merciless, and deceitful. There may be, and probably are, hardships inflicted by some of the landlords; but they are produced in most instances by criminal and precedent acts on the part of the people. In no country in the world are the rights of property so ill understood or so recklessly violated: the industrious man fears to surround his cottage with a garden, because his fruit and vegetables ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... on the other hand, have anticipated, that in proportion to the strength of character required for the effort, and to the absence of distracting sentiments, whether respect for precedent, or affection for ideal beauty, would be the energy exhibited in the pursuit of the special objects which the youths proposed to themselves, and their success ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... he resembled his father, who, on leaving Scotland after the failure of 1715, sent money to Argyll to compensate the country folk whose cottages had been burned in the war; an act without precedent or imitation. ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... "The memory and worth of your deceased grandfather deserves all honour and imitation, both from you and me; his 'Liber Famelicus,' his own story, written by himself, will be left to you, and was an encouragement and precedent to this larger work." Here is a family picture quite new to us; the heads of the house are its historians, and these records of the heart were animated by examples and precepts, drawn from their own bosoms; and, as Whitelocke feelingly expresses it, "all is recommended ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... tracks of two other deer, but they had no temptations for him. He wanted to solve the mystery of that spreading hoof-print, and to make sure that his shot had not been a clean miss. And now began a day which was without precedent in the Buck's whole history. Those woods are not the best in the world for a deer who has to play hide-and-seek with a man, for there are few bare ridges or half-wooded slopes from which he can look back ...
— Forest Neighbors - Life Stories of Wild Animals • William Davenport Hulbert
... supposed. Miranda was rather mollified by and pleased with the turn of events, although she did not intend to show it, or give anybody any reason to expect that this expression of hospitality was to serve for a precedent on any subsequent occasion. ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... There is no gulf across which the voice of human suffering cannot be heard, beyond which massacre and torture cease to be execrable. Simply as a patriot, again, a man should recognize that a nation may become great not merely by painting the map red, or extending her commerce beyond all precedent, but also as the champion of justice, the succourer of the oppressed, the established home of freedom. From the denunciation of the Opium War, from the exposure of the Neapolitan prisons, to his last appearance on the morrow of the Constantinople ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... found Mr. Dennis Farraday unprepared by any precedent established in the two foregoing hours, for between the artists and Mr. Vandeford there had been alone the matter of salary to be settled and not one of them had inquired whether they were being engaged to play a Billy Sunday or an Ethiopian slave. ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess
... Irish Bulls is said to have found its way into a catalogue of works upon natural history; with which precedent in my favour, and pending the inquiries of naturalists, ratcatchers, and farmers into the history of the above-named formidable invader, I hope MR. HIBBERD will have no objection to my intruding a bibliographical curiosity under the convenient head he has opened for ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 185, May 14, 1853 • Various
... smallest chance of his being able to get back in time for the visitors' innings. As he rode on he tried to imagine what would happen in consequence of that desertion, and he could not do it. His crime was, so far as he knew, absolutely without precedent in ...
— A Prefect's Uncle • P. G. Wodehouse
... another for the public official, and thus the executive is really independent of the judiciary, for the government has always a free hand, and can violate the law if it wants to do so without having anything to fear from the ordinary courts."[502] Although not without precedent in the Old Regime, the distinction between ordinary and administrative law in France was first clearly established by Napoleon in the constitution of 1799, and the system of administrative courts erected under that instrument has survived in large ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... the opinion of Appius appeared, as in fact it was, harsh and severe. On the other hand, the proposals of Verginius and Larcius appeared injurious, from the precedent they established: that of Larcius they considered especially so, as one that would destroy all credit. The advice of Verginius, was reckoned to be most moderate, and a happy medium between the other two. But through party spirit and men's regard for their ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius
... State Legislation; The State Constitutions; When Statutes Should Be Unconstitutional; Effect of the Initiative and Referendum; The True Value of Precedent. ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... of tremendous cosmic proportions, showing he had images of a might and power far exceeding the sane, normal strength of conception, with no precedent for them in experience. Even when the life-boat with its small load of castaways, shrieking, praying, or unconscious, was dancing on the great broad swells of the heavy, mineral ocean, Frederick had had no such feeling of the microscopic ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... speak to Sir W. Clerke about my wife's brother, who importunes me, and I doubt he do want mightily, but I can do little for him there as to employment in the army, and out of my purse I dare not for fear of a precedent, and letting him come often to me is troublesome and dangerous too, he living in the dangerous part of the town, but I will do what I can possibly for him and as soon as I can. Mightily troubled all this afternoon with masters coming to me ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... the slowness of this letter a precedent for delay, or imagine that I approved the incivility that I have committed; for I have known you enough to love you, and sincerely to wish a further knowledge; and I assure you once more, that to live in a house that contains such a father and such a son, ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... to her that Slade was fighting on the defensive, that he feared to let the Three Bar succeed and set up a precedent in defiance of the signs that ...
— The Settling of the Sage • Hal G. Evarts
... that to make the gift still sweeter, 55 The Duke has given him the very same In which he first saw service, and since then, Worked himself, step by step, through each preferment, From the ranks upwards. And verily, it gives A precedent of hope, a spur of action 60 To the whole corps, if once in their remembrance An old deserving ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... was not seriously uneasy about Ermine's health, for these nervous attacks were not without precedent, as the revenge for all excitement of the sensitive mind upon the much-tried constitution. The reaction must pass off in time, and calm and patience would assist in restoring her; but the interview with Lord Keith had been a revelation ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... law which we live under—and the law in those States which have adopted either the English, or the Roman law—descends from the past. It has been evolved precedent, by precedent, by the decisions of generation upon generation of judges, and it has for centuries been purged by amending statutes. Moreover we, the present male electors—the electors who are savagely attacked by the suffragist for our asserted ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... that sweet Power by which these Lays Alone are lovely, good, and true; Nor credence to the world's cries give, Which ever preach and still prevent Pure passion's high prerogative To make, not follow, precedent. From love's abysmal ether rare If I to men have here made known New truths, they, like new stars, were there Before, though not yet written down. Moving but as the feelings move, I run, or loiter with delight, Or pause to mark where gentle Love Persuades the soul from height to height. ...
— The Angel in the House • Coventry Patmore
... similar instance of a whole body of men, thus repelling every allurement of protection and preferment, of home, country, friends, fortune, possessions, for the still calls of piety, and private dictates of conscience, precedent may be defied, and the annals of virtue explored ...
— Brief Reflections relative to the Emigrant French Clergy (1793) • Frances Burney
... excited the wrath of the leaders of the opposite party, who induced some of their followers at last to throw the press and type of the obnoxious journal into the Bay, while they themselves, following the famous Wilkes' precedent, expelled Mackenzie from the legislature, and in defiance of constitutional law, declared him time and again ineligible to sit in the Assembly. The despotic acts of the reigning party, however, had the effect of awakening the ...
— The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People • John George Bourinot
... about; And o'er his crooked journey went The traffic of a continent. A hundred thousand men were led By one calf near three centuries dead. They followed still his crooked way, And lost one hundred years a day; For thus such reverence is lent To well-established precedent. ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... independently of historical diversities, sculpture presents every degree of the meretricious, the grotesque, and the beautiful,—more emphatically, because more palpably, than is observable in painting. The inimitable Grecian standard is an immortal precedent; the Mediaeval carvings embody the rude Teutonic truthfulness; where Canova provoked comparison with the antique, as in the Perseus and Venus, his more gross ideal is painfully evident. How artificial seems Bernini in contrast ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... finally in the train hold-up of '97. But the others we tried for rustling. We didn't have much of a case, as the law went then, and they'd have gone free if the woman hadn't turned evidence against them. The killin' was too much for her. And, as the precedent held good in a lot of other rustlin' cases, Larry's death was really the beginnin' of law and order ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... ground where he had been peeling potatoes at his leisure with a table knife, and proceeded to do as he was bid. He was of an obliging nature and could be relied upon to perform odd jobs not strictly his duty, so long as they did not establish a precedent. ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... struggles gallantly against its own inclinations; it becomes stubborn for honour's sake, and sacrifices everything to the noble pride of keeping its word. Though I have pardoned him now, do not consider this a precedent for the future. Whatever fortune has in store for me, I cannot think of giving my hand to the Prince of Navarre, until he has shown that he is completely cured of those gloomy fits which unsettle his reason, ...
— Don Garcia of Navarre • Moliere
... gentleman, "hated the vulgar crowd," and Nicolo Machiavelli, fifteen centuries later, denounced the nobles of Florence for their "easy-going contempt of everything and everybody"; so Lady St. Maur had plenty of historical precedent for ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... not the lesser? When the archbishop died here, as your Majesty was advised, the bishop of Zibu, who entered into his place, petitioned that he be given some gratuity from the salary enjoyed by the archbishop, because of the many expenses of living in this city—taking a precedent from the vacant see of the other archbishop, in which the treasury council assigned him one thousand two hundred pesos. On this occasion it seemed necessary, so that the bishop might be able to support himself, to assign him one thousand pesos annually; ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXIV, 1630-34 • Various
... of a whole year; preaching to them not to steal and at the same time stripping them of everything; and saying to them: "It seems to me that if I were the people I should be virtuous"? It is from England that we obtain the precedent which husbands should adopt in their houses. Those who have eyes ought to see that when the government is running smoothly the Whigs are rarely in power. A long Tory ministry has always succeeded an ephemeral Liberal cabinet. The orators of a national party resemble the rats which wear their teeth ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... be made plainly apparent. That an improvement will be effected must be clearly demonstrated, or the new status of affairs which will exist after the change, must be shown to have been already successfully tried. Here, as in law, custom and precedent are all powerful. It would be a difficult task to secure the general adoption of any system of time-reckoning which cannot be employed by all classes of the community. Business men would refuse to regard as a reform any proposition which introduced diversity where uniformity now exists, ...
— International Conference Held at Washington for the Purpose of Fixing a Prime Meridian and a Universal Day. October, 1884. • Various
... governor to remove them. His Excellency disclaimed any power under the circumstances to interfere. The House denounced a standing army in time of peace, without the consent of the General Court, as "without precedent, and unconstitutional."[363] In 1769 one of the courts of Massachusetts gave a decision friendly to a slave, who was the plaintiff. This stimulated the Negroes to an exertion for freedom. The entire colony was in a feverish state of excitement. ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... transcending the usual forms, he rather confused than advanced the public business. If he ever failed in the scrupulous regard due to the relative rights of Congress, it was so evidently without design that no conflict could ensue, or evil precedent be established. Truth he would receive from any one, but when impressed by others, he did not use their opinions till, by reflection, he had made them ...
— Memorial Address on the Life and Character of Abraham Lincoln - Delivered at the request of both Houses of Congress of America • George Bancroft
... Lords to sign their own death warrant. It was settled between Lloyd George and Mr. Asquith to take the House of Lords by the throat. Lloyd George was prepared for extreme measures, and Mr. Asquith, a student of English history, found out a way by means of ancient precedent. Twice before in the story of the British Parliament there had been similar episodes. In the reign of Queen Anne and in the reign of William IV. the Prime Minister of the day, encountering opposition from the House of Lords, had gone to the ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... called constitutions. Some of these of course are personal, and not to be followed as precedents, since this is not the Emperor's will; for a favour bestowed on individual merit, or a penalty inflicted for individual wrongdoing, or relief given without a precedent, do not go beyond the particular person: though others are general, and bind ...
— The Institutes of Justinian • Caesar Flavius Justinian
... for a sum of money—though it is too true that it was sold and published in a very unfinished state (which I have since regretted), to enable me to extricate myself from some engagements which fell suddenly upon me by the unexpected misfortunes of a very near relation. So that, to quote statute and precedent, I really come under the case cited by Juvenal, though not quite in the extremity of the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... important question presented by this bill been settled, in the language of the late Daniel Webster (who, while dissenting from it, admitted that it was settled), by construction, settled by precedent, settled by the practice of the Government, and settled ...
— History of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, • Edumud G. Ross
... his Most Christian Majesty, he desired me to renew his assurances of affection to the United States. The succeeding day his Majesty honored me with the accustomed present of his portrait. Republican strictness, and the utility of the precedent, lead me to refer it to the supreme representative of the majesty of the American people, the organ of that sovereign will ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. IX • Various
... which thus sets active the play of forces I shall call circumstance. If it has been long delayed, I have the precedent of all the story of human life as my excuse. For we are the children of circumstance. We move each in our little circle by a stout hedge encompassed. Circumstance suddenly will break the wall: some fellow man or woman ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... of our early sovereigns seems to afford a precedent for the mode in which divers gentlemen and persons of quality voluntarily showed civility towards Richard Evelyn, and for that in which several gentlemen of birth and estate testified their respect and affection for Humphrey Chetham. Nicholas Assheton also appears to have ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 211, November 12, 1853 • Various
... backed up by judicious use of the patronage, to carry his program through. At that, his own State rebelled and, through a resolution of the Legislature, put itself behind the candidacy of Senator Hugh L. White. The bold actions of his second Administration, defiant alike of precedent and opposition, had alienated many of the President's more intelligent and conservative followers. Yet the allegiance of the masses was unshaken; and when the Democratic convention assembled at Baltimore in ...
— The Reign of Andrew Jackson • Frederic Austin Ogg
... the Author has here endeavoured to execute has not, so far as he knows, the advantage of any near precedent in any literature, he hopes that a few explanatory words may be offered ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... reputation of Catiline, and his atrocious designs, the imprudence of his accomplices, the treason of several, the strategy of Cicero, the angry outbursts of Cato, and the terror of the Senate, baffled this enterprise, which, in furnishing a precedent for expeditions against the rich, would perhaps have saved the republic, and given peace to the world. But Rome could not evade her destiny; the end of her expiations had not come. A nation never was known to anticipate its punishment by a sudden and unexpected conversion. Now, ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... Gazette. He called them before him, and required them on oath to abjure the communication, three officers refused. Poor Gage is to be scape-goat, not for this, but for what was a reason against employing him, incapacity. I Wonder at the precedent! Howe is talked of for his successor. Well, I have done with you!—Now I shall go ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... distinctions of good society, and the general exhilaration that prevailed in our party, I was far from being perfectly happy. To own the truth, I had left my heart in Picardie. I do not say I was in love; I am far from certain that there is any precedent for a pocket-handkerchief's being in love at all, and I am quite sure that the sensations I experienced were different from those I have since had frequent occasion to hear described. The circumstances which called them forth were ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... interrupted the lady-in-waiting and those who shared her opinion. "I cannot bring myself to establish such a precedent," she said, in her usual haughty tone. "It is I who have to walk first, and I shall only go half-way across the courtyard of the Louvre. It's quite far enough for the Holy Wafer-box; what's the use of walking any further for the ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... left cheek. He looked out of the window into the little green court. Possibly it was a technical question, who should say. The financial relations of the city treasury with other brokers before Frank had been very lax. Every banker knew that. Perhaps precedent would or should govern in this case. He could not say. Still, it was dangerous—not straight. If Frank could get them out and deposit them it would be so ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... Association have expressed themselves as satisfied with the prices fixed for Winter milk. In other agricultural quarters this action is regarded as a dangerous precedent, the view being that no farmer should ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 26, 1917 • Various
... relieve the monotony of the horizontalism, a simple arcading has been inserted in the wall spaces above the central window, and above the aisle windows (plain lancets) on the right and left. Independently of the question of precedent, the absence of a doorway in this front is quite intelligible at the present day, when the church wall almost touches the narrow public pavement, and the close street of lofty business houses allows no room for perspective, ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Southwark Cathedral • George Worley
... be seen. Half a dozen of your men may be mown down by a machine gun. You will be blamed and will blame yourself for not having decided to remain behind the parapet. If you do not go out you may set a precedent, and night after night the work will be postponed, till at last it is too late, and the Hun has got through, and raided the trench. If you hesitate or ask advice you are lost. You have to make up your mind in an instant, and to stand by ...
— A Student in Arms - Second Series • Donald Hankey
... Ferdinando King of Naples, Lorenzius Medici, and Ludovicus Sforza, potentates, the one of Florence, the other of Milan. Neither is the opinion of some of the Schoolmen, to be received, that a war cannot justly be made, but upon a precedent injury or provocation. For there is no question, but a just fear of an imminent danger, though there be no blow given, is a lawful ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... made an open issue of the question as to whether the lieutenant-governor was eligible to become governor by succession, under the Constitution, or that a successor should be chosen at an election to be called by act of the Legislature. There had been no precedent to this date. The question was fiercely agitated, in and out of the legislative halls, during two years of the executive term, before a subsidence of partisan feeling ended the contest. Governor Slaughter held firmly to his convictions of constitutional right, came safely through the angry waves ...
— The Battle of New Orleans • Zachary F. Smith
... of scurvy were such a customary accompaniment of long voyages in those days that the condition of Flinders' company at the termination of this protracted navigation was healthy almost beyond precedent. But this young captain had learnt how to manage a ship in Cook's school, and had profited from his master's admonitions. Cook, in his Endeavour voyage of 1770 and 1771, brought his people through a protracted period at sea with, "generally ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... concerning whom history is singularly brief; we know only that he was of a virtuous and austere renown—that he wrote a great number of verses, as little durable as his laws [98]. As for the latter—when we learn that they were stern and bloody beyond precedent—we have little difficulty in believing that ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... this precedent as an excuse for digressing at a moment when I have burned down a small settlement, dispatched a fellow being, and left my heroine alone in the company of an escaped convict who has just developed insanity as a ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... recent prose is the number of books devoted to the study of American letters; and that, like the study of nature, is a phenomenon which is without precedent. Notwithstanding Emerson's plea for independence in The American Scholar (1837), our critics were busy long after that date with the books of other lands, thinking that there was no American literature worthy of their attention. ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... of cleavage in the Unionist camp began to appear. Already, landlords in the South and West had found a common ground of action with representatives of the tenants. It was felt, alike in Ireland and England, that this precedent ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... confessed, and indeed, exulted in their act. At their trials they obtained the highest possible characters. It was shown that they had been actuated solely by superstition, and it was urged that they only followed the highest ecclesiastical precedent. The jury recommended them to mercy, and they were only sentenced to pay twenty-five francs a year to the husband of the victim, and to be imprisoned for four months. ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... He had picked up a little English, and loafed around the mining-camps picking up a meal where he could get it. He called himself "Captain Charley," and, like a true native American, was proud of his title. If it was self-assumed, he was still following the precedent set by a vast host of captains, majors, colonels, and generals, who never wore a uniform or hurt anybody. He made his appearance at the little parsonage on the hill-side in Sonora one day, and, thrusting his bare head into the ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... orders deliberated together in one hall, although against precedent and legality, the course of revolution might have been directed into a different channel; or if an able and resolute king had been on the throne, he might have united with the people against the nobles, and secured all the reforms that were imperative, without invoking revolution; or ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... which Napoleon claimed a precedent in the history of the ancient Franks, was to have two objects: first, to make such alterations and reforms in the Constitution of the Empire as circumstances should render advisable; secondly, to ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... said Octavian. There was an anxious ring in his voice as he named the time-limit; was there not the precedent of a German king who did open-air penance for several days and nights at Christmas- time clad only in his shirt? Fortunately the children did not appear to have read German history, and half an hour seemed long ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... English literature and English culture, all that great erudition which, once accepted, frees the mind from restlessness, I should have had to give up my Irish subject matter, or attempt to found a new tradition. Lacking sufficient recognised precedent I must needs find out some reason for all I did. I knew almost from the start that to overflow with reasons was to be not quite well-born, and when I could I hid them, as men hide a disagreeable ancestry; and that there was no help ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... the year 186—— the entire world was singularly excited by a scientific experiment without precedent in the annals of science. The members of the Gun Club, a circle of artillerymen established at Baltimore after the American war, had the idea of putting themselves in communication with the moon—yes, with the moon—by sending a bullet to her. ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... on the flat surface of a transparent body in which they should spread in this manner. I took AB for the exposed region of the surface. And, since a ray perpendicular to a plane, and coming from a very distant source of light, is nothing else, according to the precedent Theory, than the incidence of a portion of the wave parallel to that plane, I supposed the straight line RC, parallel and equal to AB, to be a portion of a wave of light, in which an infinitude of points ...
— Treatise on Light • Christiaan Huygens
... out that a dangerous precedent would be established; that forest fires would be sure to originate from the locomotive's sparks, and that the Poquette woods were the center of the great ...
— The Rainy Day Railroad War • Holman Day
... been said that the town-governments of New England were established without any conscious reference to precedent; but, however this may be, they are certainly not without precedents and analogies, to enumerate which will carry us very far back in the history of the Aryan world. At the beginning of his essay on the "Growth ...
— American Political Ideas Viewed From The Standpoint Of Universal History • John Fiske
... may take a man's life in God's name, there can be no objection to telling him a lie. The violation of the safe-conduct which brought Hus to Constance was a fine precedent for breaking faith with a heretic. When Luther came to Worms to answer for himself before Emperor and Diet, the Pope's representatives reminded Charles of the principle which had lighted the fires at ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... execution. The clerk knew better than to disobey an order from such a source, and the plaintiff accordingly took nothing by his verdict. The unrighteous magistrate escaped the penalty of his misdeeds, and furnished a sort of standing precedent for magisterial iniquity. Other equally flagrant perversions of justice are recorded by the same authority. An illegal and unjustifiable extent issued, at the suit of the Crown, against one of the civil officers. It lasted for years; yet the officer dared not resist oppression ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... the Portuguese were later utilized by the Spaniards in their American colonies. The slave-trade was a sombre precedent, followed only too readily; the system of grants of newly discovered territory to captains or contractors who would continue its discovery or conquest, exploit its resources, and pay to the crown a large share of its ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... an heir; and so, even unto this day, the head of that ancient house still weareth his hat or helm before the King's Majesty, without let or hindrance, and this none other may do. {3} Invoking this precedent in aid of my prayer, I beseech the King to grant to me but this one grace and privilege—to my more than sufficient reward—and none other, to wit: that I and my heirs, for ever, may SIT in the presence of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Investigation proved the mine to be of no great depth, and, thanks to the pumps of the Silver Stream, as dry as a bone. A company of reliable small boys was formed with exceeding caution and a fine observance of rule and precedent; for Dick Haddon did nothing by halves, and forgot nothing that might give an air of reality to the creations ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... is a precedent to teach wicked men; That when they leave religion, and turn atheists, Their own abilities leave them. Pray you take comfort, I will endeavour you shall be his guardians In his distraction: and for your land, Mr. Wellborn, Be it good or ill in law, I'll be an ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... cause for blame, because he was persuaded His Majesty's Ministers had not acted with any ill intention, it was still a principle never to be departed from, because it never could be departed from without establishing a precedent which might lead to very serious abuses. He lamented that the privy council, who had received no petitions from the people on the subject, should have instituted an inquiry, and that the House of Commons, the table of which had been loaded with petitions from various parts of the kingdom, should ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... piquant face. "I should certainty grant whatever you asked me if it lay in my power. As a matter of fact, however, I think Jasper said that, as they were unable to make Briar Farm pay, would I lower the rent; and as that would be creating a precedent for ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... attending to the mule and preparing my porridge and eggs for breakfast. He thought I liked my eggs hard, and each morning construed my look of remonstrance into one of approbation. It is very true of the Chinaman that precedent determines his action. The first morning Laohwan boiled the eggs hard and I could not reprove him. Afterwards of course he made a point of serving me the eggs every morning in the same way. I could say in Chinese "I don't like them," but the morning ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... were swept from their moorings, and reason destroyed. All historic perspective was lost. Our first assassination, there was no precedent for comparison. It had been over two hundred years in the world's history since the last murder of a great ruler, ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... the obsequies of his friend, with reinvigorated heart he turns once more to the future—"To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new." A singular ending, no doubt, to an elegy! But it is blind and hasty to conclude that therefore the precedent laments are "not to be considered as the effusion of real passion." A soldier's burial is not the less honoured because his comrades must turn from his grave to give their thought and strength and courage to the cause which was also his. The maimed ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... ages, and revered all that they said and did. And the rural Chinese to-day says that what did for the sages of olden times must do for him to-day. The conservative instinct leads the Chinese to attach undue importance to precedent, and therefore the people at Hong-shih-ai, knowing that the village has been in the same pitiable condition for generations, live by conservatism, and make no effort ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... the truce, and information that civil matters could not be entertained in any convention between army commanders. General Sherman has been guided in his negotiations with Johnston entirely by what he thought was precedent authorized by the President. He had before him the terms given by me to Lee's army and the call of the rebel legislature of Virginia authorized by General Weitzel, as he supposed with the sanction of the President ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... the inconveniences I have just now stated; and the act itself was esteemed so highly detrimental and injurious to the royal prerogative, that it was repealed by statute 16 Car. II. c. 1. From thence therefore no precedent ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... over the dusty records, not without inconvenience to myself, I can't discover one single instance of a departure from it since history began. There is no record, gentlemen, of any such event having taken place. I may say, without fear of contradiction, that no precedent exists. We may, therefore, regard it as a fixed principle of common law, from which no departure can be legal, without the special and express sanction of all the nation, or of its representatives assembled. We may even go further, and hazard the opinion, not without some authority, that ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... good thing, he would give him back his purse again. It is true that he took people's money more by force than fraud; and the law (being used to the inverse method) was bitterly moved against him, although he could quote precedent. These things I do not understand; having seen so much of robbery (some legal, some illegal), that I scarcely know, as here we say, one crow's foot from the other. It is beyond me and above me, to discuss ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... movement might develop a hot war similar to the anti-Hitler coalition of the 1930's. If that precedent is followed, however, the defeat of the United States would be followed by a period of fragmentation similar to or even more intense than the fragmentation of the 1950's ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... a paragraph appeared in an illustrated paper contradicting the report (published in an earlier issue) that a certain titled Lady had been present at somebody's party. This novel departure should be useful as a precedent to the creme de la creme of suburban society. In future, such announcements as the following may be expected to be frequently found in the "Fashionable Intelligence" columns of the more aspiring of our Penny Socials:—"On Thursday last Mr. and Mrs. MADEIRA TOP-FLOOR SMITHIES ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, April 5, 1890 • Various
... executed, and that similar writs were in existence in England and made use of there on the authority of English statutes. The pleas against them advanced by Otis took cognizance of the fact that the Writs were irreconcilable with the charter of the Massachusetts Colony, that English precedent for their enforcement had no application in America, and that taxation by the Motherland and compulsory acts of the nature of the Writs did open violence to the rights and liberties of the people and were inherently arbitrary ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... Collectivism," Alienist and Neurologist, November, 1902) that this is in "a most natural and just view." In France at the Revolution a law of the 28th Germinal, in the year III, to some extent admitted the irresponsibility of the pregnant woman generally,—following the classic precedent, by which a woman could not be brought before a court of justice so long as she was pregnant,—but the Napoleonic code, never tender to women, abrogated this. Pinard does not consider that the longings of pregnant women are irresistible, and, consequently, regards ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... was a problem which had no precedent, and the solution would be a revelation of the human mind and heart. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Shall be my precedent; as thou got'st Milan, I'll come by Naples. Draw thy sword: one stroke Shall free thee from the tribute which thou payest; And I the ...
— The Tempest - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... she entreated him to give up the dinner and to spend his last evening with her; and upon his gentle but definite answer that such a departure from precedent was hardly possible, she fell to sobbing with the passionate unrestraint of a child. In vain Desmond tried to reason with her, to assure her that these big nights on the eve of active service were a time-honoured custom; and that all married ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... for him—but again Judge Maynard's measured progress was momentarily barred. Curiosity may have prompted it, and then again it may have been that he was betrayed by the very fury of his desperate, eleventh hour effort to assert his right to the center of that stage—the right of long-established precedent—yet even those two long files of old men gasped aloud their dismay at his temerity when Old Jerry thrust his way forward and planted himself for a second time squarely in the great ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... not yet acquainted with the little god. If your lover consents to the sacrifice you have demanded, he will indicate a weakness of character which augurs ill for the future: and if you insist upon the sacrifice, you will establish a selfish precedent which can only make you a tyrant in your own domain, and at the same time belittle your husband in ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... If followed up it will result in a saturnalia of crime in this community. Already several of our young men are reading dime novels and taking lessons in banditry; but the sheriff has stated that this parole will not be considered a precedent. The affair has resulted in some good, however. In addition to placing the young man under Christian influences, and others, it has unearthed a patch of the biggest, best, ripest and sweetest wild strawberries ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... Resurrectionist" and "The Smile on the Portrait." The first of these is a haunting affair of body-snatching, or rather of an early escapade of the notorious BURKE, who was asked to supply a red-haired corpse, and not finding one produced instead a gentleman who had yet to fulfil the condition precedent to body-snatching, i.e. who had to be killed first and snatched afterwards. This is certainly as grim as anything I have met over the Castellated signature. Beside it, "The Smile on the Portrait," the tale of a jealous husband who becomes a maniac, is almost soothing. They had clearly ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug 8, 1917 • Various
... had sent him out into the garden to pick onions. If she had done her duty by him then, he would not have been now in his present most unsatisfactory position, and she would still have had her nose. The fathers and mothers in the audience applauded, but the children, scenting addition to precedent, looked glum. ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... within narrow boundaries; traced backward through a number of generations so limited that they might be counted on one's fingers, the human personae, did not absolutely disappear, but they emerged again, and in a precedent cycle, only as divinities. The consciousness of human destiny was thus elevated by infinite grades, but not of this destiny as human, as depending for its splendors upon the human will. It was an exaltation that consisted in the sacrifice of humanity. No definite ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... present. It is by no means improbable, however, that these hydrocarbons are, at least in part, products of the action of the sulphuric acid. Cahours and Kraemer's and Godzki's observations on the higher fractions of crude wood spirit, in fact, furnish a precedent for this view. Referring to the results obtained by Anderson, Tilden, and Renard, the author suggests that rosin spirit perhaps contains hydrides intermediate in composition between those of the CnH{2n-6} and CnH{2n} ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... be mad, but one seems to see in politics over here a lack of definition and purpose, a tendency to cling to the abstract and to precedent—'the mainstay of the mandarin' one of the papers calls it; that's a good word—that give one the feeling that this kingdom is beginning to be aware of some influence stronger than its own. It lies, of course, in the great West, where the corn ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... to face with men in winning their friendship, and my partner's displeasure put me on my mettle. I felt that when I got into touch with this gentleman I could convince him that what he proposed would result in a bad precedent. My reasoning (in my own mind) was logical and convincing. I went to see him, and put forth all the arguments that I had so carefully thought out. But he stormed about, and in the end I had the further humiliation of confessing to my partner that I had failed. I had been ...
— Random Reminiscences of Men and Events • John D. Rockefeller
... determined, adjudged, and discussed, by the course of the Parliament, and not by the Civil Law, nor yet by the common laws of this realm used in more inferior courts." And after founding himself on this very precedent of the 11th of Richard II., he adds, "This is the reason that Judges ought not to give any opinion of a matter of Parliament, because it is not to be decided by the common laws, but secundum Legem et Consuetudinem Parliamenti: and so the Judges in ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... prayer may the signs of the times be correctly interpreted and the imminence of the Lord's appearing be apprehended. To the unwatchful and the wicked the event will be as sudden and unexpected as the coming of a thief in the night.[1571] But we are not left without definite information as to precedent signs. Biblical prophecies bearing upon this subject we have heretofore considered.[1572] As later scriptures affirm: "Before the great day of the Lord shall come, Jacob shall flourish in the wilderness, and the Lamanites shall ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... Show me a single precedent." Bradshaw rose up in a passion: "Sir, we do not sit here to reply to your questions. Plead to the accusation, guilty or ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 277, October 13, 1827 • Various
... Ind." Of fifteen pictures of this subject, which he painted at different times, the finest undoubtedly is that in the Madrid Gallery. Another, also very fine, is in the collection of the Marquis of Westminster. In both these, the Virgin, contrary to all former precedent, is not seated, but standing, as she holds up her Child for worship. Afterwards we find the same position of the Virgin in pictures by Vandyck, Poussin, and other painters of the seventeenth century. It is quite an innovation on the old religious arrangement; ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... enemies of autocracy, and the strongest advocates of republicanism and racialism, in all parts of the world. The French Revolution opened a new era for nationalism, both directly and indirectly. The deposition of the Bourbons was a national act which might be a precedent for other oppressed peoples. And when the Revolution itself began to trample on the rights of other nations, an uprising took place, first in Spain and then in Prussia, which proved too strong for the tyrant. The apostasy of France from her own ideals of liberty proved the futility of mere doctrines, ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... were gaining an importance which they had not had in his own youth. His own mind was divided, for a younger brother of his had been sent to Germany when he failed in some examination, thus creating a precedent but since he had there died of typhoid it was impossible to look upon the experiment as other than dangerous. The result of innumerable conversations was that Philip should go back to Tercanbury for another term, and then should ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... betray passions and mental habits so singularly generous and pure. And why? Because he did not believe in the necessity of what is vulgar, and did not pay that demoralising respect to it, under the title of fact or of custom, which it exacts from most of us. The past seemed to him no valid precedent, the present no final instance. As he believed in the imminence of an overturn that should make all things new, he was not checked by any divided allegiance, by any sense that he was straying into the vapid or fanciful, ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... professions of anxiety to help local authorities, I did not," said the Chancellor, "expect the right hon. gentleman and his friends would go rummaging in the dustbins of ancient precedent, to find obstacles to place in the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, July 1, 1914 • Various
... was founded chiefly on hearsay, and that the greatest part of it was false; that it had undergone no cross-examination; that it was unconstitutional; and that, if they admitted it, they would establish a dangerous precedent, and abandon their rights. It was urged on the other hand by Mr. Courtenay, that it could not be ex parte evidence, because it contained testimony on both sides of the question. The circumstance also of its being contradictory, ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... has promised to break up all trusts. He can do so only by proceeding at law. If he proceeds at law, he can hope for success only by taking what I have done as a precedent. In fact, what I did as President is the base of every action now taken or that can be now taken looking toward the control of corporations, or the suppression of monopolies. The decisions rendered in various cases brought by my direction constitute the authority on which Mr. Wilson must base ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... other passages of the foregoing report, declares that the record made abroad by the United States Navy, in co-operation with the navies of Great Britain, France, Italy, and Japan, is without precedent in allied warfare. He pays a high tribute to the efficiency of Admiral Sims, Commander-in-Chief of American naval forces in European waters; of Rear-Admiral Rodman, in command of the American battleships with the British fleet; of Vice-Admiral Wilson, in France; Rear-Admiral Niblack, ...
— Our Navy in the War • Lawrence Perry
... then stopped a minute, and whispered with his junior. After which he turned to the Judge. "My Lord, we that are of counsel for the crown desire to do nothing that is hard where a person's life is at stake. We yield to the prisoner any indulgence for which your Lordship can find a precedent in your reading; but no more: and so we ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... not impossible, to get the body as at present constituted elected at the start, for scattered as the artists of the Dominion are, few knew the capabilities of others outside of his own neighbourhood. Following, as we will have to do here therefore, an English precedent, it was thought best that the first list should be a nominated one. However carefully this has been attempted, some omissions and faults have been made, and these will be corrected, for the plan followed at the commencement will not be pursued hereafter, but at a general meeting ...
— Memories of Canada and Scotland - Speeches and Verses • John Douglas Sutherland Campbell
... on which a serious resolution cannot be grounded. The best, therefore, that the Captain expects will be to get the matter delayed, which is very hard on the brave Captain and his honest owners, and will be a bad precedent for others, who may venture into the European seas. I have done every thing in my power, and am in hopes from the strong assurances given me, that all will be settled to my satisfaction in this affair, but cannot but feel on the occasion as well for the Captain as for the public. ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. I • Various
... of great nations—such, for instance, as were embodied in those Palladia, or protesting talismans, which capital cities, whether Pagan or Christian, glorified through a period of twenty-five hundred years, we shall find a long succession of these enchanted pledges, from the earliest precedent of Troy (whose palladium was undoubtedly a talisman) down to that equally memorable, and bearing the same name, at Western Rome. We may pass, by a vast transition of two and a half millennia, to that great talisman of Constantinople, the triple serpent, (having perhaps an original reference ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... haughtiness for dignity: his study is his toilet, and his mind, like his face, is a vacuity neither sensible, intelligent, nor agreeable. He has few associates, for few will accept him for a companion. With his superiors in rank, his precedent honorary distinction yields him no consideration; with his equals, it places him upon too familiar a footing; while with his inferiors, it renders him tyrannical and unbearable. His mornings, between school hours, are spent ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... only by the close vote of 53 to 50 that I be seated. George D. Tillman, now a member of Congress from South Carolina, made a very bitter speech against seating me. He thought the insolence of this Yankee was beyond precedent in claiming to represent the grand old parish of St. Helena, which had been represented in the past by Middleton, Rhett, Bull and other distinguished citizens of the State. In a speech that was really prophetic, he predicted that to admit me ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... indeed beautiful. Springing from a long line of American descent, she was one of those wonderful working-class blooms which occasionally appear, defying all precedent of forebears and environment, apparently without cause or explanation. She was a beauty in color, the blood spraying her white skin so deliciously as to earn for her the apt description, "peaches and cream." She was a beauty in the ...
— The Game • Jack London
... the means of flight from the dungeon or other imminent peril. The dread of ridicule, that conscience of all poets who write for the world of fashion, is very visible in the care with which he avoids all bolder flights as yet unsanctioned by precedent, and abstains from everything supernatural, because such a public carries not with it, even to the fantastic stage of the opera, a belief in wonders. Yet this fear has not always served as a sure guide to Metastasio: besides such an extravagant use of the "aside," as often ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... next morning, when there was nothing left of the Equinoxes, because the Precession had preceded according to precedent, this 'satiable Elephant's Child took a hundred pounds of bananas (the little short red kind), and a hundred pounds of sugar-cane (the long purple kind), and seventeen melons (the greeny-crackly kind), and said to ...
— Just So Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... itself unbidden in his mind and was frowned down with a blush of apology to himself. And yet he remembered his coquetry with the Lady Ta-meri as some small defense in the form of precedent. ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... been permitted to leave the stand Wiseman arose to address the court on behalf of the plaintiff. He spoke in his own peculiar sledge-hammer style, sonorously striking the anvil and ringing all the changes upon law, custom, precedent, and so forth that always gave the children into the custody of the father. And he ended by demanding that the children be at once ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... eating her meals or asleep in her bed, absolute silence on Mrs. Presty's part was a circumstance without precedent in the experience of her daughter. Mrs. Presty was absolutely silent ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... standards of the old system rather than to the rules of the new, and I cheerfully admit that it is abundantly supported by precedents—precedents written in characters of blood upon almost every page of human history. Austria furnishes the most recent precedent; it was Austria's firmness that dictated the ultimatum against Serbia, which ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... why. Types.—[They had to deal with a carnal people and to render them the depositary of the spiritual covenant.] To give faith to the Messiah, it was necessary there should have been precedent prophecies, and that these should be conveyed by persons above suspicion, diligent, faithful, unusually zealous, and known ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... Pinkey, he formed partisans among the discontented nobles, won from his brother the affections of the young king, and believing every thing ripe for an attack on his usurped authority, he designed to bring forward in the ensuing parliament a proposal for separating, according to ancient precedent, the office of guardian of the king's person from that of protector of the realm, and for conferring upon himself the former. But he discovered too late that he had greatly miscalculated his forces; his proposal was not even permitted to come to ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... been called by Professor Owen metagenesis. In this case "the new parts are not moulded upon the inner surface of the old ones. The plastic force has changed its course of operation. The outer case, and all that gave form and character to the precedent individual, perish and are cast off; they are not changed into the corresponding parts of the new individual. These are due to a new and distinct developmental process," &c.[887] Metamorphosis, however, graduates so insensibly into metagenesis, that the two processes cannot be distinctly ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... the sense of danger was not so near as that of loneliness—of a pervading silence without precedent in her experience, as if its master's soul in flitting had, whatever Scripture may say, taken something out of the house with it. 'Lizabeth had known this kitchen for a score of years now; nevertheless, to-night it was unfamiliar, with emptier corners and wider intervals ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... in skirmishes outside the city sufficed to spread extremely disquieting rumors as to the size to which his band had grown; his way of waging warfare with ruffians in disguise who slunk about under cover of darkness with pitch, straw, and sulphur, unheard of and quite without precedent as it was, would have rendered ineffectual an even larger protecting force than the one which was advancing under the Prince of Meissen. After reflecting a short time, the Governor determined therefore to suppress altogether the decree he had received; he merely posted ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... for ballad poetry (Spectators 70, 74, 85) was not a sheer novelty. He had a ringing English precedent in Sidney, whom he quotes. And he may have had one in Jonson; at least he thought he had. He cited Dryden and Dorset as collectors and readers of ballads; and he might have cited others. He found comfort in the fact that Moliere's Misanthrope ...
— Parodies of Ballad Criticism (1711-1787) • William Wagstaffe
... remember that the unsuccessful claimant in the Bearsdale case got a barony? That's our precedent. But it's felt not to go quite all the way—because there was a doubt there. (Luckily for Mina she was not by to hear.) But it is felt that in the event of the two branches of your family being united it would be proper to—to obliterate past—er—incidents. ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... was uneventful. Carthoris and I were wrapped in the gloomiest of thoughts. Kantos Kan was sombre in contemplation of the further calamity that might fall upon Helium should Zat Arrras attempt to follow the age-old precedent that allotted a terrible death to fugitives from the Valley Dor. Tars Tarkas grieved for the loss of his daughter. Xodar alone was care-free—a fugitive and outlaw, he could be no worse off in ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... omnes! And thus a set of rascals, who might, with temper and discretion, have obtained a very wholesome Constitution, Witness Poland! have committed infinite mischief, infinite cruelty, infinite injustice, and left a shocking precedent against liberty, unless the Poles are as much admired and imitated as the French ought to be detested. I do not believe the Emperor will stir yet; he, or his ministers, must see that it is the interest of Germany to let France destroy itself. His interference ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... held sacred concerts, pulled teeth, played baseball and seven-up, and ate our six thousand meals per day, and Des Moines paid for it. Des Moines pleaded with the railroads, but they were obdurate; they had said we shouldn't ride, and that settled it. To permit us to ride would be to establish a precedent, and there weren't going to be any precedents. And still we went on eating. That was the terrifying factor in the situation. We were bound for Washington, and Des Moines would have had to float municipal ...
— The Road • Jack London
... workers against the peasants who will then be the ruling class. Thus they attack the present Trades Union leaders for being directly influenced by the Government in fixing the rate of wages, on the ground that this establishes a precedent from which, when the change comes, it will be difficult to break away. The Communists answer them by insisting that it is to everybody's interest to pull Russia through the crisis, and that if the Trades Unions were for such academic reasons to insist on their complete independence instead ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome
... electors, all who compared the magnitude of the design with his capacities and resources, warned him of the danger into which he was about to rush. Even King James of England preferred to see his son-in-law deprived of this crown, than that the sacred majesty of kings should be outraged by so dangerous a precedent. But of what avail was the voice of prudence against the seductive glitter of a crown? In the moment of boldest determination, when they are indignantly rejecting the consecrated branch of a race which had governed them for two ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... from this meager evidence that William Spence lived on his farm outside of the fortified area. If such were the case, he may have set a precedent that has had a pronounced influence on the development of this country. It was the belief of the authorities in the London Company that the colonists would all live in small communities for mutual protection and perform their ...
— Agriculture in Virginia, 1607-1699 • Lyman Carrier
... Henderson, was appealed to. He gave a diplomatic reply. It had been held, he said, by two chairmen that smoking was not in order at the public sessions of a Standing Committee; and, of course, if his ruling were formally asked he would be bound to follow precedent. He said this with a suavity and a smile which disarmed any possible objector. Nobody raised the formal point of order; so other members "lighted up," and the proceedings went on peacefully to ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... knows, a principle which has guided our pen from the inception of this work to this point, and which must continue to the bitter end. We shall be relentless and truthful to the last, even though in so doing we are compelled to overthrow all historical precedent. ...
— Mr. Bonaparte of Corsica • John Kendrick Bangs
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