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More "Self-constituted" Quotes from Famous Books



... barred, and a strong detachment of the so-called Royal Regiment left in charge. The deputies were threatened with death if they attempted to return there or to meet in any other spot, and the city of Teheran immediately passed under military control. The self-constituted directoire of seven who accomplished this dubious feat first ascertained that the considerable force of Bakhtiyari tribesmen, some 2,000, who had remained in the capital after the defeat of the ex-Shah's forces ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor

... with her in that respect. Fanny Burney, afterwards Madame D'Arblay, was at an early age petted by Dr. Johnson, and introduced to the wits and scholars of the day at the tables of Mrs. Thrale and Sir Joshua Reynolds. Anna Seward, in her self-constituted shrine at Lichfield, would have been miserable, had she not trusted that the eyes of all lovers of poetry were devoutly fixed on her. Joanna Baillie and Maria Edgeworth were indeed far from courting publicity; they loved the privacy of their own families, one ...
— Memoir of Jane Austen • James Edward Austen-Leigh

... and laid open a scheme in which they invited me to take a part. It was in fact a project for an organization inside the Democratic Party, by which the action of the party should be controlled. First, a central organization composed of a few men self-constituted; next a small number of assistants in each State who were to organize through confidential agents in the counties, cities and large towns. All these agencies through newspapers and by other expedient means would be able, ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell

... has a tendency to draw young people out of the circle of home duty, influence, and authority, and thus to make them independent of those whom God has given them to be their guides and counsellors, and to substitute the rules and penalties of a self-constituted society for the motives and discipline of the gospel, can neither be sound in itself, nor strengthening to the character, nor healthful either ...
— True to his Colours - The Life that Wears Best • Theodore P. Wilson

... that questions of government were eagerly discussed in the seventeenth century. It was only needed to live under the Stuarts and to pass through the Civil War and Protectorate to realize that a transition from the divinely anointed ruler to a self-constituted governor resting upon an army, and again to a trial of the legitimate holder of royal prerogative, offered an education in matters of political rule which naturally led to a constitutional monarchy, and which could not be equalled ...
— The Isle Of Pines (1668) - and, An Essay in Bibliography by W. C. Ford • Henry Neville

... touch, with crisis after crisis in their lives. No one who had trusted him with his confidence once, ever shrank from doing it again. I am forced to admit that, far more than many of his authorized brethren, he discharged the priestly office. He was self-constituted, or rather called, to be ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson

... the commissariat, or for other Government purposes, on the ground of having been once or twice employed on that duty; and what they get is but a small portion of that which the public lose. One of these self-constituted functionaries has a boat seized on its way down or up the river; and the crew, who are merely hired for the occasion, and have a month's wages in advance, seeing no prospect of getting soon out of the hands ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman

... Larrian, and forth they trooped down a pathway of nodding heads and curtsies, resembling oak and birch-trees under a tempered gale, even to the shedding of leaves, for here a turban was picked up by Sir Lukin, there a jewelled ear-ring by the self-constituted attendant, Mr. Thomas Redworth. At the portico rang a wakening cheer, really worth hearing. The rain it rained, and hats were formless,' as in the first conception of the edifice, backs were damp, boots liquidly musical, the pipe ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... Northern States, if patriotism, or love for the Union were insufficient to restrain us from attempting this fatal measure, we have seen that it would blast forever the fortunes of the planters of Mississippi. But what States will unite in this convention? Georgia has disavowed the act of the self-constituted, self-elected minority convention that acted in her name. The history of Virginia speaks in the voice of indignant rebuke to all those States that assemble sectional conventions. North Carolina, unassuming, but steadfast in support of the Union, will ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... with my passionate admiration for her, that I have never felt before for any woman, and it is very sweet to me. But how in the world are we to get rid of this confounded young sprig of nobility, her self-constituted champion? May the ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier

... And so my two visitors with the aristocratic titles staggered off, and left us plain, untitled citizens, Hiram and myself, to set our posts, and consider the question whether we lived in a free country or under the authority of a self-constituted ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... that we have of this assembly are at all edifying, but its existence shows the freedom permitted to women, and points to the important fact that they were accustomed to combine with one another to settle their own affairs. The Emperor Heliogabalus took this self-constituted Parliament in hand and ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley

... the fall of the nation's heroes on the field of battle, as in the mourning of the Trojan maidens over the death of Hector; at other times, some brave and heroic spirit, goaded with the sense of her country's wrongs, girds upon her own fair and tender form, the armor of proof, and goes forth, the self-constituted but eagerly welcomed leader of its mailed hosts, to overthrow the nation's foes. We need only recall Deborah, the avenger of the Israelites against the oppressions of the King of Canaan; Boadicea, ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett

... thought. Who could the self-constituted watcher have been? Who was interested in this case other than the proper authorities? Apparently some one knew more than Mackay, more than Kennedy. Whoever it was had made no effort to communicate with any of us. This was a new angle to the mystery, a mystery ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve

... belief that even then "the progress of civil war might have been arrested," which seems doubtful. But it is impossible not to agree with his lordship in condemning the refusal by the ministry to take any notice of the petition, on the ground that the Congress was a self-constituted body, with no claim to authority or recognition, and one which had already sanctioned the taking up arms against the King.—History of England, ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge

... its March meeting of 1773. He was miffed by an implied rebuke of the House of Burgesses for his handling of counterfeiters; but he had better reason to be disturbed by another development. On March 12, the House revived its committee of correspondence and extended its functions. As proposed by a self-constituted meeting at the Raleigh Tavern and headed by Richard Henry Lee, the House instructed its new committee of correspondence to inquire into the Gaspee affair, to keep in touch with the legislatures of the other colonies, and to correspond with the London ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education

... investigate the New York City police officials, the police department being at that time notoriously corrupt. They employed as their counsel George Bliss, a lawyer of prominence, with a sharp tongue and a contempt for self-constituted reformers. While Roosevelt was cross-examining one of the officials, Bliss, who little understood the man he was dealing with, interrupted with a scornful and impertinent remark. "Of course you do not mean that, Mr. Bliss," said the young reformer with impressive politeness, "for ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer

... removed to Windsor. On the 23d, the Commons voted that he should be brought to trial. On the 20th of January, Charles Stuart, King of England, was brought before the Court of High Commission, in Westminster Hall, and placed at the bar, to be tried by this self-constituted body for his life. In the indictment, he was charged with being a tyrant, traitor, and murderer. To such an indictment, and before such a body, the dignified but unfortunate successor of William the Conqueror demurred. ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord

... a case at his home a complete set of oculist's instruments, said to be the best in the county—a very unusual equipment for a country doctor. Indeed, he assumed that the responsibility for the health of the community rested upon him. He was a sort of self-constituted health officer. He was always sniffing about for old wells and damp cellars—and somehow, with his crisp humour and sound sense, getting them cleaned. In his old age he even grew querulously particular about these things—asking a little more of human nature than it ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson

... from the old attitude of literary obsequiousness, by harsh distinctions and hard words, which are paid back by equally emphasized contempt. The apostles of light regard the rest of mankind as barbarians and Philistines, and the world retorts that these self-constituted apostles are idle word-mongers, without any sympathy with humanity, critics and jeerers who do nothing to make the conditions of life easier. It is natural that every man should magnify the circle of the world in which he is active and imagine that all outside of it is comparatively ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... he, as we have seen, who succeeded in outwitting and overthrowing the self-constituted regency on the death of his brother Hsien Feng, and, with the Empress Dowager, seated her infant son upon the throne, with the two Empresses and himself as joint regents. This condition continued for some years, with ...
— Court Life in China • Isaac Taylor Headland

... on the self-constituted and disinterested follower to accept of any thing for himself out of these warlike spoils, Morton resolved to take the first opportunity of returning Lord Evandale's property, supposing him yet to be alive; and, ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... alliance between the police and criminal vice had become so open and aggressive under this bi-boss patronage that the people were aroused and indignant. But as they had no capable leaders and no way of selecting leaders, there arose a self-constituted leadership of uptown Phariseeism and sentimentality, planning the "purification" of ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)

... with adjacent regions. Over these, though as yet the claimants had not taken possession of them, the authorities of Virginia had no color of jurisdiction. England claimed all North America, in virtue of the discovery of Cabot; and Sir Thomas Dale became the self-constituted champion of British rights, not the less zealous that his championship promised a harvest ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.

... friendly; but one in particular, a James Blackshaw, proved himself most desirous of being comradely with us. He was a sort of self-constituted sheik of the community. It was usual for him to take all new-comers under his wing, and with officious good-nature endeavour to make them feel at home. He called on us daily, tied his horse to the paling fence beneath the shade of a sallie-tree in the backyard, and when ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin

... came leaping back through the fire, and lay groaning on the floor, where the kahveh's owner's seven sons poured water on him by Kagig's order. His burns were evidently painful, but not nearly so serious as I expected. I got out the first-aid stuff from our medicine bag, and Will, who was our self-constituted doctor on the strength of having once attended an autopsy, disguised as a reporter, in the morgue at the back of Bellevue Hospital in New York City, beckoned a gipsy woman, and proceeded to ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy

... Germany we are indeed fighting an evil Will—evil because it seeks to crush the growth of individual and national freedom. Its object is to put the world back under the thrall of self-constituted authority. So long as this Will can compel the bodies of soldiers to do its bidding, these bodies must be destroyed. Until the Will behind them is broken, the world cannot be free. Junkerism is the final expression ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... and—with the exception of those of the Dnieper—loyal subjects of the Tsar; but in reality they were something different. Though they were Russian by origin, language, and sympathy, the habit of kidnapping Tartar women introduced among them a certain admixture of Tartar blood. Though self-constituted champions of Christianity and haters of Islam, they troubled themselves very little with religion, and did not submit to the ecclesiastical authorities. As to their religious status, it cannot be easily defined. Whilst professing allegiance ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace

... of self-destruction, a few madmen in the Southern States may counsel, it may confidently be expected that rational thoughts will prevail among the masses. The paths of duty and of interest are for them the same; and, upon the whole, are too broad and plain to be mistaken. Their self-constituted leaders have already overwhelmed them with calamities. The emancipated people will scarcely heed the advice of these, when their plausible schemes shall have been all baffled, and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various

... enter the Palais Egalite, speak to several persons who seemed to listen to him with extreme deference, and afterwards repair to the house of one of the most influential members of the Committee of Public Safety, where he remained until two o'clock in the morning, and then returned home. The self-constituted spy concluded that he had to deal with one of the Committee's secret agents; and he was inspired with such wholesome awe that he decided to push his ...
— Which? - or, Between Two Women • Ernest Daudet

... There was only one thing to be done, and circumstances were such that not only must that thing be done by him, but also it must be done by him in direct opposition to the strenuous insistence of all his official and most of his self-constituted advisers. It was necessary to ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse

... and its neighboring village of Cedarville, by pooling together could tie the convention, and in addition to these towns they always controlled several of the outlying townships by judicious flattery of their self-constituted managers, who were given small favors, put on the central committee, and otherwise made to feel that they were leading men in the township; and it was beginning to be stated that the county treasurer had regularly bribed ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland

... standing in fashionable society. At the division of the goods of this earth, he was wandering like Schiller's poet. But the difference between American and German regulations would seem to be, that in Germany the poet, when not "with Jove," is left at peace on earth; while here he is, by a self-constituted police, declared "mad." ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... continued, "Are you and your self-constituted leaders of the American working people, gods? Are you not as human as any McIver or Adam Ward of the very class you condemn? Would you not be subject to the same temptations of power—the same human passions? ...
— Helen of the Old House • Harold Bell Wright

... of self-constituted roving commission, to carry into effect a long-projected intention to make a week's tramp in "Dickens-Land," for purposes of health and recreation; to visit Gad's Hill, Rochester, Chatham, and neighbouring ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes

... out of this several civilians were shot at and wounded, either by accidental shots meant for soldiers or for refusing obedience to the new self-constituted authorities. ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard

... as involved in the bill before us, is one of admitted importance, possibly of difficult solution; and it is further embarrassed by not only the conflicting views of those entitled to some respect, but by the multifarious prescriptions intruded by a host of self-constituted experts and by all of the quack financiers of the land. Every crocheteer and pamphleteer, cocksure "there's no two ways about it," generously contributes his advice free of charge; but sound, trust-worthy advice does not roam like tramps and seldom ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various

... navy-yards, arsenals, forts, and, indeed, all the buildings so purchased and controlled, stood, was vested in the United States, not alone by the right of eminent domain, but also by formal legislative deeds of cession from the States themselves, wherein they were located. The self-constituted governments of these State now assumed either that the right of eminent domain reverted to them, or that it had always belonged to them; and that they were perfectly justified in taking absolute possession, "holding ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 4 • Various

... Shaw was much the worst. My most innocent remark to the beautiful youth appeared to rouse suspicion in his self-constituted guardian. If he did not say in so many words, Beware, dear lad, she's stringing you! or whatever the English of that is, it was because nobody could so wound the faith in the b. y.'s candid eyes. But to see the fluttering, anxious wing the Scotchman tried to spread over that babe of six-feet-two ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon

... Church thought that they could not send less than 7,040 Roman crowns; and Portugal carried her devotion to science as far as 30,000 cruzados. It was the widow's mite— eighty-six piastres; but self-constituted empires are always ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne

... self-constituted body like the provisional Government at Paris could not accept these terms, which most deeply concerned the nation at large. In the existing temper of Paris and France, the mention of such terms meant war to the knife, as Bismarck must have known. On their side, Frenchmen could not believe that ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose

... no reason why even to-day a number of persons avowedly united in the same 'Belief' and recognizing each other as the self-constituted social vanguard should not form a recognized spiritual community centering round some kind of 'religious' edifice and ritual, and agree to register and consecrate the union of any couples of the members according ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells

... this subject. Let us now return to the lynch law of the desert. It was before a tribunal without appeal, and in the presence of self-constituted judges, that Don Antonio de Mediana was about to appear. A court assembled in a city, with all its imposing adjuncts, could not have surpassed in solemnity the assizes which at this moment were convoked in the desert, where three men represented human justice ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid

... overburdened County Council could properly carry on the work. On the other hand, the Fabian Society was in a stronger position. The Chairman of the Technical Education Board was something more than a self-constituted authority on the organisation of education: and the other members of the Society were engaged on a contest on their home ground. Into the details of the resolutions submitted to the Fabian Society outlining a plan for London education it is needless now to enter, except to say ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease

... a treatise in itself I will but touch on, to suggest to all interested a matter of general and grave concern—the growing materialism of religious bodies. On all sides self-constituted defenders of the faith are troubling themselves, not with the faith but with the numbers of their adherents who have jobs, equal sharers in emoluments, and so forth. A Protestant of standing writes a book and proves his religion is one of efficiency; a Catholic of equal standing quickly rejoins ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney

... Sources of Feudalism.—The spirit of feudalism arises out of the early form of Teutonic social life. It sprang from the personal obligation of the comitatus, which was composed of a military leader and his followers or companions. The self-constituted assembly elected the leader who was most noted for courage and prowess in battle. To him was consigned the task of leading in battle the host, which was composed of all the freemen in arms. Usually {295} ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar

... the service of his master, he should not have been a man of the people, a German patriot, worthy of a seat in the Paulskirche, and so on. Such crying ingratitude and malicious detraction prove that these self-constituted judges are as great knaves morally as they are intellectually, which is saying ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer

... killed at Waterloo—his victim-charge following him a few days later. The story is well told, and not, as actual things go, impossible. But there are some questions which it suggests. "Is it, as literature, a whole?" "Is it worth telling?" and "Why on earth did the captain obey such an order from a self-constituted authority of scoundrels to whom no 'sacrament' could ever be binding, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury

... Baumberger, public opinion tried—with the aid of various plugs of tobacco and much expectoration—the case and rendered a unanimous verdict upon it long before the coroner arrived. "Done just right," was the verdict of Public Opinion, and the self-constituted judges manifested their further approval by slapping Good Indian upon the back when they had a chance, or by solemnly shaking hands with him, or by facetiously assuring him that they would be good. ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower

... doctrine of the Apostles, but also that these ministers should be ordained and commissioned by the Apostles or their legitimate successors. "Neither doth any man," says the Apostle, "take the honor to himself, but he that is called by God, as Aaron was."(73) This text evidently condemns all self-constituted preachers and reformers; for, "how shall they preach, unless they be sent?"(74) Sent, of course, by legitimate authority, and not directed by their own caprice. Hence, we find that those who ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons

... noble thing had grown to be. Institutions become effete. Age is apt to sap the strength of movements as of men. Feudalism and the Crusades had commissioned the knight-errant; and now, when law began to hold sword for itself, the self-constituted legal force—knight-errantry—was no longer needed. But to know when an institution has served its purpose is little less than genius. Some things can be laughed down which can not be argued down. A jest is not infrequently more potent than any syllogism. ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle

... converse with love-sick tales and languishing swains? They will become love-sick, too, and long for marriage with one who is like the hero of their last-read romance. Perhaps they will not think their matrimonial debut sufficiently flavored with romantic essence, unless they run off with some self-constituted count, or at least with their papa's ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips

... he says to the doctor, speaking in a kind of shrill sing-song that cut your nerves in that room full of bottled-up excitement like a locust on a hot day. "You are to be tried before this self-constituted court of Caucasian citizens—Anglo-Saxons, sir, every man of them, whose forbears were at Runnymede! The charge against you is stirring up the negroes of this community to the point of revolt. You are accused, sir, of representing yourself to them as some kind ...
— Danny's Own Story • Don Marquis

... you all about it some day," he had said. But he had told Dan the whole story, and, although he did not know it, Dan had from that time on been his self-constituted bodyguard. During his campaign speeches Dan was always near, his right hand on a revolver in his coat pocket, and for hours at a time he stood outside the pharmacy, favoring every seeker for drugs or soap or perfume with a scowling ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... village seek in his friendly canoe that relief which nature offers to the tired brain, let him go into the wilderness and live close to his Creator by studying his works, and a whole community vex him on his return with "the appearance of the thing." These self-constituted critics, who are generally ignorant of the laws which God has made to secure health and give contentment to his creatures, would poison the sick man's body with drugs and nostrums when he might have ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop

... not surprising that pictures, with all their attraction for eye and mind, are, to many honest and intelligent people, too much of a riddle to be altogether pleasant. What with the oracular dicta of self-constituted arbiters of taste, the discrepancies of popular writers on Art, the jargon of connoisseurship, the vagaries of fashion, the endless theories about color, style, chiaro 'scuro, composition, design, imitation, nature, schools, etc., painting has ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various

... have heard of levellers, but I have never seen one: all are disposed to level down, but nobody to level up. As for nobility, there is none in Europe beside the Venetian. Nobility must be self-constituted and independent: the free alone are noble; slavery, like death, levels all. The English come nearest to the Venetian: they are independent, but want the main characteristic, the self-constituted. You have been in England, Signor Conte, and can judge ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor

... and the two were cowering in the corner, their faces turned away. Ramona dared not look on; she felt sure Alessandro would kill some one. But this was not the type of outrage that roused Alessandro to dangerous wrath. He even felt a certain enjoyment in the discomfiture of the self-constituted posse of searchers for stolen goods. To all their questions in regard to the stolen steer, he maintained silence. He would not open his lips. At last, angry, ashamed, with a volley of coarse oaths at him for his obstinacy, they rode away. Alessandro went to Ramona's side. She was trembling. ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson

... misuse some ancestor of their own, sent back, as the one mercy for him, to reassume far past forms and conditions—far past in physical, that is, but not in moral development—and so have another opportunity of passing the self-constituted barrier. The suggestion may appear very ridiculous, and no doubt lends itself to humorous comment; but what if it should be true! what if the amused reader should himself be getting ready to follow ...
— Hope of the Gospel • George MacDonald

... as a French Marquise of the seventeenth century, when a De in the name, petticoats, and Paris were an infallible receipt for cleverness. Toward the end of her volume, Mrs. Howe enters a spirited and telling protest against a self-constituted censorship, which would insist on a traveller's squaring his impressions with some foregone theory of right and wrong, instead of thankfully allowing facts to rectify his theory. A traveller is bound to tell us what he saw, not what he expected or wished to see; and it is only by comparing ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various

... means, learning, political interest and race pride suggest that they should be. True, it frequently happens that our papers fall into the hands of characterless adventurers who are "anything for a dollar," and it is felt that the best method of rebuking their self-constituted and erratic leadership is to treat them with silent contempt. To this no thinker can offer a reasonable objection. A journal that does not represent the highest impulses of a community does not deserve support. The personal organ, the scandalmonging sheet, the political and social blackmailer, ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various

... man," answered Miss Du Plessis' self-constituted advocate, as he shovelled the earth in over the tin box. "Muggins, you rascal, if you dig that up again, ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell

... was no other than her self-constituted lover, Don Gregorio. He had dined that day with a party of officers, and had dipped rather deeper into the bottle than, to tell the truth, he was often guilty of doing. He suspected that Isabella was in the habit of visiting the prison; but as she was generally accompanied, in all her rambles, ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames

... people, their daily wants, their pressing interests, moral, human, and social. He was thus enabled to preach a discourse which sent home many of his congregation much wiser than they came, if only in reference to their homely duties of farmstead and family. John Cross was none of those sorry and self-constituted representatives of our eternal interests, who deluge us with a vain, worthless declamation, proving that virtue is a very good thing, religion a very commendable virtue, and a liberal contribution to the church-box ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms

... the Boers, who still had command of the lines of communication. Then he sent the news in verbal messages to his nephew, the paramount chief in the siege, who in turn communicated it to Her Majesty's officers in command. By means of this self-constituted intelligence bureau the garrison learnt of the surrender of Cronje — a happy consummation of the battle of Paardeberg — shortly after the good news reached their besiegers; and when official confirmation ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje

... with difficulty upon the high-posted bed, where the servant found her fevered and unconscious when she came an hour later to awaken her for breakfast. The struggle that had been waged around the bed of the young child was now renewed by that of his self-constituted nurse. Weeks passed away before it was over, and ere that time the music of little feet had ceased about the ancient mansion, and the stroke to pride and love had rendered the invalid grand-mother still ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee

... not condescend to justify his ways to man, he gives judgment on the past controversy. The self-constituted pleaders for him, the acceptors of his person, were all wrong; and Job—the passionate, vehement, scornful, misbelieving Job—he had spoken the truth; he at least had spoken facts, and they had been defending a transient ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude

... Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia, who apparently had not a month to live, yet who rivaled Talleyrand in political intrigue; John Wentworth, a tall son of New Hampshire, transplanted to the prairies of Illinois; Andrew Johnson, of Tennessee, a born demagogue and self-constituted champion of the people; John Slidell, of New Orleans; Robert Dale Owen, the visionary communist from Indiana; Howell Cobb, of Georgia, and Jacob Thompson, of Mississippi, who were busily laying the foundations for the Southern Confederacy, ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore

... innocent Englishman, who, being elderly and deaf, knew nothing of what had happened, came downstairs unsuspectingly on to the pavement into the middle of the crowd, and had a very narrow escape for his life. Some ingenious self-constituted detective called out "That's the man," and the crowd, having long waited in vain for somebody, were only too glad to have a victim thus extemporized to their hands, and if a few of the cooler and more humane bystanders had not interfered, the Englishman might ...
— The Insurrection in Paris • An Englishman: Davy

... tone seemed to calm Ninitta. She allowed Helen to arrange the soiled and crumpled pillows, and yielded when her self-constituted nurse wished her to lie down again. The latter procured a bowl of water, and with her handkerchief bathed the sick girl's face, soothing her with womanly touches which waked in Edith a new feeling of sympathy and tenderness. Mrs. Greyson's ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates

... counted the greatest among themselves, and each one fearful that his own betrayal might come next, every crook, every thug in the Bad Lands now eyed his oldest pal with suspicion and distrust, and each was a self-constituted sleuth, with the prod of self-preservation behind him, sworn to the accomplishment of that unhallowed slogan—death to the Gray Seal. Almost daily now he must show himself as Larry the Bat in some gathering of the underworld—a prolonged absence from his haunts was not merely ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard

... we talk of marks and brands, whether on the bodice of her gown or the flesh of her forehead?" cried another female, the ugliest as well as the most pitiless of these self-constituted judges. "This woman has brought shame upon us all, and ought to die; is there not law for it? Truly there is, both in the Scripture and the statute-book. Then let the magistrates, who have made it of no effect, thank themselves if their own wives ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... my self-constituted advisers informed me, with great asperity in her look and tone, that "it would be better for me to lay by the pen, and betake myself to some more useful employment; that she thanked her God that she could make a shirt, and see to the ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie

... and found expression in actions more eloquent than words. She was thankful for the slightest evidence of kindness from her self-constituted protectors. She even exaggerated the amount of consideration which she received. She was not free from the hereditary taint of pride; but in her it took a new form and unprecedented expression. The sense of indebtedness spurred her on to discover ways by which she could avoid ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie

... army." They are made up of female captives and other women, wear special uniforms, and in battle are credited with even greater ferocity than the men. These women are Amazons not of their own accord but by order of the king. But in other parts of Africa there is reason to believe that bands of self-constituted female warriors have existed at various times. Diodorus Siculus, who lived in the time of Julius Caesar, says that on the western coast of Libya (Africa) there used to live a people governed by women, who carried on wars and the government, the men being obliged to do domestic work ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck

... to Holland, and thence emigrated to New England in 1620, in the Mayflower, and called their place of settlement "New Plymouth," where they elected seven Governors in succession, and existed under a self-constituted government for seventy years. The other class were called "Puritan Fathers;" the first instalment of their emigration took place in 1629, under Endicot; they were known as the Massachusetts Bay Company, and their final capital was ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson

... he reprobated it, Lord Cochrane wisely judged that it was not for him to quarrel. "As the existence of this self-constituted authority," he said, "was no less at variance with the institutions of the Chilian Republic than with its solemn promises to the Peruvians, I hoisted my flag on board the O'Higgins, determined to adhere solely to ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, G.C.B., Admiral of the Red, Rear-Admiral of the Fleet, Etc., Etc. • Thomas Cochrane, Earl of Dundonald

... To another self-constituted delegation—this time from the West—who called at the White House one day, excited and troubled about some of the commissions or omissions of the administration, the President, after hearing them patiently, replied: ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne

... necessary that both be well watched. Paul's irresponsible craze will do the rest. The 'lay' of this spy can only be surmised. Perhaps these villains are suspected of other crimes. It is improbable that any self-constituted detective is on their trails. However, this sleuth will be persistently shadowed. It is possible that thereby some important 'find' may occur. By such course our bureau will hedge against ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee

... under-rating its own pet work; and more than one book has been ruined in the market, for having been carelessly titled by the definite THE; as if, forsooth, it were the world's arbiter of that one topic, self-constituted pundit of, e.g., title-pages. And this word brings me back: consider the truly ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... hold but a pint, illustrates the capacity of many of those who are subjects of a single idea. They do not hold but one, and it would be useless to prescribe a larger number. In a country like ours, in which every thing is new and everybody is free, there are multitudes of self-constituted doctors, each of whom has a nostrum for curing all physical and moral disorders and diseases,—a patent process by which humanity may achieve its proudest progress and its everlasting happiness. The country is full of hobby-riders, ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb

... prepared for them. The whole affair occurred within the space of an hour. The State and City and County authorities had succumbed to the Committee without resistance, and the law was usurped by the new and self-constituted power. The Courts were virtually overborne and ignored, if not derided; and the will of the Vigilance Committee became the supreme law in ...
— The Vigilance Committee of '56 • James O'Meara

... a line to paint Their moral ugliness, I'm not a saint. Not one of those self-constituted saints, Quacks—not physicians—in the cure of souls, Censors who sniff out mortal taints, And call the devil over his own coals— Those pseudo Privy Councillors of God, Who write down judgments with a pen hard-nibb'd; Ushers of Beelzebub's Black Rod, ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood

... himself with architecture;[372] writes laws, and contrives to execute his will through the hands of many nations; and, especially, establishes a select society, running through all the countries of intelligent men, a self-constituted aristocracy, or fraternity of the best, which, without written law, or exact usage of any kind, perpetuates itself, colonizes every new-planted island, and adopts and makes its own whatever personal beauty or extraordinary native ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... rain. Thus they moved onward slowly till the twenty-eighth, when they reached the main stream of the Trinity, and encamped on its borders. Joutel, who, as well as his companions in misfortune, could not lie down to sleep with an assurance of waking in the morning, was now directed by his self-constituted chiefs to go in advance of the party to the great Cenis village for a supply of food. Liotot himself, with Hiens and Teissier, declared that they would go with him; and Duhaut graciously supplied him ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman

... own or in foreign poetry, the nineteenth century has produced. In the face of all critics, the Laureate of England has now reached a position which at once imposes and instils respect. They are self-constituted; but he has won his way through the long dedication of his manful energies, accepted and crowned by deliberate, and, we rejoice to think, by continually growing, public favour. He has after all, and it is not the ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson

... continually droning in the ceiling, and an especially large bluebottle busy in the window, who might just as easily have gone out and enjoyed the last hour of a long evening in a glorious sunshine, but who mysteriously preferred to beat himself for ever against a closed pane of glass, a self-constituted prisoner between it and a gauze blind—let him shut his eyes, and try to think out what it all meant, ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan

... trembling with indignation and his frail body swaying under his rapidly growing excitement. "She is guilty of the damnable heresy of concealing knowledge, of hiding truth, of stifling honest questionings! She is guilty of grossest intolerance, of deadliest hatred, of impurest motives—she, the self-constituted, self-endowed spiritual guide of mankind, arrogating to herself infallibility, superiority, supreme authority—yea, the very ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... the House, and had to bear many reproaches for his officiousness. He also nagged at Pitt at every opportunity, until, on his opposing a motion of urgency for a Bill for better manning the Navy, Pitt's patience gave way. He accused the self-constituted leader of seeking to obstruct the defence of the country. The charge was in the main correct; for Tierney's opposition to a pressing measure of national defence was highly unpatriotic. Nevertheless, Tierney had right on his side when he called Pitt to order and appealed to the Speaker for protection. ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose

... and heard the Mediterranean at Marseilles. He has been in the Fortress of Joux; and forty-two months, with hardly clothing to his back, in the Dungeon of Vincennes;—all by Lettre-de-Cachet, from his lion father. He has been in Pontarlier Jails (self-constituted prisoner); was noticed fording estuaries of the sea (at low water), in flight from the face of men. He has pleaded before Aix Parlements (to get back his wife); the public gathering on roofs, to see since they could ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... nothing but their interests. There must be no strings tied to your proposal. I cannot consider it an obligation of returned personal favours to any individual. We must clearly understand that we are acting in the interest of the people of New Jersey and in the interest of nobody else." If the self-constituted committee thought this merely handsome talk without specific meaning, they had only themselves to thank for their subsequent predicament. They found he meant exactly ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty

... the power with which they were now invested to bring down the established church to the same level on which they themselves stood; to annihilate all the rights, powers, and privileges which belonged to its members; and, by depriving it of all support from the funds of the state, convert it into a self-constituted religious community. Their great objects were to obtain those privileges from which they were excluded, and to be relieved from the necessity of supporting an establishment in the advantages of which ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... Lassie holds the power of the high, the middle, and the low justice over all Our Square by the divine right of loveliness and kindliness. So that evening I went while the Little Red Doctor, as a self-constituted Committee in Waiting, sat on my bench. Stepfather Time himself opened ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... Royal Academy, have never had a chance of judging for themselves what they approve of and what they do not, and their taste has been vitiated for generations by the exhibition of what this self-constituted authority, no doubt unconsciously, conceives to be best for them—and which, as might be expected, is usually found to coincide pretty nearly with the sort of thing they are capable of producing themselves. Hogarth's predictions at the time the Academy was instituted have in a great ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies

... defied analysis as he made his way through the crowded hall to the rear veranda. He peered into the smoking-room in passing and found several self-constituted Lords of Misrule holding full sway. Two young scions of great New York families were fencing with billiard cues, punctuating each other's coats with blue chalk dots and dashes, while a swaying ring cheered them on. One youth emerged from the room with steps ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry

... exactly what I think," said Giselle. "The self-constituted champion has given the evil ...
— Jacqueline, Complete • (Mme. Blanc) Th. Bentzon

... architecture and music, and that limitless range of human activities in design and pattern-making for embellishment—including also the whole category of "useful arts"—which may be subsumed under the comprehensive term decoration. In these arts the "subject" is self-constituted and does not derive its significance from its likeness to any object external to it; the form itself is the subject. Lyric poetry stands midway between the two classes. It is the expression of "inner states" but it externalizes ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes

... that homeward bound convoy—that big village of the Sioux, with its distinguished captives, wounded and unwounded; one of the former, the young sub-chief Eagle Wing, alias Moreau;—one of the latter a self-constituted martyr, since she was under no official restraint,—Nanette Flower, hovering ever about the litter bearing that sullen and still defiant brave, whose side she refused ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King

... he was by no means as well fitted to act the part of a diplomatist as he was to sail a ship. It was, in truth, a somewhat delicate mission on which his son had sent him, for he could not assert definitely that the hermit actually was Kathleen Holbein's father, and her self-constituted parents did not relish the idea of letting slip, on a mere chance, one whom ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne

... her aptitude for music, her skill at games, made her an all-round force and a referee on most subjects. There is no doubt that Ingred would have had the undivided post of favorite in her form had it not been for Bess Haselford. Not that Bess was in any way a self-constituted rival—on the contrary she was rather shy and retiring, and made no particular bid for popularity. Perhaps that was one reason why the girls liked her. She was generous in lending her property, invited her form-mates to charming parties at Rotherwood, and often ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil

... bring them back to Indian Bar. He found them a few miles from this place, and returned with them in triumph, and alone, his friend having been compelled to remain behind on account of excessive fatigue. The self-constituted court, after a fair trial, obliged the five men to settle all liabilities before ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe

... would bring him. Eliza Pike headed the party with Teether hitched high up en her arm and Martin Luther clinging to her short blue calico skirt. They all drew up in a semicircle in front of Mother Mayberry and Miss Wingate and looked at Eliza expectantly. On all occasions of excitement Eliza was both self-constituted and unanimously appointed spokesman. On this occasion she began in the dramatic part of the news ...
— The Road to Providence • Maria Thompson Daviess

... to minister to the caprices of hysterical sensitiveness is the person of a household who feels most for the invalid, and who for this very reason suffers the most. The patient has pain,—a tender spine, for example; she is urged to give it rest. She cannot read; the self-constituted nurse reads to her. At last light hurts her eyes; the mother or sister remains shut up with her all day in a darkened room. A draught of air is supposed to do harm, and the doors and windows are closed, and the ingenuity of kindness is taxed to imagine new sources of like trouble, ...
— Fat and Blood - An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria • S. Weir Mitchell

... way. Here again we see the natural tendency of sects to make sectarians and thus reproduce their kind. When particular forms and ceremonies, which are not required by Scripture, are enforced upon men by a self-constituted, self-perpetuating ecclesiastical authority, the inevitable result is to stamp the same principles upon succeeding generations and thus perpetuate the ...
— The Last Reformation • F. G. [Frederick George] Smith

... glorious trinity, Rembrandt, Frans Hals, and Vermeer, hanging in the Rijks, what a piquant contrast to study the new-fangled heresies and fantastic high-kicking of the Futurists! This group, consisting of five Italian painters in company with the poet Marinetti as a self-constituted chef d'ecole, is perfectly agreed that all the old conventions of pictorial art have outlived their usefulness; that drawing, colour, perspective, harmonious composition must walk the plank as far as they are ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker

... enormous knowledge of it, and who show enough truth in their pretension to gain the unlimited support of Puritan capitalists. The vice crusade, to mention one example, has produced a large crop of such self-constituted experts, and some of them are in such demand that they are overwhelmed with engagements. The majority of these men have wholly lost the flavour of sacerdotalism. They are not pastors, but detectives, statisticians and mob orators, and not infrequently their secularity becomes distressingly evident. ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken

... required of him and then gracefully effacing himself, his success would have been assured. But that was not Quin's nature. Having identified himself with the family, he promptly assumed full responsibility for its welfare. By the end of the second week he was the self-constituted head of the establishment. No mission was too high or too low for him to volunteer to perform. One moment he was tactfully severing diplomatic relations with a consulting physician in the front hall, the next he was firing the furnace in the basement. Whenever he was in the house he was meeting emergencies ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice

... attendance of Irish members in the Imperial Parliament at Westminster, elections to which Sinn Fein candidates are, if necessary, to contest on the undertaking that if elected they will not take the oath at Westminster, but will attend a self-constituted National Council in Dublin, under the control of which a system of National education and of National arbitration courts, in addition to a National Stock Exchange, will be established. To develop Irish industries this body, it is suggested, ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell

... straight-laced in doctrine, and eminently puritan in practice, intolerant, bigoted, and presumptuous. Potts had accomplished one great aim of his mission: he had married a lady of fortune, and assumed more purity than any one else, and was a sort of self-constituted exponent of the only true doctrines of his church. Arrogant and conceited, he, though a very young man, thrust himself forward as a censor, and very soon was in controversy with Dr. Clapp. Without a tithe of his talent, or a grain ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks

... and therefore a subject for self-adulation and—generally speaking—airs; so that Harold, hugging his slate and his chains, was out of the question now. In such a matter, girls were worse than useless, as wanting the necessary tenacity of will and contempt for self-constituted authority. So eventually I slipped through the hedge a solitary protestant, and issued forth on the lane what time the rest of the civilised world was sitting ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame

... Germany an expression of popular discontent and of democratic and even, to a large extent, of republican aspirations. The princely authorities endeavoured to stem the wave of popular indignation and revolutionary enthusiasm by recognizing a provisional self-constituted body, and sanctioning the election of a national representative Parliament at Frankfurt in place of the effete Federal Council. The Archduke of Austria, who was elected head of the new, hastily organized National ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax

... rests the choice to break through all these hypocrisies, the patent cheats and masks of brute force, and help set the world free, or else stand aside and let it be dominated through sheer weight of arms and the arbitrary choices of the self-constituted masters by the nation which can maintain the biggest armies, the most irresistible armaments, a power to which the world has afforded no parallel, in the face of which political ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson

... of paper picked up anyhow, and with worn-out pens begged from the counting-house. Encouraged by the foreman of their department, who begged some rough, movable desks for them, and aided by timely but not oppressive prizes from the Messrs Wilson, and by the presence of Mr J. P. Wilson, the little self-constituted school progressed considerably, until it reached the number of thirty; then a large old building was cleared out, a rickety wooden staircase taken down, an iron one put up in its stead, and a lofty school-room, capable of holding ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 446 - Volume 18, New Series, July 17, 1852 • Various

... political platform against British methods of government than on a platform of social and religious reforms which offended many different prejudices and threatened many vested interests. The Congress developed into a purely political body, and like all self-constituted bodies with no definite responsibilities it showed greater capacity for acrid criticism, often quite uninformed, than for any constructive policy. As the years passed on without any tangible results from its expanding flow of oratory and long "omnibus" resolutions, proposed ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol

... mentioned which she wanted from town, and even laid in a stock of amusements for little Geoff,—boys' books, suited rather to his years than to his precocity. About the other and more serious part of his self-constituted mission Warrender, however, had done nothing. He had passed one of those "Scholastic Agencies," which it had been his (vague) intention to inquire at, had paused and passed it by. There was truth, he reflected, in what Cavendish said. How could he tell who might be recommended to him as ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant

... was convened, and Patty, a self-constituted chairman, outlined the tenets of the Virgil Union. Sixty lines was to constitute a working day. The class was to explain the case to Miss Lord at the regular session on Monday morning, and politely but positively refuse to read the ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster

... their heads, shirt sleeves rolled up, unembarrassed by either vest or coat, and butchers' aprons bound around them. At the head of the table sat Maillard, at that time the idol of the blood-thirsty mob of Paris. These men composed a self-constituted tribunal to award life or instant death to those brought before them. First appeared one hundred and fifty Swiss officers and soldiers who had been in the employ of the king. They were brought en masse before the tribunal. "You have assassinated ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott

... the former Napoleon as "dictator of Europe." The title so pleased the insulted pride of his people that they followed him eagerly, and remained blind to many failings through more wars than one. The self-constituted dictator insisted that his whole desire was for peace and the artistic beautifying of his country; yet if Russia persisted in extending her power and ignoring France—. In 1854 he joined England in the war of the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne

... disappeared, and the end of the world has come," was the way he phrased it for the listening ear; but the word which came back must have been peculiarly heartening, since from that time on to an hour well past midnight Gantry figured hilariously as the self-constituted host of any and all who ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde

... right was vested in the worthiest; that is, practically, the strongest. An admirable doctrine for 1653,—how unfit for 1660 remained to be discovered by him. Under its influence he had successively swallowed Pride's Purge, the execution of Charles I. by a self-constituted tribunal, and Cromwell's expulsion of the scanty remnant of what had once seemed the more than Roman senate of 1641. There is great reason to believe with Professor Masson that a tract vindicating this violence was actually ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett

... beneath me. Slant sunshine glitters on polished gun-barrels and tinselled uniform. Gravely and soberly they pass on, as if duly impressed with a sense of the deep responsibility of their position as self-constituted defenders of the world's last hope,—the United States of America, and possibly Texas. They look out with honest, citizen faces under their leathern visors (their ferocity being mostly the work of the ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... charm. The ice was broken, and the current became free. Without more ado, as if in opposition to the self-constituted authority from the high-backed chair, the guests, with one exception only, commenced with a vigorous discharge of "airy missiles," which by degrees subsided into a sort of desultory sharp-shooting; but their words were neither few nor ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby

... not peculiar to the Rosicrucians; there is too much of it in even the religious sects of this enlightened age; it is too much, 'Lord, bless me and my sect;' 'Lord, bless us, and no more.' There are self-constituted mountain-tops that would extract all the mercy and grace with which the winds come freighted from the great ocean of Love, so that they would pass over beyond them hot, dry winds of wrath. But I am glad that this is impossible; that in the moral world there ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... on through the ordinary diplomatic channels, but before a complete and binding agreement is entered into, the duly constituted representatives of the popular will should know and give their sanction to what is being done. On the other hand, for unauthorised persons or any self-constituted bodies or conferences to attempt to pre-judge such questions and to carry on negotiations either with regular or irregular representatives of other nations is pernicious. Such action is likely both to lead to confusion and to hamper the action of the authorised representatives ...
— Rebuilding Britain - A Survey Of Problems Of Reconstruction After The World War • Alfred Hopkinson

... audacity!" The news of the investment of Verdun by the allies, published at Paris on 2 September, was the signal for the beginning of a wholesale massacre of royalists in the French capital. For five long days unfortunate royalists were taken from the prisons and handed over by a self-constituted judicial body to the tender mercies of a band of hired cutthroats. Slight discrimination was made of rank, sex, or age. Men, women, and children, nobles and magistrates, priests and bishops,—all who were suspected of royalist sympathy ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes

... it was all over; and Cleena, Hallam, and Amy, with their self-constituted bodyguard, Fayette, were gathered about a big table in the kitchen of the "Spite House," to eat a supper of bread and milk, and to discuss the events of that memorable day. Strangely enough, as ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond

... the fourth day after his return, Mr. Belcher was waited upon at his house by a self-constituted committee of citizens, who merely called to inquire into the wonders of the region he had explored. Mr. Belcher was quite at his ease, and entered at once upon a narrative of his visit. He had supposed that the excitement was without any good foundation, ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland

... these hypocrisies and patent cheats and masks of brute force and help set the world free, or else stand aside and let it be dominated a long age through by sheer weight of arms and the arbitrary choices of self-constituted masters, by the nation which can maintain the biggest armies and the most irresistible armaments—a power to which the world has afforded no parallel and in the face of which political freedom must ...
— In Our First Year of the War - Messages and Addresses to the Congress and the People, - March 5, 1917 to January 6, 1918 • Woodrow Wilson

... labouring to subvert; any further responsibility enters not into their creed, if that may be called a creed, in which all the articles are negative. I? we turn from politics to what should be humaner literature, and look at the self-constituted censors of whatever has passed the press, there also we shall find that they who are the most incompetent assume the most authority, and that the public favour such pretensions; for in quackery of every kind, whether medical, political, critical, or hypocritical, quo quis impudentior ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey

... place was taken by a large, loose-limbed man, with florid face and big staring eyes, and an immense array of fishing-basket, rod, fly-cases, and so forth. He was of the type that one could instinctively locate as a loud-voiced, self-constituted authority on whatever topic might happen to be discussed in the ...
— When William Came • Saki

... good thing in its way and place, but it may be carried too far, or employed amiss; and this looks like an illustration. The boy, in more than fifteen years, had never done anything in prison that called for discipline; but because some self-constituted and arbitrary psychologist chose to believe, or to say, that his temper was not under full control, he was doomed to spend the rest of his life in a cell. This prisoner knows, of course, that he has been ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne

... the plain meaning of words, and the study of their context, may know more of the original spirit and intention of the authors of the New Testament than all the controversial writers of former ages put together." (pp. 340-1.) This might be tolerated perhaps, in the self-constituted oracle of a Mechanics' Institute; but as proceeding from a Divinity Lecturer in one of the first Colleges in Oxford, I hesitate not to declare that such ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon

... faith and regarding him as a godless despot who had made the Pope a captive, refused to recognize the French pretender. Until Ferdinand VII could be restored to his throne, therefore, the colonists had to choose whether they would carry on the administration under the guidance of the self-constituted authorities in Spain, or should themselves create similar organizations in each of the colonies to take charge of affairs. The former course was favored by the official element and its supporters among ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd

... days I saw at different times that we were followed; but afterwards it seemed that the spies, self-constituted or not, had given up their task, and that we were free to roam ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn

... the posse of self-constituted seekers after the captives. They could not hope, for some time yet, to come upon actual traces of the Yaquis. But they felt that they were heading ...
— The Boy Ranchers Among the Indians - or, Trailing the Yaquis • Willard F. Baker

... Her captain, being hailed by the dock-loafers, and made the victim of the proverbial Yankee inquisitiveness, stated that he had just come from the West Indies with a load of lignum-vitae, pineapples, and hides, which he hoped to sell in Boston. The self-constituted investigating committee seemed satisfied, and the captain strolled on ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot

... one deceive himself by being induced to cease an investigation of this subject because some self-constituted wise one will say: 'You can never know when the Lord will come'? Jesus himself said to his faithful followers: "Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come". (Matthew 24:42) "And what I say unto you I say unto all, Watch." (Mark 13:37) The clear inference here is that the ...
— The Harp of God • J. F. Rutherford

... Englishman, Dr. John Dee, who was in like condemnation. No doubt the two were a precious pair of rogues, but King Rudolph II had asked for trouble by encouraging alchemists from all over Europe to visit him in Prague. The present-day compeers of Dee and Kelly are no doubt the self-constituted experts on politics, finance, commerce and other questions which puzzle international commissions, conferences and such-like amenities of our times. Anyway, Dr. Dee and Mr. Kelly failed to give satisfaction, and so were incarcerated ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker

... to his dream. During all the hilarity of the feast and the drinking of the mock whiskey, be acted as self-constituted sentinel. Finally, when everybody else had succumbed to sleep, he gathered together several broken and discarded lariats of various materials—leather, buffalo's hair and horse's hair. Having lengthened this variegated rope with innumerable knots, he fastened one end of it around ...
— Indian Boyhood • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman

... a specific instance. A certain self-constituted "board of morals" is quoted in a dispatch from the United States to the effect that 1,046 men of the "north-eastern States" were locked up in the guardhouse following their ...
— The Stars & Stripes, Vol 1, No 1, February 8, 1918, - The American Soldiers' Newspaper of World War I, 1918-1919 • American Expeditionary Forces

... a self-constituted leader in a crusade against dancing. At his earnest suggestion, every minister in town agreed to preach upon the subject at prayer-meeting the Wednesday evening of ...
— Sandy • Alice Hegan Rice

... world of meaning in the phrase. Charteris felt that he was in the same case. They had not let him. He had come. Here was a kindred spirit, another revolutionary soul, scorning the fetters of convention and the so-called authority of self-constituted rules, aha! Bureaucrats! ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse

... been well content, as they have ever been, despite the protests of self-constituted "reformers" of the order established by the Infinite. Man is creation's lord de facto and de jure. The immutable laws of nature make his sovereignty both a privilege and a duty. The voice of prophecy proclaims him king; he wears his crown by Divine ordination and right of conquest. Woman was created ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... announced the flagman, a self-constituted umpire. "Git out 'er the way there, Chick, and give the gent a chanct ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice

... protest of silent tears, and the airs of a much injured mortal. Had Kirsty been backed by the child's father, she might have made something of her; but it grew more and more painful to think of her future, when her self-constituted guardian should have lost what influence she ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald

... of conscience, first in Boston, then in Plymouth, and finally in Portsmouth, where he had become a leader after the withdrawal of Coddington. But in each place his instinct for justice and his too vociferous denial of the legality of verdicts rendered by self-constituted authorities led him to seek further for a home that would shelter him and his followers. No sooner, however, was he settled at Shawomet, than the Massachusetts authorities laid claim to the territory, and it was only after arrest, imprisonment, and a narrow escape from the death penalty, followed ...
— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews









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