"Chicanery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... will prevent the child's going where she belongs. I wish you to understand that I shall continue this fight to the very last. I—I am not one to be easily beaten. Simpson, you and Thomas come with me. This night's despicable chicanery is only the beginning. This is bad business for you, Cy Whittaker," he snarled, his self-control vanishing, "and"—with a vindictive glance at the schoolmistress—"for those who are with you in it. That appointment was obtained under false pretenses and I can ...
— Cy Whittaker's Place • Joseph C. Lincoln
... justice; and in that romantic chamber that lurks somewhere in every man's make-up, he felt that classic tradition had armed him with all the preparation necessary for heroic achievement. He, Chamberlain, was unexpectedly called upon to act as an agent of justice against chicanery and violence, and it was not in him to shirk the task. His labors, which, for the greater part of his life, had been expended in tracing the evolution of blind fish in inland caves, had not especially fitted him for dealing with the details ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... was long in awaking to the consciousness that driving Lee out of Richmond would not end the Rebellion. It was more than this: it was a casting-out of prejudice, a discarding of political chicanery and a time-serving policy, and a recognition of Justice, Right, and Freedom as the true elements of political economy. There was an increasing desire on the part of the people to root ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... the government. Moreover, there is a manifest disposition, on the part of architects everywhere, to help in this matter all they can. The danger dwells in the possibility that their advice will not be heeded, their services not be fully utilized, but through chicanery, ignorance, or inanition, we will relapse into the tentative, "expensively provisional" methods which have governed the housing of workers hitherto. Even so, architects will doubtless recapture, and more than recapture, their imperiled prestige, ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... von Stein discerned vaguely; that William I emphasized in his cold-blooded, clear-eyed manner of the soldier; that von Sybel fought for; that scores, nay, hundreds and thousands of noble men and women, utterly apart from political chicanery, did indeed long for with all the fervor of their earnest God-fearing German nature; Bismarck stands in the ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... offices intimating that a fair count might give the Republicans enough Southern States to elect Hayes. This appeared to Bartley the most impudent piece of political effrontery in the whole history of the country, and among those who went about denouncing Republican chicanery at the Democratic club-rooms, no one took a loftier tone of moral indignation than he. The thought that he might lose so much of Halleck's money through the machinations of a parcel of carpet-bagging tricksters ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... civilization of the Old World. The United States cannot claim to be exempt from manifestations of economic slavery, of grinding the faces of the poor, of exploitation of the weak, of unfair distribution of wealth, of unjust monopoly, of unequal laws, of industrial and commercial chicanery, of disgraceful ignorance, of economic fallacies, of public corruption, of interested legislation, of want of public spirit, of vulgar boasting and chauvinism, of snobbery, of class prejudice, of respect of persons, and of a preference of the material over the spiritual. In a word, America ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... expected to understand a claim for liberty originating in the rights of the common people and not in the gracious benevolence or intelligent policy of the King? The very idea must have been practically inconceivable by them. Accordingly, they strove by every available device of chicanery to wheedle the Netherlanders into accepting their independence as a gift from the King of Spain. But to such a piece of self-stultification the clear-sighted Dutchmen could by no persuasion be brought to consent. Their independence, they argued, was ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... of its undoubted weakness and inconvenience in a struggle with States autocratically governed; there is even a sort of secret reaction to autocracy. On those lines there is no way out of a future of bitter rivalries, chicanery and wars, and the probable total failure of our civilisation. The only cure which I can see lies in democratising the whole world and removing the present weaknesses and shams of democracy by education of the individual conscience in every country. Good-bye to that chance ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... Stoughton and the widow of another son argued vituperously in print, each claiming sole possession of Richard's complicated secret, and each terming the other a scoundrel. The daughter-in-law accused the son of financial chicanery, and the son condemned the daughter-in-law for having run through two husbands and for desperately wanting a third. In the midst of this running battle, a third party entered the lists as maker of the Elixir. She was no Stoughton—though a widow—and ...
— Old English Patent Medicines in America • George B. Griffenhagen
... to be held in high esteem. Truth was to be used if convenient, but if a lie would serve a better purpose for the moment, it would be brought into service without hesitation or scruple. Fortune was his goddess, if he did deference to any unseen power; tricks and chicanery were to him helps to rapid and boundless wealth. "Let the sharpest win, and may the devil take the hindermost," these were the tenets in his creed, if ...
— The Evolution of Dodd • William Hawley Smith
... once, he could effectually debar Blount from any share in the accumulating profits. The small payments on past royalties and his five cents a share would be all that Blount would receive; and then he would be left, a spectacle for gods and men—a banker who had been beaten by a boy. It was the chicanery of Blount which had ruined his father and driven Colonel Huff to his death, and what could be better, as poetic justice, than to see him hoist on his own petard. And if the Colonel was not dead—as would appear from Charley's maunderings—if he could be discovered and brought back to ...
— Shadow Mountain • Dane Coolidge
... obeying the law discovered by Darwin, that the female surrenders herself to the fittest male, to him who knows how to adapt himself to the medium in which he lives, and to live in Manila there was no other like Pelaez, who from his infancy had had chicanery at his finger-tips. Lent passed with its Holy Week, its array of processions and pompous displays, without other novelty than a mysterious mutiny among the artillerymen, the cause of which was never disclosed. The houses of light materials were torn down in the presence of a troop of cavalry, ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... any means new. They have never been described from a scientific point-of-view, nor has any philosophical explanation of them ever been advanced, but there is no question whatever of their existence, and of their being now regarded by the most advanced scientists as beyond the region of chicanery and imposture. Mr. W. J. Jenks, in a recent lecture on "The Protection of Electric Light Stations from Lightning," treats the subject very exhaustively, and shows that where the ability to locate electrical or magnetic attraction is vested in an individual the ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, Jan-Mar, 1890 • Various
... you imagine, sir, that I will ever hire myself to chicanery, and be the willing promoter of fraud? If I do, may I live hated, and ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... would gladly have led a forlorn hope in Don Lovell's interests. Agitation over the matter was maintained at white heat for several days, as we again angled back towards the Cimarron. Around the camp-fires at night, the chicanery of The Western Supply Company gave place to the best stories at our command. "There ought to be a law," said Runt Pickett, in wrathy indignation, "making it legal to kill some people, same as rattlesnakes. ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... she jumped to the conclusion of chicanery. At first there seemed no other explanation. "He stole it," she cried, rousing vehemently from her inertia—"mine—mine. He stole ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... approximately the same: That Lane Fleming saw his company drifting reefward, was unwilling to survive the shipwreck, and performed seppuku. The family are supposed to have faked up the accident afterward. I dismiss the whole thing as a rather less than subtle bit of market-manipulation chicanery." ...
— Murder in the Gunroom • Henry Beam Piper
... cheap and worthless counterfeits of the real article. The classic mythology had a large and varied assortment of deities, from which every man could select a supply to suit himself. Thus the lawyer could place a bust of Mercury, the god of chicanery, in his office, and so secure the patronage of the god and save the expense of a tin sign announcing his profession. The editor could dedicate his paper to the service of Janus, the two-faced deity, and thus pursue his business without perilling his reputation for religious ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, Issue 10 • Various
... Ministers would have gone out: Sir Robert Peel has repeatedly said they would in the event of parliament condemning their Irish policy. This would bring in Lord John, and then would be revealed the distraction of his party, the chicanery of his late motion, and the mere incapacity of moving at all upon Irish questions, either to the right or to the left, for any government which at this moment the Whig-radicals could form. Doubtless, Lord John cherishes hopes of future power; but ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... the sort of thing that goes on in my unhappy country all the time, Mr Frobisher—theft, bribery, corruption, all manner of petty chicanery, especially in matters connected with the Army and Navy; and then they expect us unfortunate officers to do our work with any old material that the high officials have not thought it worth while to pilfer! It is heart-breaking. There, in order to replenish the pockets of Prince Hsi, ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood
... them to throw off the yoke. To persons terribly frightened about their state after death, they speak only of the hopes which we may entertain of the goodness of God. To those who have too much confidence, they preach up the terrors of the Lord, and the judgments of a severe God. By this chicanery they contrive to subject or retain under their yoke all those who are weak enough to be led by the contradictory doctrines of these ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... of our judicature and our Parliament; but there was something as congenial to his mind in its definiteness, its rigidity, its narrow technicalities. He was never wilfully unjust, but he was too often captious in his justice, fond of legal chicanery, prompt to take advantage of the letter of the law. The high conception of royalty which he borrowed from St. Lewis united with this legal turn of mind in the worst acts of his reign. Of rights or liberties unregistered in charter or roll Edward would know nothing, while his own good ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... too—slothful as she has been, and tardy as she seems in appreciating her own interests and her rights, and kind and generous as she has been in inviting a Peace Congress to agree upon measures of safety for the Union. The time will come, however, when old Virginia will stand trifling and chicanery no longer. Neither will North Carolina suffer it. None of the slave States will endure it; for they cannot separate one from the other, and they will not. They will go out of this Union and into one of their own; forming a great, homogeneous, and glorious Southern Confederacy. ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... alone, Woods waits for Hardin to speak. He is silent. There is a gulf between them which never can be bridged. Joseph feels he is no match for Hardin in chicanery, but he has his little surprise in store for the lawyer. It is an ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... does not forget the precepts of his youth. A very touching anecdote is told of a horse, in the cavalry service of the British army, during Napoleon's time. After the battle of Waterloo, when the combined force of Europe, through chicanery—not valor—defeated the greatest soldier the world ever saw, the British army was cut down, rank and file—Napoleon having promised to "be a good boy," and let 'em alone in future. Among the cut offs, was a troop of horse, and in this troop was an old veteran ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... meet with a greater variety of genuine eccentricity, unalloyed with any baser or offensive material. Matthew Temple himself is a great original, pure Somerset, perfectly good-natured, ever ready to oblige, and although for many years the commander-in-chief of the Castle, is yet in all the chicanery of his ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... to see that the juries were not composed of persons hostile to the government. In the days of Charles and James, the Solicitors of the Treasury had been with too much reason accused of employing all the vilest artifices of chicanery against men obnoxious to the Court. The new government ought to have made a choice which was above all suspicion. Unfortunately Mordaunt and Delamere pitched upon Aaron Smith, an acrimonious and unprincipled politician, who had been the legal adviser ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... hurled at the aged singer, the conclusion of his sons was greeted by a general roar of laughter, the populace apparently recognising the picture of their own chicanery ...
— Punch Among the Planets • Various
... who, from some distaste or disability, could never so much as understand the meaning of the word politics, and has given up trying to distinguish Whigs from Tories; but take her on her own politics, ask her about other men or women and the chicanery of everyday existence—the rubs, the tricks, the vanities on which life turns—and you will not find many more shrewd, trenchant, and humorous. Nay, to make plainer what I have in mind, this same woman has a share of the higher ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... forms of life. Under the systems which we call patriarchal, the modern distinction between sins and crimes had no existence. All gross sins were offences against society, as it then was constituted, and, wherever it was possible, were punished as being so; chicanery and those subtle advantages which the acute and unscrupulous can take over the simple, without open breach of enacted statutes, became only possible under the complications of more artificial polities; and the oppression or injury of man by man was open, violent, obvious, and therefore easily ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... such lawlessness and outrage and chicanery can exist in America—many of the outrages would disgrace Russia or Turkey—yet every episode related here has ten prototypes in Life, in Fact; not of twenty years ago, or yesterday, or the day before yesterday, but to-day. For instance, the number of sheep destroyed is given ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... entered upon. He is, however, miserably hampered. The new rulers have come down to Washington very much in the spirit of the Goths when they captured Rome. Every one is on the make. The contract system is something beyond the wildest excesses I ever read of in pillage and chicanery. Shoes by the million have been accepted that melt as soon as they are wet; garments are stacked mountain-high in the storehouses that blow into rags so soon as the air goes through them. Food, moldy, filthy, is accumulated on the wharves of Washington, Baltimore, and Alexandria ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... fifteenth century scepticism, not yet replaced by the scientific and socialistic disbelief which is puritanic and iconoclastic; sly and savage habits of vengeance still doing service among the lower classes instead of the orderly chicanery of modern justice;—these are the things, and a hundred others besides, concrete and spiritual, things too magnificent, too sordid, too irregular, too nauseous, too beautiful, and, above all, too utterly unpractical and old-fashioned for our times, which I call the rags of the Renaissance, ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... action and began a careful, patient, thorough investigation. As it proceeded, his amazement increased. He found that Bivens had only scratched the surface of the truth. He found that the system of fraud and chicanery had spread from the heads of the big companies until the whole business world was honeycombed with ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... forces him to sell his connection. Desroches, our friend Desroches, understood the full resources of a trade carried on in a beggarly way enough by poor devils; he would buy up causes of men who feared to lose the day; he plunged into chicanery with a fixed determination to make money by it. He was right; he did his business very honestly. He found influence among men in public life by getting them out of awkward complications; there was ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac
... chicanery is not viewed, as with us, in the light of an offence, since, from the exceeding low value of the Chinese cash—twenty-seven being only equivalent to a penny—those must be bad indeed which will not pass current with the rest; and, accordingly, the inferior sorts, when used in moderation, are ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 439 - Volume 17, New Series, May 29, 1852 • Various
... and three thousand Negroes, the Company having secured among other privileges the exclusive right to trade with the colony for twenty-five years and the absolute ownership of all mines in it. The sufferings of some of the white emigrants from France—the kidnapping, the revenge, and the chicanery that played so large a part—all make a story complete in itself. As for the Negroes, it was definitely stipulated that these should not come from another French colony without the consent of the governor of that colony. The contract had only begun to be carried out when Law's bubble ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... passed, or caused to be passed, after his accession to power, what were they all, with the exception of the Civil Code? The legislative reveries of the different men who have from time to time ruled France form an immense labyrinth, in which chicanery bewilders reason and common sense; and they would long since have been buried in oblivion had they not occasionally served to authorise injustice. I cannot, however, pass over unnoticed the happy effect produced in Paris, and throughout the whole of France, by some ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... Craigengelt, but in a manner sufficiently offensive to the Ashtons. "He thought the report," he said, "highly probably, and heartily wished it might be true. Such a match was fitter and far more creditable for a spirited young fellow than a marriage with the daughter of an old Whig lawyer, whose chicanery had so ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... tortured and executed by the thousand. By this savage policy he stamped out heresy, placed freedom of thought under a ban, and put an end to the intellectual progress of the country. In his dealings with other nations his diplomacy included all the arts of chicanery ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot
... deserve it! I can't see help on any hand. I don't believe our people, as a class, are actually vicious and corrupt—only callous and indifferent, accustomed so long to the spectacle of political chicanery and depravity that they have lost their ability to appreciate its significance. But, so far as results are concerned, it all amounts to the same thing. Once, I hoped I should be able to do something. But now—I'm a nonentity, Mr. Rathbawne, as you know, and not only that, but a man who has taken ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... and courts the sponger gives a wide berth they are the haunts of chicanery; there is no satisfaction to be got out of them. But at wrestling-school and gymnasium he is in his element; he is their chief glory. Show me a philosopher or orator who is in the same class with him when he strips in the wrestling- school; look at them in ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... for these reasons I examined the two wounded Zulus with considerable anxiety, only to discover another instance of the chicanery which it amused this Ayesha to play off upon me. For what did I find? That they were practically well. Their hurts, which had never been serious, had healed wonderfully in that pure air, as those of savages have a way of doing, ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... those unfortunates who had chanced to incur the malicious hatred of the great, legalized malefactor, Ames, by opposition to his selfish caprice, and whose utter defeat and discrediting before the public would now place the crown of righteous expediency upon his own chicanery and extortion and his wantonly ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... election and after a shoot." His own manipulation of the Ems telegram was venial compared to the manner in which the German diplomatists, egged on by their ruler—whose marginalia on the despatches furnish the most amusing reading in the volume—used all the arts of chicanery to deceive Europe as to their real intentions and to defeat the efforts of England—on whose neutrality they confidently counted—to secure a peaceful settlement. Though primarily addressed to the German proletariat, Herr KAUTSKY'S book ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 25th, 1920 • Various
... true? A state of society in which a man can contract a debt for a cow, or his household goods, and laugh at his creditor when he seeks his pay, on the one hand; and on the other, legislators and executives lending themselves to the chicanery of another set, that are striving to deprive a particular class of its rights of property, directly in the face of written contracts! This is straining at the gnat and swallowing the camel, with a vengeance; and all for votes! Does any one really expect a community can long ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... being a Republican. This has added largely to the emigration, and the tide has reached not only Kansas, but the older States of the North. It has entered Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois, and soon will find its way into Wisconsin, Iowa, and Michigan. We find no political chicanery of the North in this universal uprising of the colored people of the South in leaving the home of their birth. But it is the mistaken policy of the South that is driving their laborers northward; that is, compelling them to flee to more congenial surroundings. It is among the wonders that ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... success, even aided by that practical apostle of external piety and internal intrigue, Wolsey. The latter, too, had a second bitter disappointment in the election of Clement VII. to succeed Adrian, and as this was easily traced to the chicanery of the emperor, who had twice promised the portfolio of pontiff to Wolsey, the latter determined to work up another union between Henry and ...
— Comic History of England • Bill Nye
... south? There are to-day as many houseless, homeless, poor, wandering, idle white men here as there are negroes in the same condition, yet no arrangements are made for their working. All the trickery, chicanery and political power possible are being brought to bear on the poor negro, to make him do the hard labor for the whites, ...
— Report on the Condition of the South • Carl Schurz
... to most readers, in connection with the rabbinical doctrine, that it is unlawful to over-reach any one, that the Jews appear to have long ignored such maxims of morality. But it should be remembered that if they have earned for themselves, by their chicanery in mercantile transactions, an evil reputation, their ancestors in the bad old times were goaded into the practice of over-reaching by cunning those Christian sovereigns and nobles who robbed them of their property by force and cruel tortures. Moreover, where ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... subject either to the other, but the Romans labouring at the arts of peace, the Goths wielding for their defence the sword of war. Over all was to be the strong hand of the King of Goths and Romans, repressing the violence of the one nation, correcting the chicanery of the other, and from one and all exacting the strict observance of that which was the object of his daily and nightly cares, CIVILITAS. Of this civilitas—which we may sometimes translate 'good order,' sometimes 'civilisation,' sometimes 'the character ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... Reason and Religion, Wesley, like Brown and Hartley, draws up a striking indictment of the manners of the time. He denounces the liberty and effeminacy of the nobility; the widespread immorality; the chicanery of lawyers; the jobbery of charities; the stupid self-satisfaction of Englishmen; the brutality of the Army; the indolence and preferment humbug of the Church—the true cause, as he says, of the 'contempt for the clergy' which had become proverbial. His remedy of course ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... into consideration. Usually, in cases of a similar nature, there is left in the mind of the spectator some glimmering of doubt as to the reality of the vision before his eyes; a degree of hope, however feeble, that he is the victim of chicanery, and that the apparition is not actually a visitant from the old world of shadows. It is not too much to say that such remnants of doubt have been at the bottom of almost every such visitation, and that the appalling horror which has sometimes been brought about, is to be attributed, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... a pure or perfect woman. There are trials which chasten the heart and elevate the mind; but it is doubtful whether it can be for the welfare of any helpless, childish creature to be familiar with falsehood and chicanery, with debt and dishonour, from the earliest awakening of the intellect; to feel, from the age of six or seven, all the shame of a creature who is always eating food that will not be paid for, and lying on a bed out of which she may be turned at any ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... intelligent and controlling convictions of duty are absent, and that they do not thus unite, however explained, clearly accounts for the subversion of the spirit which founded our institutions, and the ascendency of a spirit of chicanery, greed, and corruption. ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... thing must first be done. The past must be wiped off. He must recommence with a clean sheet. True, he had always refused duels. But now he saw the fineness, the necessity of them. In a world of chicanery and treachery the sword alone ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... In remote ages, when our country was emerging from a state of semi-barbarism, such things were in common practice. Political chicanery was a name given to various underhand and dishonest maneuvers to gain office and public power. It was frequently the case that the most responsible positions in the Government would be occupied by the basest characters, who used their ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... fluctuating and the permanent. "Lightly come, lightly go," is a proverb, which they can very well afford to leave, when they leave little else, to the losers. They do not always find manors, got by rapine or chicanery, insensibly to melt away, as the poets will have it; or that all gold glides, like thawing snow, from the thief's hand that grasps it. Church land, alienated to lay uses, was formerly denounced to have this slippery ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... clothes in view of an important bargain that was to be made. He had cunning little eyes, and a mouth that seemed to have acquired from many ancestors, and from the habits of a lifetime, a concentrated expression of rustic chicanery which told me that no business was to be done ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... been depending several years, it was at last, to the deep regret of all who knew him, by the chicanery of the lawyers of the opposite side, and the remissness of his own, carried against him; and his expenses having been very great in supporting for years his possession, he found himself reduced from an ...
— The History of Sir Charles Grandison, Volume 4 (of 7) • Samuel Richardson
... lawyer in the midst of a heap of dusty papers. Mr. Bordacsi, for that was his name, had an extraordinary faculty for so identifying himself with any complicated case he might take up as to absolutely live and breathe in it. Any attempt at sophistry or chicanery made him downright venomous, and he only recovered himself when, by dint of superior acumen, he had enabled the righteous cause to triumph. He was also far-famed for his incorruptibility. Whoever approached him with ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... recantation proved the knave no fool.[2] Behold him later in another sphere, Where thieves abound and murderers appear; Tricked out in low and meretricious art, He plays with skill the pettifogger's part; Chicanery's brought to succor darkest crime, Too basely foul t' expose in decent rhyme. Oh! shades of Littleton and Murray rise, Where Webster trod and Choate all honor'd lies— Rise to behold the satyr in their place, Who points the moral of his clime and race; And if decay ...
— The American Cyclops, the Hero of New Orleans, and Spoiler of Silver Spoons • James Fairfax McLaughlin
... considers the future in its own interest; it limits the receipts of the current year so as not to compromise the receipts of coming years; it avoids ruining the present tax-payer who is also the future taxpayer; it does not indulge in gratuitous chicanery, in expensive lawsuits, in warrants of execution and imprisonment; it is averse to converting a profitable laborer into a beggar who brings in nothing, or into a prisoner for debt who costs it something. Through this course, the relief is immense; ten years previous to the Revolution,[3241] ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... he knew he could not be compelled to do so. Instead of that, he had invested his surplus in lands, cotton, and naval stores. Now the evil day was not far off, as he knew, and he had little to meet it. Nevertheless he made a brave effort. The ruggedness of the disowned family of Smiths and the chicanery inherited from the gnarly-headed and subtle-minded old judge came to his rescue, and he determined not to fail without a fight. He shingled himself with deeds of trust and sales under fraudulent judgments or friendly liens, to delay if they did not avert ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... efforts in behalf of his country's interests were understood and appreciated. He returned to the United States with the firm conviction, which his Republican friends shared, that he had been made the victim of Federalist chicanery. In the following year he published an elaborate defense which served admirably as a popular campaign document in the next ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... Perhaps the most striking characteristic of these fanatics is the absolute openness of their cheat. A more commonplace imposture has never been offered for acceptance, even to the most ignorant of mankind. It appeals neither to reason nor romance. The one is insulted by the very shallowness of its chicanery, while its rank plebbishness disgusts the other. Even the nomenclature, both of its offices and office-bearers, has a vulgar ring that smacks of ignoble origin. The names "twelves," "seventies," "deacons," "wifedoms," "Smiths" (Hiram and Joseph), Pratt, Snow, Young, Cowdery, and ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... drafting of a Bill applicable to every English parish was beset with difficulties, and that enclosures, while adding greatly to the food supply of the nation, had for the most part told against the independence of the poorer villagers. But this was largely due to the expense and chicanery consequent on the passing of parochial Acts of Parliament; and what objections were there to facilitating the enclosure of wastes and open fields by parishes where everyone desired it? In such a case ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... victim of the wrecks of his fortune! Absenteeism, the curse of England, is the only alternative of wretched and humiliating imprisonment. An entire change of habit ensues: ease and elegance of manners dwindle into coldness and neglect, liberality to meanness, and good-natured simplicity to chicanery and cunning. In society, too, how changed; once the gay table companion, full of gallantry and wit, now solitary and dejected, with the weeds of discomfort and despair rankling around his heart. If fortune ever enable him to regenerate from such obscurity, perhaps custom ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 277, October 13, 1827 • Various
... course of study, and was admitted to the bar. The practice of the law was not, at that time, in France, nor is it, indeed, now, invested with the high character attaching to it in England. Its codes and rules bore the impress of a barbarous age; and among its practitioners, fraud, artifice, and chicanery were the rule, and honesty the rare and generally ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... him in the East words as great as the pyramids, at Tilsit he taught Emperors majesty, at the Academy of Sciences he replied to Laplace, in the Council of State be held his own against Merlin, he gave a soul to the geometry of the first, and to the chicanery of the last, he was a legist with the attorneys and sidereal with the astronomers; like Cromwell blowing out one of two candles, he went to the Temple to bargain for a curtain tassel; he saw everything; ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... friend and protector, Field-marshal Konigseck, Governor of Vienna, when he had determined to interest himself in my behalf. I have been beloved by the greatest men Austria ever produced, but unfortunately have been persecuted by the chicanery of pettifoggers, fools, fanatics, and priests, who have deprived me of the favour of my Empress, guiltless as I was of crime or deceit, and left my ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 1 (of 2) • Baron Trenck
... Seni recocto. Horace applies this epithet to one who has served the office of quinquevir, or proconsul's notary, and who was therefore master of all the arts of chicanery. These are his words, Sat. v. ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... without raising a whirlwind of jealousy and opposition. The struggle was long and arduous. Directors of theatres and concert halls, furious to see a part of their public tempted away, raised the cry of immorality against the new-comers, and called to their aid every resource of law and chicanery. At the end of the first year Salis found himself with over eight hundred summonses and lawsuits on his hands. After having made every effort, knocked at every door, in his struggle for existence, he finally ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... seems to have been lost sight of amid much discussion and some chicanery with regard to the possession of the chateau, was a wise man in his day and instead of attempting to unite the feudal fortress and the hunting seat, as Le Nepveu was doing at Chambord, he was content to make of Azay-le-Rideau a palace of pleasure. ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... satisfaction of such universal and primary necessities as food, shelter, clothing, leisure and reasonable comfort, but towards the creation of unnecessary luxury and artificial frippery, towards the piling up, by means of advertisement, monopoly, exploitation and every kind of chicanery of unproductive accumulation of ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... the obligations under which the Burra people bend, introducing discord into families, restraining the energies of the fishermen, and tending to a deeply rooted aversion towards the lessees and their service, but producing systems of chicanery and deceit subversive of moral principle and destructive of all efforts in the ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... the shifting of the incidence of competition. Socialists tell us that hitherto the labourer has not had his fair share of the produce of industry. The existing system has sanctioned a complicated chicanery, by which one class has been enabled to live as mere bloodsuckers and parasites upon the rest of society. Property is the result of theft, instead of being, as Economists used to assure us, the ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... a putwarrie's account. Each ryot pretty accurately remembers his own particular indebtedness, but woe to him if he pays the putwarrie the value of a 'red cent' without taking a receipt. Certainly there may be a really honest putwarrie, but I very much doubt it. The name stands for chicanery and robbery. On the one hand the landlord is constantly stirring him up for money, questioning his accounts, and putting him not unfrequently to actual bodily coercion. The ryot on the other hand is constantly inventing excuses, getting up delays, and propounding innumerable reasons ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... political questions, the forming an estimate of the character of public men or public measures, the casting a vote, which is the result of that study and estimate, certainly have in themselves nothing to degrade the most delicate and refined nature. The violence, the fraud, the crime, the chicanery, which, so far as they have attended masculine struggles for political power, tend to prove, if they prove anything, the unfitness of men for the suffrage, are not the result of the act of voting, but are the expressions of course, criminal and evil natures, excited by the desire for victory. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... meet them. Now I must inquire what you are doing, and how you are. Mamma and I hope that you are quite well. I am still in my very happiest humor; my head feels as light as a feather since I got away from that chicanery. I have grown ...
— The Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, V.1. • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
... del Rosario, more exactly the cases of Richard Haddon v. 10 Doubloons, etc., of Ybanez v. L2409, and of the King v. Thomas Miller and Sampson Simpson, give excellent illustrations of the chicanery with which prize cases could be conducted and of the manner in which through admiralty courts the ends of justice could be defeated. The materials are copious. The history of the capture is sufficiently set forth in docs. no. 187 and no. 188. The ...
— Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period - Illustrative Documents • Various
... man to estimate at its real worth the possession of this knowledge. Knowledge of Indian character has too long been synonymous with knowledge of how to cheat the Indian—a species of cleverness which, even in the science of chicanery, does not require the exercise of the highest abilities. I fear that the Indian has already had too many dealings with persons of this class, and has now got a very shrewd idea that those who possess ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... methods, to enable a Native and his stock to drink the fresh water and breathe the pure air in the wide tracts of South Africa, for by law Natives have now less rights than the snakes and scorpions abounding in that country. Can a law be justified which forces the people to live only by means of chicanery; and which, in order to progress, compels one to cheat the law officers of the Crown? This case is but one of many that came under our own observation, and there may be many more of ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... Right, Left and Center. The Right was the Vindictives; the Left, the irreconcilable Democrats; the Center was composed chiefly of liberal Republicans but included a few Democrats, those who rebelled against the political chicanery of ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... (1853) rather at a discount in public estimation; but let the reader assure himself that even the Court of Chancery is not quite so black as it is painted; that the true ground for the delays and ruinous expenses in ninety-nine out of one hundred instances is not legal chicanery, still less the wilful circuitousness and wordiness of law processes, but the great eternal fact that, what through lapse of time, decays of memory, and loss of documents, and what through interested suppressions of truth, and the dispersions of witnesses, ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... consented to do, and did as follows: "This, sire," I said gravely, "is an old and brave soldier; who formerly served your Majesty to good purpose in Normandy, but has been cheated out of the recompense which he there earned by the trickery and chicanery of one of your Majesty's counsellors, ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... of religious madness, your King and his system—organized selfishness. Chicanery for those dependent upon him, ruin for all more gifted ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... a potential power, making it theoretically possible for the electorate to take possession of the country. In practice, the franchise has had no such result. Quite the contrary, the masters of American life by a policy of chicanery and misrepresentation, advertise and support first one and then the other of the "Old Parties," both of which are led by the members of the propertied class or by their retainers. The people, deluded by the press, ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing
... conditions under which the Church of England now exercises that right of electing her chief pastors which has been from the beginning the heritage of Christendom. It would be difficult to imagine a more dexterous use of chicanery, preserving the semblance but carefully precluding the reality of a free choice. We all know something of Deans and Chapters—the well-endowed inhabitants of cathedral closes—and of those "greater Chapters" which consist of Honorary ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... feuilleton. It was, even when not a professed Socialist, a great promoter of Socialism, by the thorough support which it lent to all the slimy, jesuitical corruptions of Guizoism, and all the turpitudes and chicanery of Louis Philippism. When the Presse was not a year old it had 15,000 subscribers, and before it was twelve years old the product of its advertisements amounted to 150,000 francs a-year. Indeed this journal ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... interesting to the gallant and handsome informant than to his brother statesman; and that emphatic and vehement tone with which Lord Aspeden is assuring the minister for —— of some fact, is merely an angry denunciation of the chicanery practised at ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... The functions of the government are substantially the guardianship of the same interests for which the State, the county, the township and the individual exercise concern. Government has lost its mystery: even diplomacy has somewhat changed from lying and chicanery to common-sense dealing. The qualities that are required in the government—industry, economy, integrity, knowledge of men and affairs—are precisely those which are of value to every individual ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... punishment is inflicted. We will picture his feelings"—the Earl paused, and fired a shot more or less at a venture—"when he becomes aware that, though by law enabled to buy his son off from military service, he has by chicanery been rendered powerless. We will imagine him an enforced spectator, wincing as each stroke ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... resumed Hafner, with evident disgust, so greatly did the cavilling and the ill-will of the nobleman irritate him, "where are you wandering to? What do you mean by bringing up chicanery of this sort?" ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... Lord Tenterden's Act, passed in our own time. Every one of those Acts was retrospective. Every one of them barred claims arising out of past transactions. Nor was any objection ever raised to what was so evidently just and wise, till bigotry and chicanery formed that disgraceful league against which we are now contending. But, it is said, it is unreasonable to grant a boon to men because they have been many years doing wrong. The length of the time during ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... great pageant, or on the recent occasion of their kneeling in their own shame to pledge a faith they do not feel, in expectation of some royal notice or royal favour. What is mournful in both instances is this, that a show of wealth, a practice of successful chicanery called good sense, or public trust won by intrigue and falsehood, should so blind the world to the man's rotten and vulgar heart as to raise them to a position where their acts should be regarded as indicative of the feeling or important to the destiny ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... office, where, at a dollar an hour for the use of his machine-tools, he would "develop" his ideas, as passed upon by the manufacturer who knew no more of construction or the reading of mechanical drawings than he did of the chicanery of the engineer, and in this way roll up the costs against the unfortunate. In the end the engineer might and might not produce a satisfactory working machine. There was nothing in the contract about this—save only as it protected the ...
— Opportunities in Engineering • Charles M. Horton
... Barnes, and the other two listened while the whole miserable story of the divorce, in its American aspects, unrolled. At first Roger showed a certain apathy and brevity; he might have been fulfilling a task in which he took but small interest; even the details of chicanery and corruption connected with the trial were told without heat; he said nothing bitter of his wife—avoided naming her, indeed, ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... subjection. He broke no law of nations if, without notice, cause or provocation, he made war upon his neighbor in an attempt to conquer and subdue additional territory. He violated no principle of government if in carrying out his purpose he resorted to trickery, chicanery, and dishonesty. The result was that every ruler was suspicious of ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... they intended to remain like blocks of wood. At last Pierre met with a stroke of luck which enabled him to return the ten thousand francs to his son. When, however, he wanted to reckon up accounts with him, Aristide interposed so much chicanery that he had to let the couple go without deducting a copper for their board and lodging. They installed themselves but a short distance off, in a part of the old quarter called the Place Saint-Louis. The ten thousand ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... scintillates and glitters as purely and perfectly as the diamond—men who are not wholly the slaves of the material occupations and pleasures of life, wholly engrossed in trade, in the breeding of cattle, in the framing and enforcing of revenue regulations, in the chicanery of the law, the objects of political envy, in the base trade of the lower literature, or in the heartless, hollow vanities of an eternal dissipation. Every generation, in every country, will bequeath to those who succeed it splendid examples and great images of the ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... that our father forgives. It must, I say, be right to forgive. Every attribute of God must be infinite as himself. He cannot be sometimes merciful, and not always merciful. He cannot be just, and not always just. Mercy belongs to him, and needs no contrivance of theologic chicanery to ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... the mountain heights of science, from the contemplation of the unchangeable and ineffable glories, into the foul fields and farmyards of earthly practical life, and become a drudge among political chicanery, and the petty ambitions, and sins, and falsehoods of the earthly herd.... And the price which he offers me—me, the stainless—me, the virgin—me, the un-tamed,—is-his hand! Pallas Athene! dost thou ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... of it. That is the history of this innovation, beginning with books, proposing pitiful reformations in clothes, and cookery, and law chicanery. That would serve to show an ill-used people that there was some care for them stirring, some tribuneship at work already. 'What I say of physic generally, may serve AS AN EXAMPLE OF ALL OTHER SCIENCES,' says this same scribbler, under his scribbling ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... loyalty, and of evil times evil men are the natural fruit. In nearly all respects Asgill was as unscrupulous a man as the time in which he lived and the class from which he sprang could show. Following in the steps of a griping, miserly sire, he had risen to his present station by oppression and chicanery; by crushing the weak and cajoling the strong. And he was prepared to maintain his ground by means as vile and a hand as hard. But he loved; and—strange anomaly, bizarre exception, call it what you will—somewhere ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... wheat—was ruined upon one hand; the working-man—he who consumed it—was ruined upon the other. But between the two, the great operators, who never saw the wheat they traded in, bought and sold the world's food, gambled in the nourishment of entire nations, practised their tricks, their chicanery and oblique shifty "deals," were reconciled in their differences, and went on through their appointed way, jovial, ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... increase of salary. But have I ever CABALLED for it? No, you would be wrong in thinking so, my dearest one. HOW could I ever have done so? You yourself have had many opportunities of seeing how incapable I am of deceit or chicanery. ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... ratified, after all; but hung, for so many years, always on the point of being so. These are the uses of your purchased Grumkow, and of riding the length of a Terrestrial Equator keeping a Majesty in company. If, by a Double-Marriage with England, that intricate web of chicanery had been once fairly slit in two, and new combinations formed, on a basis not of fast-and-loose, could it have been of disadvantage to either of the Countries, or to either of their Kings?—Real and grave ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... the habitans, as he travelled from parish to parish and from seigniory to seigniory, drawing bills and hypothecations, marriage contracts and last wills and testaments, for the peasantry, who had a genuine Norman predilection for law and chicanery, and a respect amounting to veneration for written documents, red tape, and sealing-wax. Master Pothier's acuteness in picking holes in the actes of a rival notary was only surpassed by the elaborate intricacy of his own, which he boasted, not without reason, would puzzle the Parliament of Paris, ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... short the thread of this shocking series of corruption, oppression, fraud, and chicanery, which lasted for upwards of four years: Paterson remains without employment; the inhabitants of great provinces, whose substance and whose blood was sold by Mr. Hastings, remain without redress; and the purchaser, Debi Sing, that corrupt, iniquitous, and bloody tyrant, instead of ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... better. We got there on the 31st, when Zaldechar Khan sent us a licence. We agreed to send a present to Mir Sumela, a great officer under the king at Condapoli, and farmer of his revenues, that we might be secured against the chicanery ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. VIII. • Robert Kerr
... gave him, after his education was finished, the small fortune of his father. He came to finish his studies in law at Paris, and bought a place in parliament as a barrister, where he practised little and without any notoriety. He despised chicanery; his mind and language had the proportions of the great causes of the people and the throne. The Constituent Assembly began to stir them. Danton, watchful and impassioned, was anxious to mingle with them: he sought the leading men, whose eloquence resounded throughout ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... every office at court was held by a creature and toady of the Duke, bribery and corruption of all kinds ruled the State, and there appeared to be no limit to his lust and rapacity, and no barrier against the chicanery of ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... comparatively easy to adopt it and give it a yet wider scope, by making the sacrifice spiritual rather than physical, and by finally rewarding the hero with heavenly joys. It is to be noted, too, that even at this early period there is a certain glorification of chicanery: the fiend fulfils his side of the contract, but God Himself breaks the other side. This becomes a regular feature in all tales that relate dealings with the Evil One: all Devil's Bridges, Devil's Dykes, and the Faust legends show that Satan may be trusted to keep his word, ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... and sensuality try to compass their respective ends. Let us select for consideration one group of these vices,—the important group which fall under the general head of untruthfulness. Insincerity, disingenuousness, shiftiness, trickery, duplicity, chicanery, evasion, intrigue, suppressio veri, suggestio falsi, fraud, mendacity, treachery, hypocrisy, cant,—their name is Legion. That externalism, whether in school or out of school, is the foster-mother of the whole brood, is almost too ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes |
