"Political system" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dated the European period of Russian history. Before Peter's time Russia belonged to Asia rather than to Europe, and was doubtless regarded by Englishmen and Frenchmen pretty much as we nowadays regard Bokhara or Kashgar; since that time she has formed an integral part of the European political system, and her intellectual history has been but a reflection of the intellectual history of Western Europe, modified and coloured by national character and ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... tho not all of them, said when it was pressed on them in 1914 that Germany had to fight for her life. Had she possessed a true Parliamentary system for a generation before the war there would probably have been no war. What has happened to her is a vindication of Democracy as the best political system despite certain drawbacks ...
— Before the War • Viscount Richard Burton Haldane
... fortune more important yet was their relatively free religious and political system. Toleration in religion was large. Self-government was nearly complete internally, and indeed externally, till the navigation acts. Canada, on the other hand, was oppressed by a feudal constitution in the state, settlers being denied the fee simple ...
— History of the United States, Vol. I (of VI) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... The Scotch, as an aggregate, are intellectually, physically, and in their local institutions and habits one of the most distinct national types existing. They are drawn together by a strong sentiment of patriotism, but they are as little likely to demand a separate political system, a parliament sitting at Edinburgh, as the members from Hampshire and Wiltshire are likely to combine for the establishment of parliamentary government on the banks of ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... causa occasionalis of the war, but not its true causa efficiens. What was? Where do the true permanent causes of war, as distinguished from its proximate excitements, find their lodgment and abiding ground? They lie in the system of national competitions; in the common political system to which all individual nations are unavoidably parties; in the system of public forces distributed amongst a number of adjacent nations, with no internal principle for adjusting the equilibrium of these forces, and no supreme Areopagus, or court of appeal, for deciding disputes. Here lies the ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... a digression, in which he speaks of the origin of society. He describes, first of all, the family; secondly, the patriarchal stage, which is an aggregation of families; thirdly, the founding of regular cities, like Ilium; fourthly, the establishment of a military and political system, like that of Sparta, with which he identifies Argos and Messene, dating from the return of the Heraclidae. But the aims of states should be good, or else, like the prayer of Theseus, they may be ruinous to themselves. This was the case in two out of three of the Heracleid kingdoms. ...
— Laws • Plato
... force. All the violence, so far as any has been shown, is wholly on the other side. Leaving entirely out of view the exceptional irregularities arising from a state of civil war, and it must be acknowledged that the social and political system of the Southern States is one which rests on arbitrary force as its corner stone. It is this arbitrary and tyrannical spirit embodied in Southern institutions which has seized on the pretext of secession in order to destroy the Government of the Union. The efforts of the loyal States ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... were in a state of disaffection; the entire country was suffering; hope had deserted the labouring classes; they had no confidence in any future of the existing system. Their organisation, independent of the political system of the Chartists, was complete. Every trade had its union, and every union its lodge in every town, and its central committee in every district. All that was required was the first move, and the Chartist emissary had long fixed upon Wodgate as the spring of the explosion, ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... not only imperial in all those material results which constitute and form the greatest commonwealth in this constellation of commonwealths, but in our political system she has become the arbiter of our national destiny. As goes New York so goes the Union, and her voice indicates that the next President will be a man with New England blood in his veins or a representative of ...
— Model Speeches for Practise • Grenville Kleiser
... that their authority is for that reason just. It certainly does condemn anarchism, and it does also by inference condemn atheism, since it clearly names the Creator as the ultimate authority from whom these equal rights are derived. Nobody expects a modern political system to proceed logically in the application of such dogmas, and in the matter of God and Government it is naturally God whose claim is taken more lightly. The point is that there is a creed, if not about divine, ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... because of erosion and economic development; furthermore, the regime gives insufficient priority to agricultural research. The next few years will witness increasing tensions between a highly centralized political system and an increasingly decentralized economic system. Rapid economic growth likely will continue ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... misfortune of the French people that all great changes in their political system, no matter how promoted or in what spirit, must be wrought out within the vicious circle of this centralized administrative machinery. The initiative in liberating France from this centralized administrative machinery can only come from within the vicious circle itself. ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... democracy can endure. With general primary education up to a point necessary for the intelligent exercise of the suffrage, one may have hopes for the continuance and development of a democratic republic. On this account primary education should be made free: it is part of our political system; it is the essential ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... world healthier, more really national, but less picturesque, less wrapt in the mystery and splendour that poets love. Great as were the faults of Puritanism, it may fairly claim to be the first political system which recognized the grandeur of the people as a whole. As great a change was passing over the spiritual sympathies of men. A sterner Protestantism was invigorating and ennobling life by its morality, its seriousness, its intense conviction of God. But ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... observation—that "British statesmen, in their zeal for introducing their democratic system of government into India, forget that India is pre-eminently an aristocratic land." This appreciation of the Indian situation formed the basis of the political system favoured by no less an authority than Sir Henry Lawrence, and stood in marked contrast to that advocated by his no less distinguished brother, Lord Lawrence. Mr. Mitra, therefore, suggests that a certain number ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... made possible the unification of a great political system like the British Empire. In the Parliament House and government offices of Westminster centre the political interests of Canada, Australia, South Africa, Egypt, and India, as well as of islands in every ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... longer possible to do without Catholics in America; not merely do ditches have to be dug, roads graded, coal mined, and dishes washed, but franchises have to be granted, tariff-schedules adjusted, juries and courts manipulated, police trained and strikes crushed. Under our native political system, for these purposes millions of votes are needed; and these votes belong to people of a score of nationalities—Irish and German and Italian and French-Canadian and Bohemian and Mexican and Portuguese and Polish and Hungarian. Who but the Catholic Church ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... his arrogance; but here was a genuine disciple of the Pitt school (that school of ignorance and insolence), who sets himself up as the moral regenerator of nations and as a distributor of provinces, while he is grossly ignorant of the political system of the country on whose destinies he pretends to decide so peremptorily. Had Castlereagh paid attention to what was going forward in Germany in 1805, he would have seen too that of all powers Prussia was the very last who with any shadow of justice could pretend to an indemnification ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... bonds of society, he ought not to suffer it to be made the pretext of destroying its peace, order, liberty, and its security. Above all, he ought strictly to look to it, when men begin to form new combinations, to be distinguished by new names, and especially when they mingle a political system with their religious opinions, true or false, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... He read an extract from an editorial in the Tribune, of February 11, in regard to the giving way of moral integrity in the affairs of the nation, and commended the question to the consideration of all. The country was never in greater danger than now of having the whole political system destroyed. Some great moral influence ought to be brought to eradicate the corruption so prevalent among public men. There were two great vices in existence—drunkenness and licentiousness—and in both, woman was the victim of man in the majority of cases. The legislation which pressed down ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... politics and scandal, the jokes of the salons and the councils of the Cabinet are inextricably mixed up together, and reveal a political system in which the authority exercised under free institutions by men had been transferred to the art, the tact, and the accomplishments of the female sex. We therein see how much women have done by those subtle agencies. If France was a despotism tempered by epigrams, it was ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... iniquities of former ages; and it also appears open to the suspicion of generating diverse interests—and often hostile ones—between the governors and the governed. They claim for all that political system which, without doubt, holds humanity in the most esteem; and however one may despise the practical working of their theory, the grandeur of its principles can not ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... that this consideration is not essential to the practical question in dispute: since any woman, who succeeds in an open profession, proves by that very fact that she is qualified for it. And in the case of public offices, if the political system of the country is such as to exclude unfit men, it will equally exclude unfit women: while if it is not, there is no additional evil in the fact that the unfit persons whom it admits may be either women or men. As long therefore as it is acknowledged that ...
— The Subjection of Women • John Stuart Mill
... it upon the most liberal principles of franchise except as to females. The question of female suffrage had not then been much agitated, and I knew the community had not thought sufficiently upon it to be ready to introduce it as an element in our political system. While I am aware of that fact, I think it will puzzle any gentleman to draw a line of demarkation between the right of the male and the female on this subject. Both are liable to all the laws you pass; their property, their persons, and their lives are affected by the laws. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... the press is inherent in our present constitution: no change can be made in this, without altering our whole political system: but we want repressive laws, particularly in the present state of the nation. I recommend this ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. II • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... Type: republic; presidential system in which military leaders hold key offices; on 31 December 1990, the government announced a National Political Charter to serve as a basis for transition to a presidential/parliamentary political system; the 1978 constitution was replaced in June 1991 via popular referendum by a new constitution creating a multiparty system with a president and prime minister Capital: Kigali Administrative divisions: 10 prefectures ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... councils of the infant commonwealth at a period when most of his accusers were in their cradles, and when mistake was ruin to the republic; he on whose strong arm the father of his country had leaned for support; the man who had organized a political system out of chaos; who had laid down the internal laws, negotiated the great indispensable alliances, directed the complicated foreign policy, established the system of national defence, presided over the successful financial ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... years, in our new and changeful country, and we learn that, follow as we may either the grand old etiquette of England or the more gay and shifting social code of France, we still must make an original etiquette of our own. Our political system alone, where the lowest may rise to the highest preferment, upsets in a measure all that the Old World insists upon in matters of precedence and formality. Certain immutable principles remain common to all elegant people who assume to gather ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... the domestic policy of David was to bring all accessible territory under the social and political system of western Europe, "the Feudal System." Its principles had been perfectly familiar to Celtic Scotland, but had rested on a body of traditional customs (as in Homeric Greece), rather than on written laws and charters signed and sealed. ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... they went wandering amongst the mountains. And it is a doctrine entertained by theologians, that the mere act of wandering, without anything else, carries with it a vehement suspicion of capital crime. Nature herself demonstrates it in the curious political system of the bees, in whose well-governed republic the drones are killed in April, ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... invaded by either, they can make use of the other as the instrument of redress. How wise will it be in them by cherishing the union to preserve to themselves an advantage which can never be too highly prized! It may safely be received as an axiom in our political system, that the State governments will, in all possible contingencies, afford complete security against invasions of the public liberty by the national authority. Projects of usurpation cannot be masked under pretenses so likely ...
— The Federalist Papers
... Charleston that Douglas warmed to his subject. He refused to recognize the right of a caucus of the Senate or of the House, to prescribe new tests, to draft party platforms. That was a task reserved, under our political system, for national conventions, made up of delegates chosen by the people. Tried by the standard of the only Democratic organization competent to pronounce upon questions of party faith, he was no longer a heretic, ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... election has not yet been estimated, but there is reason to believe that the proportional vote of women was as large as in previous years. The vote of good women, like that of good men, is involved in the evils resulting from the abuse of our present political system; but the vote of women is noticeably more conscientious than that of men, and will be an important factor in bringing ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... The political system of the allied powers is essentially different in this respect from that of America. This difference proceeds from that which exists in their respective Governments; and to the defense of our own, which has been achieved by the loss of so much blood and treasure, and matured by the wisdom of ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... they believe will take place—must take place. In the first place, there must be political changes to make complete our political democracy. You may be surprised at this, Jonathan. Perhaps you are accustomed to think of our political system as being the perfect expression of political democracy. ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... exile, a source of happiness and love, the only creature who responded to the highest feelings of man, while her miseries were to be recompensed by the idolatry of every heart. How could the consistency, which was wanting in a political system, be expected in the general ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... registration, conscription and espionage measures, the effort to control news, the governmental supervision of food supplies, transportation, production and corporation earnings, the war taxes. On the other hand, thought is so stimulated that everything is questioned: our political system, our social institutions—marriage, the family, education. As some one says, "Nothing is radical now." We probably shall escape a sudden revolution, but the conflict must produce profound readjustment in every aspect of our life; for thought and action ...
— The Soul of Democracy - The Philosophy Of The World War In Relation To Human Liberty • Edward Howard Griggs
... SYSTEM.—Feudalism was perhaps the best form of social organization that it was possible to maintain in Europe during the mediaeval period; yet it had many and serious defects, which rendered it very far from being a perfect social or political system. Among its chief faults may be pointed out the two following. First, it rendered impossible the formation of strong national governments. Every country was divided and subdivided into a vast number of practically independent principalities. ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... Revolutionary tribunal. The two sentiments, equal in force, kept her stationary by a law as true in ethics as it is in statics. This state of uncertain expectation is pleasing to unmarried women as long as they feel themselves young, and in a position to choose a husband. France knows that the political system of Napoleon resulted in making many widows. Under that regime heiresses were entirely out of proportion in numbers to the bachelors who wanted to marry. When the Consulate restored internal order, external ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... whose extensive privileges had constituted one of the most striking features of the political system of mediaeval Europe, had been shorn of their exorbitant claims founded upon royal charters or prescriptive usage. The kings of France, in particular, had favored the growth of the municipalities, in order to secure their assistance in the ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... asked me questions which I felt obliged in honesty to answer. God knows I don't wish to differ with you, but circumstances seem always against us. I will talk plainly, if you will let me. I try to look at things from your point of view. I know that you believe that a political system should go hand in hand with the great commercial system which you are engaged in building. I disagree with your beliefs, but I do not think that your pursuit of them has not been sincere, and justified by your conscience. I suppose that you sent for me to know whether Mr. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... economic necessity. Even if we cannot expect the mass of mankind to become disinterested, at any rate we observe in them a power of organization which fifty years ago would never have been suspected. The same forces which have revolutionized the political system of Europe, may effect a similar change in the social and industrial relations of mankind. And if we suppose the influence of some good as well as neutral motives working in the community, there will be no absurdity in expecting ...
— The Republic • Plato
... arts of life, but no evidence exists of the overthrow among them of gentile society and the substitution of political. It is impossible to found a political society or a state upon gentes. A state must rest upon territory and not upon persons, upon the township as the unit of a political system, and not upon the gens, which is the unit of a social system. It required time and a vast experience, beyond that of the American Indian tribes, as a preparation for such a fundamental change of systems. It also required men of the mental ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... from whose hands all power of imposing a penalty has practically been withdrawn. And these changes have been thrust upon the monarchy by the will, not of the people, but of that class or section which in the evolution of our political system happened at the time to be the ruling one. At one period it was the Church, at another the army, at another the landlord or the capitalist; it was never that latent force lying in the future, that ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... has a cultus, so also it has a clergy, who are the pivot of his entire social and political system. Their nature and office will be best shown by describing his ideal of political society in its normal state, with the various classes of which ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... and deeply on general subjects. His habit was to analyze on paper whatever he studied, and he had dealt thus in 1861 (aged eighteen) with all Sir Thomas More, Bolingbroke, and Hobbes. Among the papers for 1862 there is preserved such an analysis of Coleridge's political system; a note on the views of the Abbe Morellet, with essays on comparative psychology, the association of ideas, and the originality of the anti-selfish affections. These are deposits of that course of philosophic reading over which, says the Memoir, 'I wasted a good ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... questions of practical politics its subject, and historical fact its basis.[1] He is entirely unscholastic and unecclesiastical. The power and independence of the nation are for him of supreme importance, and the greatness and unity of Italy, the goal of his political system. He opposes the Church, the ecclesiastical state, and the papacy as the chief hindrances to the attainment of these ends, and considers the means by which help may be given to the Fatherland. In normal circumstances a republican constitution, ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... between Canada and the United States "in respect to every sign of productive industry, increasing wealth, and progressive civilization" was considered by the people of the latter country to be among the results of the absence of a political system which would give expansion to the energies of the colonists and make them self-reliant in every sense. Lord Durham's picture of the condition of things in 1838-9 was very painful to Canadians, although it was truthful ...
— Lord Elgin • John George Bourinot
... launched from the cabinet into the House were not received by a confiding majority, firm in their faith in the statesmanlike qualities of the authors of these measures and in their sympathy with the general political system of which the ministry was the representative. On the contrary, the success of the measures depended on a* variety of sections who in their aggregate exceeded in number and influence the party of the ministers. These became critics and took the ministerial measures in hand; the measures ...
— Lord George Bentinck - A Political Biography • Benjamin Disraeli
... Talcott, Marcy, and Butler changed the existing political system. Prior to their activity, the distribution of patronage depended largely upon the local boss. His needs determined the men who, regardless of their personal fitness, should be given office. But Talcott and his colleagues ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... Already the liberal party throughout the world express the apprehension that "the one retrograde institution in America is undermining the principles of progress, and fatally violating the noblest political system the world ever saw." This is not the taunt of enemies, but the warning of friends. Is it quite safe to disregard it—to despise it? Is there no danger to liberty itself in discarding the earliest practice and first precept of our ancient faith? In our greedy chase to make ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... one of the vices of our political system, not yet remedied, that it holds out great inducements to unscrupulous and ambitious men to deceive the ignorant and credulous masses, in order to obtain their good will and their votes. This deception has necessarily to be practised, moreover, concerning ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... ceremony invented by the devil for the gratification of his servants and the plaguing of his enemies. The introduction attains its most malevolent development in this century, being, indeed, closely related to our political system. Every American being the equal of every other American, it follows that everybody has the right to know everybody else, which implies the right to introduce without request or permission. The Declaration of Independence ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... the social system of the Mexicans we have repeatedly seen how the organization of gentes influenced and even controled all the departments of their social and political system. One of the cardinal principles, we must remember, is that all the members of a gens stand on an equal footing. In keeping with this we have seen that all were trained as warriors; yet the great principle of the division of labor ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... Sanction, to snatch the golden moment, and spring hunter-like on a moribund Austria, were the hunting-dogs once out and in cry. To Friedrich it seems unlikely the Pragmatic Sanction will be a Law of Nature to mankind, in these circumstances. His opinion is, "the old political system has expired with the Kaiser." Here is Europe, burning in one corner of it by Jenkins's Ear, and such a smoulder of combustible material awakening nearer hand: will not Europe, probably, blaze into general War; Pragmatic Sanction ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Christian tongue you asked, gentlemen, what was the true system of society. A competitor [3] dared to maintain, and believed that he had proved, that the institution of a day of rest at weekly intervals is inseparably bound up with a political system based on the equality of conditions; that without equality this institution is an anomaly and an impossibility: that equality alone can revive this ancient and mysterious keeping of the seventh day. This argument did not meet with your approbation, since, without denying the ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... that the States, separately, are too much engaged in their local concerns and have too many of their ablest men withdrawn from the general council for the good of the commonweal. In a word I think our political system may be compared to the mechanism of a clock and that we should derive a lesson from it, for it answers no good purpose to keep the smaller wheels in order if the greater one, which is the support and prime mover of the ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... while Jose heard no more. His ears burned and his brain throbbed. He had become conscious of but one all-absorbing thought, the fact of his vassalage to a world-embracing political system, working in the name of the Christ. Not a new thought, by any means—indeed an old one, often held—but now driven home to him most emphatically. He forgot his clerical duties and sank into profound revery on his inconsistent ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... is it not madness to prescribe laws to an apple-tree that it shall bear apples and not thorns?"[212] This view naturally proceeded from the axiom of the certainty of the salvation of all who believe in the Confession of Augsburg.[213] It is the most important element in Luther's political system, because, while it made all Protestant governments despotic, it led to the rejection of the authority of Catholic governments. This is the point where Protestant and Catholic intolerance meet. If the State ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... should be treated properly and judiciously. Whenever disease shows itself we should apply a suitable remedy—one that is suggested by the pharmacy of mutual brotherhood, and yet powerful enough to reach every nerve in our political system. ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... collapse of the Roman Empire. The luxury, immorality, and race-suicide which are popularly conceived to have been the immediate causes of Rome's decline and fall, were in reality the logical results, the inevitable attendant phenomena of a political system based on a false hypothesis. For when wealth was concentrated in a few hands, when there was no all-embracing popular education, all incentives to thrift, to private initiative, and hence to the development of the sturdy moral ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
... Our national political system may be divided into two parts. On the one hand, there is the working machine, which goes on, year in, year out, whether Parliament is sitting or not, and which would still go on quite well for a time if Parliament never met again. ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... as his residence, because it was under the protection of "his household god;" his doctrines are said to have been delivered in the Dorian dialect; and much of his educational discipline, much of his political system, bear an evident affinity to the old Cretan and Spartan institutions. But, on the other hand, it is probable, that Pythagoras favoured the god of Delphi, partly from the close connexion which many of his symbols bore to the metaphysical ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... planets with every religion known to man throughout the ages. Everything ranging from primitive animism to the most advanced philosophic ethic. We have every political system ever dreamed of, and every socio-economic system. It can all be blamed on the crack-pot manner in which we're colonizing. Any minority, no matter how small—religious, political, racial, or whatever—if it can collect the funds to buy or rent ...
— Ultima Thule • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... Mr. Southey's political system is just what we might expect from a man who regards politics, not as matter of science, but as matter of taste and feeling. All his schemes of government have been inconsistent with themselves. In his ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... and they have every incentive to commit crimes which will bring them the means of supplying their wants. It is a common habit of some European governments to ship their criminals to this port, where they have a new field opened to them. The political system of the city teaches the lower class to disregard all rights, either of property or person, and, indeed, clothes some of the most infamous criminals with an amount of influence which is more than dangerous in their hands, and ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... no Political System; yet it is controlled by the very Acme of System. Each Individual of their vast population is guided by "The Light Within" ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon
... agricultural enterprise, in the development of the national resources, the progress had been steady and rapid. The politicians of Europe had been amazed to find that their unanimous prediction of the frailty of our political system had totally failed. The idea of a political centre combined with separate State organizations was as firmly fixed as ever. The General Government wielded an undiminished power in aid of the general good; the local Legislatures controlled, within ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... parlance is the political system which a number of independent and sovereign States adopt when they join together for purposes of domestic and especially International policy; local government is freely left with the individual States, and only in the matter of chiefly foreign ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... empires immediately seized the occasion of soliciting an alliance with France. The motives for this appeared so plausible, that it was believed the latter would have entered into this alliance, and that thus, the whole political system of Europe would have taken a new form. What has prevented this court from coming into it, we know not. The unmeasurable ambition of the Emperor, and his total want of moral principle and honor, are suspected. A great share of Turkey, the recovery ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... nearer home, I would call your attention to our sister states to the north of us. These states are bound up with us in a political system. Destiny has made us one people, and by the outside world we must be reckoned with as a unit. Under these circumstances, the thought must unavoidably develop that that for which all are to be held responsible must, when the need arises, be made the subject ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... other hand there are in the imperial system two causes of decay and of rot silently at work. They may not be the faults of the Emperor, but they are such misfortunes as may cause the fall of the Empire. The first is an absolute divorce between the political system and the intellectual culture of the nation. The throne and the system rest on universal suffrage,—on a suffrage which gives to classes the most ignorant a power that preponderates over all the healthful elements of knowledge. It is the tendency of all ignorant multitudes to personify ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... French phrase commonly used, even by English writers, to denote the social and political system established in France under the old monarchy, which was swept away by the Revolution of 1789. The phrase is generally applicable only to France, for in no other country, with perhaps the exception of Japan, has there been in modern times so clearly marked a division between "the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... themselves have put this matter beyond dispute. Why did the Papists divide territorially the country? Why did they assume territorial titles? and why do they so pertinaciously cling to these titles? Why, because their chief aim is to erect a territorial and political system, and they wish to secure, by fair means or foul, a pretest or basis on which they may afterwards enforce that system by political and physical means. Have we forgotten the famous declaration of Wiseman, that his grand end in the ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... Business men who have tried to set up a control in politics through the machine have more and more deceived themselves, have allowed themselves to think that the whole matter was a necessary means of self-defence, have said that it was a necessary outcome of our political system. Having reassured themselves in this way, they have drifted from one thing to another until the questions of morals involved have become hopelessly obscured and submerged. How far away from the ideals of their youth have many of our men of business drifted, enmeshed in the vicious system,—how ...
— The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People • Woodrow Wilson
... suffered to grow up in his kingdom. But whatever might be the origin, the effect was, to break off the intercourse with France and her corruptions, and to exhibit a new energy and purity in the people. Cromwell raised a sudden barrier against France by his political system, and the nation recovered its daring and its character in its contempt ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... said that the North must bear these incidents of slavery, so obnoxious to it, in deference to our complex political system. Yes, but it was equally the South's duty to bear the, to it, obnoxious incidents of freedom. Southern men seem never to have thought of this. Doubtless, as emancipation in any style would have afflicted it, the South could not but account all incitements thereto as ...
— History of the United States, Volume 3 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... imagined on the laws of modern times. Wherever the barbarians, who issued from their northern hive, settled in new habitations, they carried with them their native genius, their original manners, and the first rudiments of the political system which has prevailed in different parts of Europe. They established monarchy and liberty, subordination and freedom, the prerogative of the prince and the rights of the subject, all united in so bold a combination, that the fabric, in some ...
— Germania and Agricola • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... fit emblem of ancient Egypt. Yet material happiness appears to have been enjoyed. From sports, from caricatures, from the fanciful decorations of their houses, from their use of music as a daily recreation, we should judge that the Egyptians were not a gloomy people; and that their social and political system aimed, though imperfectly, at a high standard, may be inferred from the reverence, however exaggerated, which was entertained for it ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... popular passion; her House of Commons, representing the conflicting sentiments of an estate of the realm not less privileged than that of the Peers, though far more numerous, has enlisted the great mass of the lesser proprietors of the country in favour of a political system which offers them a constitutional means of defence and a legitimate method of redress; her Ecclesiastical Establishment, preserved by its munificent endowment from the fatal necessity of pandering to the erratic fancies of its communicants, has maintained the sacred ...
— Sketches • Benjamin Disraeli
... balance, and with a popular government in which all offices were filled by men chosen by ballot, who should hold office for a limited term. Thus there was to be a constant flow of new blood through the political system, and the representative was to be kept true as a ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... following drama would certainly have suffered greatly. Moreover, this sketch is historically faithful; it shows a social stratum of importance in any portrayal of manners and morals, especially when we reflect that the political system of the Younger branch rests almost wholly ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... in the English public schools, in the English political system, and to some extent in the English character, is a weakness which necessarily produces a curious crop of superstitions, of lying legends, of evident delusions clung to through low spiritual self-indulgence. There are so many of these public-school ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... criticism of Marx which goes much deeper than those that we have been hitherto considering. Marx's views on historical development may have been in a greater or less degree mistaken in fact, and yet the economic and political system which he sought to create might be just as desirable as his followers suppose. Syndicalism, however, criticises, not only Marx's views of fact, but also the goal at which he aims and the general nature of the means which he recommends. Marx's ideas were ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... a delightful listener, for she was always anxious to learn and to understand, and before long she was quite AU FAIT, and understood a great deal about that exceedingly complicated thing, the French political system. M. Lemercier was a fiery, earnest little man, with very strong convictions; he had been exiled as a communist but had now returned, and was a very vigorous and impassioned writer in one of the advanced Republican ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... seem to me to fade away before the sublime and divine conception of Catholic communion, the type of a universal social communion brought about by the word and the fact that are combined in religious dogma. It would be very difficult for any modern political system, however perfect people may think it, to work once more such miracles as were wrought in those ages when the Church as the stay and support of ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... the worst. There is another article, and far more damaging, in the indictment. Through Protection, and because of it, Paternalism has crept in; and, like a huge cancerous growth, is eating steadily into the vitals of the political system. Instead of supporting a government economically administered by money contributed by the People, a majority of the People to-day are looking to the government for support, either directly through pension payments or indirectly through ...
— 'Tis Sixty Years Since • Charles Francis Adams
... consent that another country should arrogate the power of annulling, at her pleasure, the political system of Europe, established by solemn treaties and guaranteed by the ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... turned the Prince out of the house for insulting his wife. The journals, newspapers, and memoirs of the time throw (especially for those who can read between the lines) a startling light on that hereditary principle which plays so important a part in our political system. All the ancillary vices flourished with a rank luxuriance. Hard drinking was the indispensable accomplishment of a fine gentleman, and great estates were constantly changing owners at ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... interests of some kind of national government, of which the political careers of Louis XI in France, of Edward IV in England, and of Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain were such conspicuous instances, did not fail to affect in a lesser degree that loosely connected political system of German States known as the Holy Roman Empire. Maximilian's first Reichstag in 1495 caused to be issued an Imperial edict suppressing the right of private warfare claimed and exercised by the whole noble class ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... outward room, to follow his example. The Chancellor's resignation is doubtful. General Conway has been ill since Friday; this morning St. Anthony's fire broke out in his legs. Mr. Townshend will move the Commons to adjourn. The whole political system is now in such confusion, that speculation would only tend ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... taken to the uniform black coat by way of mourning for a dead France. There is no love between equals. Between two lovers there should be differences to efface, wide gulfs to fill. The charm of love fled from us in 1789. Our dulness and our humdrum lives are the outcome of the political system. Italy at any rate is the land of sharp contrasts. Woman there is a malevolent animal, a dangerous unreasoning siren, guided only by her tastes and appetites, a creature no more to be trusted ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... year VIII, (9th of November, 1799) the Consuls of the Republic have bestowed particular attention on geographical and topographical operations. The new limits of the French territory require that the map of it should be continued; and the new political system, resulting from the general pacification, renders necessary the exact knowledge of the states of the allies of ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... socialism worthy of the name has a chance. It is possible for any intelligent, virtuous, and capable member of the lower class to transfer himself to the middle class; and once there he does not favour any system of social equality. Socialism can never prevail as a political system, until we get a majority of disinterested men, who do not want to purchase freedom from daily work by acquiring property, and who desire the responsibility rather than the influence of administrative office. But administrative office is looked upon in England as an important ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... '48 the talk of the "Rights of Man" really meant the rights of individual men—the tailor, the barber, the shoemaker—each of whom felt that the time had now come to overturn the political system of kings and to bring on the rule ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... Constantine marks the epoch of the transformation of Christianity from a religion into a political system; and though, in one sense, that system was degraded into an idolatry, in another it had risen into a development of the old Greek mythology. The maxim holds good in the social as well as in the mechanical world, that, when two bodies strike, ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... with France. But the union of France and Russia is the most threatening and terrible combination for the whole remainder of Europe. Of all the wounds which during the last ten years have been inflicted upon the old political system, and in particular upon the independence of Germany, those which were caused by the temporary agreement between France and Russia were the deepest and most incurable. If this comet should rise a ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... full light of European publicity, was gaining fame as a financial reformer and the reviver of trade and industry, the sagacious and painstaking intendant in his remote corner of the globe was laying the foundations of an economic and political system, and opening to the young country the road of commercial, industrial, and maritime progress. Talon was a colonial Colbert. What the latter did in a wide sphere and with ample means, the former was trying to do on a small scale and with limited resources. ...
— The Great Intendant - A Chronicle of Jean Talon in Canada 1665-1672 • Thomas Chapais
... life of the nation and so pregnant with the issue of slavery.[189:1] The acquisition of Florida, Texas, and the Far West followed naturally. Not only was the nation set on an independent path in foreign relations; its political system was revolutionized, for the Mississippi Valley now opened the way for adding State after State, swamping the New England section and its Federalism. The doctrine of strict construction had received a fatal blow at the ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... George's political system was, it is evident, largely based on Bolingbroke's essay On the Idea of a Patriot King. In this essay Bolingbroke lays down that a king who desires the welfare of his people should "begin to govern as soon as he begins to reign," ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... judicious. It was, perhaps, his most remarkable gift, and while he controlled the present he studied the future. Outside of the operations of armies, and the plans of campaign, he saw, as the war progressed, that the really fatal perils were involved in the political system. At the beginning of the Revolution there was no organization outside the local state governments. Congress voted and resolved in favor of anything that seemed proper, and the States responded to their appeal. In the first flush of ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... Secretary Olney for more than four months. He then asserted that President Monroe's message of 1823 had laid down two propositions: that America was no longer to be looked upon as a field for European colonization; and that Europe must not attempt to extend its political system to America, or to control the political condition of any of the American communities. In Lord Salisbury's opinion Olney was asserting that the Monroe doctrine conferred upon the United States the right to demand arbitration whenever a European power had a frontier difference with ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... the same time, to a British ambassador when dining with his political antagonists. One of these—the ambassador of France—had proposed to drink his master, Louis XIV., under the character of the sun, who dispensed life and light to the whole political system. To this there was no objection; and immediately, by way of intercepting any further draughts upon the rest of the solar system, the Dutch ambassador rose, and proposed the health of their high mightinesses the Seven United States, as the moon and six ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... "According to our political system, as a matter of Civil Administration, the General Government had no lawful power to effect Emancipation in any State, and for a long time it had been hoped that the Rebellion could be suppressed without resorting to it as a Military measure. ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... mixed with fable. Woo-Wang was brave and upright. Under him a momentous change in government took place. By him the kingdom was divided into seventy-two feudal states. Internal divisions and struggles resulted from this new political system. The Tartars availed themselves of the weakened condition of the nation, to make predatory incursions. In this period of disorder and danger, Confucius, the great teacher of China, was born (551 B.C.). His father was a district ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... remember the enormous power of the dynasty and the political system which supports it, we understand why in the past Austria has always played the part of the most reactionary, autocratic and tyrannic state in Europe. Hopes have indeed been expressed by some Austrophils in the good-will ...
— Independent Bohemia • Vladimir Nosek
... destroying his existence. Notwithstanding this, the Turks were beaten by the Russians, and the man who then predicted the fall of their empire, persists in the prediction. The result of this fall will be a complete change of the political system, as far as it relates to the coast of the Mediterranean. If, however, the French become important in proportion as they become free, and if they make use of the advantage they will obtain, their progress may easily prove of the most honorable sort; inasmuch as, by the wise decrees of fate, the ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... property in consequence of the events of the Revolution, and the titles and orders conferred by Buonaparte: in a word, which summoned the Bourbon to ascend the throne of Napoleon—on condition that he should preserve that political system which Napoleon had violated. Louis, however, though he proceeded to France on this invitation, did not hesitate to date his first act in the twentieth year of his reign; and though he issued a charter, conferring, as from his own free will, every privilege which the senate ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... poverty," rejoins a third, mutteringly. "Southern hospitality is unsound, shallow, and flimsy; a little dazzling of observances to cover very bad facts. You are sure to find a people who maintain the grossest errors in their political system laying the greatest claims to benevolence and principle-things to which they never had a right. The phantom of hospitality draws the curtain over many a vice-it is a well-told nothingness ornamenting ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... otherwise an education in politics, and besides this some practical experience in public service in institutions and in organizations. This is a vital spot in education in a democracy; we have tried too much to reform or make progress in government from within the political system itself, and too little by going back to the ultimate sources of social life and educating the people as a whole with reference to playing their part ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... our political system. Party sentiment finds its first public expression there—often it has its beginnings there in the free conversations which characterize such American political societies. You will find the "leaders" gathering there, too; and in the talks among these men those plans ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... which have passed under their influence. But the process must be a very slow one, and it can only be achieved under tutelage. It is the control of the European peoples over the non-European world which has turned the world into an economic unit, brought it within a single political system, and opened to us the possibility of making a world-order such as the most daring dreamers of the past could never have conceived. This control cannot be suddenly withdrawn. For a very long time to come the world-states whose rise we have traced must continue to ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... own part, I must confess my fears that, unless some important change is made in the constitution of our voting population, the breaking strain upon our political system will come within half a century. Is it not evident that our present tendencies are in the wrong direction? The rapidly increasing use of money in elections, for the undisguised purchase of votes, and the growing disposition to tamper with the ballot and the tally-sheet, ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... Bubanza, Bujumbura, Bururi, Cankuzo, Cibitoke, Gitega, Karuzi, Kayanza, Kirundo, Makamba, Muramvya, Muyinga, Ngozi, Rutana, Ruyigi Independence: 1 July 1962 (from UN trusteeship under Belgian administration) Constitution: 13 March 1992 draft provides for establishment of plural political system Legal system: based on German and Belgian civil codes and customary law; has not accepted compulsory ICJ jurisdiction National holiday: Independence Day, 1 July (1962) Political parties and leaders: only party - National Party ...
— The 1993 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... politicians who do not understand politics, and who advocate measures which are not for the public good, because the public good is not the end for which they strive. But the fault is in the men themselves, rather than in our political system. They must first be made manly, before they can be made truly useful. They must first learn to govern themselves, before they can successfully carry forward the work of governing the nation. They must be taught that bluster is not ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... above Francis. He had never dreamed, however, of any event so decisive and so fatal as the victory at Pavia, which seemed not only to have broken, but to have annihilated, the power of one of the rivals; so that the prospect of the sudden and entire revolution which this would occasion in the political system filled him with the most disquieting apprehensions. He saw all Europe in danger of being overrun by an ambitious prince, to whose power there now remained no counterpoise; and though he himself might at first be admitted, in quality of an ally, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... for an entente, and of the proposal that the United States enter upon a campaign to republicanize the world. It stated the intention of the Government to refrain from interference in Europe, and its belief that it was "impossible that the allied powers should extend their political system to any portion of either continent [of America] without endangering our peace and happiness." The message contained a strong defense of the republican system of government and of the right of nations to control their own internal development. It completed the foreign policy of ...
— The Path of Empire - A Chronicle of the United States as a World Power, Volume - 46 in The Chronicles of America Series • Carl Russell Fish
... code, for the purpose of correcting vices in the institutions of independent states. I say that, if you suppose such a moral obligation to be in force, the supposition leads to consequences from which every one of us would recoil, to consequences which would throw the whole commercial and political system of the world into confusion. I say that, if such a moral obligation exists, our financial legislation is one mass of injustice and inhumanity. And I say more especially that, if such a moral obligation exists, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... incipient rebellion; nor would there have been anything equivalent to the State organizations which unfortunately afforded the ready means of immediate and most effective combination. The inestimable advantages of our complex political system in avoiding the necessary despotism of consolidated government, by establishing local legislation and administration in a number of partially independent States, were in some measure counterbalanced by a natural tendency to discord among the parts, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... aware that any political deficiencies which the Irish may display at home, are commonly attributed to the political system which has been imposed upon Ireland from without. If you want to see Irish genius in its highest political manifestation, it must be studied, we are told, in the United States, the widest and freest arena which has ever been offered to the race. This view is not in accordance with ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... happiness of their fellow-men—then say if our too selfish, too material age can stand a comparison with that olden period. When you remember the politicians of ancient Greece, acknowledging no other basis for the security of the commonwealth than virtue, and see the political system of our days turning only upon manufactures, commerce, and finances, will you say that our age is more virtuous? When, looking to your own country—the best and happiest, because the freest of all—you will not dissimulate in your own mind what considerations influence the platforms of your ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... configuration of our forces may ironically become self-limiting and constraining. That is not to claim automatically that there are better military solutions or that the current defense program is not the best our political system can produce. It is to say, however, that we are well-advised to pursue alternate ideas and concepts to balance and measure against the ...
— Shock and Awe - Achieving Rapid Dominance • Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade
... of a war, which becomes more and more burthensome, she sighs after peace; whilst that the harmony among the members of the supreme Government of this country increases with our arms, according as your political system, whose necessity and salutary influence were heretofore less acknowledged, gains every day more numerous imitators. The resolution lately taken by the States of Friesland, and so unanimously adopted by our Province, furnishes, among many others, ...
— A Collection of State-Papers, Relative to the First Acknowledgment of the Sovereignty of the United States of America • John Adams
... imagined, because a political system is, under certain aspects, very unwise in its contrivance, and very mischievous in its effects, that it therefore can have no long duration. Its very defects may tend to its stability, because they are agreeable to its nature. The very faults in the Constitution of Poland made it last; ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... condition would be received into the army service. The policy of emancipation, and of employing black soldiers, gave to the future a new aspect, about which hope and fear and doubt contended in uncertain conflict. According to our political system, as a matter of civil administration, the General Government had no lawful power to effect emancipation in any State; and for a long time it had been hoped that the rebellion could be suppressed without resorting ...
— History of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, • Edumud G. Ross
... deep as any man in the ministerial councils, writes to a private friend "I never thought, to tell you the truth, that we were in any danger from this last political cloud. The Duke of Cumberland's political system, grafted upon the Earl of Bute's stock, seems, of all others, the least capable of succeeding.' This letter was written on the 7th of July, and on the 10th the new ministry ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... and Story,—to say nothing of English and French jurists,—Mr. Sumner brings authority to define and illustrate the true place of the judicial office in the political system of a free government. And here, fidelity to those principles of liberty he had explained and defended, fidelity to the "good old cause" itself, at home and in the grand forum of the nations, demanded and received ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... succession of Queen Anne's issue to the throne, even in the case of her having only the one daughter who had been meanwhile born. This does not depend so much on the actual measures taken as on the fact, that now, according to Wolsey's plan, the government had broken with the political system which had prevailed hitherto, and indeed in a sense that went far beyond his views. Not merely was a French alliance avoided; the separation from the Church of Rome was to become the basis of the whole dynastic settlement ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... a public business with us, in a sense that the protection and restoration of personal health or legal rights are not. To an extent characteristic of no other institution, save that of the state itself, the school has power to modify the social order. And under our political system, it is the right of each individual to have a voice in the making of social policies as, indeed, he has a vote in the determination of political affairs. If this be true, education is primarily a public business, ...
— Moral Principles in Education • John Dewey
... well-informed or well-ordered, but simply good; and Lord Acton believed, as the Greeks and generations of Englishmen believed before him, that it is only in the soil of liberty that the human spirit can grow to its full stature, and that a political system based upon any other principle than that of responsible self-government acts as a bar at the outset to the pursuit of what he called 'the highest objects of civil society or of private life'. For though a slave, or a man living under ...
— Progress and History • Various
... these normal distinctions between the party of structure and the party of function tend to become somewhat confused; and it is precisely the transition of politics into the social sphere which tends to introduce confusion. With a political system which proceeds ultimately out of a society with a feudalistic basis, the normal attitude of political parties is long maintained. The party of structure, the Conservative party, holds by the ancient feudalistic ideals which are really, in the large sense, socialistic, though ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... of sustained interest and equable and majestic evolution; it has given scope for the most ingenious researches into its internal history. There one age is the parent of another; the elements and principles of its political system are brought out into a variety of powers with mutual relations; external events act and react with domestic affairs; manners and views change; excess of prosperity becomes the omen of misfortune to come; till in the words of the poet, "Suis ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... pointed out, of a beleaguered encampment in an enemy's territory, that the singular institutions of Lacedaemon, the half-military, half-monastic spirit, which prevailed in this so gravely beautiful place, had been originally due. But observe!—Its moral and political system, in which that slavery was so significant a factor, its discipline, its aesthetic and other scruples, its peculiar moral ethos, having long before our Platonic student comes thither attained its original and proper ends, survived,—there is the point! survived as an end in itself, ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... war, and would slink back home if they could. These are the real tiers etat of the South, and are hardly worthy a thought; for they swerve to and fro according to events which they do not comprehend or attempt to shape. When the time for reconstruction comes, they will want the old political system of caucuses, Legislatures, etc., to amuse them and make them believe they are real sovereigns; but in all things they will follow blindly the lead of the planters. The Southern politicians, who understand this class, use them as the ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... arise out of the Social Revolution. As we see, their principles are: Collective property of the instruments of production, and remuneration to each according to the time spent in producing, while taking into account the productivity of his labour. As to the political system, it would be the Parliamentary system, modified by positive instructions given to those elected, and by the Referendum—a vote, taken by noes or ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... work to be done that was directly in the line of its operations. First and foremost, it will not be denied that a citizen of our Republic who is deprived of the elective franchise is robbed of one of his most valuable privileges—one of his most essential rights. The ballot, under a political system like ours, is both the sword and the shield of liberty. Without it no man is really a freeman. He does not stand on an equality with ...
— The Abolitionists - Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights • John F. Hume
... the future peace and harmony of the Union, it is of the highest importance that the people lately in rebellion be not permitted to build up another "peculiar institution" whose spirit is in conflict with the fundamental principles of our political system; for as long as they cherish interests peculiar to them in preference to those they have in common with the rest of the American people, their loyalty to the Union will always ...
— Report on the Condition of the South • Carl Schurz
... told Adams and Cooper say it is the most glorious day they ever saw." They saw a general manifestation of a spirit of unity in the support of common rights. Without union they knew they were nothing; with union they felt equal to all things. Thus here were working two of the elements of our political system, local ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... mind, unequalled by preceding ages, except those of Pericles and Augustus: beginning in the fourteenth Century with Dante and Petrarch, and ending at the beginning of the sixteenth with the father of the modern political system, Machiavelli, it rose to the highest point of its altitude, and remained there through the whole of the fifteenth, when such bright lights shone constantly in the meridian of mind, as that Prince of the Church, Cardinal Sadoleti, great ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... the other. The patriarchal is, as is well known, probably the oldest political system in the world. All nations may be said to have experienced such a paternal government, but most ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... Classic zone, from the beginning to the end of its visible authority, is composed of these two elements—Greek imagination, with Roman order: and the divisions or dislocations of the third and fourth century are merely the natural apparitions of their differences, when the political system which concealed them was tested by Christianity. It seems almost wholly lost sight of by ordinary historians, that, in the wars of the last Romans with the Goths, the great Gothic captains were all Christians; and that the vigorous and naive form which the dawning faith took ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... of attracting attention, of gaining adherents, of achieving at least a partial and temporary success. In the age and in the country which has seen the development of Mormonism as a successful religious, social, and political system, nothing should surprise us. Such is the restlessness of human nature that it will often, from mere weak hankering after change, hug to its bosom the wildest theories, and yield ...
— Female Suffrage • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... yet his letters abound in predictions of Russian ruin. His descriptions run in this style:—"Great expenses, and nothing to show for them. The army in a state of decay; the navy incomplete and ill-equipped; the political system languid, and such as, if pursued, must ultimately reduce this immense mass of power to that state of Asiatic insignificancy from which ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... inconvenience spare. In this way, at an expense very much less than that which he incurred in building and decorating Versailles or Marli, he succeeded in making England, during nearly twenty years, almost as insignificant a member of the political system of Europe as the republic of ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... you must teach the children right before you can have the people think right. Education and association had much to do in training the thoughts of men in the South into wrong channels. Taking this view of the subject you may find much to forgive in a political system that seems wrong in your eyes and right in the eyes of its supporters. Indeed, my son, I would enjoin you to treat with a reasonable amount of deference the arguments advanced by those who differ with ...
— Siege of Washington, D.C. • F. Colburn Adams
... as in many natural bodies, untimely decrepitude was the penalty of precocious maturity. Their early greatness, and their early decline, are principally to be attributed to the same cause, the preponderance which the towns acquired in the political system. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... conservative force, which compels rest, which seeks security, stability, and peace, and is not ardently devoted to change. It reduces the system to equilibrium. There are, of course, two kinds of equilibrium—stable and unstable—according as the social and political system is in a healthy or unhealthy state. If a body is in stable equilibrium, and any slight motion takes place, the body will return immediately to its former position; but if in unstable, it will decline further and further away from its original position, and be entirely upset. ...
— The Romance of Mathematics • P. Hampson
... persecution, had from a nationality become a conspiracy; and the disaffected adherents of the Mosaic system, dispersed through all the countries of the East, formed an explosive element in the population which involved the constant danger of a catastrophe. The Parthian political system was also, as already remarked, giving symptoms of breaking up. Those bonds which for two centuries and a half had sufficed to hold together a heterogeneous kingdom extending from the Euphrates to the Indus, and from the Oxus to the ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson
... friendship for Guizot, however, induced him to accept a temporary mission in 1845, and in 1847 to go as French ambassador to London. The revolution of 1848 was a great blow to him, for he realized that it meant the final ruin of the Liberal monarchy—in his view the political system best suited to France. He took his seat, however, in the republican National Assembly and in the Convention of 1848, and, as a member of the section known as the "Burgraves," did his best to stem the tide of socialism and to avert the reaction in favour of autocracy which ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... Professor Cheyney prepares the way for the account of the Pilgrims who founded Plymouth colony in Tyler's England in America (volume IV. of the series). An absolute essential for an understanding of colonial history before the Revolution is a clear idea of the political system of England, both in its larger national form and in its local government. Hence the importance of Professor Cheyney's chapters on English government. The kings' courts, council, and Parliament all had their effect upon the governors' courts, councils, and assemblies of ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... constitute the United States of America were established, the Spaniards were living from Florida and the Mississippi River to the South, with the exception of what is now Brazil, and had there established their culture, their institutions and their political system. ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... history, language, technical processes and trades, professional outfits, and the manifold activity of life not primarily practical, or if practical not necessarily political. Men of education, scholars especially, even in the field of political system, are not by the mere fact of their scholarship highly or peculiarly fitted to take part in the active leadership of politics, unless they have other qualifications not necessarily springing from their pursuits in learning; they are naturally ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... those bonds; and, moreover, they hold, to quote the words of an able article published two years ago in the Round Table: "The chief reason for the sentiment of Imperial unity is the conscious or unconscious belief of the people of the Empire in their own political system.... There is in the British Empire a unity which it is often difficult to discern amid the conflict of racial nationalities, provincial politics, and geographical differences. It is a unity which is based upon the conviction ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... NOTE E, p. 105. It was very agreeable to the maxims of all the feudal governments, that every order of the state should give their consent to the acts which more immediately concerned them; and as the notion of a political system was not then so well understood, the other orders of the state were often not consulted on these occasions. In this reign, even the merchants, though no public body, granted the king impositions on merchandise, because the first payments came out ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume |
