"Absolutism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 11 came a royal message to the States-General which, while promising certain concessions regarding the taxes, the Collegium Philosophicum and the language decree, stated in unequivocal terms the principle of royal absolutism. To quote the words of a competent observer of ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... element of absolutism in the man, his uncompromising severity, his command of the situation regardless of cost, sorrow or suffering to other men, is seen in his realistic physiognomy. We study these facts more and more, as we ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... Dufferin, in 1883, was almost apologetic to his countrymen for abstaining from an act of political folly. He pleaded strenuously for delay in the introduction of parliamentary institutions into Egypt, on the ground that our attempts "to mitigate predominant absolutism" in India had been slow, hesitating, and tentative. He brought poetic metaphor to his aid. He deprecated paying too much attention to the "murmuring leaves," in other words, imagining that the establishment of a Chamber of Notables implied constitutional freedom, ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... had been previously established for the great purpose of their preservation and enforcement. That which was experimental in our plan of government was the question whether democratic rule could be so organized and conducted that it would not degenerate into license and result in the tyranny of absolutism, without saving to the people the power so often found necessary of repressing or destroying their enemy, when he was found in the person ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... lived upon the crumbs of royal favor, and if on some rare occasions they have ventured to place themselves in opposition to the monarch, it has not been in the cause of the nation, but of the foreigner, or of clerical absolutism. The nobility can never be regarded as an historical element: it has furnished some fortunate Condottieri, powerful even to tyranny, in some isolated town; it has knelt at the feet of the foreign emperors who have passed the Alps or crossed ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... class, certain conditions must be assured to it under which it can, at least, continue its slavish existence. The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern laborer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the progress of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly ...
— The Communist Manifesto • Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
... for the Giffards and Duchesnays of the future, where their descendants could becomingly receive fealty and homage. (foi et homage) from their feudal retainers. There was, however, nothing here to remind one of the lordly pageantry of other times—the days of absolutism—of the dark era, the age of lettres de cachet, corvees, lods et ventes, and other feudal burthens, when the flag of the Bourbons floated over the fortress of New France. In 1846, at the time of ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... each and every assertion based on these notions, and proving that the American struggle is, after all, the ever-recurring one in human affairs between right and wrong, between labour and capital, between liberty and absolutism. When such an issue comes to be presented to the people of Great Britain, stripped of all the disguises which have been thrown over it, it is not difficult to predict at least which side it ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... House of Commons which was crowded with members directly or indirectly nominated by the royal Council. With a Parliament such as this Cromwell might well trust to make the nation itself through its very representatives an accomplice in the work of absolutism. ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... circumstances was it possible to keep alive absolutism? The answer is so curious that we must ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... ministry I could expect but little; they consisted of men, the greater part of whom had been either courtiers or employes of the deceased King Ferdinand, who were friends to absolutism, and by no means inclined to do or to favour anything calculated to give offence to the court of Rome, which they were anxious to conciliate, hoping that eventually it might be induced to recognize the young queen, ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... a word of!" cried Beulah, appropriating the last as a lunge at her favorite absolutism. Rising, she placed her drawings in the portfolio, for the sun had crept round the corner of the gallery and was ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... owners of their offices, magistrates from father to son, much wealthier and much prouder than nowadays, were, in their old hereditary mansions, the real chiefs of the province, its constant representatives on the spot, its popular defenders against ministerial and royal absolutism. All these powers, which once counterbalanced episcopal power, have disappeared. Restricted to their judicial office, the tribunals have ceased to be political authorities and moderators of the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Sovereigns who were often molested by the Pope could as a rule only look favourably upon a doctrine which added religious powers to their political powers and made each of them a Pope. Far from diminishing the absolutism of rulers, the ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... passed in the secluded convent of Yuste, in Spain, where, notwithstanding the time spent by him in religious exercises, and in his favorite diversion of experimenting with clocks and watches, he remained an attentive observer of public affairs. Political and religious absolutism was the main article in Philip's creed. He was more thoroughly a Spaniard in his tone and temper than his father, who was born in the Netherlands, and always loved the people there, as he was loved by them. Philip was cold and forbidding in his manners. He ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... king, which several historians have considered to have been states- general, one of the crown's most intimate advisers, William of Plasian, proposed, against Boniface, a form of accusation which imputed to him, beyond his ambition and his claims to absolutism, crimes as improbable as they were hateful. It was demanded that the Church should be governed by a lawful pope, and the king, as defender of the faith, was pressed to appeal to the convocation of a general council. ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... it talked about, and mentally swore that, as soon as by means of such stuff they could get places, and fill their pockets, they would be as Jacobite as the Jacobs themselves. As for the Tories, no great change in them was necessary; everything favouring absolutism and slavery being congenial to them. So the whole nation, that is, the reading part of the nation, with some exceptions, for thank God there has always been some salt in England, went over the water to Charlie. But going over to Charlie was not enough, they must, or at least ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... had arrived on the stroke of the hour, in a silk hat and frock coat, with a black bag, and had sat down at his desk and begun to rule the proceedings with an absolutism that no High Court Judge would have attempted. He was autocrat in a small, close, sordid room; but he was autocrat. He had already shown his quality in some indirect collisions with the Marquis of Lechford. The Marquis felt that he could not stomach the exposure ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... to be defended is slavery, political absolutism, or the absolutism of the head of a family, we are always expected to judge of it from its best instances; and we are presented with pictures of loving exercise of authority on one side, loving submission to it on the other—superior wisdom ordering all things for ...
— The Subjection of Women • John Stuart Mill
... in truth a "Reign of Terror" by an absolutism standing upon the ruin of every rival. The power of the Barons had gone; the Clergy were panic-stricken, and Parliament was a servant, which arose and bowed humbly to his vacant throne at mention of his name! A member ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... still suffering from the same infection in its acute, "childish" form. The social and cultural anti-Semitism of the West did not undermine the modern foundations of Jewish civil equality. But Russian Judaeophobia, more governmental than social, being fully in accord with the entire regime of absolutism, produced a system aiming not only at the disfranchisement, but also at the direct physical annihilation of the Jewish people. The policy of the extermination of Judaism was stamped upon the forehead of Russian reaction, receiving various colors at various periods, assuming ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... merchant class. They feel that they have created modern industrial Germany. The military caste (of which the naval and all government bureaus are branches) has organised the nation for war with the efficiency of the managers of a great American corporation. The government is an absolutism. No Jew can become an officer. Officers of crack regiments do not go to the homes of persons in any kind of business. A business man is called a "Kaufmann," as we speak of a house painter. Some tame professors are paid by the State to ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... Grandcourt had no intention to get rid of her; on the contrary, he wanted to feel more securely that she was his to do as he liked with, and to make her feel it also. Moreover, he was himself very fond of yachting: its dreamy do-nothing absolutism, unmolested by social demands, suited his disposition, and he did not in the least regard it as an equivalent for the dreariness of the Maremma. He had his reasons for carrying Gwendolen out of reach, but they were not reasons that can seem black in the mere statement. He suspected ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... life within her life. From this point young girls are apt to develop into either extremely high-minded women or saints. But, during this beautiful period of their youth they have in their heart, in their ideas, a sort of absolutism: before their eyes is the image of perfection, and all must be celestial, angelic, or divine to satisfy them. Outside of their ideal, nothing of good can exist; all is stained and soiled. This idea causes the rejection of many a diamond with a flaw by ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... sovereignty of the people is entirely alienated, "transferred," in that of the other, administrative authority alone is granted, "conceded," while the sovereign prerogatives remain with the people. Bodin is the founder of the theory of absolutism, to which Grotius and the school of Pufendorf adhere, though in a more moderate form, and which Hobbes develops to the last extreme. Althusius, on the other hand, by his systematic development of the doctrine of social contract and the inalienable sovereignty of ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... associates are planning to strike at civilized government throughout the world, in the effort to restore the days of autocracy. It knows you are planning a world federation of states, based on the principles of absolutism and aristocracy. It is aware of the immense financial resources behind the movement. Also that you have obtained the use of certain scientific discoveries which you believe will aid you ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... however, that her self-will was a passionate, moody absolutism. She had outgrown that, and was too well-bred ever to show much temper. The tendency of her mature purposes and prejudices was to crystallize into a few distinct forms. With the feminine logic of a narrow mind, she made her husband an ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... an inadequate and undeveloped political organization. Even that royal power which was the condition precedent to distant conquest and colonial organization was new. Spanish national unity, royal absolutism, and religious uniformity, which were famous throughout Europe in the sixteenth century, were all of recent growth; the centralized control over all parts of her widely scattered colonies which Spain, above all colonizing countries, exercised, was a ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... the mind. The logical understanding must not be allowed to put on priggish airs. The feelings have their rights also. "They may be as prophetic and as anticipatory of truth as anything else we have." There must be give and take; "what hope is there of squaring and settling opinions unless Absolutism will hold parley on this common ground and admit that all philosophies are hypotheses, to which all our faculties, emotional as well as logical, help us, and the truest of which will in the final integration of things be ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... outbreak of the present war he again illustrated his spirit of fanatical absolutism, which at times inspires him, by ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... that this should be so, for the whole course of French history since the thirteenth century had led up to the absolutism of Louis XIV. During the early ages of feudalism France had been distracted by the wars of her kings against rebellious nobles. The virtues and firmness of Louis IX {2} (1226-70) had turned the scale in favour of the crown. There were still to be many rebellions—the strife ...
— The Fighting Governor - A Chronicle of Frontenac • Charles W. Colby
... an ecclesiastical statesman, and intrenched far upon the authority of the State. We shall see him restoring the papal authority in Rome and in the Patrimony,[53] building up the machinery of papal absolutism, protecting the infant King of Sicily, cherishing the municipal freedom of Italy, making and unmaking kings and emperors at his will, forcing the fiercest of the western sovereigns to acknowledge his feudal supremacy, and the greatest of the kings of France to reform his ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... certain basic and fundamental reasons for white leadership that I need not elaborate. For one thing, there is the tonic air of democratic ideals in which long generations of white men have lived and developed as contrasted with the stifling absolutism of the East. There is also our emphasis upon the worth of the Individual, our conception of the sacredness of personality, as compared with the Oriental lack of concern for the individual in its supreme regard for the family and ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... Pascal's wager, 5. Clifford's veto, 8. Psychological causes of belief, 9. Thesis of the Essay, 11. Empiricism and absolutism, 12. Objective certitude and its unattainability, 13. Two different sorts of risks in believing, 17. Some risk unavoidable, 19. Faith may bring forth its own verification, 22. Logical conditions ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... had not assembled for three-quarters of a century; but representatives of the people met in 1789, in spite of the opposition of the king. The extreme of license followed the extreme of absolutism. The king opposed the Constituent Assembly, for this body changed its name several times, till the political conflict ended in the death by the guillotine of Louis XVI., and later by the execution ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... misstatements, ignorance of their interests, and the sort of village-like gossip which causes every man to think he is a judge of character, when he is not even a judge of facts. The abuses of absolutism are straightforward, dogged tyranny, in which the rights of the mass are sacrificed to the interests and policy of a prince and his favourites. Now, in a large country, popular excesses in one part are checked and repressed by the power and interests ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... grew in the midst of those naked timocrats, whose savagery they soothed by beads and crucifixes and weapons, were the plantings of absolutism paternalistic to the last degree. One cannot easily imagine a socialism that would go further in its prescriptions than did this affectionate, capricious, generous, if unwise, as it now seems, government of a village along the St. Lawrence ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... according to the English view, sprang also the great intellectual movement of the age. Voltaire visited the England of Addison and Pope; Montesquieu studied the English Constitution of 1689; and these two men were the writers who overthrew absolutism in Europe, who paved the way for the epoch of Revolution that was to follow. Montesquieu's Persian Letters, satirizing French society, appeared as early as 1721. Voltaire's sarcasms and witty sneers got him into trouble with the French ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... The growth of absolutism in Europe had been due at the outset to the employment of standing armies by the kings, and the consequent alliance between the crown, which was the paymaster, and the people, who furnished the soldiery. There was constant conflict between the crown and the nobility concerning privilege, constant ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... which referred everything in society to the emperor as the origin of power, rights, and honor. They adopted this standpoint for the kings of the new dynastic states and, in the might of the Roman law, they established royal absolutism, which was unfavorable to the church and the feudal nobles. They found their allies in the cities which loved written law, institutions, and defined powers. Stubbs[101] regards the form of the ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... II, while the rigour of bureaucratic administration, controlled by a monarchical absolutism, continued and was even accentuated, the absence of the able hand of Friedrich the Great soon made itself apparent. As regards external policy, however, Prussia, while allowing territories on the left bank of the Rhine to go to France, eagerly saw to the increase of her own dominions in ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... public information from your Commons in Parliament, as well of the abuses in the Church as in the civil state and government." Words yet bolder, and which sound like a prelude to the Petition of Right, met the claim of absolutism which was so frequently on the new king's lips. "Your majesty would be misinformed," said the address, "if any man should deliver that the kings of England have any absolute power in themselves, either to alter religion or make any laws concerning the same, otherwise than as in temporal causes, ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... probably no very great number. Practically all of Cuba's later experiences have their roots in this period. During these ten years, the issue between Cubans who sought a larger national and economic life, and the Spanish element that insisted upon the continuance of Spanish absolutism, had its definite beginning, to remain a cause of almost constant friction for three-quarters of a century. The Spanish Constitution of 1812, abrogated in 1814, was again proclaimed in 1820, and again abrogated in 1823. The effort of Captain-General Vives, acting under orders from ...
— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson
... find no harmony nor peace in connection, nations themselves wear the human form, and must, therefore, realize the various states of infancy, youthfulness, and manhood—of germ, growth, and fruitage. This is true of whatever national form. Nationalities founded upon the principles of absolutism, embody and express the same laws and conditions. Their principle of supreme external authority is first a condition of germination, then of growth or labored effort toward maturity, and lastly of fruitage, ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... humanity, of security and repose, will be the result. The exclusion of half the population from the polls, is not merely a gross injustice, but an immense loss of brain and conscience, in making up the public judgment. As a nation we have discarded absolutism, monarchy, and hereditary aristocracy; but we have not fully attained even to manhood suffrage. Men are proscribed on account of their complexion, women because of their sex. The entire body politic suffers ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... separated from Rome or retaining a spiritual communion with it, the Church submitted to the principle of cujus regio ejus religio, and became an instrument in the hands of kings for erecting the lay and territorial absolutism on the ruins of the universal church-state. James I spoke for all his kind when he cried out, "No Bishop no King!" The lay prince wished not to destroy the Church, but to use it; the sum of his purpose was to transfer the ultimate ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... out of petrol? I can understand and admire the independence that follows upon overwork; but when was their overwork done? The only tenable theory that I have evolved is that Lord NORTHCLIFFE (whose concurrent rise to absolutism is another phenomenon of my absence) has engaged them all to patrol the streets ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 3, 1917 • Various
... he was a firm opponent of the national rights of the Netherlands, however artfully he disguised the sharp sword of violent absolutism under a garland of flourishing phraseology. He had strenuously warned Philip against assembling the States-general before his departure for the sake of asking them for supplies. He earnestly deprecated allowing the constitutional authorities any control over the expenditures ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... victorious advance of America and her allies terminated in the armistice of November eleventh. The power of organized despotisms had been proven to be inferior to the power of organized republics. Reason had again triumphed over absolutism. The "still small voice" of the moral law was seen to be greater than the might of kings. The world appeal to duty triumphed over the world appeal to selfishness. It always will. There will be far-reaching results from all this which no one can now foresee. But some ...
— Have faith in Massachusetts; 2d ed. - A Collection of Speeches and Messages • Calvin Coolidge
... And the Segretario Reale went out from the presence, his soul revolting at the absolutism that forced him to accept; and ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... Kamehameha III., under American advice, gave up his absolute rule, founded a constitutional government and distributed the lands among the people. After the Kamehamehas came King Lunalio, who ruled but one year, and Kalakaua, who ruled from 1874 to 1891 and showed such a disposition to return to absolutism that the people were in constant dread for their liberties and lands. It was only by a revolt of the people that they regained their rights, forcing him to grant them a new constitution and their ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... under fearful exigencies, to the absolutism which, in a republic, alone can summon the full forces into the field. Power must be concentrated, and wielded with promptitude and precision, else we shall fail to achieve our independence. All obstructions in the way of necessary war measures ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... from Wyclif to Cromwell and Milton, to Wordsworth and Carlyle. It is this common impulse of the race which Henry VIII relies upon, and because he is in this their leader the English people forgets his absolutism, his ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... wherever they have been scattered by the winds of misfortune."[1] And what Mr. Fisher, in this passage, puts in a concrete fashion, Lord Acton has expressed with equal emphasis, if more abstractly. "This famous measure," he writes of the final partition, "the most revolutionary act of the old absolutism, awakened the theory of nationality in Europe, converting a dormant right into an aspiration, and a sentiment into a political claim. 'No wise or honest man,' wrote Edmund Burke, 'can approve of that partition, or can ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... This spirit of absolutism took its most offensive form in Nicholas's attitude toward Europe. He was the very incarnation of reaction against revolution, and he became the demigod of that horde of petty despots who infest Central Europe. Whenever, then, any tyrant's lie was to be baptized, he stood ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... was a liberal in politics and religion; for the people he was a democrat who hated the Restoration, loved equality more than liberty, and glorified the legendary Napoleon, representative of democratic absolutism. In the history of politics the songs of Beranger count for much; in the history of literature the poet has a little niche of his own, with which one may be content who, if he had not in elder years supposed himself the champion of a literary ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... under the pressure of a stern necessity, between civil and military life, and between the rights and duties of each. The power of the magistrate, jealously limited in the city, was enlarged to absolutism for the preservation of discipline in the field. But the distinction between the king or magistrate and the general, and between the special capacities required for the duties of each, is everywhere of late growth. We may say the same of ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... and Turkey, possibly in Germany and Austria; yet constitutional forms of government seem to be gradually taking its place. What a change in England, France, Italy, and Spain during the last hundred years!—what a breaking up of the old absolutism of the Bourbons! Even the imperialism of Napoleon is held in detestation by a large class of the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... resist the omnipotence of popular ideas. When ideas establish despots on their thrones, they are safe. When ideas demand their dethronement, no forces can long sustain them. The age of Queen Mary was the period of the most unchecked absolutism in England. Mary was apparently a powerless woman when Lady Jane Grey was proclaimed queen by the party of Northumberland, and still she had but to signify her intentions to claim her rights, and the nation was prostrate at her feet. The Protestant party dreaded her accession; but loyalty was a stronger ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... practice among the people, the origin of which is lost in antiquity. The kings of Castile, of Spain and of Navarre were obliged at their accession, either in person, or by deputy, to swear to observe these fueros; and this oath was really kept. While the cortes were trampled upon and absolutism reigned both in Spain and in France, the Basque fueros were respected; in Spain to the middle of the 19th century and in France down to the Revolution. The fueros thus observed made the Basque provinces a land apart (una tierra apartada), a self-governing ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... and a woe averted from her future. They ruined the trade which was the life-blood of New France; they stopped the current of her arteries, and made all her early years a misery and a terror. Not that they changed her destinies. The contest on this continent between Liberty and Absolutism was never doubtful; but the triumph of the one would have been dearly bought, and the downfall of the other incomplete. Populations formed in the ideas and habits of a feudal monarchy, and controlled ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... representative government—why should not he? But his ancestors represented in their own persons the nerve and sinew of the State, its most adventurous spirit, its strongest manhood, whereas Charles Albert represented only the party of reaction which was with him in his absolutism but not in his patriotism. He was accused of having changed sides, but, even allowing his complicity in the movement of 1821 to have been greater than he admitted, it is plain that the one thing which drew him into that movement ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... should assist in the work: one imagines that a similar threat from the Lord Mayor of London might have a salutary effect upon the restorers of Westminster Abbey or the decorators of St. Paul's. How very much more entertaining must have been the world when absolutism was the fashion and the preposterous method of universal suffrage had never been considered! But the Chapter, as those in power always are, was bent upon restoring, and induced Charles V. to give the necessary authority. The king, however, had not understood ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... of municipal liberty in the time of Charles V., drew in one day from the teeming workshops twenty thousand fighting men. He met the usual fate of all Spanish patriots, shameful and cruel death. His palace was razed to the ground. Successive governments, in shifting fever-fits of liberalism and absolutism, have set up and pulled down his statue. But his memory is loved and honored, and the example of this noblest of the comuneros impresses powerfully to-day the ardent young minds ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... historians select to mark the end of the Roman Republic and the beginning of the Empire. The victor Octavian had already taken the name of his grand-uncle, Caesar. He now adopted the title of Augustus, and accepted from army and senate the permanent rank of Imperator, inaugurating a system of absolutism that kept some of the forms of the old Republic as a thin disguise ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... peasants themselves are not the miserable and resigned creatures of Veressayev's earlier stories. Certainly, liberty is not yet a legal thing in Russia, and the Duma is still an unstable institution, but the end of absolutism is near, for a great event has taken place in the empire of the Tsar, namely, this awakening of the feeling of human dignity, and the spirit of revolt among the lower strata of the Russian people, which in the past, by its unconsciousness, formed the granite ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... greater rights than the German Emperor ever possessed, the German people under its regime would remain for decades to come shorn of all rights, and deprived, to a far greater extent than any people in the days of absolutism, of any independence of action, of any individual aspiration in its economic or ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... Muenster, Hanoverian envoy at St. Petersburg, discovered that Russian civilization is "merely artificial," and first published to Europe the short description of the Russian Constitution,—that it is "absolutism tempered ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... his inspiration from the metaphysical tradition, sticks to the old philosophical or economic ideas with all their rigid absolutism; at least he ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... though everything in his eyes was perfect that she did—such as may still be seen in the eyes of many a world-worn husband looking on at the movements of that directer, more simple, yet more subtle being, and the quick absolutism and certainty of the bright spirit at his side. The grey-bearded old soldier, leader of many a raid and victor in many a struggle, with this new revelation of beauty and purity bursting upon his later life, becomes to us a recognisable and friendly human ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... her old absolutism, came to his house continually to inquire and give orders, and to his room to see him every afternoon, found out for herself in the course of his convalescence this strange death of the sensuous side of Jocelyn's ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... combat we are now entering upon—who is it to be fought between? Absolutism and Democracy, perhaps some will answer. Not quite, I think; that contest was practically settled by the great French Revolution; it is only its embers which are burning now: or at least that is so in the countries which are not ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... it came to pass. Far beyond France the movement reached. Canon Trevor says of the wave of revolt against absolutism that passed over Europe: ...
— Our Day - In the Light of Prophecy • W. A. Spicer
... all this noise which is made nowadays about liberty may end in the suppression of liberty; it is plain that the internationals, the irreconcilables, and the ultramontanes, are, all three of them, aiming at absolutism, at dictatorial omnipotence. Happily they are not one but many, and it will not be difficult to ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... citizens was necessary. But Nicolas II. restricted elections to the College of Cardinals by a two-thirds vote, and gave to the German emperor the right of confirmation. For almost two centuries there was a struggle for mastery between the cardinal oligarchy and papal absolutism. The cardinals were willing enough that the pope should be absolute in his foreign rule, but the never failed to attempt, before giving him their votes, to bind him to accord to them a recognized share in the government. After his election, and before his consecration, ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... who crushed French Protestantism in America. To plant religious freedom on this Western soil was not the mission of France. It was for her to rear in Northern forests the banner of Absolutism and of Rome; while, among the rocks of Massachusetts, England and Calvin fronted her in dogged and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... of his constant references to the Ancients, one is likely to conclude that he (like Boileau and Pope) must have thought they and Nature (good sense) were the same. In a number of passages, however, Rapin depends solely on the Ancients. Two examples will suffice to illustrate his absolutism. At the beginning of "The Second Part," when he is inquiring "into the nature of Pastoral," he admits: And this must needs be a hard Task, since I have no guide, neither Aristotle nor Horace to direct me.... And I am of opinion that none can treat well and clearly of ...
— De Carmine Pastorali (1684) • Rene Rapin
... the other, and either is advanced by the prosperity and success of the other.' Where a people make a stand for spiritual liberty, they always by necessity advance civil freedom. Prelacy was bound up with the absolutism of the throne in the State as well as in the Church; Presbytery with the cause of free government and the sovereignty of the popular will, as declared in their laws by the chosen representatives ...
— Andrew Melville - Famous Scots Series • William Morison
... we rest the absolutism and finality of Jesus upon anything less than the last complete outpouring of His soul unto voluntary death for men's salvation? I do not think we can, and it is a requisite that we place larger emphasis upon this holy mystery ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... absolute. Nor have the opponents of "the faith" been slow to seize the opportunity thus offered them. "From the moment that a religion solicits the aid of philosophy, its ruin is inevitable," said Heine. "In the attempt at defence, it prates itself into destruction. Religion, like every absolutism, must not seek to justify itself. Prometheus is bound to the rock by a silent force. Yea, Aeschylus permits not personified power to utter a single word. It must remain mute. The moment that a religion ventures to print ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... internal trade, labor, and other social and economic relations. Thirdly, the control of economic and social matters by the government was in accordance with contemporary opinions and feelings. An enlightened absolutism seems to have commended itself to the most thoughtful men of that time. A paternalism which regulated a very wide circle of interests was unhesitatingly accepted and approved. As a result of the decay of mediaeval ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney
... authority; influence, patronage, power, preponderance, credit, prestige, prerogative, jurisdiction; right &c. (title) 924; direction &c. 693; government &c. 737a. divine right, dynastic rights, authoritativeness; absoluteness, absolutism; despotism; jus nocendi[Lat]; jus divinum[Lat]. mastery, mastership, masterdom[obs3]; dictation, control. hold, grasp; grip, gripe; reach; iron sway &c. (severity) 739; fangs, clutches, talons; rod of empire &c. (scepter) 747. [Vicarious authority] commission ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... the titled refugees had brought the Prussian armies to the frontier; a majority of the clergy had identified themselves with the reaction, were breaking down the revolution among the people, and were producing a reversionary tendency to absolutism. The king was vacillating and timid, but the queen had all the spirit and courage of her mother, Maria Theresa. It is very evident from Madame Roland's memoirs and letters, that these two women felt that they were in actual collision. It is ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... waving of a magician's wand. Impatient of gradation, they scorned to traverse the distance between the point of departure and that of the goal, and by way of setting up the new social structure without delay, they rolled away all hindrances regardless of consequences. In this spirit of absolutism they abolished the services of the national debt, struck out the claims of Russia's creditors to their capital or interest, and turned the shops and factories over to labor boards. That was the initial blunder which the ukase alluded to was subsequently ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... words" had "made it into a trumpet blast"—as Moltke and Von Roon, who were with him at dinner when it came, had said—"a trumpet blast which" had "roused all Germany." As he mellowed with his pipes he told me that, though he was a high Tory, he had come to see the ills of absolutism, which, to work, required the King to be an angel. "Now," he said, "Kings, even when good, have women round them, who, even if Queens, govern them to their personal ends." It was very plain that he was on bad terms with the Emperor, and equally clear ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... the remedy for absolutism lies in calling these same minorities to council. As the king-in-council succeeded the king by the grace of God, so in future democracies the toleration and encouragement of minorities and the willingness to consider ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... from Paris were accompanied by report after report from the rest of Germany, shaking the old structure of absolutism like the repeated shocks ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... probably not aware that his years of residence in the "garden" had indeed accustomed his ear to some un-Roman sounds.[6] Octavian was of course not unaware of the advantage that accrued to the ruler through the Oriental theory of absolutism, and furtively accepted all such expressions. By the time Vergil wrote the Aeneid the Roman world had acquiesced, but then, to our surprise, Vergil ceases to accord divine ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... that is it was an absolutism, marked by luxury, display, and taxation so heavy as to amount almost to oppression. Its luxuriousness and display are illustrated by his seraglio, which included seven hundred wives (1 Kings xi. 3); and its despotic nature is seen in such ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... beginning of the Czecho-Slovak struggle for the re-establishment of their independence. The movement was at first literary, and only in the forties became political. It was a continuous struggle against reaction and absolutism, and if the Czecho-Slovaks to-day can boast of an advanced civilisation, it is only owing to their perseverance and hard endeavours, and not because of any good-will on the part of the Austrian Government which put every possible obstacle ...
— Independent Bohemia • Vladimir Nosek
... forth the sympathy of all lovers of antiquity for the Greeks; and Samuel Gridley Howe, an impetuous young American doctor, crossed the seas, carrying to the Greeks his services and the gifts of Boston friends of liberty. A new conflict seemed to be shaping itself—a struggle of absolutism against democracy, ...
— 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
... He highly disapproved both of Palmerston's policy and of his methods of action. He was opposed to absolutism; but in his opinion Palmerston's proceedings were simply calculated to substitute for absolutism, all over Europe, something no better and very possibly worse—the anarchy of faction and mob violence. The dangers of this revolutionary ferment were grave; even in England ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... war, like those with which the previous history of modern Europe abounds. There have been formidable collisions between particular states; and there have been still more formidable collisions between the armed champions of the conflicting principles of absolutism and democracy; but there has been no general war, like those of the French Revolution, like the American, or the Seven Years' War, or like the War of the Spanish Succession. It would be far too much to augur from this, that no similar wars will ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... exhortations. Never before nor since has our country seen so extraordinary a union of the clever and indefatigable party-manager, with the reflective and philosophic habits of the speculative publicist. It is much easier to make either absolutism or democracy attractive than aristocracy; yet we see how consistent with his deep moral conservatism was Burke's attachment to an aristocratic party, when we read his exhortation to the Duke of Richmond to remember that ...
— Burke • John Morley
... note Fernando, p. 34, 5. Ferdinand welcomed the intervention of the French in Spain to support him in his absolutism against the advanced party, which clamored for constitutional liberties. The French expedition (1823) was completely successful, the resistance being so slight that the French describe the invasion as ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... of intellectualism is probably a reaction against the extreme absolutism of German idealism which, beginning with Kant, found fullest expression in Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. But the true way to meet exclusive rationalism is not to discredit the function of mind, but to give to it a larger domain of experience. We do not exalt faith by emptying it of all ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... absolutism, and not those of a regulated liberty, were to rule in Louisiana. The new French colony was to be the child of the Crown. Cargoes of emigrants, willing or unwilling, were to be shipped by authority to the fever-stricken banks of the Mississippi,—cargoes made up in part of those whom fortune and ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... opposed to despotic in any and all shapes. And this idea has become so ingrained in the American mind that it will be difficult to gain credence for the assertion that the terms constitutionalism and absolutism represent the forces or systems which, have really been antagonistic ever since Christianity began to affect and animate social and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... and there was a stir and a restlessness in society, which made bad subjects for an absolute monarch. The religious Reformation, which began in Germany and spread to the westward, was but the legitimate result of the intellectual agitation which preceded it; and the political absolutism of kings could no more expect exemption from searching criticism and final revolution than the religious absolutism of the Pope. The German Reformation was blind to the magnitude and significance of its own mission; for ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... wealthy families, and it mattered not what was the form of government, despotism prevailed. In many of the cities the excessive power of the despots made their reign a prolonged terror. As long as enlightened absolutism prevailed, government was administered by upright rulers and judges in the interests of the people; but when the power fell into the hands of unscrupulous men, the privileges and rights of the people were lost. It is said that ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... country is, and the quicker its step in the march of civilization, the more lawyers it will naturally have. The growth and importance of the bar are stunted wherever it is overshadowed by an hereditary aristocracy. A land of absolutism and stagnation has no use for lawyers. The institutions of China would not be safe if she had a bar. Lawyers are a conservative force in a free country; an upheaving force under a despotic government. In Russia ...
— The American Judiciary • Simeon E. Baldwin, LLD
... world had seen since the Roman Empire and it had not yet been called upon to pay the price of its greatness. By the policy of Ferdinand and Ximenez the sovereign had been made absolute, and the Church and Inquisition adroitly adjusted to keep him so. The nobles, who had always resisted absolutism as strenuously as they had fought the Moors, had been divested of all political power, a like fate had befallen the cities, the free constitutions of Castile and Aragon had been swept away, and the only function that ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... special impulse to the construction of a science of politics came from the Great Rebellion, his detestation of the principles on which it was based, and his dissatisfaction with the theory of "divine right" as a bafis for the absolutism which he counted a necessity. The "Leviathan" is the commonwealth, or state, conceived as an "artificial man," and this gives the title to this famous work. But this essay towards a science of politics was only a ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... institution for the presentation to our people of the fact that we have in this Democracy a method of doing whatever we wish done, which avoids the necessity for anything like revolutionary action. The objection to Bolshevism is that it is absolutism—as Lenine has said himself, the absolutism of the proletariat. It is an economic government by force, while our Democracy is ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... in the train of new happiness. From this point of view the marriage, though hazardous, was practicable by the end of the summer of 1846. A second obstacle lay in the nature and opinions of Miss Barrett's father, who governed even his grown-up children by "an incredible system of patriarchal absolutism." By what was variously termed an obliquity of the will, an eccentricity, a monomania, he had decided that none of his children should marry, and on this point he demanded "passive obedience." It was perfectly clear that Miss Barrett could not gain his consent to her marriage, and ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... government, all have endeavored to do something to elevate France, to win for her new glories, and to regain for her her old position. The expedition into Spain, in 1823, ostensibly made in the interest of Absolutism, was really undertaken for the purpose of rebaptizing the white flag in fire. Charles X. and M. de Polignac were engaged in a great scheme of foreign policy when they fell, the chief object of which, on their ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... spreading among the people, in spite of the combined efforts of kings, nobles, and clergy. In the year 1789 of the Christian era, the French nation, divided by caste, poor and oppressed, struggled in the triple net of royal absolutism, the tyranny of nobles and parliaments, and priestly intolerance. There was the right of the king and the right of the priest, the right of the patrician and the right of the plebeian; there were the privileges of birth, province, ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... government, and the necessity of severe and rigorous measures. It presupposes the tendency to crime and violence, that men are brutes and must be coerced like wild beasts. We are warranted in assuming a very low condition of society when despotism became a necessity. Theoretically, absolutism may be the best government, if rulers are wise and just; but, practically, as men are, despotisms are cruel and revengeful. There are great and glorious exceptions; but it cannot be denied that society is mournful when tyrants bear rule. And it is seldom that society ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... afterwards told me, these were "des dames," and it was quite proper for them to contemplate what no "demoiselle" ought to glance at. I assured him plainly I could not agree in this doctrine, and did not see the sense of it; whereupon, with his usual absolutism, he merely requested my silence, and also, in the same breath, denounced my mingled rashness and ignorance. A more despotic little man than M. Paul never filled a professor's chair. I noticed, by the way, that he looked at the picture himself quite at his ease, and for a very long while: ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... hardly have a friend, since he can never have an equal, among those around him. I do not wonder that a tinge of melancholo-mania is so often perceptible in the chiefs of that great House whose Oriental absolutism is only "tempered by assassination." But an Earthly sovereign may now and then meet his fellow-sovereigns, whether as friends or foes, on terms of frank hatred or loyal openness. His domestic relations, though never secure and simple as those ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... teacher, and drove out recusants. You must all know something of the purging of the University and the Ministry of Aberdeen by the Covenanting General Assembly of 1640. These deposed Aberdeen doctors may have had too strong leanings to episcopacy in the Church and to absolutism in the State, but they were not Vicars of Bray. The first half of the century was adorned by a band of scholars, who have gained renown by their cultivation of Latin poetry; a little oasis in the desert of Aristotelian Dialectics. It would ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... who believed in the oath of the prince-president, constituted the will of France;—the policy of Napoleon was accepted by many because it was his: it was his, because he knew it would be acceptable to many as the only safeguard against anarchy, and the only form of absolutism that could be substituted for liberty, or impose upon ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... difference in morals of the inhabitants, which are completely dominated by Roman Catholicism, to that of the inhabitants of Protestant America, but we have made this comparison in a general way; but we now want to select a country which for its absolutism of Catholic monarchy has no comparison, and that ...
— Thirty Years In Hell - Or, From Darkness to Light • Bernard Fresenborg
... revolution—a democratic upheaval—invaded men's minds everywhere. Even the autocratically ruled States, hitherto careless about the people in their underworlds, had to make advances to democracy, and give it some measure of the justice democracy threatened to deal to itself. Without demanding absolutism I do desire a predominant democratic character in our national enterprises, rather than a confused muddle or struggle of interests where nothing really emerges except the egoism of those ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell
... joined Jefferson in forcing on the then unprepared mind of the public the idea of a complete and final separation from the "Mother Country," his aggressive denunciations of the English government's attempts at absolutism made him so hated by the English administration and its colonial representatives that, with John Hancock, he was specially exempted from General Gage's amnesty proclamation of June 1775, as "having committed offenses of too flagitious a nature to admit of any other consideration than ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... coming crisis, and we can observe the formation of the opinions which he consistently and valiantly upheld throughout his career. The whole instinct of his intellectual nature—and he never lost his trust in reason—was against the high Roman or sacerdotal absolutism in matters of dogma; he ranked Morals far above Faith; and he had that dislike of authoritative uniformity in church government which is in Englishmen a reflection of their political habits. Yet he discerned plainly enough the spring of a movement ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... when it has done its work, a re-action of Reason against it; and, as in a civil polity the State exists and endures by means of the rivalry and collision, the encroachments and defeats of its constituent parts, so in like manner Catholic Christendom is no simple exhibition of religious absolutism, but presents a continuous picture of Authority and Private Judgment alternately advancing and retreating as the ebb and flow of the tide;—it is a vast assemblage of human beings with wilful intellects and wild passions, brought ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... the woof of an Oriental Palace, should have been able to hold her own in every situation, and never be crushed by the opposing forces about her, is a phenomenon in itself only to be explained by due recognition of the influence of individual qualities in a ruler even in the semi-absolutism of China.—Arthur H. Smith ...
— Court Life in China • Isaac Taylor Headland
... 1830 and the expulsion of Charles X revived the hopes of the liberal party in Spain, which party the bigoted absolutism of the king and his minister had vainly endeavored to exterminate. The liberals saluted that event as a promise that the nineteenth century should see the realization of their aspirations, and the exiled members of the party at once came to ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk
... before, he had been one of the foremost orators in the struggle for the Petition of Right. The dagger of Fenton had turned him from an impassioned patriot and constitutionalist into a vehement upholder of absolutism. His revolt had been little more than a mask for his hostility to the hated favourite Buckingham, and when Buckingham's murder cleared the path to his ambition, Wentworth passed, apparently without a struggle, from the zealous champion of ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... on earth his own exclusive affair. And the first Nicholas was a good Russian; he held the belief in the sacredness of his realm with such an intensity of faith that he could not survive the first shock of doubt. Rightly envisaged, the Crimean war was the end of what remained of absolutism and legitimism in Europe. It threw the way open for the liberation of Italy. The war in Manchuria makes an end of absolutism in Russia, whoever has got to perish from the shock behind a rampart of dead ukases, manifestoes, and ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... word "religion" cannot stand for any single principle or essence, but is rather a collective name. The theorizing mind tends always to the oversimplification of its materials. This is the root of all that absolutism and one-sided dogmatism by which both philosophy and religion have been infested. Let us not fall immediately into a one-sided view of our subject, but let us rather admit freely at the outset that we may ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... by any historian or by any biographer of Knox, except by the Reformer himself, partly in his History, partly in his letters to a lady of his acquaintance. The mystery of the Kirks turns on the Knoxian conception of the 'lawful minister,' and his claim to absolutism. ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... The unchecked absolutism of a Socialist State will hardly be palatable to Socialist workers who have been told that Socialism means freedom, and these see the only solution in the establishment of Anarchism: "The damnable idea of being marshalled and drilled or numbered ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... the more important lands of continental Europe; its influence was strongly felt in England, and even in the United States. Passing through the phases of constitutional reform, of anarchy, and of military despotism, the movement seemed for a time to have failed, and to outward appearances absolutism was stronger after Waterloo than it had been half a ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... saw that the German people was pervaded with the spirit of Treitschke and Bernhardi, which glorifies war as an end instead of holding it in abhorrence as an evil thing? Properly speaking militarism is a school for the people and an instrument to further political ends. But in the patriarchal absolutism of a military monarchy, militarism exploits politics to further its own ends, and can create a situation which a democracy freed ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... imposed upon all parishes and ministers. By these and other measures, the sovereign impiously assumed that spiritual power which belonged to Christ alone, as King and Head of the Church. Here, in its worst form, was "the absolutism that had so long threatened the extinction of their liberties; here was the heel of despotism openly planted on the neck of their Church, and the crown openly torn from the brow of ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various
... William III. suggested the Holy Alliance may be doubted; but there can be no doubt that he lived thoroughly up to its spirit, which was the spirit of intense absolutism. He broke every promise he had made to his people when he needed their aid to keep his kingdom out of the grasp of Napoleon. He became the vindictive persecutor of the men who had led his subjects in the war to rush to arms, without counting the odds they had to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... altogether. Nay, that although he is the first in seniority after Blackwater, the governor treats him with the same distance and hauteur he would use towards the youngest ensign in the service. Such are the effects of his long military habits, and his ideas of the absolutism of command. Am I not ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... "The emperor has fallen because the people wished no more of him;" others added: "The people wished the king; no, liberty; no, reason; no, religion; no, the English constitution; no, absolutism;" and the last one said: "No, none of these ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... stedfastly tending; but, at the same time, her sagacity and prudence enabled her to ward off the immediate result. She secured her throne,—she was able to maintain, in the rocking of those movements, her own political and spiritual supremacy,—she made gain and capital for absolutism out of them,—the inevitable reformation she herself assumed, and set bounds to: whatever new freedom there was, was still the freedom of her will; she could even secure the throne of her successor: it was mischief for Charles I. that ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... is a workday key to history, and our present need can be supplied without pausing to satisfy philosophers. Without inquiring how far Sarasa or Butler, Kant or Vinet, is right as to the infallible voice of God in man, we may easily agree in this, that where absolutism reigned, by irresistible arms, concentrated possessions, auxiliary churches, and inhuman laws, it reigns no more; that commerce having risen against land, labour against wealth, the State against the forces dominant in society 48, the division of power against the State, ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... is probably the most remarkable event in the history of philosophic thought. We know that in the later Vedic hymns some monotheistic conceptions of great excellence were developed, but these differ in their nature from the absolutism of the Upani@sads as much as the ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... considerations." We are startled at the precision with which More describes the processes by which the law-courts were to lend themselves to the advance of tyranny till their crowning judgement in the case of ship-money. But behind these judicial expedients lay great principles of absolutism, which partly from the example of foreign monarchies, partly from the sense of social and political insecurity, and yet more from the isolated position of the Crown, were gradually winning their way in public opinion. "These notions"—More ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... and the spread of political liberty became apparent; although it is equally certain that they were at the same time fatal alike to the aristocracy and to the magistrature; and that they rapidly paved the way to the absolutism of Louis XIV, to the shameless saturnalia of the Regency, and to the dishonouring and degrading excesses of Louis XV, who may justly be said to have prepared by his licentiousness the ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... return would labour to introduce what they had learned. Their efforts were seconded by the clergy, through the close connection with canon law which was in force in Germany. German emperors and territorial lords also favoured Roman law because they saw how well suited it was to absolutism; they liked to engage jurists trained in Italy, especially if they were doctors of both canon and Roman law. Nor did the German people object. From the fourteenth century many schools of jurisprudence were established on ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
... and Leibniz the heads of rival sects, but politically they were on the same side. As against Louis's political absolutism and enforced religious uniformity, both championed religious toleration and the freedom of the mind. Their theological liberalism was political prudence; it was not necessarily for that reason the less personally sincere. They had too much wisdom to meet bigotry with bigotry, ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... least impair freedom if, for example, one has personified evil as a living Devil. The error does not lie in this, but in the making absolute these determinate, aesthetic forms of religion. The reaction of the thinking activity against such aesthetic absolutism then undertakes in its negative absolutism to despise the content also, as if it were ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... this struggle a matter of profound interest. Though it cannot be said that the contest is that of revolutionists or even of republicans against a legitimately ruling monarch, yet the real principles involved in the contest are in substance those of absolutism and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... independent aggregate of men ever drawn together from the ends of the earth. An economic missionary, a commercial St. Paul, he preached the doctrines of expediency and force. Believing in the natural rights of man, a child himself of democracy, he bent all men to his absolutism. Government of Jacob Welse, for Jacob Welse and the people, by Jacob Welse, was his unwritten gospel. Single-handed he had carved out his dominion till he gripped the domain of a dozen Roman provinces. At his ukase the population ebbed and flowed over a hundred thousand miles of territory, ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... to take a stronger tone in foreign affairs, while the out-and-out Bonapartists jealously looked for any signs of official weakness so that they might undermine the Ollivier Ministry and hark back to absolutism. When two great parties in a State make national prestige a catchword of the political game, peace cannot be secure: that was the position of France in the early part ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... spoken on His last visit to the Temple, three days before His death, gave to the civil power, under the protection of conscience, a sacredness it had never enjoyed, and bounds it had never acknowledged; and they were the repudiation of absolutism and the inauguration of freedom. For our Lord not only delivered the precept, but created the force to execute it. To maintain the necessary immunity in one supreme sphere, to reduce all political authority within defined limits, ceased ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... carried out, there could be no such crime as treason, there could be no state, and no public authority. This new theory transfers to society the sovereignty which that asserted for the individual, and asserts social despotism, or the absolutism of the state. It asserts with sufficient energy public authority, or the right of the people to govern; but it leaves no space for individual rights, which society must recognize, respect, and protect. This was the grand defect of the ancient Graeco-Roman civilization. The ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... in 1396 Richard married Isabella, daughter of Charles VI of France, and henceforth seems to have adopted French ideas, and to have made pretensions in the direction of absolutism. He proceeded to arbitrary prosecutions which led to the violent death of several leading nobles. Richard also quarrelled with Henry, son of John of Gaunt, whom as Duke of Lancaster he succeeded in 1399. The year before, Richard had banished Henry for ten years—fearing him as a possible ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... the will of the monarch and his satellites? Unfortunately for the cause of order and quiet, there will always be found certain tough lumps, in the shape of rebellious or non-conformist men, which refuse to be melted in the strong solvents or ground up in the swift mills of Absolutism. Government must look after these impediments. If they are positively dangerous, they must be destroyed or removed. If only suspected, or known to be powerless or inactive, they must at ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... more chance of stability in this form of government than in those preceding it, and it was evident that it had a more powerful genius at its head, so they rallied round it with confidence and sincerity. The Empire followed, with its inclination to absolutism, its Continental system, and its increased taxation; and the Protestants drew back somewhat, for it was towards them who had hoped so much from him that Napoleon in not keeping the promises ...
— Massacres Of The South (1551-1815) - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... of important regions for the placing of industrial and banking capital. From the point of view of rivalry in armaments, it is a preventive war provoked by the German and Austrian war parties together in the obscurity of semi-absolutism and of ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... had been defeated by Charles' fleets in the Mediterranean. The Council of Trent, at first refractory, seemed yielding to his wishes. Spain, where at one time he had faced a violent revolt against his absolutism, was now wholly submissive. Germany seemed equally overcome. The Emperor was at the summit of his ambitions. Europe lay ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... appeared in France in the reign of Louis XV what was known as "the new literature," in contrast with the classic literature of the previous reign. The king and the church combined fought this new literature, because it had a tendency to endanger absolutism. It was made by such brilliant men as Helvetius, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Condillac, and Rousseau. Perhaps the writings of these men had more to do with the precipitation of the revolution than the arbitrary assumptions of royalty, ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... and the execution of Charles I. The provocation was the same in the two nations; the result highly different. In both cases it was a revolt against the tyranny of the court and the attempt to establish absolutism. But the difference in results lay in the fact that England had a single parliament, composed of politicians, while France had ten parliaments, composed of magistrates, and unaccustomed to handle great questions of public policy. Richelieu had taken from the civic parliaments ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... Colony, the author remarks that "while as yet there was no spot in Christendom where religious belief was free, and when even the Commons of England had openly declared against toleration, Calvert founded a community wherein no man was to be molested for his faith. At a time when absolutism had struck down representative government in England and it was doubtful if a Parliament of freemen would ever meet again, he founded a community in which no laws were to be made without the consent of ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... me. Take off his tattooing, make him white, and clothe him! With his masterful carriage, his soft, cultivated voice, and his attitude of absolutism, he might have been Leopold, King of the Belgians, a great ambassador, a man of power in finance. Nevertheless, I thought of the death by the Stinking Springs. How could one explain his benign, open-souled deportment and his cheery laugh, with such ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... is an age of progress. Wars of succession are no more. Absolutism must forever hang its head. Fling a glance at France; peer into Prussia, Vox populi is the voice of the King, and the voice of the king is therefore vox Dei. When a king speaks for his people he must speak sooth; what he says of other peoples must be taken with a ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 19, August 6, 1870 • Various
... later times-we may say, without exaggeration, of all time—must be reckoned The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau. It deals with leading personages and transactions of a momentous epoch, when absolutism and feudalism were rallying for their last struggle against the modern spirit, chiefly represented by Voltaire, the Encyclopedists, and Rousseau himself—a struggle to which, after many fierce intestine ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... and feelings of others, and a shallow forgetfulness of all that great and precious part of our natures that lies out of the immediate domain of the logical understanding. One can understand how an honest man would abhor the darkness and tyranny of the Church. But then to borrow the same absolutism in the interests of new light, was inevitably to bring the new light into the same abhorrence as had befallen the old system of darkness. And this is exactly what happened. In every family where a ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... the president of these commissioners. Penn instructed them to act as if he himself were present, and at the next meeting of the Assembly to annul all the laws and reenact only such as seemed proper. This course reminds us of the absolutism of his friend, King James, and, indeed, the date of these instructions (1686) is that when his intimacy with that bigoted monarch reached its highest point. Penn's theory of his power was that the frame or constitution ...
— The Quaker Colonies - A Chronicle of the Proprietors of the Delaware, Volume 8 - in The Chronicles Of America Series • Sydney G. Fisher
... for the time, was at an end. Tilly, whose purposes were the complete restoration of Catholicism in Germany, held the provinces conquered by him with an iron hand. Wallenstein, who seemingly had in view the weakening of the power of the League and the raising of the emperor to absolutism, broke down all ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... necessary to an understanding of its workings, and of its prosperity, and of its influence upon the arts. Save one turn to England or to the British colonies, it is impossible to find a parallel for the astounding absolutism of Comstock and his imitators in any civilized country. No other nation has laws which oppress the arts so ignorantly and so abominably as ours do, nor has any other nation handed over the enforcement of the statutes which exist to agencies so openly pledged to reduce all aesthetic expression ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... we have seen life steadily and seen it whole. It is only when we are in the habit of recognizing our opinions as a partial experience seen through our stereotypes that we become truly tolerant of an opponent. Without that habit, we believe in the absolutism of our own vision, and consequently in the treacherous character of all opposition. For while men are willing to admit that there are two sides to a "question," they do not believe that there are ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... inspired by the traditions of the past, but had a much less vague conception of the moral to be drawn from them than had the multitude. Athens, for him as for them, was to be the first state in Hellas; she was above all to be the protectress of democracy everywhere, against both absolutism and oligarchy, and the leader of the Hellenes in resistance to foreign aggression. But, unlike the multitude, Demosthenes saw that this policy required the greatest personal effort and readiness ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 1 • Demosthenes
... that imperialism abroad will lead quickly and inevitably to despotism at home." It has characterized the Republican government in the Insular regions as an "indefinite, irresponsible, discretionary and vague absolutism," and Republican policy as a policy of "colonial exploitation." That the American people have believed the Republican administration to have been good and beneficent, is shown by their retaining that party in power. But ...
— "Colony,"—or "Free State"? "Dependence,"—or "Just Connection"? • Alpheus H. Snow
... of strong journalists, journalists of the Harden type for example. The dynasty tends to become degenerate, so that the probability of either some gross scandals or an ill-advised reactionary movement back to absolutism may develop a crisis within a few years of the peace settlement. The mercantile and professional classes will join hands with the social democrats to remove the decaying incubus of the Hohenzollern system, and Germany will become a more modern and larger ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... conscious effort, tremor of the nerves will always interfere with the line of conduct he has conceived in advance. Already Reardon had spoken with far more bluntness than he proposed; involuntarily, his voice slipped from earnest determination to the note of absolutism, and, as is wont to be the case, the sound of these strange tones instigated him to further utterances of the same kind. He lost control of himself. Amy's last reply went through him like an electric shock, and for the moment he was a mere husband defied by his wife, the male ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... in modern history—the Germanic and the Romanic races. The Germanic races tend to personal liberty, to a sturdy individualism, to civil and to political liberty. The Romanic race tends to absolutism in government; it is clannish; it loves chieftains; it develops a people that crave strong and showy governments to support and plan for them. The Anglo-Saxon race belongs to the great German family, and is a fair exponent of its peculiarities. The Anglo-Saxon carries self-government ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... of Absolutism, the myth of Agreement between the Revolutionary Party and Europe and Asia Trading Co. America drops out of the Six-Power group American press agents treaty opening Korea America's Chinese policy Anglo-Japanese treaty Annuity of Manchu Imperial Family ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... not only mere administrator of family property. He got power over life and death of his children. This increase of power went together with a change of the position of the ruler. The period transition (until c. A.D. 1000) was followed by a period of "moderate absolutism" (until 1278) in which emperors as persons played a greater role than before, and some emperors, such as Shen Tsung (in 1071), even declared that they regarded the welfare of the masses as more ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... in summer, and indeed, if the mind and body are active from an early hour, a little repose is useful, if not necessary, after mid-day. Busy men however like Cicero could not always afford it in the city, and we find him noting near the end of his life, when Caesar's absolutism had diminished the amount of his work both in senate and law-courts, that he had taken to the siesta which he formerly dispensed with.[434] Even the sturdy Varro in his old age declared that in summer he could not possibly do without his nap in the middle ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler |
