"Laborer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Elder Pill from Douglass to come over and preach every Sunday afternoon at the schoolhouse, an' we want help t' pay him—the laborer is ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... that "the laborer is worthy of his hire," and, moreover, that he deserves to have a home and family of his own. Indeed, one of her motives in buying so large an estate was that she might do something for the toilers, and thus add her influence ...
— Pulpit and Press (6th Edition) • Mary Baker Eddy
... have been cited, not at all for the benefit of Europe, but for our own good. The American People are now confronted by the Italian and Austrian and Hungarian laborer and saloon-keeper and mechanic, and all Americans should have an exact measure of the sentiments of southern Europe toward our wild life generally, especially the birds that we do not shoot at all, and ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... and hungry as the wanderers themselves. No one gave them anything, and they lived for three days with only two penny loaves to eat (for all their money was now gone), and slept at night in the ashes of some poor laborer's hut. ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... laborer. But they were all employed by "the old man." Who was he? And was there some relation between all of these and ...
— Ronicky Doone • Max Brand
... each share of stock and a similar amount to each colonist of the time, to be followed in either case by the grant of a second hundred acres upon proof that the first had been improved; and fifty acres additional in reward for the future importation of every laborer. ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... faces, Making one place two places? One, by humble farmer seen, Chill and wet, unlighted, mean, Useful only, triste and damp, Serving for a laborer's lamp? Have the same mists another side, To be the appanage of pride, Gracing the rich man's wood and lake, His park where amber mornings break, And treacherously bright to show His planted isle where roses glow? O Day! and is your mightiness A sycophant to smug success? Will the sweet sky and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... economical relations of American slavery, once more, prominently before the public. It is time that the true character of the negro race, as compared with the white, in productive industry, should be determined. If the negro, as a voluntary laborer, is the equal of the white man, as the abolitionists contend, then, set him to work in tropical cultivation, and he can accomplish something for his race; but if he is incapable of competing with the white man, except in compulsory labor,—as ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... that I would sail with you," she answered, "even if you ever finished it. A laborer's work for a laborer's hand. You must go back to ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Hiram was in the doorway. He sprang to his feet. "Yes, I mean it!" he cried, his brain confused, his blood on fire. "I don't care what you do. Cut me off! Make me go to work like any common laborer! Crush out all the decency there ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... accompany him. Melanchthon earnestly desired to join them. His heart was knit to Luther's, and he yearned to follow him, if need be, to prison or to death. But his entreaties were denied. Should Luther perish, the hopes of the Reformation must center upon his youthful co-laborer. Said the Reformer as he parted from Melanchthon: "If I do not return, and my enemies put me to death, continue to teach, and stand fast in the truth. Labor in my stead.... If you survive, my death will ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... They have not the acute pain of being turned back into the stale atmosphere of bread and beans. Of course it is by no means every day or every week even that M. le Cure breakfasts at the chateau; but there must nevertheless be a certain uncomfortable crookedness in his position. He lives like a laborer, and yet he is treated like a gentleman. The latter character must seem to him sometimes a rather heavy irony on the other. But to the ideal cure, of course, all characters are equal; he thinks neither too ill of his bad breakfasts, nor too well of his good ones. I won't say ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... kind of life to which the poor laborer looks up with consuming envy, and which makes him what he thinks is a socialist. Given a couple of sharp pencils and some blocks of paper, along with sympathy and encouragement, Lester Larkin might have become a writer or an artist ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... perfect merely to distinguish between work grossly unskilful, and work executed with average precision and science; and I have been pleading that any degree of unskilfulness should be admitted, so only that the laborer's mind had room for expression. But, accurately speaking, no good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... coarse garments rendered still more remarkable, and sadly said to the monk: "Our father has been very ill for two months; our mother is taking care of him—there is no money in the house; we have been obliged to take the wheat and the rent to support the day laborer and his wife who takes my father's place in the farm work, and then it has been necessary to sell the hens to ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... significant fact, that within a bow-shot of Paris I found tools in use, which would be laughed at in the free states of America? The true reason for this, is to be found in the condition of the French agricultural laborer. He is ignorant and unambitious. Where the laborer is intelligent, he will have light and excellent tools to work with. This is a universal fact. The slaves of the southern states are in a state of brutal ignorance, and their agricultural implements are heavy and large. Such ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... for discipline, that night; Rimrock was feeling too happy and gay. He would shake hands with a Mexican with equal enthusiasm, or a Chinaman, or a laborer off the railroad. They were all his friends, whether he knew them or not, and he called on the whole town to celebrate. The Mexican string band that had met him at the train was chartered forthwith for the night, Woo Chong had an order to bring all the grub in town and feed it ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge
... strongest, and they were fighting a death struggle with each other. How could he leave her for years—perhaps never see her again—and yet how could he ask her to be the wife of such as he was now—a mere laborer? And again, his college course, his cherished ambition for years—how could he give it up; and yet he felt—he knew she loved ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... railroad director and asked: "Why are you building railroads?" "For profits," was the answer. But a laborer beckoned him aside and whispered: "No—we are making the World one neighborhood. East is now next door to West, and all peoples ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... instances it had been necessary for other persons, who knew the people, to point out the dead to the living and assure them positively of the identification before they could be aroused. I saw a railroad laborer who had come in to look for a friend. He walked up and down the aisles like a man in a trance. He looked at the bodies, and took no apparent interest in any of them. At last he stopped before one of them which he had passed twice before, muttered, ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... increased, especially from the Mexicans, for the Mexican peon, or laborer, is often a furious gambler who will stake even ...
— The Young Engineers in Arizona - Laying Tracks on the Man-killer Quicksand • H. Irving Hancock
... very hard job. Her day laborer doesn't get two hours off every afternoon to take excursions into ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... the last to quit the scene. Walking slowly down the road, he overtook a bent old man in the smock of a farm laborer, trudging ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... of these broad estates, Behold, before your very gates A worn and wanting laborer waits! Let me but toil amid your grain, Or be a gleaner on the plain, So I may leave ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... subsequently bayoneted her. He was killed with the butt end of a rifle by a Belgian soldier who had seen him commit this murder from a distance. At Herent the charred body of a civilian was found in a butcher's shop, and in a handcart twenty yards away was the dead body of a laborer. Two eye witnesses relate that a German soldier shot a civilian and stabbed him with a bayonet as he lay. He then made one of these witnesses, a civilian prisoner, smell the blood on the bayonet. At Haecht the bodies of ten civilians ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... A poor laborer of Ohio had raised, with the greatest possible care and attention, a nursery of vines, from which, after much labor, he at last succeeded in producing a pipe of Catawba wine, and forgot, in the joy of his success, that each drop of this precious nectar had cost a drop of ...
— What Is Free Trade? - An Adaptation of Frederic Bastiat's "Sophismes Econimiques" - Designed for the American Reader • Frederic Bastiat
... Ohio town. He had an aunt in Winesburg, a black-toothed old woman who raised chickens, and with her he lived until she died. He had been ill for a year after the experience in Pennsylvania, and after his recovery worked as a day laborer in the fields, going timidly about and striving to conceal his hands. Although he did not understand what had happened he felt that the hands must be to blame. Again and again the fathers of the boys had talked ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... chubby woman, always laughing. Uncle Charles was a man of strong Irish features, like Grandfather. He was a farmer who lived in Genesee County. Uncle Martin was a farmer of fair intelligence; Ezekiel was lower in the scale than the others; was intemperate, and after losing his farm became a day-laborer. He would carry a gin-bottle into the fields, and would mow the stones as readily as he would the grass—and I had to turn the grindstone to sharpen his scythe. Uncle Edmund was a farmer and a pettifogger. Uncle William died ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... the workers of Germany be taxed to support a war against England, Germany's best market? Can the rice growers of Japan profit by killing Americans to whom they sell their produce? War means suffering and want, and the laborer has come to know it. He is cold to the sight of its flaunting flags and the sound of its grand, wild music, for he sees the larder bare, funds exhausted, and hunger at the door. He refuses to sacrifice his body and the welfare of his family upon the altar of Mars. No longer can kings ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... and cruel of mien. "Will you not rather be made an earl, proud knave?" he asked. "Go home, fool; go, and be evermore a thrall and churl, [Footnote: An Ignorant laborer of the lowest rank.] as you have ever been; no other reward shall be yours. For very little I would lead you to the gallows for your ...
— The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)
... time differed little from that of ordinary farm-hands. His great strength and intelligence made him a valuable laborer, and his unfailing good temper and flow of rude rustic wit rendered him the most agreeable of comrades. He was always ready with some kindly act or word for others. Once he saved the life of the town drunkard, whom he found freezing ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... mine," said a citizen, "asked me the other evening to go and call on some friends of his who had lost the head of the family the day previous. He had been an honest old man, a laborer with a pick and shovel. While we were with the family an old man entered who had worked by his side for years. Expressing his sorrow at the loss of his friend, and glancing about the room, he observed a large floral anchor. Scrutinizing it closely, he turned to the widow and in a low tone ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... who would accept it.—The monkish historians lavish their praises upon Hellouin. They assign to him every virtue under heaven; but they particularly laud him for his humility and industry: all day long he worked as a laborer in the building of his convent, whilst the night was passed in committing the psalter to memory. At this period of his life, a curious anecdote is recorded of him: curious in itself, as illustrative of the character of the man; and particularly curious, in being quoted ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. II. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... handy little volume is a condensation of the rules and the laws which every man, from the day laborer to the banker, should be ...
— Business Hints for Men and Women • Alfred Rochefort Calhoun
... of workmanship or scientific or literary education is necessary to mastery in it. Amalgamation is a chemical process it is true, but it is so simple that after a few days' experience, the rudest laborer will manage it as well as the ...
— Hittel on Gold Mines and Mining • John S. Hittell
... expressing professional or permanent occupation: "rajdanto", a rider, "rajdisto", jockey, horseman, "jugxanto", a judge (of something), "jugxisto", judge (professional), "laboranto", a person working, "laboristo", laborer.] ...
— A Complete Grammar of Esperanto • Ivy Kellerman
... meditations ripened. The chrysalis felt one day the ray of the sun, which called it to life, broke its involucrum, and it launched forth fearlessly from the darkness of its humble cloister into the luminous spaces of its destiny. The farmer, day-laborer, shepherd, like Cincinnatus, left the ploughshare in the half-broken furrow, and, legislator of his own State, and afterwards of the Great Republic, saw himself proclaimed in the tribunal the popular chief of several millions of people, ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... hardship of the night. In the drizzling haze half a dozen men, assistants to the engineer—rough looking but strong-featured and quick-eyed—sat with buckets of steaming coffee about a huge campfire. Four men bearing a litter came down the path. Doctor Lanning halted them. A laborer had been pinched during the night between loads of piling projecting over the ends of flat cars and they told the doctor his chest was hurt. A soiled neckcloth covered his face but his stertorous breathing could be heard, and Gertrude ...
— The Daughter of a Magnate • Frank H. Spearman
... one of these large cold unadorned vaults, a tall grayheaded slave, a rural laborer, as it required no second glance to perceive, was presiding over piles of cheese, stone-jars of honey, baskets of autumn fruits, and sacks of grain, by the red light of a large smoky flambeau; while a younger man, who from his resemblance to the other ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... this second man held out a hand, which the submarine boy unsuspiciously took, at the same time looking over this second man. He appeared, like the first, to be a laborer at ...
— The Submarine Boys' Trial Trip - "Making Good" as Young Experts • Victor G. Durham
... implements. It pays such a man to interrupt his hunting long enough to make a spear or a bow and arrows. This amounts to saying that it is an advantage to him to become, in a simple way, a capitalist as well as a laborer; for the primitive implements of the chase are forms of productive wealth, or capital. Moreover, if he possesses foresight, he will keep enough food within reach to tide him over periods when game is not to be had, and such a store is another form ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... before he was Seatoned he had grown a silky mustache and beard of singular length and beauty; and, what with these and his workingman's clothes, and his cheeks and neck tanned by the sun, our readers would never have recognized in this hale, bearded laborer the pale prisoner that had trembled, raged, wept and submitted in the dock of the Central ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... clever; quick in imitation, quick in appropriating what is new or useful—ready prepared for civilization. Try to teach a laborer in foreign countries anything out of the way of his daily occupation, and he will still cling to his plow: with us, only give the word, and the peasant becomes musician, painter, ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 5, July 29, 1850 • Various
... great show of magnanimity in leaving him, as the sole remnant of what he acquired through the Civil War, a very inadequate public school education, which, by the present program, is to be directed mainly towards making him a better agricultural laborer. Even this is put forward as a favor, although the Negro's property is taxed to pay for it, and his labor as well. For it is a well settled principle of political economy, that land and machinery of themselves produce nothing, and that labor indirectly pays its fair proportion ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... time for Mr. Todd to quiet down sufficiently to tell his story coherently. He was an humble laborer in the vineyard of the Lord. He had gleaned among the poorest of the native population in the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro until his health suffered, and had taken passage home in a passenger-ship, which, ten days out, was captured by a pirate brig. And the pirate crew had murdered every soul ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... is all," he said, "except of course that the man was killed. And I can think of nothing but that body hurled down through the air, and the crushed figure and the writhing limbs. I fancy the epic grandeur of soul of that poor ignorant laborer, and the glory that must have flamed up in his heart at that great instant; so I find it a dreadful poem, and wonder if it would not frighten that careless girl to ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair
... species. Color is the most obvious and the principal indication of difference in the human families, and is evidently influenced to a great extent by the action of the sun,[209] as the swarthy cheek of the harvest laborer will witness. Under the equator we find the jet black of the negro; then the olive-colored Moors of the southern shores of the Mediterranean; again, the bronzed face of the Spaniard and Italian; next, the Frenchman, darker than those who dwell under the temperate skies of England; ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... 1861-65 developed one aspect of the conflict between capital and labor. The slaveholders were the capitalists, and with them also were the intelligence and power. These levers were used to crush down the laborer into the severest form of slavery known among men. Labor was patient, but large sympathy was developed in the North in favor of the slave. This alone would not have brought on the war. Southern capitalists gloried in their power, and, ...
— The American Missionary — Vol. 48, No. 10, October, 1894 • Various
... etc. One poor person in a thousand, educated, while the nine hundred and ninety-nine remain uneducated, has usually aimed at raising himself out of his class, therefore education makes people dissatisfied with the condition of a laborer. Bookish men, taken from speculative pursuits and set to work on something they know nothing about, have generally been found or thought to do it ill; therefore philosophers are unfit for business, etc., etc. All these are inductions by simple enumeration. Reasons having ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... "see what it was like" (with the Abbe Gaudron's permission, be it understood), Monsieur Baudoyer took her—for the glory of the thing, and to show her the finest that was to be seen—to the Opera, where they were playing "The Chinese Laborer." Elisabeth thought "the comedy" as wearisome as the plague of flies, and never wished to see another. On Sundays, after walking four times to and fro between the place Royale and Saint-Paul's church (for her mother ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... age 14-2; mental age 9; I Q approximately 65. Father a laborer. Does unsatisfactory work in fourth grade. Plays with little girls. A menace to the morals of the school because of her sex interests and lack of self-restraint. Rather good-looking if one does not hunt for appearances of intelligence. Mental reactions ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... have, by our own wise (I will not say wiseacre) measures, so increased the trade and wealth of Montreal and Quebec, that at last we begin to cast a wistful eye at Canada. Having done so much toward its improvement, by the exercise of "our restrictive energies," we begin to think the laborer worthy of his hire, and to put in a claim for our portion. Suppose it ours, are we any nearer to our point? As his minister said to the king of Epirus, "May we not as well take our bottle of wine before as after this exploit?" ...
— American Eloquence, Volume I. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... laboring man. Mills tracked down the cost of the suit and the tariff on the materials composing it, and further entertained the House by an exhibit showing that it cost $4.98 to manufacture the suit and that the remainder of the price which the laborer paid was due to the tariff. In the end, the Mills bill passed the House with but four Democrats voting against it. Randall was so ill that he was unable to be present when the final vote was taken, but a letter from him declaring his opposition to the bill was greeted with ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... they have no crowd of dependents about them who hope to grow rich without labor by their countenance and favor, and who are therefore always ready to execute their wishes. The planter, the farmer, the mechanic, and the laborer all know that their success depends upon their own industry and economy, and that they must not expect to become suddenly rich by the fruits of their toil. Yet these classes of society form the great body of the people of the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 3: Andrew Jackson (Second Term) • James D. Richardson
... accented, alliterative lines, something like Beowulf, and its immense popularity shows that the common people still cherished this easily memorized form of Saxon poetry. Its tremendous appeal to justice and common honesty, its clarion call to every man, whether king, priest, noble, or laborer, to do his Christian duty, takes from it any trace of prejudice or bigotry with which such works usually abound. Its loyalty to the Church, while denouncing abuses that had crept into it in that period, was one ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... such as would seem possible only in the crowded cities of London and Paris. When fate thus attacks, by chance as it were, a little corner so sheltered by hedges and trees, I am reminded of those spent balls which during a battle kill a laborer at work in the fields, or a child returning from school. I think if we had not had little Cecile, my wife would have died with her daughter. Her life from that hour was one long silence, full of ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... any better physical shape than I am, I'll—" He interrupted himself to begin again eagerly. "I'll make you a sporting proposition," he announced "I'll fight any man on the isthmus ten rounds—no matter who he is, a wop laborer, shovel man, Barbadian nigger, marine, anybody—and if he can knock me out I'll stop drinking. You see," he explained patiently, "I'm no mollycoddle or jelly-fish. I can afford a headache. And besides, it's my own head. If I don't give anybody ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... the roll is called of those that have added to the chivalry and glory of the American press, every fellow-laborer who knew "MacGahan of Kiva and San Stefano" will salute ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... want of distinguishing carefully between possession and ownership that the Pope falls into his ludicrous economic blunders. This part of his encyclical is absolutely self-contradictory. He is arguing for the securing to the laborer of the fruits of his labor. The workman on land must have ownership of those things he has produced, and hence must have exclusive possession of that part of the earth which he tills. He must have such disposal of it ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... think I have the germ of the law which would cure our economic ills—that no person should be allowed to receive value without earning it. Because I believed in that I gave up a fortune and went to work as a laborer on a ranch, but Fate has forced wealth upon me, doubtless in order that I may prove out my own theories. Well, that is what ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... simple laborer of the Lagunes, "and a better hand with a net, or a truer friend in need, never rowed a gondola to or from the Lido. Diavolo! It would have done your highness pleasure to have seen the poor old Christian among us, on a saint's day, taking the lead in our little ceremonies, and teaching ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... we passed the place of a large Sabbath school, which was first opened by a soldier, W. Badger, Jun., a faithful laborer in this work. It had ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... a haphazard manner, taking it from the adjacent stove as fast as it was ready. A stolid-looking hired man sat opposite to Roger, and shovelled in his food with his knife, with a monotonous assiduity that suggested a laborer filling a coal-bin. He seemed oblivious to everything save the breakfast, and with the exception of heaping his plate from time to time he ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... tomb, that all have forgot, no cross nor stone marketh, There let the laborer guide his plough, there cleave the earth open. So shall my ashes at last be one with thy hills and thy valleys. Little 'twill matter then, my country, that thou shouldst forget me! I shall be air in thy streets, and I shall be space in thy meadows. I shall ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... very embodiment of easy self-possession as she piloted her escort to a seat in the middle of the room. Long, red and perspiring, and rigged out in all the splendor of the haberdasher's art, even to boots that screamed in pain, had the air of a social laborer who was worthy of his hire. As soon as he was seated he reached for Dixie's fan and began waving it to and fro with the conscientious regularity of a pendulum, thereby increasing his warmth ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... figures 1 and 2, is for a laborer's cottage intended to be erected on the grounds connected with a fine estate on the western slope of the Palisades in New Jersey. It is to be built of rough stone, plainly finished. It is 16 by ...
— Woodward's Country Homes • George E. Woodward
... who accompanied him in his voyage across the dark Atlantic, and his apostolic journeys through Mexico and California to "break the bread of life" to the unfortunate heathen. Among the notable band of missionaries was Father Francisco Palou, life-long friend and co-laborer of ...
— Chimes of Mission Bells • Maria Antonia Field
... no country where so much wine is drank as in Georgia, even a laborer is allowed five bottles a day. The grapes are exceedingly fine, quite different from the little berries called grapes in Circassia. The casks are very curious, they are the skins of buffaloes, and as the tails and legs are not cut off, a ...
— Far Off • Favell Lee Mortimer
... the refinements of life, those things which adorn, and beautify it, take their true place as consolers and soothers of the care-worn and toil-wearied mind. No Italian opera can give such delight to the sated man of pleasure as the tired laborer feels in listening to the evening song with which some loved one, in his home, ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh
... familiar images of daybreak, the half-burnt torch of the traveller; and, apparently, from the position which it holds in his description, where it is ranked with the most familiar of all circumstances in all countries,—that of the rural laborer going out to his morning tasks,—it must have been ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... sufficient old-age provision while at work the claim for an Old-age Pension is growing. This may be either a subsidy from the state, a joint pension from the state and the employing business in which the man or woman has worked, or it may be a threefold provision contributed to from the savings of the laborer, the quota from the employer, and the state subsidy. Since no insurance system that discourages thrift, or fails to encourage it, is socially sound, the latter seems the best ideal. There may be, in addition, ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... harvest has sent us forth. A dead laborer, or even a sick one, is not much use. It is surely our duty to take all sensible precautions, and whenever possible to use the safeguards to health with which modern science has provided us. We have ...
— Have We No Rights? - A frank discussion of the "rights" of missionaries • Mabel Williamson
... liberties of the people, and chose every occasion to insult and degrade them. An oft-quoted instance of their cruelty is recorded of a bailie named Landenburg, who publicly reproved a peasant for living in a house above his station. On another occasion, having fined an old and much respected laborer, named Henry of Melchi, a yoke of oxen for an imaginary offence, the Governor's messenger jeeringly told the old man, who was lamenting that if he lost his cattle he could no longer earn his bread, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... this time were much aroused, and Luther's cause grew and strengthened. The learned Melanchthon, Reuchlin's relative and pupil, was added to the faculty at Wittenberg, and became Luther's chief co-laborer. The number of students in the university swelled to thousands, including the sons of noblemen and princes from all parts, who listened with admiration to Luther's lectures and sermons and spread his fame and doctrines. And the feeling was deep and general that ...
— Luther and the Reformation: - The Life-Springs of Our Liberties • Joseph A. Seiss
... left his veins, the youth thought that at last he was going to suffocate. He became aware of the foul atmosphere in which he had been struggling. He was grimy and dripping like a laborer in a foundry. He grasped his canteen and took a long swallow of ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... Prof. J. E. Thorold Rogers. Shows that the real wages of the laborer, as measured by his standard of living, are actually lower now than in the ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... your life has had the law of compensation bring to you more than to others of whom you may think, and who, because of their bank account, get more out of life than you. A man may have a million dollars, and yet not be as happy as the laborer living in a thatched cottage. Perhaps Justice has tipped the scales in your favor already—and you have failed to recognize it. Perhaps you have children, loved ones, family and fireside which bring more comfort to you than the land owner gets who lives in his palace ...
— The Silence • David V. Bush
... would say, grudgingly, "and I suppose maybe a little exercise is good for you; but those fellers from Alford who come over here don't have to work, and as for Guy Lawson, the boss's son, he's a fool! He couldn't earn his bread and butter to save his life, except on the road digging like a common laborer. Playing golf! Playing! H'm!" Then was the ...
— The Shoulders of Atlas - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... good to have their diamonds removed, their good clothes replaced by the tattered garments of the tramp, and then let them look at themselves and see how little they amount to. In some lodges a man is taught a useful lesson by stripping him to the buff and taking a clapboard and letting a common laborer maul him until he finds out that he is not the whole business. If that were done occasionally by society you wouldn't find so many men looking over the common people. It would take the starch out of some people ...
— Peck's Uncle Ike and The Red Headed Boy - 1899 • George W. Peck
... going West to. work for Doheny in some oil field, starting at the bottom. I rather think this is right, but of course he won't stay as a laborer very long. The boy is fine and gay, and did splendid work, and is anxious to get into the game and make money. Just where he gets this desire for making money I don't know. Certainly I never had it. But he was telling me the other day of his hope that ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... he answered, "you will create a precedent. There is no recorded case of a laborer claiming what he calls his rights when his life is at stake. Even an American tramp has been known to work like a fiend under ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... Englishman at that moment to grasping the secret of control of this child of many moods. Had he but learned it a few years, even a few months, sooner—But again was the satire of fate manifest, the same irony which, jealously withholding the rewards of labor, keeps the student at his desk, the laborer at his bench, until the worse than useless prizes flutter about like ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... court his own cause, and that of the Drury Lane Theatre, an Irish laborer, known amongst the actors by the name of Billy Brown, was called upon to give his evidence. Previous to his going into court, the counsellor, shocked at the shabby dress of the witness, began to remonstrate with him on this point: "You should have put on ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... others carried away the ant-hills which the first dug up. It seemed an endless task to fill the wheelbarrows. Fill, did I say? They were never filled. After a bucketful of earth had been slowly shovelled in, the laborer paused, laid down his spade carefully on the little heap, sighed profoundly, looked as if to receive congratulations on his enormous success, then, flinging, with a grand sweep, the tattered old cloak over his left shoulder, lifted his wheelbarrow-shafts ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... philosopher, though a lover of learning, and it could not perhaps be expected that he should at once perceive how eminently worthy was this laborer of the hire which he was reduced to solicit. He contented himself therefore with procuring for his kinsman the reversion of the place of register of the Star-chamber, worth about sixteen hundred pounds per annum. Of this office however, which might amply ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... Return, overtopping anything that Achilles did. Still Ulysses pays him the meed of heroship: "We Argives honored thee as a God, while living, and now thou art powerful among the dead; therefore do not sorrow at thy death, O Achilles." But he answers that he would rather be the humblest day laborer to a poor man than to be King of the Shades. It is not his world, he longs for the realm of heroic action, here he has no vocation. No Troy to be taken, no Hector to be vanquished down in Hades; the heroic ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... good memory," writes his biographer. "Thus he remembers—even though it be as through a haze—that he was once in the world as the son of a laborer, a carpenter, or something in that line, and that he went with food in a tin-pail to his father, when he was at work. During this incarnation he must have behaved rather shabbily; for in the next he found himself degraded to a fox—a silver fox—and in this capacity he was ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... to the thread of my narrative. When Scott had got through his brief literary occupation, we set out on a ramble. The young ladies started to accompany us, but they had not gone far, when they met a poor old laborer and his distressed family, and turned back to take them to the house, ...
— Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey • Washington Irving
... twenty-six years of Abraham Lincoln's life have been traced in the preceding chapters. We have seen him struggling to escape from the lot of a common farm laborer, to which he seemed to be born; becoming a flatboatman, a grocery clerk, a store-keeper, a postmaster, and finally a surveyor. We have traced his efforts to rise above the intellectual apathy and the indifference to culture which characterized ...
— McClure's Magazine, March, 1896, Vol. VI., No. 4. • Various
... nature's noblest mould." Of commanding presence, with a physical development commensurate with his mental powers, thoroughly democratic in habit and manner, accessible to all, meeting the humblest and highest upon equal terms, sympathizing heartily with the honest laborer in every field of action, frank and outspoken in his opinions, hating hypocrisy and sham with all his soul, fighting corruption and dishonesty wherever he finds them, respecting the opinions and listening to the suggestions of others, but acting invariably in accordance with his own ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume II. No. 2, November, 1884 • Various
... gestures are deprecated, when at fault for words resort instinctively to physical motions that are not wild nor meaningless, but picturesque and significant, though perhaps made by the gesturer for the first time. An uneducated laborer, if good-natured enough to be really desirous of responding to a request for information, when he has exhausted his scanty stock of words will eke them out by original gestures. While fully admitting the advice ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... beast of burden. For want of a shelter, I slept in deserted yards and tumble-down houses. Upon a piece of bread and a drink of water I lived, saving, with miserly greediness, the money which I earned as messenger or day-laborer. At the end of a year, I had earned sufficient to buy an old suit of clothes at a second-hand clothing-store, and present myself to the director of the Gymnasium, imploring him to receive me as pupil. Bitterly weeping, ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... One day his father dropped a chance word regarding some one, miles in the country, who wanted a fence built inclosing a tract out of the wood. It was isolated work, a task of a month or two for a strong man, a mere laborer. Young Harlson became interested. ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... can I do, my darling Una? If your father and mother won't consent—as I fear they won't—am I to bring you into the miserable cabin of a day laborer? for to this the son of a man so wealthy as my father is, must sink. No, Una dear, I have sworn never to bring you to ...
— Fardorougha, The Miser - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... work which has been outlined in the following less expensive manner. A working plant might be established, on ground rented or purchased at a low figure, for about ten thousand dollars; the salary of a director, assistants, a clerical helper, and combined mechanic and laborer might be estimated at the same figure; the cost of animals and of maintenance of the plant would approximate five thousand dollars. Thus, we should obtain as an estimate of the expenditures for the first year twenty-five thousand ...
— The Mental Life of Monkeys and Apes - A Study of Ideational Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... forth all this wealth and beauty to bless the most sterile soil stirred by willing and intelligent labor; while the reversing of that spell scatters squalor and poverty and misery over lands endowed by Nature with the highest fertility, spreading their leprous infection from the laborer to his lord. All this is in strict accordance with the laws of God, as expounded by man in his books on ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... fault you've got to find wi' me, Mr. Tulliver," said Mr. Moss, deprecatingly; "I know there isn't a day-laborer works harder." ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... on the monopoly of land combined with the monopoly of machinery. It cannot occur in a new country, but must develop when all the land is monopolized and worth a hundred dollars an acre. The independence of the laborer owing to cheap vacant land is more than restored by a Department of Productive Labor which establishes a minimum of wages below which they cannot be forced, and gives a standing ground on which exaction can be ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... relinquished his riches and Lazarus his rags; the creditor loses his usury, and the debtor is acquitted of his obligation; the proud man surrenders his dignity, the politician his honors, the worldling his pleasures. Here the invalid needs no physician, and the laborer rests from unrequited toil. Here at last is Nature's final decree of equity. The wrongs of time are redressed, and injustice is expiated. The unequal distribution of wealth and honor, capacity, pleasure, and opportunity, which makes ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... of an idiot, hailing from the Polish districts. He grinned like a maniac, and he was entirely unfit for drill or any other kind of service that required even the faintest degree of intelligence; but, having been laborer with a Polish peasant, he knew how to handle horses and to clean the stable. He addressed, in his broken German, everybody, including the officers, as "Thou," and doffed his cap in token of ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... the benefit of vessels entering the port of Bangkok. The stream is rich in fish of excellent quality and flavor, such as is found in most of the great rivers of Asia; and is especially noted for its platoo, a kind of sardine, so abundant and cheap that it forms a common seasoning to the laborer's bowl of rice. The Siamese are expert in modes of drying and salting fish of all kinds, and large quantities are exported annually to Java, ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... developed, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in the southern South the type of slavery which corresponds to the modern factory system in its worst conceivable form. It represented production of a staple product on a large scale; between the owner and laborer were interposed the overseer and the drivers. The slaves were whipped and driven to a mechanical task system. Wide territory was needed, so that at last absentee landlordship was common. It was this latter type of slavery that marked the cotton kingdom, and the extension ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... journey and came to Kleona, where a poor laborer, Molorchus, received him hospitably. He met the latter just as he was about to offer a sacrifice ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... youth went from house to house asking for any kind of work "that would enable him to study art." But it was all in vain, and to save himself from starvation he was at length forced to accept the position of a day laborer, crushing stones for street paving. Yet he hoped to study painting when ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... in her kitchen, or foreign wines in her cellar, but both were well furnished, and at every one's service; and her coffee, though served in earthenware cups, was excellent. Whoever came to her house was invited to dine there, and never did laborer, messenger, or traveller, depart without refreshment. Her family consisted of a pretty chambermaid from Fribourg, named Merceret; a valet from her own country called Claude Anet (of whom I shall speak hereafter), a cook, and two hired chairmen when she visited, which seldom happened. ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... was largely abandoned, and its advocacy was generally based upon the fallacy, less obvious then than now, of securing high wages to laborers by means of high import duties. This plea for high duties the laborer found to be fallacious. ...
— A Brief History of Panics • Clement Juglar
... fact was that the registrants were all on an equal footing and that their mustering brought nearer the realization of the President's dream of a "citizenry trained" without favoritism or discrimination. The son of the millionaire and of the laborer, the college-bred man and the worker forced to earn his living from early youth, were to march side by side in the ranks and practice marksmanship and trench digging together. Great Britain and France had democratized their armies; the United States ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... same gains. As a rule, the negro has been the common laborer in the cities and in the trades does not seem to hold the same relative position he had in 1860. In recent years there has been quite a development of ...
— The Negro Farmer • Carl Kelsey
... them to learn how to point the telescope, record a transit, and perform the other technical operations necessary in an astronomical observation. A third grade was that of computers: ingenious youth, quick at figures, ready to work for a compensation which an American laborer would despise, yet well enough schooled to make simple calculations. Under the new system they needed to understand only the four rules of arithmetic; indeed, so far as possible Airy arranged his calculations in such a way that subtraction and division were rarely ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... girl who married a day laborer seven years ago. In a few months I will again be a mother, the fourth child in less than six years. While carrying my babies am always partly paralyzed on one side. Do not know the cause but the doctor said at last birth ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... of this sifting process, to which we have given but a glance, a very decidedly depressing element is now being rapidly introduced into New England farming life. The Irish girls have found their way into the farmer's kitchen, and the Irish laborer has become the annual "hired man." At present, there are no means of measuring the effect of this new element; but it cannot fail to depress the tone of farming society, and surround it with a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... are good places to study human nature, for all classes use them. You see here the poor, pale working girl, whom toil and poverty are making prematurely old, and the blooming lady of fashion; the beggar and the millionaire; the honest laborer and the thief; the virtuous mother and her children, and the brazen courtezan and her poodle dog. You can tell them all by their appearance and aspect, for here they enjoy a few moments of enforced idleness, and during that time they are natural in ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... quicken the spirit and efficiency of labor throughout our whole industrial system by everywhere and in all occupations doing justice to the laborer, not only by paying a living wage but also by making all the conditions that surround labor what they ought to be. And we must do more than justice. We must safeguard life and promote health and ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson
... manner as to remove every weed and yet not injure the plant in the least. In other words, the best efforts of the novice cannot possibly bring the results so easily accomplished by the more skillful laborer. Except in a few cases, I have found inexperienced ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... more simple mental make-up was the Slovak laborer who brought his pregnant "American wife" and two children to the district office of a charity organization society, saying that the relatives in Europe of Anna, his first wife, had sent Anna to this country, and ...
— Broken Homes - A Study of Family Desertion and its Social Treatment • Joanna C. Colcord
... for labor is conditioned especially by the extent to which, and the security with which, he may hope to enjoy the fruit of his labor himself. Hence it is that, as a rule, the slave ( 71, ff.) and socager work least willingly, the day laborer with less industry than the piece-worker,(240) who is at the same time more satisfied with himself, and gives most satisfaction to his master,(241) since he acquires more both for himself and for his master. The superiority of piece-paid labor is greater in proportion as the workman calculates ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... most profoundly! That deep knowledge and that deep feeling is the chrism oil that has anointed you a messenger and a laborer in the cause of humanity. 'Called and chosen,' be thou also faithful. There are many inspired, many anointed; but few ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... thee; the village keeping holiday enjoys leisure in the fields, together with the oxen free from toil. The wolf wanders among the fearless lambs; the wood scatters its rural leaves for thee, and the laborer rejoices to have beaten the hated ground in ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... outlay incurred by the capitalist-employer for raw materials, labor, etc. The real cost is the personal sacrifice made by the producing parties, workmen as well as employers. It is not a mercantile but a psychological phenomenon, a reaction upon the men themselves occasioned by the effort of the laborer and the abstinence of the capitalist. These personal sacrifices gauge the market value of commodities within the fields in which, in the terms of the theory, competition is free. The adjustment takes place through the spontaneous movement of capital and labor from employments that ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... Yorick in the section, the "Spider."[31] The return journey in the sentimental moonlight affords the author another opportunity for the exercise of his broad human sympathy: he meets a poor woman, aday-laborer with her child, gives them a few coins and doubts whether king or bishop could be more content with the benediction of the apostolic chair than he with the blessing of this unfortunate,—asentiment derived from ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... of illustration are set forth, but whether the laborer completes his work well or ill, whether he brings great ability or only honest intention to its accomplishment, he is engaged in a business as fascinating as it is uncertain. Failure only drives him to another try, and success is always ...
— The Building of a Book • Various
... tender-hearted laborer. "Every thing that I have earned I owe to you. I had nothing when I married Bess; and yet, with your kindness, we have managed to succeed. God's mercy and your favor have made us prosperous; while you, our benefactors, have become unfortunate and are forced to wander away from their home,—God ...
— The Poor Gentleman • Hendrik Conscience
... machinery becomes perfected, all the coarser tasks are constantly being handed over to the German or Irish immigrant,—not because the American cannot do the particular thing required, but because he is promoted to something more intellectual. Thus transformed to a mental laborer, he must somehow supply the bodily deficiency. If this is true of this class, it is of course true of the student, the statesman, and the professional man. The general statement recently made by Lewes, in England, certainly holds not less in America:—"It is rare to meet with good digestion ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various |
