"Dead letter" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... laughing, "he says that he has my father's permission to make love to me, and he seems determined that the permission shall not become a dead letter ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... end of the Mosaic law being the preparation of the Israelitish people, and through them the world, for Christ's advent, it was not the purpose of God that it should be hidden as a dead letter beside the ark in the inner sanctuary. It was a code for practice, not for theory. It contained the constitution of the state, civil as well as religious; and God's almighty power and faithfulness were ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... found emphatic expression in Black Laws forbidding with heavy penalties their permanent abode in that section. These laws have only been removed in the memory of men still living. In many communities, however, these laws were a dead letter, just as to-day there are isolated localities in Indiana and Illinois, as in Georgia and Texas, where no Negro ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... the system. But, of course, it proved quite unpracticable, and though that lesson obviously remained unlearned during the cycle that separated the Daika and the Daiho periods, there is good reason to think that these particular provisions of the land law (Den-ryo) soon became a dead letter. ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... those in respect of which an impromptu bargain might be proposed by the very symbol itself, and assented to without previous formality by the person to whom it was presented. More briefly, the butler of St. John's would not have been able to understand and read it aright. It would have been a dead letter to him—a snuff-box and not a letter; whereas to the butler of Trinity it was a letter ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... certain advantages in this over the plan that was afterwards adopted—that is, Sumner's plan—but it included the danger that the Southern States might have adopted universal suffrage and negro citizenship for the sake of Congressional representation, and afterwards have converted it into a dead letter, as it is at present. Andrew considered Lincoln's attempts at reconstruction as ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... so many streams and ponds scattered about the country within easy reach, the farmers do not care for fishing. A farmer engaged in fishing is a rarity indeed. They are eagerly fond of fox-hunting, coursing, and shooting, but fishing is a dead letter. A party will sometimes go out and net a pond, but as for fishing proper, with rod and line, it is almost unknown. Every chance of shooting is eagerly snatched at. In May the young rooks are shot, after which the gun is put aside for a while. ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... I coldly turned to Mr. Lansing and said: "Mr. Lansing, the Constitution is not a dead letter with the White House. I have read the Constitution and do not find myself in need of any tutoring at your hands of the provision you have just read." When I asked Mr. Lansing the question as to who should ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... told now. Much of it, no doubt, was unconstitutional; but it was hoped that the laws enacted would serve their purpose before the question of constitutionality could be submitted to the judiciary and a decision obtained. These laws did serve their purpose, and now remain "a dead letter" upon the statute books of the United States, no one taking interest enough in them to give ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... has not the Spirit," he wrote, "and who fails to find Him in the Scriptures, seeks life and finds death; seeks light and finds darkness, whether it be in the Old or in the New Testament."[41] "He who thinks that he can be made truly righteous by means of a Book is ascribing to the dead letter what belongs to the Spirit."[42] He does not belittle or undervalue the Scriptures—he knew them almost by heart and took the precious time out of his brief life to help to translate the Prophets into German—but he wants to make the fact forever plain ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... order to rethink Don Quixote in opposition to the Cervantists and erudite persons, in order to make a living work of what was and still is for the majority a dead letter. What does it matter to me what Cervantes intended or did not intend to put into it and what he actually did put into it? What is living in it is what I myself discover in it, whether Cervantes put it there or not, what I myself put into and under and over it, and what we all put into ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... poor relation and dependant; that her bills had never been paid; that all those incalculable and mysterious "extras," which are the martyrdom of parents and the delight of schoolmistresses, were a dead letter so far as Diana was concerned. She knew that "poor Di" had been taken home suddenly one day, not in compliance with any behest of her father's, but for the simple reason that her kinswoman's patience had been worn out by the Captain's dishonesty. It ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... them; for the huge chimney there which serves the acres of weaving and spinning sheds of Sir Titus Salt and his brothers is as guiltless of smoke as an ordinary kitchen chimney. Or Manchester: a gentleman of that city told me that the smoke Act was a mere dead letter there: well, they buy pictures in Manchester and profess to wish to further the arts: but you see it must be idle pretence as far as their rich people are concerned: they only want to talk about it, and have ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... exception of the women of the wandering Eeliaut tribes, there were few chaste wives in Persia. Although the nominal punishment for adultery is death, the law, as it stands at present, is little else than a dead letter, and, as in some more civilized countries, husbands who are fond of intrigue, do not scruple to allow their wives a similar liberty. Not half an hour's walk from the Tomb of Hafiz, at the summit of the mountain, is a deep well, so deep that no one has ever yet succeeded in sounding ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... will take a quarter of an hour more. (Laughter and applause.) When I took office the anti-trust law was practically a dead letter and the interstate commerce law in as poor a condition. I had to revive both laws. I did. I enforced both. It will be easy enough to do now what I did then, but the reason that it is easy now is because I did it when it was ...
— The Attempted Assassination of ex-President Theodore Roosevelt • Oliver Remey
... to the religion of his fathers, was beheaded at Constantinople. The Christian powers of Europe immediately remonstrated, and it was hoped that the law against apostates from Mohammedanism would be permitted to become a dead letter. In a few months, however, a firman issued from the government ordering the decapitation of a young man near Brooza, who was put to death for having promised in a passion, but had afterwards refused, to become ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... the Dead Letter Office in Washington? If you have never paid such a visit, you can form no conception of the tons, the hundreds of thousands of letters and parcels that are lost ...
— Business Hints for Men and Women • Alfred Rochefort Calhoun
... obey, his need of absorbing other ideas than his own, attracted him to circles whose ideas were diametrically opposed to his own. He had friends among men to whom his art, his idealistic faith, his moral conceptions, were a dead letter: they had absolutely different ways of envisaging life, love, marriage, the family, every social relationship:—but they were good fellows, though they seemed to belong to another stage of moral evolution: the anguish and the scruples ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... spent in war against the barons and Prince Louis of France. "They have placed twenty-five kings over me!" he shouted, in his fury, referring to the twenty-five leading men who had been appointed to see that the Great Charter did not become a dead letter. But the twenty-five did their duty, and ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... quail, this autumn, have been sold openly in the markets, many days previous to the expiration of close time. And, in fact, sorry I am to say it, as far as eating-houses are in question, the game laws are nearly a dead letter. ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... then she forfeits her share in the family property. She may be abducted with impunity. In Manu[1276] it is said that three years must elapse before she gets the right of self-disposition. The right is long since a dead letter. The "Law of Manu" can lose its authority where it is favorable to women! or when it runs counter to the mores, for Hindoo women have no training to take up self-disposition, if the case occurs.[1277] Female virtue is rated ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... slice of good fortune principally to the fact that the crew of a privateer were exempt from impressment, which exemption was allowed to hold good in the West Indies, although the exemption was frequently little better than a dead letter at home and in other parts of the world. I now went to work to provision and water the schooner for a three-months' cruise; and so well did my agent work for me that, within seventy-two hours of my arrival at Port Royal, I was able to report myself ready ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... letters and papers for delivery properly post-marked? Are they all intended for the delivery of the office? Are they sorted into the proper boxes? Are there any which should have been sent to the Dead Letter Office? ...
— General Instructions For The Guidance Of Post Office Inspectors In The Dominion Of Canada • Alexander Campbell
... is acted out in the commercial world to-day. All good intentions, all right convictions, all wise counsels of religious teachers, are side-tracked and become as a dead letter if they stand in the way ...
— A California Girl • Edward Eldridge
... 1860, showed that either irresistible illusion or a foregone conclusion of complicity guided his Italian policy. He accused the Catholics of becoming excited without grounds, and of ingratitude towards him. The logic of events, so plain to all besides, was a dead letter to the imperial mind, blinded as it was by ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... become as faint-hearted as that animal. These may be called their superstitions, but religion they have none; and though they know a name for God, and entertain some faint notion of a future state, yet it is only in the abstract, for practically the belief seems to be a dead letter. At their marriage they kill fowls, as I have narrated; but this is a ceremony, not a sacrifice. They have no priests or idols, say no prayers, make no offerings to propitiate the Deity, and it is little likely therefore that human ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... to get the clause in question carried into effect. In this he failed. Public opinion in England ran furiously against the Irish Catholics, and the Parliament absolutely refused to ratify it. The essential clause was accordingly struck out, and the whole treaty soon became an absolute dead letter. ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... garden, where lettuces and other vegetables, a cure for their sufferings, grew in profusion, and did not take a leaf. I know, had I been in like case, early training would have gone to the winds, and the eighth Commandment have become a dead letter. ...
— A Trip to Manitoba • Mary FitzGibbon
... her. (17) Moreover, I may ask now, is a man to assent to anything against his reason? (18) What is denial if it be not reason's refusal to assent? (19) In short, I am astonished that anyone should wish to subject reason, the greatest of gifts and a light from on high, to the dead letter which may have been corrupted by human malice; that it should be thought no crime to speak with contempt of mind, the true handwriting of God's Word, calling it corrupt, blind, and lost, while it is considered the greatest of crimes to say the same of the letter, which is merely the ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part III] • Benedict de Spinoza
... made him Assistant-Superintendent of Works, and shortly afterwards appointed him Minister of Crime. Here, again, his success was complete. From the day of his appointment crime is said to have disappeared, and the penal laws remained a dead letter. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... there was no power of coercion but war, Congress could not lay imposts, or other taxes, by its own authority; the whole general government, therefore, was little more than a name. The Articles of Confederation, as to purposes of revenue and finance, were nearly a dead letter. The country sought to escape from this condition, at once feeble and disgraceful, by constituting a government which should have power, of itself, to lay duties and taxes, and to pay the public debt, and provide for the general ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... came from Montfort Court was sure to be regarded with a most malignant and distorted vision. Meanwhile, though Mr. Allsop was popular with the higher classes and with such of the extreme poor as his charity relieved, his pastoral influence generally was a dead letter. His curate, who preached for him—a good young man, but extremely dull-was not one of those preachers who fill a church. Tradesmen wanted an excuse to stay away or choose another place of worship; and they contrived to hear some passages in the sermons—over which, while the curate ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and executed that are far in advance of public opinion. That cannot be done in a democracy. The law may be a slight step in advance, and so perhaps educate public opinion to its level; but if it goes beyond that step, after the first flurry of interest in the law is past, it remains a dead letter on the statute books—worse than useless, because cultivating that dangerous disrespect for all law, which we have seen growing upon ...
— The Soul of Democracy - The Philosophy Of The World War In Relation To Human Liberty • Edward Howard Griggs
... Polycarp to the Philippians, which is the only one among those which he wrote that has been preserved, is, even in the dead letter, a standing proof of the apostolic spirit with which he was animated, and of that profound humility, perfect meekness, burning charity, and holy zeal, of which his life was so admirable an example. The beginning ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... of concealed weapons is prohibited by law in the United States and some other countries, but in Mexico a statute is not permitted to be simply a dead letter. While we were at the Iturbide, the police of the capital were vigorously enforcing a new law, which forbids the carrying of any sort of deadly weapon except in open sight. The common people were being searched for knives, of which, when found, they ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... that into which the Latin Church sank deeper amid deeper from the sixth to the fourteenth century; during which time religion was likewise merely objective and superstitious—a letter proudly emblazoned and illuminated, but yet a dead letter that was to be read by its own outward glories without the light of the Spirit in the mind of the believer. The consequence was too glaring not to be anticipated, and, if possible, prevented. Without that spirit in each true believer, ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... of the courts the National Government had power over the railways, I found, when I became President, that this power was either not exercised at all or exercised with utter inefficiency. The law against rebates was a dead letter. All the unscrupulous railway men had been allowed to violate it with impunity; and because of this, as was inevitable, the scrupulous and decent railway men had been forced to violate it themselves, under penalty of being beaten by their less scrupulous ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
... discussion; to even discuss the question of the divinity of Christ was considered blasphemy, and the person so offending was punished most severely by the criminal laws. At the present time this wretched remnant of the dark ages is practically a dead letter. The friends of Shelley suffered from this most intolerant spirit. Keats, it is believed by many, was wounded unto death for daring to speak on behalf of freedom, and we are given glimpses in the Adonais of his feelings ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran
... this matter a dead letter. Cases may occur in which they are disregarded, and a few instances may be found where slaves may have learned to read; but such are isolated cases, and only prove the rule. The great mass of slaveholders look upon education among the slaves as utterly subversive ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... only. That the words of the New Testament contained the highest truth accessible to man,—truth not to be taken from nor added to,—all good men (as I thought) confessed: never before had I seen a man so resolved that no word of it should be a dead letter to him. I once said: "But do you really think that no part of the New Testament may have been temporary in its object? for instance, what should we have lost, if St. Paul had never written the verse, 'The cloak which I have left at Troas, bring with thee, and the books, but especially the parchments.'" ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... by such infernal arts." A similar statute was contained in the "Fundamentals" of Massachusetts, probably inspired by the command of Scripture, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." This law, we shall see, was not a dead letter. ...
— History of the United States, Vol. I (of VI) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... It was refused by Kent and by Fairfield, governors of Maine, and representing, I believe, each of the then federal parties. We appealed then to fraternity, but we submitted; and this constitutional right has been practically a dead letter from that day to this. The next case came up between us and the State of New York, when the present senior senator [Mr. Seward] was the governor of that State; and he refused it. Why? He said it was not against the laws of New York to steal a negro, and therefore ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... his wrath to be quizzed by a committee of a body many of whose members had accepted his bribes. When he was asked why he had so high-handedly refused to run his trains across the river, the old fox smiled grimly, and to their utter surprise, showed them an old law (which had hitherto remained a dead letter) prohibiting the New York Hudson Railroad from running trains over the Hudson River. This law had been enacted in response to the demand of the New York Central, which wanted no competitor west of Albany. When the committee recovered its breath, its chairman timidly inquired of Vanderbilt ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... necessary, an escort through the mountains, yet I am afraid a short time must elapse before the people of Damascus can be made aware of the important changes in their social condition, when the Hatti Sherif of Gulhane shall be no longer to them a dead letter, when violence shall no longer usurp the place of justice, nor men endanger their lives by bearing witness to the truth. You will be able to return to Syria in a few months under better auspices, and cover the slanderers ...
— Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore, Volume I • Sir Moses Montefiore
... Santisimo Nombre de Jesus o Cebu; anos de 1597 a 1698; est. 68, caj. 1, leg. 34." It would appear from the endorsement on this letter that some brothers were sent at this early date; although this instruction probably remained a dead letter. (Cf. VOL. XVIII of this ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... scurrilous, ignorant stories of the Village. Pose? Sure!—it's two-thirds pose. But the rest is beautiful. And even the pose is beautiful in its way. Life is rotten and beautiful both at once. So is the Village. The Village is big in idea and it's growing. They talk of its being a dead letter. It's just beginning. First it—the Village, as it is now—was really a sort of off-shoot of London and Paris. Now it's itself and I tell you it's beautiful, and more remarkable than ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... obeyed. They do not want them overthrown by revolutionary violence or defeated by fraud. They do not wish them repealed by constitutional amendments, abrogated by judicial construction, nullified by unfriendly legislation, State or National, or left a dead letter by non-action on the part of law-makers or executive officers. Has the time come when the country can afford to trust the Democratic party on these questions? Consider ...
— The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes • James Quay Howard
... may arm himself, and kill a legal officer who attempts the discharge of his sworn duty; then I may arm myself also, when I deem the Law unjust to me, and kill another legal officer, who attempts to execute the Law! And if all this may be, LAW is nothing but a bugbear or a bubble—is a dead letter—and the texts of God's word which we have just read to you may be disobeyed, and ought to be ...
— The Religious Duty of Obedience to Law • Ichabod S. Spencer
... verse in the "familiar style," as Cowper has it, I prefer Mr. Locker when he is tender and not untouched with melancholy, as in "The Portrait of a Lady," and Mr. Austin Dobson, when he is not flirting, but in earnest, as in the "Song of Four Seasons" and "The Dead Letter." He has ingenuity, pathos, mastery of his art, and, though the least pedantic of poets, ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... additional force of ten thousand men, he was told, would be sent to him from Boston and New York as soon as possible. Though this order was never formally revoked or modified, yet in fact it was from the first a dead letter, and Banks, who received it in New York, remained there to complete the organization and to look after the collection and transport of the additional force mentioned in Halleck's instructions. Including the eight regiments of Emory, ...
— History of the Nineteenth Army Corps • Richard Biddle Irwin
... having, in compliance with popular clamour, passed a bill by which Catholic prelates were prohibited, under many penalties, from assuming territorial titles of sees, found itself, from the very first, obliged to treat this enactment as a dead letter, in consequence of the legal difficulties and complications which arose from it. Common sense suggested its removal from the statute-book. This was not effected without considerable effort to escape from that necessity by some less humiliating alternative. Mr. Hope-Scott ...
— Memoirs of James Robert Hope-Scott, Volume 2 • Robert Ornsby
... living churchman, and Bright, the greatest living nonconformist, voting in the same lobby. The fight was stiff, and was kept up until the end of the summer. The weapon that had been forged in this blazing furnace by these clumsy armourers proved blunt and worthless; the law was from the first a dead letter, and it was struck out of the statute book in 1871 in ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... political fashion patronised by the liberals of the day. But no effort was made to prevent the Government being virtually absolute, unless it was by rendering it absolutely powerless. The constitutions were framed to remain a dead letter. The national assemblies were nothing but conferences of parties, and the laws passed were intended to fascinate Western Europe, not to operate with effect ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, G.C.B., Admiral of the Red, Rear-Admiral of the Fleet, Etc., Etc. • Thomas Cochrane, Earl of Dundonald
... decent, but it makes my infamy the blacker.... Anyway I did write you and did send you the strap-watch. I sent both to Fifty-fourth Street. The Dead Letter Office returned them to me."... He drew from his inner pocket a letter and a packet. ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... darkling vistas of the ravine on either hand. There was a long stretch of sunny weather, and somehow that shifting purple haze accented all its languorous lustres. It seemed a vague sort of poetry a-loose in the air, and color had license. The law which decreed that a leaf should be green was a dead letter. How gallantly red and yellow they flared; and others, how tenderly pink, and gray, and purplish of hue! What poly-tinted fancies underfoot in the moss! Strange visitants came from the north. Flocks of birds, southward bound, skimmed these alien skies. Sometimes they alighted on the tree-tops or ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)
... checks had proved utterly inefficient. The laws which had been framed to secure the distinct authority of the executive magistrates and of the legislative assemblies—the freedom of election—the freedom of debate—the freedom of the press—the personal freedom of citizens—were a dead letter. The ordinary mode in which the Republic was governed was by coups d'etat. On one occasion, the legislative councils were placed under military restraint by the directors. Then, again, directors were deposed by the legislative councils. Elections were set aside by the executive authority. Ship-loads ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... taking up the commodity transported at the boundary line at one end of a State, and leaving it at the boundary line at the other end, the Federal jurisdiction would be entirely ousted, and the constitutional provision would become a dead letter."[356] In short, it was admitted inferentially, that the principle of the decision would apply to land transportation; but the actual demonstration of the fact still awaited some years.[357] ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... language, is, that by this mode of analyzing and reducing it to practice, it cannot, in this age, be comprehended as the medium of thought. Were this method to prevail, our present literal language would become a dead letter. Of what avail is language, if it can not be understood? And how can it be accommodated to the understanding, unless it receive the sanction of common consent? Even if we admit that such a manner of unfolding the principles of our language, is more rational and ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... that the royal recommendations of clemency remained a dead letter, and that, under the pressure of the incessant demand for gold, the Indians were reduced to the ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk
... eighth article of the treaty of Bucharest, concluded by Russia with the Porte, which remained a dead letter, was followed by the fifth article in the treaty of Akerman, formally securing the ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... superstition. I have thought proper to premise thus much, lest the incredible tale I have to tell should be considered rather the raving of a crude imagination, than the positive experience of a mind to which the reveries of fancy have been a dead letter and ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... fixed the lessons in their memories. It is true, indeed, that they did not repent; but this only shows that parables, even when dictated by the Spirit, have not inherent power to convert; even God's word may, through the hearer's sin, remain a dead letter in his hand. It emerges incidentally in the history that the preaching of Ezekiel was eminently popular; crowds came out to ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... the poor youth came hither to see whether the guardian whose wardship has hitherto been a dead letter, were indeed so utterly obdurate and helpless as had ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the law may be brought into action for attempts against nature even with mutual consent; the penalty is one hundred strokes with the bamboo and a month's imprisonment; if there is violence, the penalty is decapitation; I am not able to say how far the law is a dead letter. According to Matignon, so far as homosexuality exists in China, it is carried on with much more decorum and restraint than it is in Europe, and he thinks it may be put down to the credit of the Chinese that, unlike Europeans, they never practice ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... had measurably cast out the "daimon of unrest" from the mind of labor, while at the same time he had given a notable illustration to all his people of the folly of outrunning too far the sentiments of your age, and the arrant rot of placing edicts upon the statute books that at once become a dead letter unless backed by despotic force, and feeling the security of his position, stood before his petitioners, lightly leaning on his left foot, with his right hand in the breast of his ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... a thing which was fixed by authority, and was for obvious reasons of special importance in the case of the necessaries of life.... The legitimate price of a thing as fixed by authority had to be based upon the natural price, and therefore lost its validity and became a dead letter the moment any change ...
— An Essay on Mediaeval Economic Teaching • George O'Brien
... part, originated in a praiseworthy desire to familiarize the people with Holy Writ, which had, in consequence of changes in the vernacular, become to them, in the course of time, almost a dead letter. These Midrashim have little or nothing to do with the Halachoth or legal decisions of the Talmud, except in aim, which is that of illustration and explanation. They are not literal interpretations, but figurative and allegorical, and as such enigmatic. They are, however, to ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... fall heavily and in marked angles—nor are they affected by the wind, except under circumstances of very rapid motion. The ideal of the face is often solemn—seldom beautiful; occasionally ludicrous failures occur: in the smallest designs the face is very often a dead letter, or worse: and in all, Giotto's handling is generally to be distinguished from that of any of his followers by its bluntness. In the school work we find sweeter types of feature, greater finish, stricter care, more delicate ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... and growth thus liberated to be kept within the bounds set by existing institutions. "The peace, the prosperity, and the very existence of the Union," he wrote, "are vested in the hands of the seven Federal judges. Without them the Constitution would be a dead letter: the Executive appeals to them for assistance against the encroachments of the legislative power; the Legislature demands their protection against the assaults of the Executive; they defend the Union from the disobedience of the States, the States ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... between us and them. Bantering, because first of all our fishermen no longer frequented St. George, and secondly, because the prohibition, which was compulsory during the four or five days in the year during which our warships were present, became simply a dead letter during the other three hundred and six days of the year. It was easy, of course, to see that our exclusive right to fish could not be maintained when once a sufficient indigenous population had settled there, ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... be her cherisher and protector through life. Then came the devastating thought that Elfride's childlike, unreasoning, and indiscreet act in flying to him only proved that the proprieties must be a dead letter with her; that the unreserve, which was really artlessness without ballast, meant indifference to decorum; and what so likely as that such a woman had been deceived in the past? He said to himself, in a mood of the bitterest cynicism: 'The ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... rushed through on a holiday, on which most of the members thought that no session would be held. Later on, when objection was taken to such a method, the Deputy, it is said, silenced the resisters by assuring them that they were mere formalities which must remain a dead letter.[29] ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... as to the Juelich-Cleves succession, and the change in the policy of the French government owing to the assassination of Henry IV, led both sides to desire an accommodation; and James consented, not indeed to withdraw the edict, but to postpone its execution for two years. It remained a dead letter until 1616, although all the time the wranglings over the legal aspects of the questions in dispute continued. The Republic, however, as an independent State, was very much hampered by the awkward fact of the cautionary towns remaining in English hands. The occupation of Flushing and Brill, ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... principal resort of the emigrants, requiring them to cease to give them shelter, and announcing that if they should refuse to remove them from their dominions he should consider their refusal a sufficient ground for war; while, to show that he did not intend this menace to be a dead letter, he soon afterward announced to the Assembly that he had ordered a powerful army of a hundred and fifty thousand men to be moved toward the frontier, under the command of Marshal Luckner, Marshal Rochambeau, ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... It is expected to ripen by itself, but it never becomes sweet, and often it rots. A premature measure may be carried through the House by a minister with a powerful majority, but it does not acquire vitality and maturity by being carried; it often remains on the Statute-book a dead letter, till in the end it has to be abolished ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... hot oysters, chicken salad, every known variety of sandwich, ices and cakes was taken standing for the most part, Madame Zattiany, however, once more enthroned at the head of the room, women as well as men dancing attendance upon her. Prohibition, a dead letter to all who could afford to patronize the underground mart, had but added to the spice of life, and it was patent that Miss Dwight had a cellar. More cocktails, highballs, sherry, were passed continuously, ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... represented, must be represented in its turn; and yet the effect on the whole man, in its complete unity, can only be imperfectly set forth by continued and varied reflections. It is only when religion is driven out from the society of the living, that it must conceal its manifold life under the dead letter. ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... martial law, the inhabitants being compelled to work the engines. In London, the principal means of arresting fires is a voluntary association of the insurance companies, without legal authority of any sort, the legal protection by parish engines being, with a few praiseworthy exceptions, a dead letter. ...
— Fire Prevention and Fire Extinction • James Braidwood
... enable the alien to fit into his new surroundings, or the neglect to set such social machinery agoing where it already exists. In the small towns it is not unusual for health ordinances to be strictly enforced in the English-speaking localities, and allowed to remain a dead letter in the immigrant districts. In Chicago it was in the stockyards district that garbage was dumped for many years; garbage, the product of other wards, that the residents of those other wards insisted be removed from their back-doors. ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry
... range, or, as the farmers say, carries a wide swath, and has some notions of things which in my view have as little foundation in true philosophy as they have warrant in Scripture; but, if he sometimes speculates falsely, he lives truly, which is by far the most important matter. The mere dead letter of a creed, however carefully preserved and reverently cherished, may be of no more spiritual or moral efficacy than an African fetish or an Indian medicine-bag. What we want is, orthodoxy in practice,—the dry bones clothed with warm, generous, holy life. It is one thing to hold ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... meteor or shooting star, they inferred that the king had sinned against the deity, and they suspended him from his functions until the Delphic or Olympic oracle should reinstate him in them. This custom, which has all the air of great antiquity, was not suffered to remain a dead letter even in the last period of the Spartan monarchy; for in the third century before our era a king, who had rendered himself obnoxious to the reforming party, was actually deposed on various trumped-up charges, among which the allegation that the ominous ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... formed from it would be free, by the same laws of climate and resources which determined that the entire West would remain free. Before the Mexican War the Senator had become convinced that the extension of slavery had reached its limit; that the Missouri Compromise was a dead letter except as a psychological palliative; that Nature had already ordained that slave labor should be forever excluded from all Western territory both north and south of that line. His reply to Calhoun's ...
— The Anti-Slavery Crusade - Volume 28 In The Chronicles Of America Series • Jesse Macy
... appoint two investigators who, with the United States Commission of Labor, should form a board to investigate the controversy and recommend "the best means for adjusting it." But as they were empowered to produce only findings and not to render decisions, the law remained a dead letter, without having a single case brought up under it. It was superseded in 1898 by the Erdman Act, which provided that certain Federal officials should act as mediators and that, in case they failed, a Board of Arbitrators was to be appointed whose word should be binding for a certain ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... the film that shrouded the ears of my brain, and the words became inspired and alive, and I forgot my own thoughts in listening to the Holy Book. For is not the voice of every loving spirit a fresh inspiration to the dead letter? With a voice other than this, does it not kill? And I thought I had heard the voice before, but where I sat I could not see the Communion Table.—At length the preacher ascended the pulpit stairs, and, to my delight and the rousing of an altogether unwonted expectation, ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 1 • George MacDonald
... all had the most utter contempt for Napoleon III., and on the day when the Prince Imperial was baptized there was no distribution of bon-bons for us, and we were not allowed the holiday that was accorded to all the colleges, boarding-schools, and convents. Politics were a dead letter to me, and I was happy at the convent, ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... left for them to do. It was only too certain that for the authorities at Rio Janeiro the undeciphered document would have no value whatever, that it would be a dead letter, that the first verdict which declared Joam Dacosta the perpetrator of the crime at Tijuco would not be set aside, and that, as in such cases no commutation of the sentence was possible, the order for his execution would ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... were popularly represented. He further argued, that if a house of commons were once elected on the principles of this bill, it would cramp the crown in the exercise of its prerogatives, and create a body in that house so irresistible as to make their lordships' decisions on all public questions a dead letter. The house of commons would become too much the image of the people. The dangers, indeed, which at this moment surrounded their lordships proved the accuracy of his argument. They had now a popular house of commons—a delegate house of commons; that house had passed this measure, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... they had to leave home earlier than this, because their 'job' was more than half an hour's walk away. It did not matter how far away the 'job' was from the shop, the men had to walk to and fro in their own time, for Trades Union rules were a dead letter in Mugsborough. There were no tram fares or train fares or walking time allowed ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... since crossing the Plains in 1849. Joe was an invaluable guide and Indian fighter whenever the clause of the statute prohibiting liquors in the Indian country happened to be in full force. At the time in question the restriction was by no means a dead letter, and Joe came through in thirty-six hours, though obliged to keep in hiding during daylight of the 28th. The tidings brought were joyfully received by everybody at Camp Supply, and they were particularly agreeable tome, for, besides being ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... desolation of preaching and of the Sacraments. And after losing our preachers, our own lives and limbs would not be safe among the miners, and we must needs expect a revolt of all the people." (Walther 19f.) Thus the Interim before long became a dead letter throughout ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... he stroked mi heead, "Tak my advice, young chap," he sed, "Let liquors be, sup ale asteead, An' tha'll be better, An' dunnot treat th' advice tha's heard Like a dead letter." ...
— Yorkshire Ditties, Second Series - To which is added The Cream of Wit and Humour - from his Popular Writings • John Hartley
... river. Sir Samuel Argall, governor of Virginia, conceived that this foreign settlement trenched upon the rights granted by the English crown to its subjects, and by a display of superior force constrained the Dutch colony to acknowledge British sovereignty (1613);[351] but this submission became a dead letter some years later, when large bodies of emigrants arrived from the Low Countries (1620);[352] the little trading post soon rose into a town, and a fort was erected for its defense. The site of this establishment was on the island of Manhattan;[353] the founders called ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... the operations of the Post Office to the Decimal Currency, the internal letter postage rate shall be changed from three pence to its equivalent of five cents, per half ounce—the charge for advertising a dead letter from three farthings to two cents—the charge for returning a dead letter to the writer, from one penny to three cents; and in all cases where a one halfpenny or penny rate of Postage is chargeable, these rates shall be changed to one cent and two ...
— The Stamps of Canada • Bertram Poole
... seems to be so rigidly enforced in other parts of the city, is a dead letter in the Bowery. Here on Sunday, one may see shops of all kinds—the vilest especially—open for trade. Cheap clothing-stores, etc., concert saloons, and the most infamous dens of vice, are in full ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... arrested in full flight to join the national enemy. Power naturally fell into the hands of the men of conviction, energy, passion, and resource. Patriotism and republicanism became synonymous, and the constitution against which Burke had prophesied was henceforth a dead letter. The spirit of insurrection that had slumbered since the fall of the Bastille and the march to Versailles in 1789, now awoke in formidable violence, and after the preliminary rehearsal of what is known in the revolutionary calendar as the 20th of June ...
— Burke • John Morley
... these remarks of mine which have strayed so woefully from their jovial text, save that I ought fairly to confess that my last impression of the Carnival was altogether Carnivalesque.. The merry-making of Shrove Tuesday had life and felicity; the dead letter of tradition broke out into nature and grace. I pocketed my scepticism and spent a long afternoon on the Corso. Almost every one was a masker, but you had no need to conform; the pelting rain of confetti effectually disguised you. I can't say I found ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... a business what as an amusement perhaps might have delighted him) was deemed a dead letter, and as such, neglected; while he bestowed himself on other mechanism, presenting more ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... Non-conformists had been gradually relaxed. The repeal of two, the Five Mile and the Conventicle Acts, had, as we have seen in the last chapter, been recent measures of Lord Liverpool. But the Test Act still remained, though it had long been practically a dead letter. The Union with Scotland, where the majority of the population was Presbyterian, had rendered it almost impossible to maintain the exclusion of Englishmen resembling the Scotch in their religious tenets from preferments, and even from seats in the House of Commons, to which Scotchmen ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... Portland at last, and promised faithfully to send word to a certain friend of Monckton's, in London, where he was, and what he was doing. Meantime he begged his way northward from Portland, for the southern provinces were a dead letter to him. ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... letters began with "My dear husband;" and some were never called for. But the fact that the only regular correspondent of Five Forks never received any reply became at last quite notorious. Consequently, when an envelope was received, bearing the stamp of the "dead letter office," addressed to "The Fool," under the more conventional title of "Cyrus Hawkins," there was quite a fever of excitement. I do not know how the secret leaked out; but it was eventually known to the camp, that the ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... the very existence of the Union, are invested in the hands of the seven judges. Without their active co-operation the constitution would be a dead letter: the executive appeals to them for assistance against the encroachments of the legislative powers; the legislature demands their protection from the designs of the executive; they defend the Union from the disobedience of the states, the states from the ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... no more accept of burnt offerings and sacrifices! and that the ceremonial law was ipso facto abolished; because, if such passages do signify the abolishment of the Mosaic law, it must be considered as having been a dead letter ever since David, Isaiah., and Jeremiah ...
— Five Pebbles from the Brook • George Bethune English
... to that enjoyed by it in other European legislatures. It was soon recognized as a fundamental principle of the constitution, that no tax could be imposed without its consent; [34] and an express enactment to this effect was suffered to remain on the statute book, after it had become a dead letter, as if to remind the nation of the liberties it had lost. [35] The commons showed a wise solicitude in regard to the mode of collecting the public revenue, oftentimes more onerous to the subject than the ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... possessed at the most two garments for each season, which lasted their lifetime and beyond it. These garments were bequeathed to their children. Consequently the clause in the marriage-contract relating to arms and clothes, which in these days is almost a dead letter because of the small value of wardrobes that need constant renewing, was then of much importance. Great costs brought with them solidity. The toilet of a woman constituted a large capital; it was reckoned among the family possessions, and was kept in those enormous chests ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... himself on leaving college by a studious life, and austere manners. Literature and the bar shared his time. The philosophy of Jean Jacques Rousseau had made a profound impression on his understanding; the philosophy, falling upon an active imagination, had not remained a dead letter; it had become in him a leading principle, a faith, a fanaticism. In the strong mind of a sectarian, all conviction becomes a thing apart. Robespierre was the Luther of politics: and in obscurity he brooded over the confused thoughts ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... had then been in existence ten years should at once be turned over to bishops, and the Indians attached to them made subject to civil authority. Though promulgated in 1813, this decree was not published in California till 1820, and even then was practically a dead letter. Two years later, California became a province of the Mexican Empire, and in due course the new government turned its attention to the missions, in 1833 ordering their complete secularization. The atrocious mishandling by both Spain and Mexico of the funds by which they had been kept up, ...
— The Famous Missions of California • William Henry Hudson
... characters, not to general facts"; and the reason given for the decided preference manifested for his vivid record is not less true than philosophical,—"We learn so much from him enjoyably." It is precisely the lack of this pleasurable trait which makes the greater part of the annals of the past a dead letter to the world, and wins to romance, ballad, epic, fiction, relic, and poetry the keen attention which facts coldly "set in a note-book" never enlisted. How many of us unconsciously have adopted the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... Duma opposed Stolypin's bill, and the law was introduced by stealth and promulgated during a forced recess of the Duma. Contrary to expectation the law neither led to the results desired by the Government, nor to those feared by Constitutional Democrats. It remained a dead letter. Few members of peasant communities applied for separation. The Government tried to boost its scheme by building at its own expense model, fake peasant homes. The peasants had already their own idea as to remedies in regard to land shortage and did ...
— The Russian Revolution; The Jugo-Slav Movement • Alexander Petrunkevitch, Samuel Northrup Harper,
... character of the music. These sonatas are of great historic interest. This preface, also the evident necessity for additional (inner part) notes at times, especially in the slow movements of E. Bach and other composers of that day, make one feel that, as it now stands, much of Bach's music is a dead letter. Here we are face to face with a question which in a kindred matter has given rise to much controversy. If the music is to produce its proper effect, something must be done. To that (in the case of Emanuel Bach's sonatas) all ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... that, in the first place, this empirical method, which Cuvier introduces as quite subordinate, and to be used only in aid of the rational method, is really the method which Cuvier habitually employed—the so-called rational method remaining practically a dead letter; and, in the second place, he has shown that Cuvier himself has in several places so far admitted the inapplicability of the rational method, as virtually to surrender it as a method. But more than this, Professor Huxley contends that the alleged necessary correlation is not true. Quite admitting ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... most troublesome to themselves, always on the point of mutiny for more pay and plunder. The Swiss were beginning to see the evils of the system, and prohibited the taking of pensions in 1503, though this law remained largely a dead letter. [Sidenote: September 13-14, 1515] The reputation of the mountaineers suffered a blow in their defeat by the French at Marignano, followed by a treaty with France, intended by that power to make Switzerland a permanent dependency in return for a large annual ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... harm in agreeing to forfeit him if you fail," rejoined Wallace; "for if you certainly do feed him, then your agreement to forfeit him will be a dead letter." ...
— Stuyvesant - A Franconia Story • Jacob Abbott
... if the constitution has formally conferred these powers, the constitution on these points is a dead letter, because it contravenes an unwritten constitution of higher authority, viz., the inner inspiration of ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... a prevalent notion that no fat person could get to heaven; and thus spoiled and wasted her body through excessive fastings. A quaker, to prove the text that "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by the word of God," persisted in refusing his meals. The literal text proved for him a dead letter, and this practical commentator died by a metaphor. This quaker, however, was not the only victim to the letter of the text; for the famous Origen, by interpreting in too literal a way the 12th verse of the ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... persons of the insurrection to come, in periods specified, and amply long enough, to stand their trials. Certain it is, as we said before, that though many of these were or became prisoners, none were executed. The Act was a dead letter; and considering the principles of the time, surely the ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... citizens of the United States. This was not the mere will of governmental officials; the Mexican statutory law prohibited the granting of licenses to citizens of the United States. This law was, however, often made a dead letter by Americans; for, they frequently, but stealthily evaded it. In order, therefore, to hoodwink the Mexican authorities, Mr. Young had to resort to various expedients. His preparations were so carefully and secretly made, that the real business he ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... dead letter,—an old gentleman long retired from business at his bank to a cottage at the Lakes, where he was written to, but without much hope of his taking the trouble even to reply. However, if the choice lay only between James and the representative of the new lights, ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Rabout-Saint-Etienne, Volney, Sieyes, are hatching out a long arrears of resentments or hopes, and who only await the opportunity to impose their system with all the intolerance of dogmatism and of faith. To minds of this stamp the past is a dead letter; example is no authority; realities are of no account; they live in their own Utopia. Sieyes, the most important of them all, judges that "the whole English constitution is charlatanism, designed for imposing on the people;"[2132] he regards the English "as children in the matter ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... it was met and spurned not only by human reason, but by human passion. In truth, the strong and influential of both religions treated it with contempt, and trampled on it without any dread of the consequences. By the time of his return from transportation, it was merely a dead letter, disregarded and scorned by both parties, and was no obstruction to either the marriage or the happiness of himself and his ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... communicate to others, or which they would listen to with delight, that is not a fit subject for poetry. It is not a branch of authorship: it is "the stuff of which our life is made." The rest is "mere oblivion," a dead letter: for all that is worth remembering in life, is the poetry of it. Fear is poetry, hope is poetry, love is poetry, hatred is poetry; contempt, jealousy, remorse, admiration, wonder, pity, despair, or madness, ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... a valuable truth," says the reviewer, "has been sent undulating through the air by men who have lived and died unknown. At this moment the rising generation are supplied with the best of their mental aliment by writers whose names are a dead letter to the mass; and among the most remarkable of these is Michael Angelo Titmarsh, alias William Makepeace Thackeray, author of the Irish Sketch Book, of A Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo, of Jeames's Diary, of The ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... comfort and even of luxury, and establish new institutions in a new world. The Massachusetts settlers were forbidden by the terms of their charter to enact any laws repugnant to the laws of England. This restriction was a dead letter from the very beginning. Indeed, literally construed, it would have defeated the very object of Puritan emigration—to escape from the rule of a hierarchy established under English laws. As Massachusetts was for many years the leading colony of the north of English origin, and ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... practical illustration of that great truth, which ought to be familiar to all statesmen and politicians, that a law passed by the national legislature to operate locally upon a people not represented, will always remain practically a dead letter upon the statute book, if it be in opposition to the wishes and supposed interests of those who are to be affected by it, and at the same time charged with its execution. The Ordinance of 1787 was practically ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... been a blunder to abandon them. This quickly became apparent. Champigny himself saw the necessity of compromise. The instructions of the king were scarcely given before they were partially withdrawn, and they soon became a dead letter. Even Fort Frontenac was retained after repeated directions to abandon it. The policy of the governor prevailed; the colony returned to its normal methods of growth, and ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... evidence was sent in every few days, and with it, on July 24, was included Collier's legal opinion: "It appears difficult to make out a stronger case of infringement of the Foreign Enlistment Act, which, if not enforced on this occasion, is little better than a dead letter." Such language implied almost a charge of collusion with the rebel agents — an intent to aid the Confederacy. In spite of the warning, Earl Russell let the ship, four ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... Plantations, for protection in the Colonies. Lord Granville was gracious. He informed the deputation that though the Act could not be repealed at once the Board of Trade would recommend the repeal as soon as legally possible; and the upshot of the matter was that the Act became a dead letter. ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... religious, and yet analyse point by point what they believe in? She lives in the midst of the traditional churches, and is full of reverence by nature; and yet if you knew how fearlessly that woman has torn up the old cerements and taken note of what is a dead letter within, yet preserved her faith in essential spiritual truth, you would feel more admiration for her than even for writing 'Uncle Tom.' There are quantities of irreverent women and men who profess infidelity. ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... naught. A gigantic system of smuggling was carried on. The custom-house officials had no force at their disposal which would have enabled them to check these operations, and the law enforcing a trade with England was virtually a dead letter. ...
— True to the Old Flag - A Tale of the American War of Independence • G. A. Henty
... mighty profitable to an active young printer; but precisely at this juncture the firm of Cointet Brothers, paper manufacturers, applied to the authorities for the second printer's license in Angouleme. Hitherto old Sechard had contrived to reduce this license to a dead letter, thanks to the war crisis of the Empire, and consequent atrophy of commercial enterprise; but he had neglected to buy up the right himself, and this piece of parsimony was the ruin of the old business. Sechard thought joyfully when he heard the news ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... respect the subject was referred to a Select Committee of the House of Commons. The Committee's report disposed of the view which, until then, Parliament had held, and expressed the opinion that the right of persons to run their own engines and carriages was a dead letter for the good reason, amongst others, that it was necessary for railway trains to be run and controlled by and ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow
... a member of parliament in the time of Henry VIII., and was imprisoned by that despot in 1542, very probably without any just cause. He about the same time translated into English the great charter of Englishmen which had become a dead letter through the tyranny of the Tudors; and he rendered the same public service respecting several important statutes which existed only in Latin or Norman French; proofs of a free and courageous spirit extremely rare ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... purpose of settling the mutual relations of the constituent states. Each state was ordered to adopt a constitutional form of government, but, as no provision was made for enforcing this clause, it remained a dead letter. Prussia regained her provinces on the left bank of the Rhine, with a population exceeding 1,000,000, and was allotted the northern part of Saxony, with a population of 800,000, besides retaining her original share of Poland, with the province of Posen, which had formed part of the duchy of Warsaw. ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... mentioned manna, he tried to turn their attention from material to spiritual bread. When he sat upon Jacob's well, and discoursed with the woman of Samaria, he directed her attention from ordinary, or elementary to spiritual and living water. So he did upon this occasion. He gave life to the dead letter of an old ceremony by a new meaning. His disciples were from henceforth to turn their attention, if they chose to celebrate the passover, from the paschal lamb to himself, and from the deliverance of their ancestors out of ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume II (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... invention—the result in both cases is quite beyond the true purpose of Art. Art—when all is said and done—a suggestion, and it refuses to be explained. Make it obvious, unfold it in detail, and you reduce it to a dead letter." ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... simplifying. The latest attempt at linguistic jerrymandering has been the somewhat autocratic document of President Roosevelt. He has found that there are limits to what the American people will stand even from him, and it seems likely to remain a dead letter. But there is not the smallest doubt that the English language is heavily handicapped by its eccentric vowel pronunciation and its spelling that has failed to keep pace with the development of the language. The same is true, though in a lesser degree, of the spelling ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark |
