"Speculator" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was a speculator in town-lots—a profession that was, just then, in high repute in the city of New York. For farms, and all the more vulgar aspects of real estate, he had a sovereign contempt; but offer him a bit of land that could be measured by feet ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... a little alarmed for poor old Cal. After all, the man had done me a service; had got me a job. As for her, she struck me as a potentially dangerous person. One couldn't tell, she might be some adventuress, or if not that, a speculator who would damage Cal's little schemes. I put it to her plainly afterward; and quarrelled with her as well as I could. I drove her down to the station. Callan must have been distinctly impressed or he would never have had ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... things, and in his other schemes for the 'subiti guadagni' of the speculator and the "sudden making of splendid names" for the benefactors of our species, Clemens satisfied the Colonel Sellers nature in himself (from which he drew the picture of that wild and lovable figure), and perhaps made as good use of his money as he could. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the attempt to search out what the gods had not chosen to reveal could hardly (he supposed) be well pleasing in their sight. Indeed, the man who tortured his brains about such subjects stood a fair chance of losing his wits entirely, just as Anaxagoras, (18) the headiest speculator of them all, in his attempt to explain the divine mechanism, had somewhat lost his head. Anaxagoras took on himself to assert that sun and fire are identical, (19) ignoring the fact that human beings can easily look at fire, but to gaze steadily into the face of the sun is given to no man; or that ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... Revolution, by a sharper who was famous in that day. He was known as Thomas Washington, but his real name was Walsh. Washington, or Walsh, is described as being a very extraordinary man. He had fought in the service of Georgia, but he had the instinct of a speculator; and when the war was ended, he gave himself up to the devices of those who earn their living by their wits. He was a man of good address, and his air of candor succeeded in deceiving all whom he met. Those who dealt with him always had ...
— Stories Of Georgia - 1896 • Joel Chandler Harris
... certain class of land speculators, when buying land for reselling in plots, do not pay so much attention to the qualities of the land as to its advertising possibilities. If land in a widely known valley is alkali land, so much the better, for the buying price is lower. The speculator in his advertisement makes it appear as fruit land with a great future. It seems also to have been by no means uncommon for the agent's commission to be higher than the price paid by the owner ...
— A Stake in the Land • Peter Alexander Speek
... the same breath, however, she wished that daddy could send her more money. For Lottie Drugg had gone to Boston. Her father had given over the violin to Joe Bodley, and that young speculator paid the storekeeper the remainder of the hundred dollars agreed upon. With this hundred dollars Hopewell started for Boston with Lottie, leaving his wife to take care of the store for the few days he expected to be absent. Janice went over to stay with ...
— How Janice Day Won • Helen Beecher Long
... the life in the village of Melrose, of 700 inhabitants, have been talked over with my mother, and many embodied in a little MS. volume of reminiscences of her life. I hold more from her than from my father; but, as he was an unlucky speculator, I inherit from him Hope, which is invaluable to a social or political reformer. School holidays were only a rarity in harvest time for the parish school. At Miss Phin's we had, besides, a week at ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... evidences on which it rests, can scarcely, with justifying warrant, do less than lay his hand on his body, and turn his gaze aloft, and exclaim, "Though death shatters this shell, the soul may survive, and I confidently hope to live forever." Meanwhile, the believer and the speculator, combining to form a Christian philosophy wherein doubt and faith, thought and freedom, reason and sentiment, nature and revelation, all embrace, even as the truth of things and the experience of life demand, may both adopt for their own the expression ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... reconcilers argued on the basis of their own ideas and of the philosophies of their time. The early physicist thought that myth concealed a physical philosophy; the early etymologist saw in it a confusion of language; the early political speculator supposed that myth was an invention of legislators; the literary Euhemerus found the secret of myths in the course of an imaginary voyage to a fabled island. Then came the moment of the Christian attacks, ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... case of a famous actor, the wives numbered four. Ordinarily in Canada—certainly in eastern provinces—a third is the wife's reserve unless she sign it away. How four wives could each have a third was a poser for the speculator and the knot was cut by ignoring the wife's claims. Now that the fevered mad mania of speculation is over this remissness of the law in two provinces ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... those radiant thoughts and startling truths which warrant his claim to genius, if not to greatness. It is curious to observe how at this early period of Carlyle's life, when all the talent and learning of England bowed at these levees before the gigantic speculator and dreamer, he, perhaps alone, stood aloof from the motley throng of worshippers,—with them, but not of them,—coolly analyzing every sentence delivered by the oracle, and sufficiently learned in the divine lore to separate the gold from the dross. What was good and productive ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... shall never be able to regard Mr. Harrison with as much respect as you do. It may be ignorance, but I never could see much difference between a speculator in ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... side of Stockton street, between Sacramento and Clay streets, stood the old Pioche residence, wherein were given many lavish entertainments, for its owner was an epicure and hospitable to a degree. He was a heavy speculator and at one time possessed of much property. His death was a mystery and has never been solved. During the '90's his home was ...
— California 1849-1913 - or the Rambling Sketches and Experiences of Sixty-four - Years' Residence in that State. • L. H. Woolley
... possession of land belonging to government and cultivating it: such was the custom of the back-woodsmen, and, for want of this law, it often happened that after they had cultivated a farm, the land would be applied for and purchased by some speculator, who would forcibly eject the occupant, and take possession of the improved property. A back-woodsman was not to be trifled with, and the consequences very commonly were that the new proprietor was found some fine morning with a rifle-bullet ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... and hope. Blessed and delightful it is to find, that even in these new ages the creeds which so many fancy to be at their last gasp, are still the final and highest succour, not merely of the peasant and the outcast, but of the subtle artist and the daring speculator. Blessed it is to find the most cunning poet of our day able to combine the complicated rhythm and melody of modern times with the old truths which gave heart to martyrs at the stake; and to see in the science and the history of the nineteenth century new and living ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... Brandon would interfere with his prospects. This sort of thing was kept up with such great delicacy of management on Cigole's part that Brandon himself would have been completely deceived, and would have come to consider him as nothing more than a speculator in wool, had it not been for a certain deep instinct within him, which made him regard this man as one who was actuated by something far deeper than mere regards for a ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... Wiesbaden critic. A literary man or a flunkey, as you like. He is in the pay of a local speculator here, and so is bound to praise everything and be ecstatic over every one, though for his part he is soaked through and through with the nastiest venom, to which he does not dare to give vent. I am afraid he's an awful scandalmonger; he'll run at once to tell ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... William's reign could remember the days when there was not a single banking house in London. Goldsmiths had strong vaults in which masses of bullion could lie secure from fire and robbers, and at their shops in Lombard Street all payments in coin were made. William Paterson, an ingenious speculator, submitted to the government a plan for a national bank, which after long debate passed both Houses ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... an openness to ideas, an aptness for intuitions, and sometimes a seemingly positive preference for the bird in the bush," which latter may account for that skilful Yankee versatility so perfectly exemplified in the chaplain, poet, editor, merchant, speculator, politician, historian, and ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 4, April, 1886 • Various
... share of their crop would come to them when harvested, they did not exert themselves to produce what they could. They often abandoned their crops before harvest, knowing that they had already spent them. In cases, however, where the Negro tenants had acquired mules, horses or tools upon which the speculator had a mortgage, the blacks were actually bound to their landlords to secure the property. It was soon evident that in the end the white man himself was the loser by this evil system. There appeared waste places in the ...
— A Century of Negro Migration • Carter G. Woodson
... evolution, but is actually based upon the fundamental proposition of evolution." ... "The teleological and the mechanical views of nature are not necessarily mutually exclusive; on the contrary, the more purely a mechanist the speculator is, the more firmly does he assume a primordial molecular arrangement, of which all the phenomena of the universe are the consequences; and the more completely thereby is he at the mercy of the teleologist, who can always defy him to disprove that this primordial ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... crown of Sweden; and, in our own days, Great Britain, involved in a long and losing war with her American colonies. Every-day life, too, is full of such examples." I asked her to mention some. "Thou canst see one," she answered, "in the speculator, whose anxiety for sudden wealth has reduced his family to indigence; and in the girl who leaves her plain country home, and sacrifices her health, and perhaps her virtue, in a city workshop. Disputatious people, passionate people, those who indulge ...
— Godey's Lady's Book, Vol. 42, January, 1851 • Various
... as if the devil were wreaking his spite on Mr. Titmouse; nay, perhaps it was the devil himself who had served him with the bottles in Bond Street. Or was it a mere ordinary servant of the devil—some greedy, impudent, unprincipled speculator, who, desirous of acting on the approved maxim—Fiat experimentum in corpore vili—had pitched on Titmouse (seeing the sort of person he was) as a godsend, quite reckless what effect might be produced on his hair, so as the stuff were paid for, ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... heart had become attuned to the real theater—to the hum of its shifting life, to the swift tumult of its tears and laughter. The excitement of the drama, and all the speculation that it involved (and he was a born speculator), were in his blood. He heeded the call and went back ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... sleeping on cots and billiard-tables; that there are no front-row seats for the Follies, no berths in any cabin of any steamer, remind yourself that there is always a pony in Corea for Dinwiddie. The rule is that the hotel clerk discovers a vacant room, a ticket speculator disgorges a front-row seat, and the ship's doctor sells you a berth in the sick bay. But in Salonika the rule failed. As already explained, Salonika always is overcrowded. Suddenly, added to her 120,000 peoples, came 110,000 ...
— With the French in France and Salonika • Richard Harding Davis
... the day should not be daytime; there should be one hour, if no more, which the day did not bring forth. Scholars are wont to sell their birthright for a mess of learning. But is it necessary to know what the speculator prints, or the thoughtless study, or the idle read, the literature of the Russians and the Chinese, or even French philosophy and much of German criticism. Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all. "There are the worshippers with offerings, ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... the poor," not money, for he himself was as poor as any of them; but his time, labor and professional skill; he was "giving to the poor;" he was "lending to the Lord," and he "liked the security." And the most successful speculator that ever made a fortune on 'change never, never invested time, labor or ...
— Capitola's Peril - A Sequel to 'The Hidden Hand' • Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth
... said the highly gratified Bill, turning with a threatening gesture upon a speculator opposite. "Wot do you say ...
— At Sunwich Port, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... be true, but I am not a speculator; and if you are not prepared to pay money, why, it is useless ...
— The Jucklins - A Novel • Opie Read
... seen to resist with fury the philanthropic invaders, and to perish in thousands before they are convinced of their mistake. The inevitable gap between conquest and dominion becomes filled with the figures of the greedy trader, the inopportune missionary, the ambitious soldier, and the lying speculator, who disquiet the minds of the conquered and excite the sordid appetites of the conquerors. And as the eye of thought rests on these sinister features, it hardly seems possible for us to believe that any fair prospect is approached ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... remarkable in Stevenson is that a man who was so much the dreamer of dreams—the mystic moralist, the constant questioner and speculator on human destiny and human perversity, and the riddles that arise on the search for the threads of motive and incentives to human action—moreover, a man, who constantly suffered from one of the most trying and weakening forms of ill-health—should ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... want any of your fluctuating incomes for my girl. I don't care if you earned ten thousand pounds this year. So long as you can't guarantee that to last, you're no better than a speculator—a hand-to-mouth, don't-know-where-you-are-to-morrow sort of person. Now, that sort of thing won't do, Mr. Vernon. Before you next think of marrying a girl in my daughter's position, let me give you this bit of advice: learn ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... received as his reward the princely estate of Bohemia Manor. Arnoldus van Hardenberg, another merchant, had been a victim of judicial oppression by both Kieft and Stuyvesant. Jacob van Couwenhoven had come out in 1633 and resided at first at Rensselaerswyck; he was afterward of note as speculator and brewer in New Amsterdam. Oloff Stevensz van Cortlant had been store-keeper for the Company and deacon of the church; later he was burgomaster of New Amsterdam. Michiel Jansz and Thomas Hall were farmers, the latter, the first English settler in New York State, having come to Manhattan ...
— Narrative of New Netherland • Various
... swept by, since men no longer fought, since they remained there resting, pillaging, and devouring amidst the heaped-up spoils. And the pity of it was that the old hero, the paralytic, motionless father beheld it all—beheld the degeneration of his son, the speculator and company ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... then we turn for the most striking example of the playwright's powers. This first appeared as Le Faiseur (The Speculator), being originally written in 1838-40. Justice compels us to state, however, that another hand is present in the perfected play. In the original it was a comedy in five acts; but this was revamped and reduced to three acts ...
— Introduction to the Dramas of Balzac • Epiphanius Wilson and J. Walker McSpadden
... of public distress did Tom Walker set up as usurer in Boston. His door was soon thronged by customers. The needy and adventurous, the gambling speculator, the dreaming land-jobber, the thriftless tradesman, the merchant with cracked credit—in short, everyone driven to raise money by desperate means and desperate ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... "Governments, like corporations, are considered without souls, and according to the code of some people's morality, should be swindled and cheated on every occasion." Linton gave this picture of "a notorious speculator who has ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... ostensibly an innkeeper, but this business, honest enough in itself, only veiled the man's real trade, in which he defied alike the laws of honesty and of his country. The other was by turns a gentleman of property, a merchant, a cattle owner, or a speculator, in all of which characters he acted excellently, and succeeded in making the acquaintance of men ...
— Do and Dare - A Brave Boy's Fight for Fortune • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... full, at least, of kindness and veneration for genius and social virtue, than of indignation at baseness and profligacy. Altogether it is not much like the production of a mere man of letters, or a fastidious speculator in sentiment and morality; but exhibits throughout, and in a very pleasing form, the good sense and large toleration of ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... much avarice makes a contemptibly mean man; not enough makes a foolish spendthrift, who is always appealing to his friends for help. Too much bravery in man makes a bully; not enough a coward. Too much speech in man makes a bore; not enough a "stick." Too much hope in man makes a speculator and a gambler; not enough, a hermit and a man-hater. So of ambition. It is a flame to be guarded—a willing slave, an unpitying master. In its full sway it is the very essence of self-conceit and selfishness,—two ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... could be sent to a king was a copy of a Roman historian. The best credentials which a young Greek arriving from Byzantium could use to gain the patronage of men like Palla degli Strozzi was a fragment of some ancient; the merchandise insuring the largest profit to a speculator who had special knowledge in such matters was old parchment covered with crabbed ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... railroad securities by the state also furnished a source of easy money to the dishonest official and the crooked speculator. After the Civil War, in response to the general desire in the South for better railroad facilities, the "Johnson" governments began to underwrite railroad bonds. When the carpetbag and Negro governments came in, the policy was continued but without ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming
... ascent and trust, of faith as distinguished from sight. Divest reason of its trust, and the universe stops at the impersonal stage—there is no God; and yet, if the first step in religion is the greatest, how is it that the freest and boldest speculator rarely declines it? How is it that the most mysterious of all truths is a universally accepted one? What is it which guards this truth? What is it which makes men shrink from denying it? Why is atheism a crime? Is it that authority ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... some vivid literary contribution, some powerful and popular work, a new despotic of combustion in that mighty mine on which stood in thin and fatal security the throne of France. Rousseau, the most impassioned of all romancers, the great corrupter of the female mind. Buffon, a lofty and splendid speculator, who dazzled the whole multitude of the minor philosophers, and fixed the creed of Materialism. Moutesquieu, eminent for knowledge and sagacity in his "Spirit of Laws" striking all the establishments of his country into contempt; and in his ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... content with themselves for being "self-made," are just as grumpy, and with as many weaknesses. Some of these West Side rich men live on Ashland Avenue. There certainly lived and lives Mr. Jason B. Grampus, a great speculator, whose home has its ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... tenement houses of the city, and accommodate fully two-thirds of the entire tenement-house population. When the number of families living under one owner exceeded ten, it was found that such owner was engaged in the keeping of a tenement-house as a business, and generally as a speculator. It is among this class of owners that nearly all the evils of the tenement-house system are found. The little colony exhibit in their rooms, and in the little areas around their dwellings, extreme want of care. The street in front of the ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... labour must be to bring the greedy private owner and the speculator under a far more drastic discipline than at present. The property-owning class is continually accusing labour of being ignorant, suspicious, and difficult; it is blind to the fact that it is itself profit-seeking by habit, greedy, ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... anyway, I won't say why, I daren't.... But we all saw to-day when he came in that that man is not of our sort. Not because he had his hair curled at the barber's, not because he was in such a hurry to show his wit, but because he is a spy, a speculator, because he is a skin-flint and a buffoon. That's evident. Do you think him clever? No, he is a fool, a fool. And is he a match for you? Good heavens! Do you see, ladies?" he stopped suddenly on the way upstairs to their rooms, "though all my friends there are drunk, yet they are all honest, ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... doubt would buy it at a low price during the Slump, stock it with more cattle, work it up during a good season or two, and, when cattle stations boomed once more, sell it at an immense profit. That was what he himself would have done had he been a speculator in similar conditions. Even still, he could do it with a small amount of capital to supply a sop for the Bank.... Now that the Drought had broken they would be more likely to let him go on.... He thought of the 3,000 ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... horses. There is too much said about fast trotters and race horses. On some of the farms around here, the people have gone mad on breeding fast horses. An old farmer out in the country had a common cart-horse that he suddenly found out had great powers of speed and endurance. He sold him to a speculator for a big price, and it has set everybody wild. If the people who give all their time to it can't raise fast horses, I don't see how the farmers can. A fast horse on a farm is ruination to the boys, for it starts them racing and betting. Father says he is going to ...
— Beautiful Joe - An Autobiography of a Dog • by Marshall Saunders
... Prometheus is the fabled defeat which is waiting for the wanderer in those opaque spaces. While we warily, therefore, tread not upon the ground whose trespass brought the vulture of unfilled desire, the craving void for visionary lore upon the heaven-born, earth-punished speculator, we can still find flowery paths and full fruition, in meadows wherein the light of reason requires no support from the ignes fatui of imagination; meadows after all so broad, that did not metaphysics 'teach man his tether,' they would seem illimitable. The book of nature is not spread before ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the curse of the world, how was it with them? But one thought, one desire, filled their hearts; one object, one intention, was their aim. What of the speculator and extortioner of the South, Christian as well as Jew, Turk as well as Infidel! From the hour that the spirit of avarice swept through the hearts of the people, the South became a vast garden of corruption, in which the ...
— The Trials of the Soldier's Wife - A Tale of the Second American Revolution • Alex St. Clair Abrams
... of Barnum to place himself in the forefront in this city-building movement, and in the double role of speculator and public benefactor. The enterprise which he undertook was calculated both to help those who were willing to help themselves to obtain independent homes, and at the same time to pay a handsome profit to Mr. Barnum. His scheme was ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... earth but enter a room. If you happen to hit your foot against a stool, or trip over a rug, or call a lady "sir," the girls giggle and the boys nudge each other, as if it were extremely amusing. But to blow up a confiding Wall street speculator, and to be swindled out of all your money by a pretty widow, is enough to make a sensitive man a raving lunatic. I had all this to think of as I was whirled along toward home. So absorbed was I in melancholy reflection, that I did not notice what was going on until a sudden ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor
... devoted to corn-growing when the market was a district one centred in the county town, becomes the little factory town when competition is established on a national basis; it may become the pleasure-ground of a retired millionaire speculator if under the pressure of world-competition it has been found that the manufacture which now thrives there can be carried on more economically in Bombay or Nankin, where each unit of labour power can be bought at the ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... violent objection. Most of the original holders of the certificates and bonds had sold them long ago. They were now mainly held by speculators who had paid about thirty or forty cents for each dollar. Why should the speculator get one dollar for that which had cost him only thirty or forty cents? Hamilton insisted that his plan was the only way to place the public credit on a firm foundation, ...
— A Short History of the United States • Edward Channing
... came the unmistakable click of a roulette-wheel. Men talked loudly of their projects and ambitions shortly to be accomplished. An epic poet was about to publish his magnum opus, the birth of a new star in the poetical firmament; a speculator had made his great coup—to-morrow he would have the wheat ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... the Yadkin in 1773 met with a terrible disaster near Cumberland Gap, in which his eldest son and five more young men were killed by Indians, and the whole party, discouraged by the blow, retired to the safer region of Clinch River. In the mean time the dauntless speculator Richard Henderson had begun his occupation with all the pomp of viceroyalty. Harrodsburg had been founded, and corn planted, and a flourishing colony established at the Falls of the Ohio. In 1774 Boone was called upon by the Governor of Virginia to escort a party of surveyors through Kentucky, ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... night. They are recognizable, from Hawthorne's description, as the man of one idea, who has spent his whole life seeking the gem; a scientific experimenter who wishes to grind it up for the benefit of his crucible; a cynical sceptic who has come to disprove the existence of the great gem; a greedy speculator who seeks the carbuncle as he would prospect for a silver-mine; an English lord who wishes to add it to his hereditary possessions; and finally a young married couple who want to obtain it for an ornament to their new cottage. The interest of the reader immediately ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... balance which even itself requires weighing previously, or he will have done nothing that can be received for an estimate of the composite Coleridge. This astonishing man, be it again remembered, besides being an exquisite poet, a profound political speculator, a philosophic student of literature through all its chambers and recesses, was also a circumnavigator on the most pathless waters of scholasticism and metaphysics. He had sounded, without guiding charts, ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... settlement of America, so in the opening of the West, great companies and single proprietors of large grants early figured. In 1787 the Ohio Land Company, a New England concern, acquired a million and a half acres on the Ohio and began operations by planting the town of Marietta. A professional land speculator, J.C. Symmes, secured a million acres lower down where the city of Cincinnati was founded. Other individuals bought up soldiers' claims and so acquired enormous holdings for speculative purposes. Indeed, there was such a rush to make fortunes quickly through the rise in land values ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... lived in New York. His father was a speculator, and was looked upon by some as a wealthy man; but it was hinted by those who knew him best that if his debts were all paid he would have but little ready money left. Be that as it may, Mr. Morgan and his family, at any rate, lived in style, and seemed desirous of outshining all their neighbors ...
— Frank, the Young Naturalist • Harry Castlemon
... little from their substantive correctness or utility. This strange notion of images emanating from the external object, entering the mind, and being there perceived, was, after all, in its origin, rather a physical than a metaphysical hypothesis. The ancient speculator upon the causes of things felt, as we feel at this moment, the necessity for some medium of communication between the eye and the distant object, and not having detected this medium in the light which traverses or fills the space between them, he had recourse to this clumsy invention ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... Hardy, instead of being what he is, had only been a cold-hearted speculator, looking merely to the profit, and saying to himself: 'To make the most of my factory, what is needed? Good work—great economy in the raw material—full employment of the workman's time; in a word, cheapness of manufacture, in order to produce cheaply—excellence ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... But soon the light, which at first illuminated only the loftiest eminences, descends on the plain and penetrates to the deepest valley. First come hints, then fragments of systems, then defective systems, then complete and harmonious systems. The sound opinion, held for a time by one bold speculator, becomes the opinion of a small minority, of a strong minority, of a majority of mankind. Thus, the great progress goes on, till schoolboys laugh at the jargon which imposed on Bacon, till country rectors condemn the illiberality and intolerance ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... speculator, a fair critic, and a lucid writer, and in particular those Lectures are in Germany universally recognised as affording a perspicuous and impartial survey of the various modern systems of German Philosophy, at once comprehensive and compendious. This version of a work, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 215, December 10, 1853 • Various
... Guillaume de Lorris was a refined and graceful exponent of the conventional doctrine of love, a seemly celebrant in the cult of woman, an ingenious decorator of accepted ideas; Jean de Meun was a passionate and positive spirit, an ardent speculator in social, political, and scientific questions, one who cared nothing for amorous subtleties, and held woman in scorn. Guillaume addressed an aristocratic audience, imbued with the sentiments of chivalry; Jean was a bourgeois, ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... are expected home presently - were in Oxford Street when last heard of - shall be fetched, for our delight, within ten minutes. In another, one of the two or three Professors who drew Napoleon Buonaparte and a couple of mackerel, on the pavement and then let the work of art out to a speculator, is refreshing after his labours. In another, the vested interest of the profitable nuisance has been in one family for a hundred years, and the landlord drives in comfortably from the country to ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... world has thus been preserved from a uniformity of character fatal to all improvement. Every part of it has been illuminated with light reflected from every other. Competition has produced activity where monopoly would have produced sluggishness. The number of experiments in moral science which the speculator has an opportunity of witnessing has been increased beyond all calculation. Society and human nature, instead of being seen in a single point of view, are presented to him under ten thousand different aspects. By observing the manners of surrounding nations, by studying their literature, by comparing ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the Agakhan suggested that German East Africa should be administered from India. Sir Theodore Morison would have couped up all Indians in German East Africa. The result was that both the proposals went by the board and the expected has happened. The greed of the English speculator has prevailed and he is trying to squeeze out the Indian. What will the Government of India protect? Has it the will to do so? Is not India itself being exploited? Mr. Jehangir Petit recalled the late Mr. Gokhale's views that we were not to expect a full satisfaction regarding the status of our ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi
... than he can make working for himself; and land was pretty nearly free in Monterey County then. All a man needed was a team, and he could get tools on credit; and I know plenty of cases of people breaking speculator's land and working it for years without paying rent or being molested. The rent wasn't worth quarreling about. But Gowdy couldn't get, on the average, as much out of his hired men in the way of work as they would do ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... desire to do business. Those must indeed have been palmy days, when the money so lightly made was correspondingly lightly spent; when champagne replaced the usual whisky-split at the Rand Club, and on all sides was to be heard the old and well-known formula, "Here's luck," as the successful speculator toasted an ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... matter was that Major Waldron said he would himself take the children to the speculator's camp; and accordingly, as soon as dinner was over, they all started off in high glee— the three little girls and the three little negroes— leaving Mammy standing at the top of the stairs, muttering to herself, "Er catchin' uv de ...
— Diddie, Dumps, and Tot • Louise-Clarke Pyrnelle
... and after dark we went to the china-tree in the lane where we were to meet Tom; he had been waiting for some time. He mounted his horse, and we pushed with him a second time. We rode twenty miles that night to the house of a friendly speculator. I had seen him in Tennessee, and had given him several lifts. He gave me his place of residence, that I might find him when I was passing. He is quite rich, and one of the best kind of fellows. Our horses were fed as much as they would eat, and two of them were foundered the next ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... the human spring is not broken at Venice, it is seen insensibly losing its elasticity. The government, changed into a suspicious despotism, elects a Mocenigo doge, a shameless speculator profiting on the public distress, instead of that Charles Zeno who had saved the country; it holds Zeno prisoner two years and entrusts the armies on the mainland to condottieri; it is tied up in the hands of three inquisitors, provokes accusations, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... pretty well, and at the finish we shall be on top. That is more than every land speculator will be able to say ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... word, and ask a favour. I am a speculator in rarities, and I have dealings with persons interested in numismatics all over the world. I can make a profit on this purchase, just as it stands; but there is a way, if I can get your approval, whereby I can make every one of these ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... organizers of "fake" companies. Several times he had made fortunes, but it was impossible for him to stay rich. He was always ready to back a drilling proposition that looked promising, and no independent speculator can continue to wildcat ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... his occupation as engineer did not hinder DesBarres from being an ambitious land speculator. In 1765 he obtained, in conjunction with General Haldimand and one or two others, a grant of the Township of Hopewell, comprising 100,000 acres on the Petitcodiac river. But he derived little benefit from his lands, as ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond
... remarkable part of this bitter persecution was the fact that the elder had lent money to almost all the principal members of the congregation. The bold speculator had never been appealed to in vain by any one in difficulty. Some had had a hundred, some fifty, some twenty, some ten—farmers whose corn had been a loss instead of a profit, whose hops had sold for less than the cost of picking them, little tradesmen ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... in Fifty-fourth Street was one of a five-storied row built by a speculator to attract fashion many years before. Fashion ignored ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... Leonardo da Vinci as we now read it there are some variations from the first edition. There, the painter who has fixed the outward type of Christ for succeeding centuries was a bold speculator, holding lightly by other men's beliefs, setting philosophy above Christianity. Words of his, trenchant enough to justify this impression, are not recorded, and would have been out of keeping with a genius of which one characteristic ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... have been all my life a speculator and observer in all domestic matters, having them so confidentially under my eye in our own household; and so, if I write on a pure woman's matter, it must be understood that I am only your pen and mouth-piece,—only giving tangible ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... places being taken by others, who, tired of roaming about and losing nearly everything, had come in as serfs did not allay their fears. Auta Hans was already conjuring up visions of a Johannesburg speculator literally "taking" his Cape shorthorns for a mere bagatelle, as they did to William Ranco, another ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... Edinburgh. Of all the works I have seen on the question, this is the most confident, and the sorest. {5} A writer on astronomy said of Mr. Jellinger Symons,[18] "Of course he convinced no one who knew anything of the subject." This "ungenerous slur" on the speculator's memory appears to have been keenly felt; but its truth is admitted. Those who knew anything of the subject are "the so-called men of science," whose three P's were assailed; prestige, pride, and prejudice: this the author tries ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... months of expense and labor, abandon the enterprise with only his labor for his pains. These failures are also a great source of annoyance to the proprietors: for many of these abandoned wells require only capital to render them available; but the finances of the first speculator being exhausted, no new one will risk his money in them, while the old lease would interfere with his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... American bottom, which, in all probabilities, never was surpassed in fertility. After leaving the bottom the country is rather hilly and barren. Traveled twenty-two miles and lodged at Waterloo, a town without houses. Only two families in the place. Every land speculator produces one or more of these dirt-cabin villages. Indeed, two-thirds of the travelers met with are land speculators. The inhabitants of this part of the country appear to be a wretched set of beings. Their great-coats are made out of a blanket, with a cap or ...
— Narrative of Richard Lee Mason in the Pioneer West, 1819 • Richard Lee Mason
... stranding the middleman, the ENTRE-PRENEUR, the elevator-and mixing-house men dry and despairing, their occupation gone. He saw the farmer suddenly emancipated, the world's food no longer at the mercy of the speculator, thousands upon thousands of men set free of the grip of Trust and ring and monopoly acting for themselves, selling their own wheat, organising into one gigantic trust, themselves, sending their agents to all the entry ports of China. Himself, ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... Like many a speculator, Malachi Deely would have made no profit out of his bet in the end, for Shiel Crozier had had no trouble with the law, or with another man's wife, nor yet with any single maid—not yet; though there was now Kitty Tynan in his path. Yet he had had ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... conversation prepares them gradually for that exceeding and eternal weight of glory which is to be theirs as they enter in at the gate. Bunyan has thus, in this blissful passage from the river to the gate, done what no other devout writer, or dreamer, or speculator, that we are aware of, has ever done; he has filled what perhaps in most minds is a mere blank, a vacancy, or at most a bewilderment and mist of glory, with definite and beatific images, with natural thoughts, and with the sympathizing ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... begins it usually has to pay for overtime, which provokes quarterly discussion. Is it not strange that very generous men often have such serious objections to the long-distance tails to their telephone bills, and insist upon investigating them with vigour, when they pay a speculator an extra dollar for a theatre ticket without a murmur? They must remember that telephones, whatever may be said to the contrary, are one of the modern aids to domesticity and preventives of gadding, while still keeping one not only in touch with ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... of England are so closely connected with the stirring records of its eventful history, that some acquaintance with them is a matter of necessity with the legislator, the lawyer, the historical student, the speculator in politics, and the curious in topographical and antiquarian lore; and even the very spirit of ordinary curiosity will prompt to a desire to trace the origin and progress of those families whose ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... peasant who could not keep his accounts but who had a peasant's sagacity for a bargain, wormed his way into financial control. He wanted to make the colony rich, but he led it to the verge of bankruptcy. He became a speculator and promoter. Stories of his shortcomings were whispered about and in 1860 the peasant colony revolted and deposed Olaf from office. He then had himself appointed receiver to wind up the corporation's affairs, and in the following year the communal ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... buying and selling. Some person formerly rich sells clothes or furniture or jewellery in return for food; the buyer sells again at an enhanced price, and so on through perhaps twenty hands, until a final purchaser is found in some well-to-do peasant or nouveau riche speculator. Again, most people have relations in the country, whom they visit from time to time, bringing back with them great bags of flour. It is illegal for private persons to bring food into Moscow, and ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... Laura had visited Helen's grave together. Since Arthur had come down into the country, he had been there once or twice: but the sight of the sacred stone had brought no consolation to him. A guilty man doing a guilty deed: a mere speculator, content to lay down his faith and honor for a fortune and a worldly career; and owning that his life was but a contemptible surrender—what right had he in the holy place? what booted it to him in the world he lived in, that others were no better than himself? ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... that his mind was not formed for pure philosophy; and if we may believe Boswell that it was once the intention of Mr. Burke to have written against Berkeley, we may be assured that he would not have been successful in answering that great speculator; or, to speak more correctly, that he could not have discovered the true nature of the questions in dispute, and thus have afforded the only answer consistent with the limits of the ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... warning, in his story of "A Little Journey in the World." In this Mr. Warner tells us of one of the sweetest and purest of young women, who has the highest ideals, and whose standards of morality are of the noblest, who is married to an unprincipled young speculator on Wall Street, New York; and under the influence of her husband, and the society into which she is drawn by his business relations, in which he gathers millions of money, all her holy and lofty ideals are overthrown, and she becomes simply a material, worldly ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... eyeing it like a Nabob's prime minister, as he considers whether he will sign a pardon. Gobseck would take anything, from the present of game sent him by some poor devil or the pound's weight of wax candles from devout folk, to the rich man's plate and the speculator's gold snuff-box. Nobody knew what became of the presents sent to the old money-lender. Everything went in, ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac
... it may prove convenient to speculate upon the trend of development of that class about which we have the most grounds for certainty in the coming time. The shareholding class, the rout of the Abyss, the speculator, may develop in countless ways according to the varying development of exterior influences upon them, but of the most typical portion of the central body, the section containing the scientific engineering or scientific medical sort of people, ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... affairs are. I forgot to ask whether he is at Warsaw; most likely he is, as he goes there every winter. As to his business, it may be very magnificent, but I doubt whether it be on a solid basis. I am not a speculator, and could not for the life of me transact a stock-exchange affair; but I am shrewd enough to know it. Besides I am a close observer, and quick to draw conclusions. Therefore I do not believe in noblemen with a genius ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... sheltered Peers, Their wealth and influence might save it; No speculator ever fears Artists or ...
— Punch Volume 102, May 28, 1892 - or the London Charivari • Various
... dollars, fell into the trap, and purchased land in the fever-hole in question, where I was assured that a habitable house and two negro huts were already built and awaiting me. The improvements alone, the land-speculator was ready to take his oath, were worth every cent of two thousand dollars. In short, I concluded my blind bargain, and in the month of June, prepared to start to visit my estate. I was at New Orleans, which city was just then held fast in the gripe of its annual scourge and visitor, the yellow fever. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... his virtue of beneficence becomes a vice of theft. So it is with gambling. It is giving the natural tendency to chance, to risk an illegitimate play. The person who is afraid to risk anything accomplishes but little in any way, is seldom a speculator, and never a gambler. Usually the gambler is the man who is naturally full of hazard, who loves to run risks, to take chances. Nor will one find a more practical and useful tendency in one's make-up than this. See the discoverer of America and his brave crew for days and days ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... tone should be assumed by an enthusiastic speculator is not wonderful. The payment of the national debt has been one of the staple dreams of enthusiasts. It would be difficult to believe the wild nonsense that has been written on it; and Hogarth, in his dreadful picture of a madhouse, ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, No. 421, New Series, Jan. 24, 1852 • Various
... "he will not inquire whether they demand any great powers of mind." Johnson, however, conveys to us his own feelings, when he immediately expresses them under the character of a "sullen and surly speculator." The anxious life of Shenstone would, indeed, have been remunerated, could he have read the enchanting eulogium of Wheatley on the Leasowes; which, said he, "is a perfect picture of his mind—simple, elegant, and amiable; and will always suggest a doubt whether the spot inspired his verse, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... applied, by every expedient of familiar, practical, and entertaining illustration, admitting a degree of co-operation by those who attended to see and hear; and an abundance of commodious places for religious instruction on the Sabbath, where there should be wise and zealous men to impart it. Our speculator has a right to suppose a high degree of these qualifications in his public teachers of religion, when he is to imagine a parallel in this department to the skill and ardor displayed in the supposed military operations. He may add as subsidiary to such an apparatus, everything ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... story, grandmother, but he never once blamed those who were in the wrong. His son for many years had been the real manager of the estate. He was a speculator; his grandsons were wild and extravagant. They began to borrow money ten years ago and had to ...
— The Man Between • Amelia E. Barr
... of this great rush of immigration it is very natural that the prevailing idea should be that lands would greatly increase in value in the near future, and everybody became a speculator. Towns and cities sprang into existence like mushrooms in a night. Scarcely anyone was to be seen without a town-site map in his hands, the advantages and beauties of which fictitious metropolis ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... Boston became so excited over the situation that I came out with a public statement in which I frankly showed what I was trying to do. In all such affairs, however, the explanations of any man known in his business as a stock speculator or manipulator are never accepted as true. It is assumed that such announcements are merely blinds to disguise his real purpose; that they are feints or manoeuvres in his campaign. So when I declared that I was working out plans for the consolidation of all good Boston ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... and also warranted his putting the question, as to what were Alexander's views and intentions in visiting the Cape: for Mr. Fairburn knew from the letter that he was heir to Sir Charles Wilmot, and therefore that he was not likely to be going out as a speculator ...
— The Mission • Frederick Marryat
... urging that the aerolites were neither of telluric nor selenitic origin, nor yet children of the sun, as the old Greeks had, many of them, contended, but that they are visitants from the depths of cosmic space. This bold speculator was the distinguished German physicist Ernst F. F. Chladni, a man of no small repute in his day. As early as 1794 he urged his cosmical theory of meteorites, when the very existence of meteorites was denied by most scientists. And he did more: he declared his belief that these falling ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... absentee owners, and to the policy of free land grants announced by Simcoe, land was sold at a very low price. In some cases two hundred acre lots were sold for a gallon of rum. In 1791 Sir William Pullency, an English speculator, bought 1,500,000 acres of land in Upper Canada at one shilling an acre, and sold 700,000 acres later for an average of eight shillings an acre. Under these circumstances it was not surprising that ...
— The United Empire Loyalists - A Chronicle of the Great Migration - Volume 13 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • W. Stewart Wallace
... and his wife Mrs. Judith, departed from the village, never to return. Such was the reputation of the proprietor of the Western Sun, that a distinguished speculator, who was going to found a great city at the junction of Big Dry, and Little Dry, Rivers, made him the most advantageous offers to come and establish himself there, and puff the embryo bantling into existence as fast as possible. He offered him a whole square next to that where the ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... word "option" wakened the drowsy speculator in Edward Henry. And the mere act of looking at the plan endowed the plot of land with reality! There it was! ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... cigar, he found a new interest in the letters and documents left there for his consideration. After all, life was a game. Even the early red men had their sport. Modern routine work without diversion was a treadmill, prisonlike existence. Delbridge was the happy medium. The jovial speculator had never heard of such a fine-spun thing as a conscience. What if Irene and Buckton were having their fun; could he not also enjoy himself? If the worst came, surely a man of the world, a stoical thoroughbred, who was willing to give ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... along Lafayette avenue than there was need of one from the top of Trinity Church steeple to the moon! The greater facility of travel, the greater prosperity! But I am opposed to all railroads, the depot for which is an unprincipled speculator's pocket. ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... in San Francisco was built by a speculator and floater of mining shares, and cost millions that he cashed in, after cleaning out the simple minded laborer and servant girl, whom he deluded, with all the art known to his tribe, into believing that there was ...
— Confiscation, An Outline • William Greenwood
... and mammy come from? Mammy was born a slave in de Furman family in Charleston, but pappy was bought out of a drove dat a Baltimore speculator fetch from Maryland long befo' de war. Doctor practice all 'round and 'bout Monticello, happen 'long one day, see my pappy and give a thousand dollars for him, to dat speculator. I ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 1 • Various
... of interest lasted more than two and a half years. In September, 1891, there was a corner in the local market which forced the September price up to seventeen and one-quarter cents. George Kaltenbach, a wealthy speculator living in Paris, combining with three operators in Havre, Hamburg, and Antwerp, succeeded in breaking the corner, forcing the price down to ten and eight-tenths cents. They then changed to the bull side, buying heavily in all markets of the world. This was continued ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... await developments," he replied from his wicker chair over his bandaged foot, "and remember that the successful speculator is the man who always runs in the other direction from the crowd. When you see people sitting still, you'd better get up, and when you see them begin to get up, you'd better sit still. Fortune's a woman, you know; don't ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... But trivial things, invented and pursued for bread, become very serious matters of fact: and, apart from this consideration, I am not at all prepared to say, myself, that if Caleb had been a Lord Chamberlain, or a Member of Parliament, or a lawyer, or even a great speculator, he would have dealt in toys one whit less whimsical, while I have a very great doubt whether they would have been ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... off to-morrow. My father is heir to all my uncle's property, with the exception of some land in the Far West, to which I am left executor. My uncle was a great speculator, and there is much troublesome business to be settled. Therefore my father wishes me to go to New York as soon as possible, and I plainly see that I am wanted there. He has all at once conceived a high idea of ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... probable that the unexpected magnitude of the results was such as to prevent a faithful adherence to the original stipulation; and yet, from the same consideration, one can hardly doubt that the twenty thousand pesos of the bold speculator must have brought him a magnificent return. Nor did the worthy vicar of Panama, as the history will show hereafter, ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... volumes with anecdotes of a similar nature; for, in these countries, in which men of illustrious deeds abound, one is never disturbed in society by the fussy pretension and swagger that is apt to mark the presence of a lucky speculator in the stocks. Battles, unlike bargains, are rarely discussed in society. I have already told you how little sensation is produced in Paris by the presence of a celebrity, though in no part of the world is more delicate respect paid to those who have earned renown, whether in letters, arts, ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... what they call intermediates. They would gladly suppress the capitalist, the banker, the speculator, the projector, the merchant, and the trader, accusing them of interposing between production and consumption, to extort from both, without giving either anything in return. Or rather, they would transfer to the State the work which ...
— Essays on Political Economy • Frederic Bastiat
... study, in fact, of financial megalomania. It was said, at the time, that Ibsen was originally led to make this analysis of character from reading in the Christiania newspapers a report of the failure and trial of a notorious speculator convicted of fraud in 1895, and sentenced to a long period of ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... Dumouriez, Bonaparte, these are the types of the adventurers of the Revolution, and the first only belongs {22} to the period of incubation and also to the domain of letters. Thrown into the war of American independence by his double vocation of secret diplomatic agent and speculator in war supplies, he had espoused the cause of the American people with an enthusiasm that always blazed most brightly when a personal interest was at stake. His enthusiasm for American liberty was easily converted into enthusiasm for the liberty of his own class, and to ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... became curious as to the origin of the gentlemen of her Court, and found that many of their forbears were sullied by the taint of Trade. The founders of both Prince Tapfer von Schneiderleinberg's and Count Daumerlingenstamm's houses were tailors; Baron von Bohnenranken derived his title from a speculator who, after a remarkably unsuccessful venture in cattle, had made a colossal coup in beans. As for Prince Hansmeinigel, his pretensions to high descent were even more questionable—at least, if it was actually the fact, as the Fairy stated, that the first of his progenitors ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... exchange is much more than a mere roulette wheel for the speculator. Its real purpose is to provide a centre for the legitimate trader. It is a great information bureau of world happenings where every item of news concerning the wheat in any way is gathered and classified—drouth, rain, frost, rust, locusts, hail, Hessian fly, monsoon or ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... believed there was a love affair between them, and he caught at the straw of possible protection in case of discovery. The forgeries became numerous, and the total amount on that day when the passage of a new tariff saved the venturesome speculator, was very large. Hannibal was at this time in foreign parts, or at least so the merchant supposed. He soothed his conscience with the reflection that this additional wrong act would enable him to right the others that preceded it. And things might have gone ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... fixtures of quartz-crushing machinery standing drearily in the wilderness. These facts I ascertained from the engineer, who had constructed a forest track from Duluth to the mines, and into whose office I penetrated in quest of information. He, too, looked upon me as a speculator. ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... had meant of opportunity, had ended in a sense of failure on a barren soil. It was not easy for him to enter into the spirit of our Thanksgiving plans although he had given his consent to them. He was still the tiller of broad acres, the speculator hoping for ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... numbers to fill small posts in the East, and she had come on business. He gave her a nod, however, and an affectionate smile, and indicated with his blue pencil a chair on the other side of the table. He had once made three hundred rupees in tea shares, and that gave him the air of a capitalist and speculator gamely shrewd. Tapping the table with his blue pencil he asked Miss Howe how the world was ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... A speculator became interested in these girls, and plead with all his eloquence for official favor in their behalf. General Grant softened his heart and gave this man a written permit to ship whatever cotton belonged to the orphans. ...
— Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field • Thomas W. Knox
... Decidedly an original! Everybody was longing to know him. The libraries and the box-office of the Opera House were bombarded with demands for seats for the first performance, at which the beautiful Annie Meredith, singer, actress, dancer, speculator, and breeder of prize bulldogs, was to ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... The speculator, whose name was well known in financial circles, took it, examined the seal and signatures curiously, ...
— The White Lie • William Le Queux
... sons of good family; the civil service and the Church were the other two. In Genoa, nobles had engaged in commerce with equal honor and profit; nearly every argosy that sailed to or from the port of Venice belonged to some lordly speculator; but in Milan a noble who descended to trade lost his nobility, by a law not abrogated till the time of Charles IV. The nobles had therefore nothing to do. They could not go into business; if they entered the army it was not to fight; the civil service was of course actually ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... the son to buy our property," Gifford said with a tinge of bitterness. "Well, it might have been worse. Wynford has not passed into the hands of some Jew millionaire or City speculator, but has gone to a gentleman, a good ...
— The Hunt Ball Mystery • Magnay, William
... he exclaimed. "I'd look pretty, wouldn't I, a busted land speculator, falling in love with you! I've some sense of the fitness of things. But when you ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... had few intimate confidants; the chief among these were his half-brother Morny, one of the illegitimate offspring of Queen Hortense, a man of fashion and speculator in the stocks; Fialin or Persigny, a person of humble origin who had proved himself a devoted follower of the Prince through good and evil; and Fleury, an officer at this time on a mission in Algiers. These were not men out of whom Louis Napoleon could form an administration, but they were ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... thought fifteen dollars was a high price for paintin' a view of a house I was slightly mistaken. Next time I'll offer the paintin' feller the house and ask him what he considers a fair boot, besides. Sam Cahoon's a better speculator than I thought he was. Hello, Commodore! what's ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... speculator. He was a nervous speculator. Before he gambled he consulted bankers, lawyers, architects, contracting builders, and all of their clerks and stenographers who were willing to be cornered and give him advice. He was a bold entrepreneur, and he desired nothing more than complete safety in his investments, ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... he seldom visits, or receives company. Part of his money is supposed to be in the Funds, and part laid out in railway investments, which have survived the panic of eighteen hundred and forty-six, and are rapidly rising in value. He is said to be a bold speculator. Since his arrival in England he has invested, with great judgment, in house property. He has some houses in remote parts of London, and some houses in certain watering-places on the east coast, which are shown to be advancing in public ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... his subsequent prosperity in the Rue d'Arras. You had better listen to the old man as long as he continues to grumble on, the more so as you will detect in the rancor and bitterness of his remarks all the vexation of a disappointed speculator. He will confess to you besides that he subsists entirely on the bounty of the lad, whom he had stigmatized as an ungrateful villain. Of course, the Duke will have to leave behind him some testimonial of his pleasure, and you will hurry off to the Rue d'Arras. The proprietor of the house will tell ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... chapter may well be prefaced by an extract from Herbert Spencer on the treatment of offspring. He first supposes that some future philosophic speculator, examining the course of education of the present period, should find nothing relating to the training of children, and that his natural inference would be that our schools were all for monastic orders, who have no charge of infancy and childhood. He then remarks, "Is it not an astonishing ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... plunder of the Indians, have come at length to look upon them as no better than the wild beasts of the forest, and whose many atrocities make it a moral duty, on the part of the whites, to exterminate by fire and the sword. Again there is the regular squatter and land speculator, whose interest is always promoted by a war, because it usually results in driving the Indians further back from the frontier. Intermixed with these classes, are many quiet and worthy citizens, who with their families, have been carried to the frontiers, ...
— Great Indian Chief of the West - Or, Life and Adventures of Black Hawk • Benjamin Drake
... prejudiced without knowing it. But it really seems to me that the future is full of great promise. The South, after all, is growing more prosperous. It is producing more and more every year, until in time it will become wealthy. The West is growing almost beyond the imagination of a speculator, and the Eastern and Middle States are much more than holding their own. We have now fifty millions of people and in a few years will have a hundred. That we are a Nation I think is now settled. ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... thereby made a general, and in that capacity conducted Louis XVI. to the scaffold, where, as all the world knows, he ordered the drums to drown the last words of the King. He was an incorrigible and indefatigable speculator, and while he drove a roaring trade at Paris in beer, he was always on the look out for demolished churches and convents in the provinces. Napoleon took his measure promptly, subsidised and used him to good purpose. Hearing once that there ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... integration; that is, having assumed (or, suppose even having demonstrated) the existence of some great influential quality in excess sufficient to overthrow the apparent equilibrium demanded by the common standards of a just national character, the speculator then proceeds, as in a matter of acknowledged right, to push this predominant quality into all its consequences, and all its closest affinities. To give one illustration of such a case, now perhaps beginning to be forgotten: Somewhere ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... intrepidity, were carrying on a complete scene of deception. A rumour spread that the French king disavowed his accredited agent, and apologised to the emperor for having yielded to the importunities of a political speculator, whom he was now resolved to recall. This somewhat paralysed the exertions of those palatines who had involved themselves in the intrigues of Montluc, who was now forced patiently to wait for the arrival of a courier with renewed testimonials of his diplomatic ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... walking he returned to the hotel, went to his room, turned on the light, and started to continue his unfinished perusal of Proudhon's book on the speculator. ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... speculator is telling lies upon the Stock Exchange he is thinking only of his own profit, but when a diplomat is guilty of obscuring facts in a diplomatic negotiation he is thinking of his country.—H. v. TREITSCHKE, P., Vol i., ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various
... speculator were to come along and insist upon our leaving room for an alternative conclusion; suppose he were to urge upon us that all this process of material development, with the discovery of which our patient study has been rewarded, may be but the temporary ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... came out from this meeting, some one handed him a paper which he carried home with him and read; and so he became acquainted with the "Appeal to Reason." About twelve years previously a Colorado real-estate speculator had made up his mind that it was wrong to gamble in the necessities of life of human beings: and so he had retired and begun the publication of a Socialist weekly. There had come a time when he had to set his own type, but he had held on and won out, and now his publication ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... schooner sailed for another swing about the French groups of islands. Llewellyn and David were associates in planting, curing, and shipping vanilla-beans, but were roisterers at heart, and ever ready to desert their office and warehouse for feasting or gaming. Polonsky was a speculator in exchange and an investor in lands, and was reputed to be very rich. He, too, would leave his strong box unlocked in his hurry if cards or wassail called. These same white men were sib to all their fellows in the South Seas except a few sour men whom avarice, satiety, or a broken constitution made ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... there are lots and lots of them kings of Wall Street," persisted Bob, who had a strong desire to become a speculator. ...
— The Boy Broker - Among the Kings of Wall Street • Frank A. Munsey
... little growl from several among the assembly, for most of those who sat there realized that it was usually the mortgage broker and speculator who reaped where the toilers with axe ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... hear issuing from the mouth of these walruses; on the contrary, it was a strong voice, but stifled, an idea of which can be given only by comparing it with the noise of a saw cutting into soft and moistened wood,—the voice of a worn-out speculator. ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac |
