"Reactionary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... successful. They have also learnt that no amount of talk will alter hard facts, and that the law that effect will follow cause is an inflexible one which torrents of fluent platitudes will neither affect nor modify. Even should this entail their being labelled with the silly and meaningless term of "reactionary," I do not imagine that their equanimity is much upset by it. It is, perhaps, natural for the elderly to make disparaging comparisons between the golden past and the neutral-tinted present; so that one shudders at reflecting what a terrific nuisance Methuselah must have become in his old age. One ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... Already a reactionary policy is being enacted in several countries where for years the State-School was the only one to share in the public treasury. In Holland, the Parliament of June, 1920, by a vote of 72 against 3, passed a new school-law which recognizes and subsidizes all ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... probably because of the shortage in electricity. I got my luggage upstairs to a very pleasant room on the fourth floor. Every floor of that hotel had its memories for me. In this room lived that brave reactionary officer who boasted that he had made a raid on the Bolsheviks and showed little Madame Kollontai's hat as a trophy. In this I used to listen to Perceval Gibbon when he was talking about how to write short stories and having influenza. There was the room ...
— Russia in 1919 • Arthur Ransome
... history of France in the nineteenth century, the popular will has expressed itself in a manner adverse to popular political institutions. Assemblies have been elected by universal suffrage, whose tendencies have been reactionary and undemocratic, and who have been supported in this reactionary policy by an effective public opinion. Or the French people have by means of a plebiscite delegated their Sovereign power to an Imperial dictator, whose whole political system was ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... Aguinaldo insurgents was persisted in, while their commissioners were on the way to us, and ours to them. While Congress was in a reactionary state owing to political games, and many members tearful on the side of the barbarians, there was a desperate conspiracy to massacre the white people of Manila and destroy the city by fire; and fighting was going on along our extended lines, the Filipinos shooting ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... what they were about. The heroic age of Iceland begins in a commonwealth founded by a social contract. The society that is established there is an association of individuals coming to an agreement with one another to invent a set of laws and observe them. Thus while Iceland on the one hand is a reactionary state, founded by men who were turning their backs on the only possible means of political progress, cutting themselves off from the world, and adhering obstinately to forms of life with no future before them, ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... "masses" and the "classes". We all know the regular process of logical fence of the journalist, i.e., thrust and parry, which is repeated whenever such questions turn up. The Radical calls his opponent Tory and reactionary. The wicked Tory, it is said, thinks only of the class interest; believes that the nation exists for the sake of the House of Lords; lives in a little citadel provided with all the good things, which he is ready to defend against every attempt at a juster distribution; ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... force ever dies; it merely changes its form or direction"—and could we but get a glimpse behind the veil, we might see his imperishable soul fleeting from sphere to sphere, struggling with cruel reactionary spirits who forced him into eternity before the work he was sent ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... Micah. This remarkable group of prophets proclaimed so many new principles that a fundamental revision and expansion of Israel's primitive codes became necessary in order to adapt the latter to the new needs of the age. The reactionary reign of Manasseh had also brought out plainly the contrast between the older heathen cults, still cherished by the people, and the exalted ideals of the true prophets. If the prophetic teachings were to become operative in the life of the nation, it was also seen ...
— The Origin & Permanent Value of the Old Testament • Charles Foster Kent
... and Russians of all descriptions. This military and political co-operation has brought together Mohammedan and Christian; Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox; negro, white and yellow; African, Indian, and European; monarchist, republican, Socialist, reactionary—there seems hardly a racial, religious, or political difference that has stood in the way of rapid and effective co-operation in ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... appeared at her best when seated, having rather short legs. Her face was well-coloured, her mouth, firm and rather wide, her nose well-shaped, her hair dark. She spoke in a decided voice, and did not mince her words. It was to her that her husband, Sir James, owed his reactionary principles on the subject ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... now was thoroughly active. Reactionary energy rushed in upon him to sharpen all his faculties. There was nothing left of the joyous throbbing in his veins which thoughts of his tryst with Dorothy had engendered. He felt like the wrathful dupe of a woman's ...
— A Husband by Proxy • Jack Steele
... mockingly. "Why, if the man of Galilee could be reincarnated the first thing He would attack would be the official expounders of Christianity, with their creeds and formalisms, their temples and their self-seeking. The Nazarene was a radical. The average preacher is an out-and-out reactionary." ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... his arduous enterprise, Kolchak, by his preterhuman patience and sustained energy and courage, has deserved exceptionally well of his country, and could afford to ignore the current legends that depict him in the crying colors of a reactionary, even though they were accepted for the time by the most exalted among the Great Unversed in Russian affairs. One may dissent from his policy and object to some of his lieutenants and to many of his partizans, but from ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... him, a malady which I have never suffered, and he was a devotee of the poet, Zorrilla, in which respect I was unable to share his enthusiasm, nor can I do so today. Finally, he was a political reactionary, while I am ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... the aggrandizement of German militarism nor Russian militarism, but the danger is that this war will promote one or the other. Britain has placed herself behind Russia, the most reactionary, corrupt, and oppressive Power in Europe. If Russia is permitted to gratify her territorial ambitions and extend her Cossack rule, civilization and democracy will be gravely imperilled. Is it for this that ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... free speech, democratic movements, political liberties, university freedom, and liberalism in government and religion. The governments in this Alliance redirected and restricted the people's schools, as much as could be done, to make them conform in purpose to their reactionary ideas. In consequence, the development of popular education in Germany, as well as in France and other continental lands, was for a time checked. The great start obtained by Prussia and the German States before 1820, though, was such that ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... overcome these difficulties are destined ultimately to triumph. The widespread acceptance of an agricultural education that followed upon the work of experiment stations, universities and high schools, has convinced even the most reactionary of the old-time group that there are, at least, certain things in the new generation which surpass, in their economic and social value, the like things of the old. The inroads of scientific agriculture have played havoc with agricultural tradition and conservatism. The ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... their illustrious martyrs. As scholars, citizens, gentlemen, and, in more than one instance, authors of real genius, these Liberals stand alone, and are not to be confounded with the perverse Radicals of a subsequent epoch. Moreover, their aspirations were, as we have seen, more reactionary than experimental; for the rights for which they conspired had been in a great measure enjoyed under Europe's modern conqueror, then impotent in action, but most efficient in remembrance, although isolated on his prison-rock. Foresti's companion in misfortune has ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... said gently. "What reactionary views! You're out of temper with me this evening—I get on your nerves with my theorizing. Forgive me, and ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... new and popular government but in continued disturbance. Factions with differing creeds raised revolts in various sections of the country until, in February, 1913, Madero was overthrown by one of these groups, led by Felix Diaz and General Victoriano Huerta, and representing a reactionary tendency. Madero and his vice president Pino Suarez were killed, it was believed by order of Huerta, and on the 27th of February, in the City of Mexico, Huerta was proclaimed President. Don Venustiano Carranza, Governor of the State of Coahuila, straightway denied the constitutionality of the ...
— The Path of Empire - A Chronicle of the United States as a World Power, Volume - 46 in The Chronicles of America Series • Carl Russell Fish
... Prussia, with the exception of the southern part about the Masurian Lakes, which has remained Polish, has been German from early mediaeval times. It is the home of the most reactionary junkers of all Prussia, a cradle of Prussian royalty and of the Hohenzollerns. Despite our hatred for these birds of prey, could we wish that the new Poland should absorb ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... her knees touched the floor, and then winding one arm slowly about his neck, she hid her face in his breast, and, bursting into tears, sobbed aloud. It was not merely the reactionary breaking down of a nervous system strung to the highest point of undue excitement. It was the half consciousness of a terrible fear lest the day might come in which, goaded by injustice and neglect, she might learn no longer to love the man before her—the wail of a ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... brand-new title of Roman Count. A heraldic agency—see advertisement—will plant and make grow at your will a genealogical tree, under whose shade you can give a country breakfast to twenty-five people. You buy a castle with port-holes—port-holes are necessary—in a corner of some reactionary province. You call upon the lords of the surrounding castles with a gold fleur-de-lys in your cravat. You pose as an enraged Legitimist and ferocious Clerical. You give dinners and hunting parties, and the game is won. I will wager that your son will marry into ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... Karen would come as quiet growth, not as transformation. Gregory's gladness had not this simplicity. It revealed to him a new world, a world newly beautiful but newly perilous, and a changed self,—the self of boyhood, renewed yet transformed, through whose joy ran the reactionary melancholy that, in a happiness attained, glances at fear, and at a climax of life, is aware of gulfs of sorrow as yet unsounded. More than his lover's passion was a tenderness for her and for her unquestioning ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... of conscience, inquisitions, violence of every sort; and during the prevalence of enlightment and humanity, the Jews were acted upon by the intellectual and cultural stimulus proceeding from the peoples with whom they entered into close relations. Momentary aberrations and reactionary incidents are not taken into account here. On its side, Jewry made its personality felt among the nations by its independent, intellectual activity, its theory of life, its literature, by the very fact, indeed, of its ideal staunchness and tenacity, its peculiar historical physiognomy. ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... disinterested relationship admitted: a kaleidoscope of couples, disjoined, separatist, meaningless entities of married couples. True, he hated promiscuity even worse than marriage, and a liaison was only another kind of coupling, reactionary from the legal marriage. Reaction was a greater ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... that a certain number of Slavophiles are addicted to the military mania, and this form of their belief is more dangerously reactionary than its ordinary phase. Many of these belong to the bureaucratic caste. Official Russia holds aloft the eagle; human Russia the dove. Official Russia leads the anti-Jewish massacres; human Russia is very little responsible for pogroms. Ignatieff, "Father of Lies," a bureaucrat ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... abuses, and are sometimes apt to think that the Evangelical revival (the expression being used in its widest sense) was the one redeeming feature of it. And as in theological and ecclesiastical thought, in philosophy, in art, in poetry, the general tendency has been reactionary, the students and writers of the eighteenth century have in many respects scarcely received their due share of appreciation. Moreover, negative results make little display. There is not much to show for the earnest toil that has very likely been spent in arriving at them; and ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... said Maggie, with calm decision. And she believed it. At that moment she felt as if the enchanted cup had been dashed to the ground. The reactionary excitement that gave her a proud self-mastery had not subsided, and she looked at the future with a ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... by the grace of Luther, Queen of England, no man could help but catch the spirit of enthusiasm. Every loft in Cheapside published its Magnum Folium (or magazine)—of its new blank verse; the Cheapside Players would produce anything on sight as long as it "got away from those reactionary miracle plays," and the English Bible had run through seven "very large" printings in, as ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... daughters were born, and their education was a heavy drain upon their parents' means. In 1845 Pierre and his wife retired from business with forty thousand francs at the most. Instigated by the Marquis de Carnavant, they went in for politics, and soon regular meetings of the reactionary party came to be held in their "yellow drawing-room." Advised, however, by their son Eugene, they resolved to support the cause of the Bonapartes, and at the time of the Coup d'Etat of 1851 Pierre was the leader of that party in Plassans. Having concealed himself when the Republican ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... fame in England decreased so much from the estimate of his contemporaries, by whom he seemed worthy of a place beside Goethe? The answer is to be sought in the fact that Byron reflected so powerfully the mood of that special time. That reactionary period in history has passed and with it much of Byron's influence and fame. He was, unlike Shakespeare, specially fitted to minister to a certain age. Again, much of Byron's verse is rhetorical, and that kind of poetry does not wear well. On the other hand, we might reread Shakespeare's ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... thoughts of the Brahmans; the severities of life of the monks of the "Virtuous Order"; the vengeance of the eternally wandering warriors, the Olets, with their Khans, Batur Hun Taigi and Gushi; the proud bequests of Jenghiz and Kublai Khan; the clerical reactionary psychology of the Lamas; the mystery of Tibetan kings beginning from Srong-Tsang Gampo; and the mercilessness of the Yellow Sect of Paspa. All the hazy history of Asia, of Mongolia, Pamir, Himalayas, Mesopotamia, ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... down with considerable bloodshed. In January, 1919, soon after the defeat of the Spartacides in Berlin, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, their leaders, were put to death, and their minority party seemed to diminish in strength. In the latter part of May, 1919, the majority Socialists of the reactionary Ebert-Scheidemann group were at first opposed to the signing of the Treaty of Paris, whereas the Spartacans, and also the Independent Socialists under the leadership of Hugo Haase and Karl Kautsky, tried ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... and tendencies of the Democratic party, its jealousy of national authority, its want of genuine patriotism, its reactionary policy as to tariff laws, its lawless disregard of fair elections, both north and south, the criminal gangs that disgrace our cities, and its low tone on all questions affecting good order and morals. In ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... and did. What they heard allayed their worst fears. She still smiled, and seemed as cheerful as before, they heard, and she neither spoke nor prayed in public, but she led the singing always. Now the anxious and the sceptical and the reactionary ventured out to see and hear; and seeing and hearing gave them a satisfaction they hardly dared express. She was more handsome than ever, and if her eyes glistened with a light they had never seen before, and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... viceroyalty of Nanking, with carte blanche to carry out his progressive ideas; and the metropolitan viceroy, Yuan, on taking leave of the Empress Dowager before proceeding to the manoeuvres, besought her not to listen to reactionary counsels such as those which had produced the ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... had acquired in the days of Stein. There were marked tendencies towards Liberalism and towards unification in different parts of Germany; and, if the Liberal party could have produced one man of firmness and decision, these forces might have triumphed over the reactionary Prussian clique. In this conflict Morier was bound to be a passionate sympathiser with the parties which included so many of his personal friends and which advocated principles so dear to his heart. With the triumph of his friends, too, were associated the ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... had also negotiated with Felix Mottl, had "signed" Miss Fremstad, and was holding Miss Farrar, in a sense his protge, in reserve till she should "ripen" for America. The acquisition of Caruso was perhaps Mr. Conried's greatest asset financially, though it led to a reactionary policy touching the opera itself which, however pleasing to the boxholders, nevertheless cost the institution a loss of artistic prestige. I emphasize the fact that Mr. Conried acquired the contract with Signor Caruso ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... "We all know each other, Pardeau. Call a spade a spade. Wyckoff was a reactionary scoundrel whom you did away ...
— The Clean and Wholesome Land • Ralph Sholto
... "greatest happiness principle," which reduced virtue to a profit-and-loss account. Carlyle took issue with modern liberalism; he ridiculed the self-gratulation of the time, all the talk about progress of the species, unexampled prosperity, etc. But he was reactionary without being conservative. He had studied the French Revolution, and he saw the fateful, irresistible approach of democracy. He had no faith in government "by counting noses," and he hated talking parliaments; but neither did he put trust in an ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... Napoleonic occupation of Rome, the brilliant essays of liberalism of Pius IX., the Republic, the siege of Rome, the reactionary government of late years, have alike supplied matter for Master Pasquin, which he has shaped according to the fashion of the times. He still pursues his ancient avocation. Res acu tetigit. But the point of the needle is not the means by ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the IMPERIALIST to worry over her friend's love affairs. In fact, she gleaned most of her information as to the Leichardt's Town Government House Party from the newspapers she happened upon at bush hotels. For Lady Bridget was evidently in a reactionary mood as regards letter-writing and Colin McKeith never put pen to paper, if he could avoid doing so, except ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... There were political parties in church and state; scheming bishops and intriguing politicians, each striving for his own advancement, or the advancement of his party. George III. during his early years had frequent changes of governors and tutors, several of whom were intense Jacobites, holding reactionary opinions. Being dull of intellect, his education tended to make ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... used later to beat him with. Lastly, he had the misfortune, as it proved later, to differ profoundly on exegetical points from a veteran Professor of Latin, Rhetoric, and Greek.[36] This was Leon de Castro, a man of considerable but unassimilated learning, an astute wire-puller and incorrigible reactionary whose name figures in the bibliographies as the author of a series of commentaries on Isaiah—a performance which has not been widely read since its tardy first appearance in 1571. The delay in publishing this work, and the contemporary neglect of it, were apparently ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... was not a reactionary; he was simply an opportunist. The whole duty of government, he said, was "to prevent crime and to preserve contracts." All one could really hope to do was to carry on. He himself carried on in a remarkable manner—with perpetual compromises, with fluctuations ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... are subsidized by the government itself, as is so often the case with the semi-official organs of Europe. Nor are any of our papers directly in the pay of foreign governments, though the espousal of the infamous reactionary regime in Russia by some of them is at least open to suspicion. The danger of manufactured public opinion in this country comes not from governments. Even the political parties are losing the allegiance of the press. The days when the Republican organs told the ...
— Commercialism and Journalism • Hamilton Holt
... The intrigue of the French government was successful, so far that the Queen of Spain was married to a Spanish Bourbon, brother to Don Enrique, a man whom the queen personally hated, a bigoted devotee and reactionary, whose fanaticism against liberty was morbid, and who was an avowed Carlist, openly denying the right of the Queen of Spain to the throne. Whatever could be supposed as likely to influence the fortunes of the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... and anti-foreign fanaticism in China which rapidly assumed alarming proportions. A sect or society known as the Boxers, founded in 1899 originally as a patriotic and ultra-conservative body, rapidly developed into a reactionary and anti-foreign, and especially anti-Christian organisation. Outrages were committed all over the country, and the perpetrators shielded by the authorities, who, while professing peace, encouraged ...
— Our Sailors - Gallant Deeds of the British Navy during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... defined in words. Under the influence of this new spirit we realize that we are not enlisted for the work of our own countries alone but that before us stretches the task of emancipating the women of the civilized world...." The brilliant Congress of Women held in Russia in spite of its reactionary government was described, and the women of Finland were urged not to be discouraged because the iron rule of Russia was again threatening their recently gained liberty. The progress in other European countries was sketched and the address then dealt unsparingly with the situation in Great Britain, ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... for a Democratic Congress, by his failure to cooeperate with the Senate in the formulation of American policy and in the appointment of the Peace Commission, and which had opposed his departure in person to Paris—all those elements now had their chance. Having won a difficult victory over reactionary forces in Europe, Wilson was now compelled to begin the struggle over again at home. And whereas at Paris he had displayed some skill in negotiation and an attitude of conciliation even when firm in his principles, upon his return he adopted a tone which showed that he had failed to gauge ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... China is sincerity but an actor is a pretender. He appears to be what he is not. Now our ancient wise men felt that pretense of any sort must have a dangerous reactionary influence on the character. If a man learns how to be a clever actor on the stage he may be a skilled deceiver in other walks of life. Moreover, no one to whom sincerity is as the gums are to the teeth, would wish to acquire the art of acting as ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... Dambreuse the first leaf of a pamphlet, bearing the title of "The Hydra," the Bohemian defending the interests of a reactionary club, and in that capacity he was introduced by ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... they may become when development has been completed. Nothing is more essential than the courage, the joy, and the insight which grow out of such an Idealism, and no spiritual possession is more easily lost. The spiritual depression of a reactionary period, the routine of work, the immersion in the stream of events, the decline of moral energy, conspire to blight this noble use of the imagination, and to chill the faith which makes creative living and working possible. ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... bald head! go up, thou bald head!" Mankind does not curse him in the name of the Lord, but invites him to play with another small boy, named Obstruction, and whose other names are Vested Interest, Reactionary, and Pedant. This one, whenever Mankind will lead him, digs in his heels or lies down in his tracks; until, pricked and goaded by his playfellow, he at length gets up and scrambles after. And so these two keep ever ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... round which revolves each policy and its success or failure. At the same time, it is his party more than he that is to be blamed for the failures. He made a distinct move toward a reduction of the tariff, and while this failed, leaving us with the reactionary result of higher duties than ever before, it is not impossible that the words, actions, and sacrifices of Cleveland will be the foundation of a new tariff-reform party. Allusion has been made to his soundness on finance. His course in this respect was unvarying. Capitalists and financiers ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... dreamer with an exquisite sense of vision, who sought and found in his work a refuge from the [v.03 p.0387] uncongenial world of every day. Jules Lemaitre, a less sympathetic critic, finds in the extraordinary crimes of his heroes and heroines, his reactionary views, his dandyism ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... brought about must be on the part of individuals. There is no hope for large numbers acting together, or for any kind of group-impulse. Group-impulse among Caucasians is nearly always frightened, conservative, reactionary, or derisive of the forward step. There is hardly an exception to this in the whole ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... been an impalpable something more effective than the palpable. Then I find no better text, (it is always important to have a definite, special, even oppositional, living man to start from,) for sending out certain speculations and comparisons for home use. Let us see what they amount to—those reactionary doctrines, fears, scornful analyses of democracy—even from the most erudite and sincere mind ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... race. He could indeed leave one half of his wealth intact to Orsino, but the law required that the other half should be equally divided among all; and as the same thing would take place in the second generation, unless a reactionary revolution intervened, the property would before long be divided into very small moieties indeed. For Giovanni had no idea of imposing celibacy upon his younger sons, still less of exerting any influence he possessed to make them enter the Church. ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... several days before he could adequately comprehend what had provoked this furious storm, with its shower of money and warning flashes of wrath and rumblings of violence. Then it became clear that he was being made the political tool of the reactionary combination then laying the axe at the root of the republican tree. The Orleanists, Bonapartists, Anti-Semites, and their allies were quick to see the value of a popular leader in the most turbulent and unmanageable ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... the statue was removed. A permanent revulsion was operant in her, which intensified as time wore on. How fright could have effected such a change of idiosyncrasy learned physicians alone can say; but I believe such cases of reactionary instinct are ...
— A Group of Noble Dames • Thomas Hardy
... other words, faced with the fact that while Ireland has been waiting for Home Rule we have taken the first great step in granting Home Rule to India. Surely this is a fact that presents a new challenge to the reactionary Unionist of the United Kingdom. Does he really contend that Ireland is incapable of receiving the same liberties as we are granting to India? Or will he make the wicked and dangerous suggestion that we are only ...
— Home Rule - Second Edition • Harold Spender
... system of education on which we lavish funds with such generous, even prodigal, hand, falls short of fulfilling its true democratic function; and that particularly in the so-called higher branches its tendency appears daily more reactionary, more feudal. It is not an agreeable reflection that so many of our university graduates lack the trained ability to see clearly, and to think clearly, concisely, constructively; that there is perhaps ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... generation. He had learned his medicine under that obsolete and forgotten system by which a youth was apprenticed to a surgeon, in the days when the study of anatomy was often approached through a violated grave. His views upon his own profession are even more reactionary than in politics. Fifty years have brought him little and deprived him of less. Vaccination was well within the teaching of his youth, though I think he has a secret preference for inoculation. Bleeding he would ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... as has anybody else, certainly as much as certain people from Birmingham. They can't turn us out, and we, the Tory Free Traders, have as much right to dictate the policy of the Conservative Party as have any reactionary Fair Traders." In 1904 the Conservative Party already recognized Churchill as one working outside the breastworks. Just before the Easter vacation of that year, when he rose to speak a remarkable demonstration was made against him by his Unionist colleagues, ...
— Real Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... duty? To think alike as to men and measures? Impossible! Even for our great party! There is not a reactionary among us. All Democrats are Progressives. But it is inevitably human that we shall not all agree that in a single highway is found the only road to progress, or each make the same man of all our worthy ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... since the restoration of Don Alfonso XII. has been in reality what it was only in name before—a constitutional monarchy. During the first years of the young King's reign, Canovas del Castillo being Prime Minister, there was a distinctly reactionary tendency from the Liberalism of Prim and the revolutionary party of 1868. It was almost impossible that it should be otherwise, considering the wild tumult of the varying opinions and the experiments in government that the country had passed ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... undisciplined, hungry, and panic-smitten public; and, upon the other side, the irresponsible, more than half-hysterical action of a group of terrified and incompetent politicians. These men had been swept into great positions, which they were totally unfitted to fill, by a tidal wave of reactionary public feeling, and of the blind selfishness of a decadence born of long freedom from any form of national discipline; of liberties too easily won and but half-understood; of superficial education as to rights, and abysmal ignorance ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... bring back the old abuses. When the Pentarchy, in 1815, had made its division of the spoils of Napoleon, the Bourbons were reseated on the throne which Louis XIV. had made famous; but Louis XVIII. was but a degenerate representative of the glories that had been. He adopted a reactionary policy against the Napoleonic (or imperialist), the republican and the Protestant elements in France; and outrages and oppressions occurred. As a consequence, secret societies were formed to counteract the ultra-royalist policy. When Louis died, it was hoped that his ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... I dominates this epoch. His character exhibits a very curious mixture of autocratic ambition and a mystical vein of sheer undiluted idealism. Probably it would be true to say that he began by being an idealist, and was forced by the pressure of events to adopt reactionary tactics. Perhaps also, deeply embedded in the Russian nature we generally find a certain unpracticalness and a tendency to mystical dreams, far remote from the ordinary necessities of every day. It was Alexander's dream to found a Union of Europe, and to consecrate its political by its ...
— Armageddon—And After • W. L. Courtney
... For a reactionary sentiment toward him had set in, and there were those fair-minded enough, although with their little all at stake, to admit that he had acted with reasonable prudence, and that it was only an unlucky chance which had sent the panic through the herds with ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... Atheism." He became a champion of monarchical principles and of religious orthodoxy, and attacked the views, which he had once held and expressed in 'Wat Tyler' (written in 1794, and piratically published in 1817), with the bitterness of a reactionary. He had also, as Byron believed, circulated, if not invented, a report that Byron and Shelley had formed "a league of incest" at Geneva, in 1816-17, with "two girls," Mary Godwin (Mrs. Shelley) and Jane Clairmont. Byron not only ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... association, their relationship with foreign nobility will give them important functions in diplomacy; these are two elements which they have in common with Catholicism and Judaism. They will retain their inclination and aptitude for the calling of arms and for administration; their reactionary sentiments will lead now to success, now to failure, and by both the inner coherence of the class will be fortified. Finally, the inevitable reversion to an appreciation of the romantic values of life will make a connexion ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... to Henderson after two ballots. You've got to keep your hand on the throttle in the convention, you understand. And I don't need to impress upon you how grave are the consequences if this man Crewe gets in, with public sentiment behind him and a reactionary Lower House. You've got to keep your ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... of affairs lasted till 1823, when, through French intervention, the constitutional Government in Spain was overthrown, and a second reactionary period set in even worse in its manifestations of odium to progress and liberty than the one of 1814. The leading men of the fallen government, to escape death or imprisonment, emigrated. Among them was O'Daly, who, after living some time in London, settled in Saint Thomas, where ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk
... out of it. It seems to have died out most in the class where the strain and stress are greatest. I don't think young men of that class to-day have the same feelings towards women of their sort as formerly. Nobody, I trust, will mistake me for a reactionary: in most ways, the modern young man is a vast improvement on you and me at twenty-five. But I believe there is really among young men in towns less chivalry, less devotion, less romance than there used to be. That, I take it, is the true reason why young men don't marry. With certain ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... Diderot, and in the first edition of the Essay, published in the year of Rousseau's death (1778), he incongruously placed in the midst of his disquisitions on the philosopher of the first century, a long and acrimonious note upon the perversities of the reactionary philosopher of the eighteenth. He was believed by those who talked to him to be in dread of the appearance of the Confessions, and we may accept this readily enough, without assuming that Diderot was conscious of hidden enormities which he was afraid of seeing publicly uncovered. Rousseau, ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... couldn't get her to say why for a long time, but at last it came out. Some one, that idiotic Englishwoman, I suppose, had put it into the dear girl's head that it was her duty not to ally herself with 'a reactionary' (I think that was the word) and in this case that meant poor harmless me. I argued till I must have been blue in the face, but I couldn't get her to give in: she says now that she thought she would make me give ...
— The Penance of Magdalena & Other Tales of the California Missions • J. Smeaton Chase
... leader of the Liberals, found himself at Frankfort regarded as an extreme Conservative; and Frankfort was moderate compared to Berlin. At this time an ordinary English Radical would have been looked upon in Germany as almost reactionary. Bismarck did not seek election for either of the Assemblies; he felt that he could do no good by taking part in the deliberations of a Parliament, the very meeting of which seemed to him an offence against the laws and welfare of the State. ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... and commerce. The police committee was of the usual kind and dealt with usual problems in the usual way. But the education committee brought out all the vexed questions of French and English, Protestant and Roman Catholic, progressive and reactionary. Strangely enough, the sharpest personal controversy was that between Hubert, the Roman Catholic bishop of Quebec, and his coadjutor Bailly. Hubert enumerated all the institutions already engaged in educational work and suggested that 'rest and be thankful' was the only proper attitude for ...
— The Father of British Canada: A Chronicle of Carleton • William Wood
... by its nature reactionary. In order to explain its influences, I have been compelled to analyze the position of Spain in the Italian peninsula, the conduct of the Tridentine Council, the specific organization of the Holy Office and the Company ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... fifty years of the history of Virginia the Dark Age during which there has been a period of radicalism followed by reaction. The Readjuster Movement was one of the independent waves of thought which characterized the reactionary period. It centered around William Mahone as the leader of an efficient machine endeavoring to readjust the State debt by compelling its creditors to share in the loss caused by the expensive internal improvement ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... was unfortunate in some of his colleagues, and the first freshness of 1906 had been wasted on a quite worthless Education Bill. But during his term of office he had two signal opportunities of showing the faith that was in him. One was the occasion when, in defiance of all reactionary forces, he exclaimed, "La Duma est morte! Vive la Duma!" The other was the day when he gave self-government to South Africa, and won the tribute thus nobly rendered by General Smuts: "The Boer War was supplemented, and compensated for, by one of the wisest political settlements ever ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... what was coming. She let the newspaper fall with a shudder as the thought arrived, hissing, gliding with venomous swiftness along the familiar path it had so often taken to her heart . . . "suppose this reactionary outburst of hate and greed and intolerance and imperialistic ambitions all around, means that the 'peace' is an armed truce only, and that in fifteen years the ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... pressure from above and the never-ceasing fermentation from below; to the feverish restlessness that had come over the body politic, changing its form, its ideals, and its convictions; and to the more scrupulous and sometimes reactionary stand that was being taken on all ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... deserted Liberalism on the Home Rule issue were returning in thousands to their old party, the Fabians, alone amongst progressives (except of course the Irish, who were keen to save the Roman Catholic schools), supported the Government in what was popularly regarded as a reactionary policy. Time has vindicated our judgment. The theological squabbles which occupied so much of the energies of the School Boards are now forgotten because the rival sects are no longer represented on the Education Authorities, ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... under George III., was a corrupt and discredited body; and the Treaty of Paris was affirmed by 319 votes to 65. It had fallen to the lot of Governor Palliser—a fine reactionary in the view he took of his charge—to frame local orders for carrying out the provisions of the Treaty of Paris. His orders were clear and unambiguous. The French right of fishing within the permitted area was declared to be concurrent. The English ...
— The Story of Newfoundland • Frederick Edwin Smith, Earl of Birkenhead
... corrupting influences with which they are surrounded here. We import them as raw material to our own disadvantage, and when we export them as manufactured here, Great Britain and India alike suffer from their reactionary tendencies. The results are unsatisfactory ...
— The Case For India • Annie Besant
... not be found in some subsisting treaty between the United States and foreign powers, it will prove to be mutually advantageous. Several of the Republics of this hemisphere, among which is Salvador, are alarmed at a supposed sentiment tending to reactionary movements against republican institutions on this continent. It seems, therefore, to be proper that we should show to any of them who may apply for that purpose that, compatibly with our cardinal policy and with an enlightened view ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Lincoln - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 6: Abraham Lincoln • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... reasonable petition after the homes of his family, including his own birthplace, had been ruthlessly destroyed by military force, while a quarrel over ownership and rents was still pending in the courts. The Captain-General at the time was Valeriano Weyler, the pitiless instrument of the reactionary forces manipulated by the monastic orders, he who was later sent to Cuba to introduce there the repressive measures which had apparently been so efficacious in the Philippines, thus to bring on the interference of the ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... for a good many months. The guards are now no more, but it is curious that the men they came mainly to protect us against—Tung Fu-hsiang's Mohammedan braves from the savage back province of Kansu who love the reactionary Empress Dowager—are still encamped near ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... excursus on the somewhat threadbare subject of the causes of unrest in India. But I want those here present to realise what potent forces have been at work and to believe that the Indian generally is not the ungrateful, black-hearted seditionist he is painted by the reactionary press. India is going through an inevitable stage of political transition, and we must not hastily judge her peoples—for the most part so gallant, so kindly, so law-abiding, so lovable—by the passing tantrums ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... confuse men's minds, and prejudice them against me. It was just at the time when the German-Catholic agitation, set in motion by Czersky and Ronge as a highly meritorious and liberal movement, was causing a great commotion. It was now made out that by Tannhauser I had provoked a reactionary tendency, and that precisely as Meyerbeer with his Huguenots had glorified Protestantism, so I with my ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... was hampered then and thereafter by the series of untoward events beginning with the San Domingo upheaval and ending with John Brown's raid. In particular the rise of the Garrisonian agitation and the quickly ensuing Nat Turner's revolt occasioned together a wave of reactionary legislation the whole South over, prohibiting the literary instruction of negroes, stiffening the patrol system, restricting manumissions, and diminishing the already limited liberties of free negroes. The temper of administration, ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... espoused the cause of the peasants and a new popular literature appeared in which the sufferings of the people were portrayed with fervor and passion. In 1868-69 there were numerous demonstrations and riots by way of protest against the reactionary policy of the government. ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... them, because as frankly as they he has spoken the musical language which to him seemed a proper investiture of his comedy, and like them has made that language characteristic of the comedy's personages and illustrative of its incidents. He has been brave enough not to fear being called a reactionary, knowing that there is always progress in the successful pursuit ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... name) seemed to me to be a beautiful type of what a priest should be—self-sacrificing and pure-minded, with a kind of simple cunning about him, and a deal of innocent fun. He had the defects as well as the virtues of his class, for he was absolutely reactionary in his views. We discussed religion with fervour, and his theology was somewhere about the Early Pliocene. He might have chattered the matter over with a priest of Charlemagne's Court, and they would have shaken hands after every sentence. ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... these and the rest of the propositions which make up the true theoretic basis of a conservative creed, are proper for the hustings, or expedient in an election address or a speech in parliament. We do say that if these high and not unintelligible principles, which alone can give to reactionary professions any worth or significance, were present in the minds of men who speak reactionary language, the country would be spared the ignominy of seeing certain real truths of society degraded at the hands of aristocratic adventurers and plutocratic parasites into some miserable process ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... Commercial side has been the chief topic of conversation among boys and masters. The latter are, I fear, reactionary—realising, no doubt, their incompetence to deal with business subjects. The boys are enthusiastic. I am constantly approached in the corridors by lads who say it has always been their ambition to become a Tipton or a Whiteridge, or a Gilling and Warow, as the case may be. One little ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 4, 1914 • Various
... CHAPLIN has been correctly reported he is even more of a reactionary than most of his opponents imagined. In the course of the debate on the Sunday Closing Bill he is said to have delivered himself as follows:—"Drunkenness is diminishing, and I say Thank God; long may it continue." The pious ejaculation ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, May 20, 1914 • Various
... When it appeared that Ireland, worse treated as usual than England, was to be fined an additional twenty-five minutes, and was to lose the proud privilege of Irish time, Mr. Courtney was more pleased than ever. He made merry over what he called the arguments of reactionary patriotism. ...
— Our Casualty And Other Stories - 1918 • James Owen Hannay, AKA George A. Birmingham
... weapon with which to combat the rising tide of popular discontent with existing social and political forms and functions. This was especially true after the accession to the throne of Prussia of that romantic and reactionary prince, Frederick William ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... Metz. I had breakfasted with Colonel Mahon, who, amid much good advice for my future guidance, gave me, half slyly, to understand that the days of Jacobinism had almost run their course, and that a reactionary movement had already set in. The republic, he added, was as strong, perhaps stronger than ever, but that men had grown weary of mob tyranny, and were, day by day, reverting to the old loyalty, in respect for whatever pretended to culture, good breeding, and superior ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... Under the circumstances, and having heard that such people as "dug-outs" actually existed, the Press as a matter of course assumed that within the portals in Whitehall Lord Kitchener was struggling in vain against the ineptitude and reactionary tendencies of a set of prehistoric creatures who constituted the whole of his staff. The fact, however, was that all the higher appointments (with scarcely an exception other than that of myself) ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... interests which he believes a section of his own nation properly represents. The German students have fought for their Fatherland; they have also fought for the liberal sentiments of their own land against reactionary movements, as in 1848. In the American Civil War no brighter record is to be found than is embodied in the tablets in Memorial Hall, Cambridge, or in Memorial Hall, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina. But the collegian possesses the international sense, and ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... to be of value and certainly both men were well grounded in philosophy and theory of social reform and had long before carefully formulated their principles, as the new English Labor Party, which is destined to break up the reactionary period, is now being created by another set of theorists. There were certainly moments during the heated discussions of this decade when nothing seemed so important as right theory: this was borne in upon me one brilliant evening at Hull-House ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... old sentimentality, the old faith in righteousness, left among men. Any organisation that became big enough to influence the polls became complex enough to be undermined, broken up, or bought outright by capable rich men. Socialistic and Popular, Reactionary and Purity Parties were all at last mere Stock Exchange counters, selling their principles to pay for their electioneering. And the great concern of the rich was naturally to keep property intact, the board clear for the game of trade. Just as the feudal concern had been ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... professors of philosophy were wrong, made my system of morality appear rather shaky. It is, in reality, as solid as the rock. These little liberties which I allow myself are by way of a recompense for my strict adherence to the general code. So in politics I indulge in reactionary remarks so that I may not have the appearance of a Liberal understrapper. I don't want people to take me for being more of a dupe than I am in reality; I would not upon any account trade upon my opinions, and what I especially dread is to appear in my own eyes to be passing bad money. Jesus ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... the other," said Harry, carelessly. "I bet the squire's a bigger pot than the county council in that county. Verner is pretty well rooted; all these rural places are what you call reactionary. Damning aristocrats ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... phenomenon, though as puzzling as ever, Barbican regarded with decided pleasure: the more directly the conical summit pointed to the Moon at the exact moment, the more directly towards her surface would the rockets communicate their reactionary motion. ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... nation; but "the authorities" forbade this and every other movement. None the less, there has been a good deal of clandestine recruiting, and bitter recriminations against this turcophile attitude on the part of Italy—this "reactionary rigorism against every manifestation of sympathy for the Albanian cause." Patriotic pamphleteers ask, rightly enough, why difficulties should be placed in the way of recruiting for Albania, when, in the recent cases of Cuba and Greece, the despatch of volunteers was actually encouraged by ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... some political disturbance in far-off Shanghai. It had not occurred to her that a hapless woman had been done to death merely as a warning to her father of the fate in store for him and his if he did not yield to the demand of the reactionary party in China, and deliver over to their vengeance some hundreds of the leading ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... Brunswick; and on her account he wrote "God Save the Queen," in imitation of the British national anthem, and the satirical piece entitled "Swellfoot, the Tyrant." In the following words he attacked the prime minister, Lord Castleragh, whose reactionary counsels were transforming England into a state analogous to that of ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran
... National Assembly opened on May 5, 1789. He then entered on a career of immense political energy, beginning by issuing a stirring and eloquent "Address to the French People." This was especially a reply to a reactionary protest on the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... this reactionary tendency sometimes given is that the Negro is only a generation from slavery. It should not be forgotten that individuals of every other race in history have at some time been held slaves. The bondage of Israel is to-day only an epic poem. The Greek Slave adorns ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... frequent. Both Parliament and army had become unpopular, taxation was heavy, and religious disputes troublesome. The majority in Parliament had carried the national church so far in the direction of Puritanism that its excesses had brought about a strong reactionary feeling. Parliament had already sat for more than ten years, hence called the "Long Parliament," and had become corrupt and despotic. Under these circumstances, one modification after another was made in the form of government until in 1653 Oliver Cromwell, the commander of the army and long ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney
... I said. "You're going to bring out of bed with you that hard reactionary bureaucratic spirit which all but ruined Russia and is in process of ruining Germany. It will be just as if the TSARITSA got loose and began to have her own way again. By the way, Francesca, what does one do when the butcher says there won't be any haunch ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 11, 1917 • Various
... asserted, in stentorian tones, that Cromwell was the only man who had ever known how to govern Ireland, and he, unfortunately, was now in hell; where, the Major would add, he was probably better off, his contribution to constructive politics had ended. He and his generation, reactionary almost to a man, instead of attempting to ride the waves of the rising tide, subscribed their guineas to construct breakwaters that were pathetic in their futility. Gallant in resistance, barren in expedient, history may condemn the folly of the. Old Guard of the "English Garrison," ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross |
