"Oligarchy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with the secession movement is the hot haste with which the most important questions connected with the interests of the people are hurried through. The ordinance of secession is not fairly submitted to the people, but a mere oligarchy of desperate men themselves assume to declare war, and exercise all the prerogatives of an independent and sovereign government. And yet the terms submitted in the Crittenden Resolutions as a peace-offering to the seceding States ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... so well if He has given them two legislators instead of one, and less and less well if He has given them a great many. An orderly tyranny most easily passes into the perfect state; in the second degree, a monarchy; in the third degree, a democracy; an oligarchy is worst of all. 'I do not understand.' I suppose that you have never seen a city which is subject to a tyranny? 'I have no desire to see one.' You would have seen what I am describing, if you ever had. The tyrant can speedily change the manners of a state, and ...
— Laws • Plato
... of their customs, their amenability and their anxiety to oblige; but unsophisticated as they are they wield an extraordinary power in Keonjhar, and when they take it into their heads to use that power, the country may be said to be governed by an oligarchy composed of the sixty chiefs of the Pawri Desh, the Bhuiya Highlands. A knotted string passed from village to village in the name of the sixty chiefs throws the entire country into commotion, and the order verbally communicated in connection with ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... all History is made up of a series of movements like the swinging of a pendulum, from democracy (often via oligarchy) to imperialism, and from imperialism back to democracy. It seems to me that there is only one effective method of ensuring world-peace. It was the method of the Romans, by which one nation having fought ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... that, if the newcomers were admitted freely to the franchise, he and all things that he cherished would be swamped. The Outlander was equally determined to have the dominant voice in the country in which he was rapidly gaining the majority. And what with corruption rife in the little oligarchy that surrounded Paul Kruger at Pretoria; what with the Anglo-German-Jewish mining magnates of Johannesburg in control of a subsidized press; what with Rhodes and Jameson dreaming of a solid British South Africa and fanatical Doppers dreaming of the day when the last ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton
... generations everything that affected the commerce of Venice was held up in the light of expression as free and candid as it was possible for opinion to be in this highly organized oligarchy; and here as elsewhere, Venice, like a faithful mother, watched over the welfare of her sons, though they were grown to man's estate; and since her commerce was, in fact, the mainspring of her wealth and prestige—a very vital part of her—she kept before their ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... second place, they had no control of the government, for the governor and his Executive Council were appointed by and responsible to the Colonial Office alone. The members of the two councils were in the main of English birth, and they constituted a local oligarchy—known as the 'Bureaucrats' or the 'Chateau Clique'—which {23} held the reins of government. They were as a rule able to snap their fingers at the majority ...
— The 'Patriotes' of '37 - A Chronicle of the Lower Canada Rebellion • Alfred D. Decelles
... Brown's Schooldays" searches in vain for any reference to compulsory games, house colours, or cricket averages. In those days, when boys played games they played them for pleasure; but in those days the prefectorial system— the system which hands over the life of a school to an oligarchy of a dozen youths of seventeen— was still in its infancy, and had not yet borne ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... hostile camp were seen from the top of the Stadthouse of Amsterdam. The Republic, thus fiercely assailed from without, was torn at the same time by internal dissensions. The government was in the hands of a close oligarchy of powerful burghers. There were numerous selfelected Town Councils, each of which exercised within its own sphere, many of the rights of sovereignty. These councils sent delegates to the Provincial States, and the Provincial States again sent delegates to the States General. A hereditary first ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of my Village Virus is simple enough. I was born in an Ohio town about the same size as Gopher Prairie, and much less friendly. It'd had more generations in which to form an oligarchy of respectability. Here, a stranger is taken in if he is correct, if he likes hunting and motoring and God and our Senator. There, we didn't take in even our own till we had contemptuously got used to them. It was a red-brick ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... impossibility for a candidate to be elected if this organization exert its influence against him. How to persuade the parties and the individual men to risk defeat until they succeed in the enfranchisement of women, which alone will destroy the absolute domination of this oligarchy, is a problem yet to be solved. That the women of New York dared attempt it, showed courage and determination of the ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... no pay for serving the state, only the richest citizens could accept the office; and thus Athens, from a monarchy, or country ruled by a king, became an oligarchy, or state ruled by the ...
— The Story of the Greeks • H. A. Guerber
... restrained, and their individual consequence more felt under an administration of this kind than when ruled by kings (as sometimes they were with a rod of iron) supported these pageants, whom they governed as they thought fit, and thereby virtually changed the constitution into an aristocracy or oligarchy. The business of the state was managed by twelve orang-kayas, four of whom were superior to the rest, and among these the maharaja, or governor of the kingdom, was considered as the chief. It does not appear, ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... most grave and stern and just assembly that the world had seen—was now, with but a few superb exceptions, a timid, faithless, and licentious oligarchy; while—name whilome so majestical and mighty!—the people, the great Roman people, was but a mob! a vile colluvion of the offscourings of all climes and regions—Greeks, Syrians, Africans, Barbarians from the chilly ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... of a Royalist outburst at home and inburst from abroad to take advantage of the political crash, the Wallingford-House chiefs would probably have thought it sufficient to constitute themselves into a military Oligarchy for maintaining and carrying on Richard's Protectorate. Fleetwood, Desborough, and Lambert would have been a Triumvirate in Richard's name, and the only deliberative apparatus would have been the general council of officers continued, ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... Flamininus, sat among the senators at the games in defiance of Cato's sentence. Yet Cato remained by far the most powerful member of the senate. Titus Flamininus, his only important rival, quickly passed out of notice. So far as there was any democratic opposition to the senatorial oligarchy, Cato was the leader of that opposition for the remainder of his life. But at that period no great political movements agitated the state within; nearly the whole interest of the time was centred in the foreign relations ...
— Cato Maior de Senectute • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... a respite. But the Church still dominated the civil courts, and a transfer of the case meant that the Church would throw the onus of executing sentence on those lay figures who were the puppets of a Pharisaical oligarchy. ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... a masculine oligarchy ceases when the cause is removed, and the cause is simple. Similarly, the revolts of nationalism against Imperial power, though the motives are more complicated, usually cease at the concession of self-government. But ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... "The New Age" that in moments such as these, when any waste is inexcusable, sterile complaint is the worst of waste. But my complaint here is not sterile. It is fruitful. This Capitalist Press has come at last to warp all judgment. The tiny oligarchy which controls it is irresponsible and feels itself immune. It has come to believe that it can suppress any truth and suggest any falsehood. It governs, and governs abominably: and it is governing thus in the midst ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc
... make sure that no one had a dagger hidden under his arm. Then they considered at leisure different points and in general made a solemn compact for securing sovereignty and overthrowing enemies. But to prevent its appearing that they were headed straight toward an oligarchy and so envy and opposition arise on the part of the people at large, the three were to be chosen in common as a kind of commissioners and correctors for the administration and settlement of affairs. This office was not to be perpetual, ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. III • Cassius Dio
... What was an oligarchy permeated by a fine spirit of liberty and adorned by the sacred principle of personal freedom, has been superseded by a socialistic democracy under which personal freedom suffers frequent curtailments, and liberty is severely abridged by the mandates of trade unions, the prohibitions of urban ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... only is certain in this scheme, which is an effect seemingly collateral, but direct, I have no doubt, in the minds of those who conduct this business, that is, its effect in producing an OLIGARCHY in every one of the republics. A paper circulation, not founded on any real money deposited or engaged for, amounting already to four-and-forty millions of English money, and this currency by force substituted in the place of the coin of the kingdom, becoming thereby ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... have been accustomed to live under their own laws and in freedom, there are three courses for those who wish to hold them: the first is to ruin them, the next is to reside there in person, the third is to permit them to live under their own laws, drawing a tribute, and establishing within it an oligarchy which will keep it friendly to you. Because such a government, being created by the prince, knows that it cannot stand without his friendship and interest, and does it utmost to support him; and therefore he who would keep a city accustomed to freedom ...
— The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... executing those laws by officers of their own appointing; and then the form of the government is a perfect democracy: or else may put the power of making laws into the hands of a few select men, and their heirs or successors; and then it is an oligarchy: or else into the hands of one man, and then it is a monarchy: if to him and his heirs, it is an hereditary monarchy: if to him only for life, but upon his death the power only of nominating a successor ...
— Two Treatises of Government • John Locke
... Tariff Reformer would for a moment maintain that there was any majority for Tariff Reform in the country comparable to the ludicrous preponderance which money has given it among the great dailies. The only inference is that for purposes of real public opinion the press is now a mere plutocratic oligarchy. Doubtless the public buys the wares of these men, for one reason or another. But there is no more reason to suppose that the public admires their politics than that the public admires the delicate philosophy ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... apart from his gloominess, may have been rather a good fellow; not so licentious as puritanical, not cruel so much as exceptionally merciful,—a rare general, a sagacious statesman, and popular to boot with all his subjects save the malignant oligarchy which he consistently snubbed, and which took revenge on him by writing his life. And, to crown all, even Catiline, abuser of our patience, seducer of vestal nuns, and drinker of children's blood,—whose very name suggests murder, incest, and ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... the Russian Bolsheviks and their sympathisers and would-be imitators elsewhere is the "dictatorship of the proletariat." Let us consider what that means. Dictatorship means despotism, and whether it is that of a Tsar or a Kaiser, an oligarchy or a Bolshevik administration, it is despotism—nothing more and nothing less. Impatience with the slowness of the mass of the people is only to be expected in all who see what human existence could ...
— Bolshevism: A Curse & Danger to the Workers • Henry William Lee
... not this the proper time to urge emancipation? Divested of all deceitful and evasive turns, the question reduces itself to this,—are we to definitely conquer the enemy once and for all, the great enemy Oligarchy, by taking out its very heart? or are we to keep up this strife with slaveholders forever? It is a great and hard thing to do, this crushing the difficulty, but we must either do it or be done for. In a few months 'the tax-gatherer will be around.' If anybody has read the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... of the people, are so distributed among the legislative, executive, and judicial branches in to which the general government is arranged that it can never be in danger of degenerating into a monarchy, an oligarchy, an aristocracy, or any other despotic or oppressive form so long as there shall remain any virtue in the ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... acted as a restraint upon any tendency toward oligarchy which the gentry might have entertained. The small farmers were in the majority and they had the right to vote. The percentage of white males who voted in the 18th Century elections was quite high. ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education
... ignorance could not develop, greedy to have and hold what you wrested from the Sons of Ham, lest white men should snatch it back from you again; and prating of Liberty and Freedom while the necks of three races of men were bending under the yoke of an oligarchy more imperious, more pitiless, more covetous, besotted, brutal, and ignorant than any other that the spotted records of History ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... alone, leaving my home desolate, my mother in need of everything, deprived of my country on the most disgraceful charges, although I have been engaged in many sea-fights and many battles, and have conducted myself in an orderly manner both under the Democracy and under the Oligarchy. ...
— The Orations of Lysias • Lysias
... "modern." Thirdly, the change which alone of the three concerns us now, the establishment of some kind of standard for the degree of Master of Arts. Through all the changes of more than thirty years, I have always said, when I have had a chance of saying anything, Give us neither a resident oligarchy nor a non-resident mob. Keep Convocation with its ancient powers, but let Convocation be what it was meant to be. Let the great assembly of masters and doctors go untouched; but let none be made masters or doctors who ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... about it and the moss upon the stone assist in doing this, although repeatedly cut and cleaned away. It seems as if Nature wished to draw a kind of veil over the memory of the witch's judge, himself the sorrowful victim of a theocratic oligarchy. The lesson we learn from his errors is, to trust our own hearts and not to believe too fixedly in the doctrines of Church and State. It must be a dull sensibility that can look on this old slate-stone without a feeling of pathos ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... moment, left Florence for Venice, taking his architect with him. In 1434, however, the Florentines, realizing that under the Albizzi they were losing their independence, and what was to be a democracy was become an oligarchy, revolted, and Cosimo was recalled, and, like his father, was elected gonfalonier. With this recall began his long supremacy; for he returned like a king and like a king remained, quickly establishing himself as the leading man ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... adopted it. (27) For the character and career of Curio, see Merivale's "History of the Roman Empire", chapter xvi. He was of profligate character, but a friend and pupil of Cicero; at first a rabid partisan of the oligarchy, he had, about the period of his tribuneship (B.C. 50-49), become a supporter of Caesar. How far Gaulish gold was the cause of this conversion we cannot tell. It is in allusion to this change that he ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... modern radical idea, that as the state is supported by the taxation of the body of the citizens, it must govern with a view to general interests rather than to those of a caste alone. About 463, Pericles, through the agency of his follower, Ephialtes, struck a great blow at the influence of the oligarchy, by causing the decree to be passed which deprived the Areopagus of its most important political powers. Shortly after the democracy obtained another triumph in the ostracism of Cimon (461). During the next few years the political course pursued by Pericles ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... and constant foe of Milan, had become a close oligarchy by a process of gradual constitutional development, which threw her government into the hands of a few nobles. She was practically ruled by the hereditary members of the Grand Council. Ever since the year 1453, when Constantinople fell beneath ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... the subject in the outset with the numerous subdivisions under which different forms of government have been classed, such as aristocracy, democracy, oligarchy, monarchy, &c. the better method will be to begin with what may be called primary divisions, or those under which all the several ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... sources of information concerning the division of the Roman republic into a moneyed oligarchy, and the proletariat are very numerous. Compare infra, 205. The speeches of the Gracchi (e.g. Plut., T. Gracchus, 9), and still more the violent discourses of Catiline's conspiracy (Sallust, Cat., 20, 23, 37-39), remind us very forcibly of the shibboleths of modern socialism. We very frequently ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... descanted upon the perils to liberty involved in the course they were pursuing. Surround the President with Ministers of State and "the President will be induced to place more confidence in them than in the Senate.... An oligarchy will be confirmed upon the ruin of the democracy; a government most hateful will descend to our posterity and all our exertions in the glorious cause of freedom will ...
— Washington and His Colleagues • Henry Jones Ford
... utter loneliness came over Split's faithful ally. She saw the balance of power in the Madigan oligarchy rudely disturbed. She beheld, in a swift, dread vision, the undisputed supremacy of the party of Sissy. Dismay entered her soul and shook her body, for with the brunette of the twins emotion and action were synonymous. "Oh, don't go, Split!" ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... flagellated in Swift's Recipe to make an Epic Poem, wherein he "makes it manifest that epic poems may be made without genius, nay without learning or much reading.... It is easily brought about by him that has a genius, but the skill lies in doing it without one." To this day there exists an oligarchy of academic persons whose taste is almost exactly on a par with the taste most in evidence two hundred years ago. They are the people who estimate literature by its correctness rather than by its fineness or power, who are impregnable in their little fortress of pedantry, and are for ever secure ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... the particular problem of their own country. Palestine cannot have a population of Prime Ministers and Chief Justices; and if those they rule and judge are not Jews, then we have not established a commonwealth but only an oligarchy. It is said again that the ancient Jews turned their enemies into hewers of wood and drawers of water. The modern Jews have to turn themselves into hewers of wood and drawers of water. If they cannot do that, they cannot turn themselves ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... adjusted as that of their kin, the Iroquois. At council meetings all the principal men attended and votes were taken with the aid of reeds or sticks, the majority prevailing in all cases. The whole organisation was essentially a democracy, as the chiefs, although an oligarchy in appearance, were controlled by the voices and results of the councils. In this as in other American savage nations, the rule governing the transmission of hereditary honours and possessions ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... grimly. "You think zo? I wouldn't moch like to drost 'em. I've driedt idt too often." He began to speak German again fiercely: "Besides, they owe me nothing. Do you think I knowingly gave my hand to save this oligarchy of traders and tricksters, this aristocracy of railroad wreckers and stock gamblers and mine-slave drivers and mill-serf owners? No; I gave it to the slave; the slave—ha! ha! ha!—whom I helped to unshackle to the common liberty of hunger and cold. And you think I would be ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... her doctrines gradually spread till today the proud boast of America is that she is the home of the free. Had the sentiments of Massachusetts prevailed, we would have had today a most bigoted form of religious government. Had John Locke's Carolina laws lasted, we would have been under a grinding oligarchy. Georgia under Oglethorpe's wise management joined hands with Calvert in Maryland, and the result of their joint efforts for the betterment of mankind is the grand Republic of the United States of today. Adams and Washington, Franklin and ...
— How Girls Can Help Their Country • Juliette Low
... reasons for objecting to class stratification of income which have heaped themselves up since the time of Jesus. In politics it defeats every form of government except that of a necessarily corrupt oligarchy. Democracy in the most democratic modern republics: Prance and the United States for example, is an imposture and a delusion. It reduces justice and law to a farce: law becomes merely an instrument for keeping the poor in subjection; and accused workmen are tried, not by a jury of their ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... has suffered much in England by the unfortunate circumstance of his having been the leader of a political party. As the chief of a powerful party which he transformed with amazing audacity, as the victorious destroyer of the old Whig oligarchy and the founder of the new Tory democracy, as a man of Jewish birth and alien race, as a man to whom satire was the normal weapon and bombastic affectation a deliberate expedient for dazzling the weak—Disraeli, ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... am rejoiced to learn, from your excellent sister here, that you are occupied with another tale exposing slavery. I feel that it will act directly upon pending questions, and help us in our struggle for Kansas, and also to overthrow the slave-oligarchy in the coming Presidential election. We need your help at once in ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... and self-interested "grandstander," as he always said, "always looking out for Teddy, you bet," but good for the country, inspiring it with visions. Rockefeller was wholly admirable as a force driving the country on to autocracy, oligarchy, possibly revolution. Ditto Hanna, ditto Morgan, ditto Harriman, ditto Rogers, unless checked. Peary might have, and again might not have, discovered the North Pole. He refused to judge. Old "Doc" Cook, the pseudo discoverer, who appeared very shortly ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... man of truer feeling. Coming to Venice from Zante, in 1793, he witnessed the downfall of a system which Venetians do not yet know whether to lament or execrate; and he was young and generous enough to believe that Bonaparte really meant to build up a democratic republic on the ruins of the fallen oligarchy. Foscolo had been one of the popular innovators before the Republic perished, and he became the secretary of the provisional government, and was greatly beloved by the people. It is related that they were so used ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... in mind that abstention from active political life had been in no sense required, or even thought desirable, in members of the Royal House. George III. himself had waged a life-long struggle with the Whig party, that powerful oligarchy that since the accession of the House of Hanover had virtually ruled the country; but he did not carry on the conflict so much by encouraging the opponents of the Whigs, as by placing himself at the head of a monarchical faction. He was in fact the leader of a third party in the State. ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... legislative act was the act of a stranger; in fine, every mark of political slavery was put upon her. A foreign soldiery was, and still is, quartered upon her soil. The control of her revenues, of the system of taxation, was wrested from her. These became the function of a hateful resident oligarchy, alien in everything to the Irish people, and of the English parliament, to which she was not admitted until the days of Daniel O'Connell. And then she was admitted only through fear ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... an Aristocracy; where the government is according to Desire and offices depend on money, that constitution is called a Timocracy. The contraries are: to Kingdom tyranny, for Kingdom does all things with the guidance of reason and tyranny nothing; to Aristocracy oligarchy, when not the best people but a few of the worst are rulers; to Timocracy democracy, when not the rich but the common folk possess the ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... object of Philip in effecting this arrangement was, no doubt, to weaken the influence of the great Thessalian families by a division of power; otherwise the Pheraean tyranny might have been exchanged for an oligarchy powerful enough to be independent of Macedonia. The decemvirate here spoken of (if the text be correct) was a further contrivance to forward Philip's views; whether we adopt Leland's opinion, that each tetrarchy was governed by a council of ten, ...
— The Olynthiacs and the Phillippics of Demosthenes • Demosthenes
... sacrificing human beings in vast wicker cages were the Druidical peoples who built Stonehenge and the great stone circles of Dartmoor and Cumberland, or whether with them the mode of worship was already traditional, preserved by a priestly oligarchy from a yet remoter age, and connected by I know not what strange links with the fierce Eastern worship of Baal or Melkarth, it is impossible to say with certainty at present, though the names by which the Cumberland men still call the peaks and valleys round the small Druid circle near Keswick ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... enough about aristocracies this morning, Hardy, and now to-night you are crowing over the success of the heaviest and cruelest oligarchy that ever lived, and praising them up ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... self-sacrificing public spirit, without which a corporate body cannot exist: but that a "democracy" of mere numbers is no democracy, but a mere brute "arithmocracy," which is certain to degenerate into an "ochlocracy," or government by the mob, in which the numbers have no real share: an oligarchy of the fiercest, the noisiest, the rashest, and the most shameless, which is surely swallowed up either by a despotism, as in France, or as in Athens, by utter national ruin, and helpless slavery to a foreign invader. Let the workmen of Britain train ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... principles a people sufficiently educated to obey its natural leaders, is the ideal which is vaguely before his mind. To ask how it is to be produced without hereditary rank, or to be prevented from degenerating into a tyrannical oligarchy, or to be reconciled at all with modern principles, is simply to be impertinent. He answers all such questions by putting himself in imagination into the attitude of a Pericles or Demosthenes or Milton, fulminating against tyrants and ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... industries and dominated the lives of its population. This group, intrenched in power in the city's business and also in its government, were facing the opposition of a new and rapidly rising power, that of organized labor, determined to break the oligarchy of business and take over its powers. The struggle of these two groups was coming to its culmination. They were like two mighty wrestlers, locked in a grip of death; two giants in combat, who tear up trees by the roots and break off fragments of cliffs from the mountains to ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... animal passion, where movement is rapid and light redundant. The breast of the thoughtful writer heaved ever to animal instincts without measure in extolling the complex phases of court, ecclesiastic, and domestic oligarchy. Statesmanship and subjunction rise and peacefully sink together, and in his magnetic touch, are made to harmoniously coalesce in the political balance. Shorthouse the author, a believer in, a champion was of two-fold or dual ...
— Original Letters and Biographic Epitomes • J. Atwood.Slater
... south. Roughly speaking, the revolution which established the republic and overthrew the Manchus represented a victory for the south. But the transformation during the last five years of the nominal republic into a corrupt oligarchy of satraps or military governors or feudal lords has represented a victory for the north. It is a significant fact, symbolically at least, that the most powerful remaining tuchun or military governor in China—in some respects the only powerful one who has survived the vicissitudes ...
— China, Japan and the U.S.A. - Present-Day Conditions in the Far East and Their Bearing - on the Washington Conference • John Dewey
... clamour, and ward organization, is more perilous every day and more impotent, and unless we are prepared to see a government de facto of rich business organizers override the government de jure, or to relapse upon a practical oligarchy of officials, an oligarchy that will certainly decline in efficiency in a generation or so, we must set ourselves most earnestly to this problem of improving representative methods. It is in the direction of the substitution of ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... height in the Athenian republic. "The inhabitants of Attica were divided among themselves as to the form of government. Those who lived on the mountains (the poor) preferred the popular form; those of the plain (the middle class), the oligarchs; those by the sea coast, a mixture of oligarchy and democracy. Other dissensions were arising from the inequality of fortunes. The mutual antagonism of the rich and poor had become so violent, that the one-man power seemed the only safe-guard against the revolution with which the republic was threatened." ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... altogether; that there are many of his kind whom, so far from loving, he hates, and that he would like to write his hatred with a lash upon their backs. Look again at the severe Prussianism which betrays itself in the New Creed of Strauss. Look at the oligarchy of enlightenment and enjoyment which Renan, in his Moral Reform of France, proposes to institute for the benefit of a select circle, with sublime indifference to the lot of the vulgar, who, he says, "must ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... to aid their bishops or represent them when they could not come. The provincial magistrates were generally members, though not always. As to the number of temporal lords, it was almost invariably more than twelve, sometimes double as many. From the very first, this self-appointed oligarchy saw that in unity was strength; and while the different members of the royal family were squabbling among themselves, the Cabinet seized the opportunity to increase its power. Though not entitled to a definite salary, it was regularly understood that Cabinet lords were to be ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... believing the worst that can be suspected of the purposes of the Democratic party. It is not uncharitable to say that the leaders and managers of that party contemplate, in the event of their triumph in November, the surrender of the country to the slaveholding oligarchy; in the event of their defeat by a small majority, the extension of the civil war over the North. Four years ago we could not be made to believe that Secession was a possible thing. We admitted that there were Secessionists ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... multitude. If a commonwealth, which implies the welfare of the entire community, could not exist in Agrigentum, Syracuse, or Athens when tyrants reigned over them—if it could not exist in Rome when under the oligarchy of the decemvirs—neither do I see how this sacred name of commonwealth can be applied to a democracy and the sway of the mob; because, in the first place, my Scipio, I build on your own admirable definition, that there can be no community, ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... eight thousand practically represent the owners of these blacks, who do not vote. Gentlemen, I have been interested in the cause of democracy in Europe—I do not deny it—yet it seems to me an oligarchy and not a democracy which exists in the American South. The conflict between an oligarchy and a natural democracy is ages old. It does not die. It seems to me that there is the end of all compromise—in the renewed struggle ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough
... taking advantage of those complications that might be easily foreseen between Rome and the eastern powers; and, as the failure of the magnificent scheme of Hamilcar and his sons had been due mainly to the Carthaginian oligarchy, the chief object was internally to reinvigorate the country for this new struggle. The salutary influence of adversity, and the clear, noble, and commanding mind of Hannibal, effected political and financial reforms. The oligarchy, which ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... delivered from high places, is more and more unfriendly to our cause; but the people,' he adds, 'everywhere sympathize with us, for they know that our cause is that of free institutions,—that our struggle is that of the people against an oligarchy.' These are the words of the Minister to Austria, whose generous sympathies with popular liberty no homage paid to his genius by the class whose admiring welcome is most seductive to scholars has ever spoiled; our fellow-citizen, the historian of a great Republic which infused a ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... that bloody struggle was really a victory for the Arti Maggiori, the Arti Minori being bribed with promises and thus separated from the populace, who had sided with the Parte Guelfa, which was beaten for ever. The oligarchy was saved, but the struggle between rich and poor was by no means over. Soon the older Guilds seem to lose grip, and we see instead great trusts arising, associations of wealth, and above all, Banking Companies. What was wanting ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... the prerogative disgusted the tories. His India bill alarmed chartered bodies, and was held, unjustly it is true, but with some show of reason, to be inspired by the wish to perpetuate the power of the whig oligarchy through corrupt influence. Feelings of personal loyalty and of admiration for the youthful minister who dared to fight, and was able to win, the king's battle against such tremendous odds, combined to destroy ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... years were the last of the party-system of England in its original form. The French Revolution made an end of that old distinction in which the Tory was known as the upholder of Crown-prerogative and the Whig as the supporter of a constitutional oligarchy of great families. It created that new political antagonism in which, whether under the names of Whig and Tory, or of Liberal and Conservative, two great parties have contended, one for a series of beneficial changes, the other for the preservation of ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... be ere long, a sharp contest between the friends of Freedom and the Southern oligarchy, I ...
— Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman • Austin Steward
... of Government, in the Histories, and books of Policy; as Tyranny, and Oligarchy: But they are not the names of other Formes of Government, but of the same Formes misliked. For they that are discontented under Monarchy, call it Tyranny; and they that are displeased with Aristocracy, called it Oligarchy: so also, they which find themselves grieved under ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... South. How the overthrow of Reconstruction government was accomplished is well-known. The significance of its overthrow is that it marked the arrogant reassertion of the malignant and desperate purpose of the southern oligarchy, trained in the absolutism of slave mastery, to despoil the Negro of the rights of citizenship, and to reduce him to a ...
— The Disfranchisement of the Negro - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 6 • John L. Love
... to preserve the public interests were weeded out, and nothing was left but a rump devoted to the Executive will. Instead of answering the purpose for which it was originally intended, the Legislative Council became a mere instrument in the hands of the oligarchy for stemming back the tide of public opinion. Instead of forming a seasonable and wholesome check upon extravagance and inconsiderate legislation in the Lower House, it contributed to the impoverishment of the Provincial revenue by assisting to keep the control of public affairs in the hands ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... some of them may be traced back to the "Rites of Chou," and to what is prescribed therein; but general administrative schemes representing in general terms things as they ought to be, or as the Chou federal and feudal oligarchy would have liked them to be, do not give us such a life-like picture of ancient China as specific accounts of definite events which really did happen. Take, for instance, the peculiar formalities connected with ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... peoples. If the misunderstanding of truth or an imperfect science is injurious, it must not therefore be rejected. Science is the constant and vigilant generator of all social improvement, and the most formidable enemy of the tyranny of a despot, of an oligarchy, or of the multitude, whether it take a religious or secular form. Since sharp instruments are powerful aids to civilization and material prosperity, they are not to be altogether set aside because some ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... themselves; and this particular form of voluntary self-sacrifice amongst the influential families in the senate was equivalent to the confession that Rome was ceasing to be an Aristocracy and becoming an Oligarchy, was voluntarily placing the claims of wealth on a par with those of birth and merit, or rather was insisting that the latter should not be valid unless they were accompanied by the former. The ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... centralized money power become not only possible, but, as Julian has said, had already so far materialized itself as to cast its shadow before. If the Revolution had not come when it did, we can not doubt that something like this universal plutocratic dynasty or some highly centered oligarchy, based upon the complete monopoly of all property by a small body, would long before this time have become the government of the world. But of course the Revolution must have come when it did, so we need not talk of what would have happened ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... responsible duties. After this, and about the time of the association with the bank, a representative council was elected by the people, and the government was administered by the Doge and this council. This was gradually transformed from a government of the people to an oligarchy; and as the years passed there were no steps taken toward a return, but the authority and power was more and more centralized. The ruling class was, in a hundred years, limited to those families enrolled ...
— Usury - A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View • Calvin Elliott
... salary of $20,000 a year, was the highest reward, either in honor or money, which his party ever bestowed on him. It is true that in those days the Whigs were very particular in reserving high places for men of rank and family. In fact, their government was, from the Revolution of 1688 on, a thorough oligarchy, divided among a few great houses. That they should not have broken through this rule in Burke's case, and admitted to the Cabinet a man to whom they owed so much as they did to him, excited wonder in his own day, and has down to our own time been one of the historical mysteries on which ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... tell me of our past Union, and for how many years we have been one. We were only one while we were ready to hunt, shoot down, and deliver up the slave, and allow the slave-power to form an oligarchy on the floor of Congress! The moment we say no to this, the Union ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... might have been secretary to Ganganelli. His views upon the subjects of politics and religion were enlarged; but his leaning was rather to the power of a single magistrate than to the authority of a democracy or even of an oligarchy. The other friend, whom I shall call Onuphrio, was a man of a very different character. Belonging to the English aristocracy, he had some of the prejudices usually attached to birth and rank; but his manners were gentle, ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... higher claim to grateful recollection than could be based upon mere forensic skill or professional duty. His it was to help to apply the first impulse to the movement which eventually broke down the strong bulwarks of territorial oligarchy. His it was to wear the political martyr's crown; his to beard a profligate Court, and a despotic, tyrannical, and corrupt Government; his to win, or to help to win, far nobler victories than were ever gained by Marlborough or Wellington: victories of which we reap the benefits now, in ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... a genius for creeping in everywhere, and under any and every form of government. This is being strikingly illustrated in these days. Under the name of a Republic, the traditions of a Military Oligarchy have grown up, and ...
— Native Races and the War • Josephine Elizabeth Butler
... in the provinces, there was rottenness at the core. In Rome's unceasing hostilities with foreign foes, and still more in her long series of desolating civil wars, the free middle classes of Italy had almost wholly disappeared. Above the position which they had occupied, an oligarchy of wealth had reared itself; beneath that position a degraded mass of poverty and misery was fermenting. Slaves; the chance sweepings of every conquered country; shoals of Africans, Sardinians, Asiatics, Illyrians, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... civilization, that the slave aristocracy despaired of further peaceful resistance to the march of liberty through the land. Like every other aristocracy that has lived, it drew the sword on the people, either to subdue the whole country, or carry off a portion of it, to be governed in the interests of an oligarchy. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... would not," replied Winthrop with an ironical laugh. "At least, it was not intended that way. But does our Government expect to make itself an oligarchy or despotism? If that is so, I should like to know what we are ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... sneered the man with the red face. 'What! bending beneath the yoke of an insolent and factious oligarchy; bowed down by the domination of cruel laws; groaning beneath tyranny and oppression on every hand, at every side, and in every corner. Prove it!—' The red-faced man abruptly broke off, sneered melo-dramatically, and buried his countenance ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... the press of our time occupies towards modern liberty: for its existence implied free criticism of the executive, and out of free speech grew free action. [Sidenote: The Roman government transformed from oligarchy into a plutocracy.] ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... come at last for Rome. The oligarchy had by its corrupt incapacity made a tyranny inevitable. They could make choice of masters, but a master they must have. Many were the proud Fabii, Claudii, and Valerii present that night—men whose lines of curule ancestors were as long as the duration of the Republic—who ground their ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... now waves its stripes and stars over every sea, and that foreign influence, which has placed the internal peace—we may say the subsistence of millions in every manufacturing country in Europe—within the power of an oligarchy of planters." ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... incredible, and for years misunderstood Sunday, on the plateaus of Manassas, where, after all, blundering and imbecility brought disaster, but not shame, upon the devoted soldiery, aroused the sense of the North to the reality of war, as the overthrow at Jemmapes in 1793 convinced the Prussian oligarchy that the republic in France was ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... economically a communism in which all had equal claims upon the land. To-day this opinion is very seriously questioned. It seems probable that there was a goodly measure of communism in the control and use of lands (tho not in other things), but this was largely confined to an oligarchy of the favored; whereas the masses lived in subjection, cut off from all but a meager share in the common lands. However that may have been, strong forces within historic times have put an end to the common ownership ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... we know, from its very foundation the Hohenzollern-Prussian monarchy has always been a more or less veiled despotism, based on working through a military and bureaucratic oligarchy. The army has been the dominant factor of the Prussian State from the beginning of the eighteenth century onwards. Prussia has been from the beginning of its monarchy the land of the drill-sergeant and ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... far removed from the main hall that only the dull rumble of voices and the shredded echoes of the blaring music reached there, was assembled the state's oligarchy awaiting the pleasure ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... revolutionary uprising, and the representative character it developed, Trotzky conceived the idea that it lent itself admirably to the scheme of proletarian dictatorship. Parliamentary government cannot be used to impose and maintain a dictatorship, whether of autocracy or oligarchy, bourgeoisie or proletariat. In the Soviet, as a result of six weeks' experience in abnormal times, during which it was never for a moment subjected to the test of maintaining the economic life of the nation, ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... difference between the Emperor and the Republic, or even between a Parliament and no Parliament. For him an Emperor meant merely despotism; he had not yet learned that a Parliament may mean merely oligarchy. He did not know that the English people would soon be made impotent, not by the disfranchising of their constituents, but simply by the silencing of their members; and that the governing class of England did ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... unscrupulous, persuaded Phoebidas, a Laconian who was passing through the town with an armed force, to seize the Kadmeia[5] by surprise, and, banishing the party that opposed them, establish an aristocratic oligarchy which would be ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... made to confuse the public mind as to its origin and motives, and to drag the people of the loyal States down from the national position they had instinctively taken to the old level of party squabbles and antipathies. The wholly unprovoked rebellion of an oligarchy proclaiming negro slavery the corner-stone of free institutions, and in the first flush of over-hasty confidence venturing to parade the logical sequence of their leading dogma, "that slavery is right in principle, and has nothing to do with difference of complexion," ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... ambitious and tenacious of the name of a republic, was, in truth, a narrow, a vulgar, and an exceedingly heartless oligarchy. To the former title she had no other claim than her denial of the naked principle already mentioned, while her practice is liable to the reproach of the two latter, in the unmanly and narrow character of its exclusion, in every act of her foreign policy, ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... obliterated the civilization of Greece and Rome, and inaugurated that long reign of intellectual night known as the Dark Ages, which, materially aiding in effecting the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, made it possible to erect upon its ruins that Italian Oligarchy, which, since then, has ruled the ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill
... possession of the town. It passes thirty thousand inhabitants under the yoke, as Rome passed their forefathers the Aquitani. Pau in the season is a British oligarchy. Society fairly spins. There are titles, and there is money; there are drives, calls, card-parties; dances and dinners; clubs,—with front windows; theatres, a Casino, English schools, churches; tennis, ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... United States. When we have made allowance for the absence of a number of picturesque phenomena which are due to temporal and physical conditions, and would be equally lacking if the country were an autocracy or oligarchy, there remains in the United States greater room for the development of idiosyncrasy than, perhaps, in any other country. It has been paradoxically argued by an English writer that individualism could not reach its highest point except in a socialistic community; i.e., that the ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... crazy with conceit and vanity and arrogance. Who am I that I should set up for a critical bookstore-keeper? What is the Republic of Letters, anyway? A vast, benevolent, generous democracy, where one may have what one likes, or a cold oligarchy where he is compelled to take what is good for him? Is it a restricted citizenship, with a minority representation, or is it ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... to remember that, as his masters have already proved that alcohol is a poison, they may soon prove that nicotine is a poison. And it is most significant of all that this sort of danger is even greater in what is called the new democracy of America than in what is called the old oligarchy of England. When I was in America, people were already "defending" tobacco. People who defend tobacco are on the road to proving that daylight is defensible, or that it is not really sinful to sneeze. In other words, they are ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... resignation of the Marechal-Duc and the election of M. Grevy the Government of France, ten years ago, became what it now is—a parliamentary oligarchy, with absolutely no practical check upon its will except the recurrence every four years of the legislative elections. And as these elections are carried out under the direct control, through the prefects and the mayors, of the Minister of the Interior, himself ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... Oligarchy - a government in which control is exercised by a small group of individuals whose authority generally is based on ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... our race—democracy will not be destroyed. All the inveterate enemies here and in Europe, all who already joyously sing the funeral songs of democracy, all of them will become disgraced. Democracy will emerge more pure, more powerful, more rational; destroyed will be the most infamous oligarchy ever known in history; oligarchy issued neither from the sword, nor the gown, nor the shop, but wombed, generated, cemented, and ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... usually conceived as an oligarchy: She was so during a period less than the half of her existence, and that including the days of her decline; and it is one of the first questions needing severe examination, whether that decline was owing in any wise to the change in the form of her government, or altogether, ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... sire his rapture, "Well, this is a great blow for father," said Bob; "what are you going to do now, father? Fugitive slavery and all its charms blotted out forever, at one fell swoop. Pretty rough on you, isn't it? No more men and brothers, no more soulless oligarchy. Dull lookout, father." ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... book of the great doctor, all may read: "The farther the government recedes from the common weal, the more unjust is it. It recedes farther from the common weal in an oligarchy, in which the welfare of a few is sought, than in a democracy, whose object is the good of the many. . . . But farther still does it recede from the common weal in a tyrannous government, by which the good of ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... most important episodes of that evolution was the "Mad Parliament"—derisively so called by the royal partisans—at which the Provisions of Oxford, long considered the rash innovations of an ambitious oligarchy, were promulgated. Of this Mad Parliament it has been said, "It would have been well for England if all ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... the whole period since the civil war I find a great change in prevalent opinion in the North concerning the events of the reconstruction. It seems to me that the champions of secession, of slavery and the southern oligarchy, have been heard in justification of everything they did and in arraignment of everything that defeated their designs with an unsuspicious confidence that has enabled them to mislead sentiment in the North, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various |
