Online dictionaryOnline dictionary
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Unearned   Listen
adjective
Unearned  adj.  Not earned; not gained by labor or service.
Unearned increment (Polit. Econ.), a increase in the value of land due to no labor or expenditure on the part of the owner, but to natural causes, such as the increase of population, the growth of a town in the vicinity, or the like. Some hold that this should belong to the nation.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |
Add this dictionary
to your browser search bar





"Unearned" Quotes from Famous Books



... from lands of storm And seas cut through by fiery lava floods I come, a wanderer. Ye, meantime, in climes Balm-breathing, gorge the fat, and smell the sweet: Ye wed the maid whose sire ye never slew, And bask in unearned triumph. Feeble spirits! Endless ye deem the splendours of this hour, And call defeat opprobrious! Sirs, our life Is trial. Victory and Defeat are Gods That toss man's heart, their plaything, each ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere

... praises soothed your infant heart: Emblazonments and old ancestral crests, With many a bright obtrusive form of art, Detained your eye from Nature: stately vests, That veiling strove to deck your charms divine, 15 Rich viands, and the pleasurable wine, Were yours unearned by toil; nor could you see The unenjoying toiler's misery. And yet, free Nature's uncorrupted child, You hailed the Chapel and the Platform wild, 20 Where once the Austrian fell Beneath the shaft of Tell! O Lady, nursed in pomp ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... marriage enjoys the credit of a domestic peace which is hardly more intimate than the relations of prisoners in the same gaol or guests at the same garden party. Taking these two cases of the single room and the unearned income as the extremes, we might perhaps locate at a guess whereabout on the scale between them any particular family stands. But it is clear enough that the one-roomed end, though its conditions enable the marriage vow to be carried out with the utmost ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw

... very bad one in my opinion. Now, after making the usual unjust allowance for interest on thirty pounds for twelve years or so that had elapsed, the sale of the picture would have brought me in a profit of over seven hundred and fifty pounds, an unearned increment to which I had no righteous claim. My solicitor, to whom I mentioned the matter, was of opinion that I might justifiably pocket the seven hundred and fifty pounds as reward for my mother's benevolence ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw

... child, that wealth which comes unearned from the industries of life—that wealth for which no service is rendered—for which no equivalent in human strength, mental or physical, is returned. Are not the children of such conditions being educated in lawlessness when the influence of ...
— Helen of the Old House • Harold Bell Wright

... right to this 'inheritance of mankind,' which by our institutions a minority is at present enabled to monopolize, and which it does monopolize and use in order to extort thereby an unearned increment; and this inheritance is true capital. We mean thereby the principle, potentiality, embodied in the axe, the spade, the plough, the steam-engine, tools of all kinds, books or pictures, bequeathed by thinkers, writers, inventors, discoverers, and other labourers of the ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson

... a description of Durban in Natal. The writer attributed the prosperity of this town to the fact that the suburbs were kept in the hands of the community, instead of being handed over to private owners who would absorb all the unearned increment. Even if this eulogium betrayed exaggeration still a student of civics might feel that the economic conditions of that town were worth studying. Similarly, in New Zealand, the adoption in 1891 of the tax on land values brought prosperity to the towns, and changed the tide of emigration ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes

... time looking up to make sure that Tom had not removed the card announcing the meeting; for Tom was a Catholic, and one of the reasons that Jimmie went to his place was to involve him and his patrons in arguments over exploitation, unearned increment ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair

... fund. I see it is appealing to you. It could not be otherwise. Now, with this aggregate, you, and I, and everyone can own vast estates, buy forty-year debentures, lend money on approved security, buy real estate, the unearned increment of which will net in some cases two or three hundred per cent. interest, besides an increased valuation on ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)

... to the fading beauty, "goddess who determineth all aright,—bless thou this land, though it wakes to call me traitor. Teach it to know I am innocent. Comfort Hermione, my wife. And restore me to Athens, after doing deeds which wipe out all my unearned shame!" ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis

... masqueraded as a physician though he was nothing in reality but a cheap charlatan fattening himself at the expense of weakness and disease. The man had been inclined to make trouble at first about his unceremonious discharge. He had no mind to lose without a protest such a convenient source of unearned increment as those checks represented. He had intended to get in many another good carouse before the sick man died or got well as nature willed. But a single interview with Alan Massey sufficed to lay his objections to leaving the case. In concise and forcible language couched ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper

... the narrow area of less than 200,000 square miles, earned yearly returns equal as a rule to the total of the capital invested. Money changed hands rapidly, credits did the work of capital, and the rapid growth of population added large unearned increments to the fortunes of those who owned land or ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd

... a sculptor. I don't mean that he lives by sculping. No. As he puts it himself: "My lower self, the self that wants bread and meat and warmth and shelter, lives on unearned increment. My higher self, the only self that ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 22, 1914 • Various

... Now no one speculates in his own legitimate business, for there he is acquainted with the hazards which, he has learned, require the best of knowledge and the greatest of prudence. It is the allurement of the unknown that tempts him to seek unearned profits through speculation in outside regions where, in the nature of the case, the chances must be against him. Now speculation has its proper place in business: there are certain inherent hazards that must be undertaken, ...
— Creating Capital - Money-making as an aim in business • Frederick L. Lipman

... creed: To close my eyes To little faults of those around me; To strive to be when each day dies Some better than the morning found me; To ask for no unearned applause, To cross no river until I reach it; To see the merit of the cause Before I follow ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris

... give it form in houses, yachts, and other things. Now twenty years of my life—to me—is worth more than a million dollars. I simply can't afford to sell it for that. I prefer to invest it, as somebody or other has said, unearned in life. I've always had a liking ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson

... the stablemen hung there at all hours of the day, infesting the broad veranda, the barroom and stores, striving to barter the skin of coyote, skunk or beaver, or, when they had nothing to sell, pleading for an unearned drink. Half a dozen of these furtive, beetle-browed, swarthy sons of the prairie lounged there now, as the elder officers and the trader returned, while Blake went on his way, exploring. With downcast eyes he followed ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King

... that moved Dr. Slavens to reach out and take the girl's hand. He caressed it with comforting touch, as if to mitigate the suffering of her heart, in tearing from it for his eyes to see, her hoarded sorrow and unearned shame. ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden

... is right when it says, 'The wages of sin is death,' doesn't it?" asked Mrs. Comstock. "Instead of doing a woman's work in life, you chose the smile of invitation, and the dress of unearned cloth. Now you tell me you are marked to burn to death with the unquenchable fire. And him! It was shorter with him, but let me tell you he got his share! He left me with an untruth on his lips, for he told me he was going ...
— A Girl Of The Limberlost • Gene Stratton Porter

... to Katharine, at least, it meant more than that, for if they could not between them get this one book accomplished they had no right to their privileged position. Their increment became yearly more and more unearned. Besides, it must be established indisputably that her grandfather ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf

... expected to join on church parade—it appears an impious folly to appraise war as a necessity for human happiness. Or if indeed it be a blessing, however much in disguise, why not boldly pray to have the full benefit of it in our time, instead of passing it on, like unearned increment, for the advantage of posterity? Such a thing is unimaginable. A prayer for war would make people jump; it would empty a church quicker than the collection. Nevertheless, it is probable that the ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson

... be remembered also that Spain, in the years following her brilliant conquests of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, lost strength and vigor through the corruption at home induced by the unearned wealth that flowed into the mother country from the colonies, and by the draining away of her best blood. Nor did her sons ever develop that economic spirit which is the permanent foundation of all empire, but they let the wealth of the Indies flow through ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal

... really hinting at is a bigger allowance under a different name," sneered old Peter. "Now you're turning socialist—oh, you don't suppose I'm blind when I come to your name and your quixotic schemes in the newspapers! You don't like the red-hot chaps raving about 'unearned increment,' or whatever they ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson

... a great deal of truth in the old saying—that it takes three generations to make a gentleman and there is no doubt but that the second is infinitely the worst of the three. Shortly the country will pass through a period when an unearned increment will fall into the hands of a half-educated class, whose life has nurtured in them strong animal passions; but I see no reason why we should not pass through the social as we are passing through the political crisis, and obtain a modified aristocracy in the third generation, which in the ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny

... intellect expanded to the requirements of his position, managing his property with care and judgment, so as to set a feasible example to less wealthy neighbours; prompt to discern and to aid useful undertakings, to succour striving merit, unearned suffering, and overmatched energy." "Such a man," he says, in a concluding burst of eloquence, "if his establishment in horses and servants is not immoderate, although he surrounds himself with all ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith

... for him, depriving him of the opportunity of earning both appetite and good digestion by honest toil. So he resorts to condiments and ragouts, palate-tickling and tongue-tickling sauces and nerve-rousing stimulants, as a means of securing the unearned ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 13th Annual Meeting - Rochester, N.Y. September, 7, 8 and 9, 1922 • Various

... unlucky in more directions than one. During this meal Clem railed in surly vein against the whole order of things as it affected himself, and made egotistical complaint as to the hardness of life; then, when his host began to offer advice, he grew savage and taunted Will with his own unearned good fortune. Blanchard, weary after a day of tremendous physical exertion, made sharp answer. He felt his old admiration for Clem Hicks much lessened of late, and it nettled him not a little that his ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts

... times, in a sense which seems to me special, pressing, and deeply beneficent. For the terms of that new covenant are nothing less than the glorious essence, the Divine peculiarity, of the Gospel of the grace of God. This forgiveness, this most sincere and entirely unearned amnesty, this oblivion of the sins of the people of God—do we hear very much about it now, even where by tradition it might be most expected? But do we not need it now? Was there ever a time when human hearts would be more settled and more energized than ...
— Messages from the Epistle to the Hebrews • Handley C.G. Moule

... academic question of economic policy! No legal technicality. The paper fell from Isabelle's hand, and she sat staring at the floor. Her husband was called in plain prose a "grafter,"—one who participated in unearned and improper profits, due to granting favors in his ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)

... of converting at any time their leasehold into a freehold by paying down the cash value of their farm, or should the State always retain the fee simple? Next, if the State should retain this, ought there to be periodical revisions of the rent, so as to reserve the unearned increment for the public? Fierce have been the debates and curious the compromises arrived at concerning these debatable points. The broad result has been that the sale of the freehold of Crown lands, though not entirely ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves

... horns of a dilemma. Painful position, very. She was the greatest of great ladies, full of fire and fashion, and with a purple blush (she was born that colour) flung bangly arms round the neck of her lord and master. The unfortunate man was a shocking sufferer, having a bad unearned increment, and enduring constant pain on account of his back being broader than ...
— Mr. Punch Awheel - The Humours of Motoring and Cycling • J. A. Hammerton

... that it is a prison offense to trespass on it without written permission. Because of his official call at the Residency, and of his card left on the Sultan, wires had been pulled, and a pompous individual whose black face sweated greasily, and whose palm itched for unearned increment, called on Monty very shortly after breakfast with intimation that the wharf had been placed at our disposal, since His Highness the Sultan desired ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy

... about that much income accumulated at my banker's while I've been herding sheep down here, so it was almost like picking the thing up on a bargain-counter for a penny. There's another little surplus of unearned increment piling up there, 'Tave. I've been thinking of a wedding trip in a yacht with white ribbons tied to the mast, through the Mediterranean, and then up among the Hebrides and down Norway ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry

... ten thousand students. Many of them come from the country and from factory towns. A large number come from the farms of the West. Many of these students are paying for their education by money earned by their own hands. It is said that unearned money does not enrich. The money that a student earns for his own education does enrich his ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden

... "Why, surely, Isabel, you're not going to receive that gentleman looking such a fright as this?" As if a Socialist could care for dress! How I felt he would despise me for all the outward signs which proved that I was living on the results of "unearned increment" (vide Karl Marx) and that I was ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith

... judge had disappeared, Billy beckoned to his friends, who speedily overtook him. When the party turned the corner of Front Street and were safely out of sight of Judge Straight's office, the capitalist entered the grocery store and invested his unearned increment in gingerbread. When the ensuing saturnalia was over, Billy finished the game of marbles which the judge had interrupted, and then set out to execute his commission. He had nearly reached his objective point ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt

... more years that they are subalterns, utter superficiality will have become their rule in life; from which, despite responsibility, they are unable to break loose, and according to which, therefore, they act. Then, when they are found to be good for nothing, they are either retired, and eat the unearned bread of pensioners (unearned, of course, only in such cases as theirs), or, if they have a cousin or great-uncle anywhere, who can put in a good word for them, or if they belong to the best families, ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein

... took his knife and cut the line with which the sack was fastened to the back of the cart, so that it fell to the ground. "That will feed our horses for a week," he said with a chuckle, in which the other man joined. It was pleasant to become so easily possessed of an unearned increment in the shape of a bag ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard

... nothing by the owner, since his acquisition of the land and while he was paying taxes upon his land upon its value for productive purposes throughout the entire period just as any other crop grower loes. It is not unearned speculative increment. To tax it annually is exactly equivalent to taxing an agricultural crop 50 times during its growing period. The proposed plan does tax the annual production fully, although not until the crop is produced, for taxing its full value when grown ...
— Practical Forestry in the Pacific Northwest • Edward Tyson Allen

... becomes merely a form of income tax, assessed not according to the income of the taxpayer but according to the alleged value of his property. It is thus, again, a variation of the system long adopted in this country of a special rate of income tax on what is called "unearned" income, i.e. income from invested property. But it is only when one begins to adopt the broadminded views lately fashionable of the possibilities of a levy on capital and to talk of taking, say, 20 per cent. of the value of a man's property ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers

... this evening she that was the life of my life passed to the relief and the peace of death, after twenty-two months of unjust and unearned suffering. I first saw her thirty-seven years ago, and now I have looked upon her face for the last time.... I was full of remorse for things done and said in these thirty- four years of married life that ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine

... felt sorry for her mistake in arousing false expectations in her cousin, because in the end it might make him all the harder, confirm him in his revolt against life. No, she must find some way out, so that a part of her unearned fortune could be of ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick

... interest and emotion; those that I dimly made you out as getting while I flattened my nose against the shop window and you were there within, eating the tarts, shall I say, or handing them over the counter? It's to-day as if you had taken all the trouble for me and left me at last all the unearned increment or fine psychological gain! I have hovered about two or three of your distinguished persons a bit longingly (in the past); but you open up the abysses, or such like, that I really missed, and the torch you ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith

... quarter past 9 this evening she that was the life of my life passed to the relief & the peace of death after as months of unjust & unearned suffering. I first saw her near 37 years ago, & now I have looked upon her face for the last time. Oh, so unexpected!... I was full of remorse for things done & said in these 34 years of married life that ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... the sedatives of shopping, the joy of lightsome fritters, these things, combined with the job, the unearned cheque and the fear of ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus

... bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh that he has wickedly seized; when it is the head I have pillowed on my breast for four years—the child that has known no father, his mother's only companion in her unearned shame, the shame of an outcast—then is it so that your law of Haro may not apply? Messieurs, it is the justice of Haro that I ask, not your lax usage of it. From this Prince Philip I appeal to the spirit ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... been lightly given; unearned money is always easily spent; besides, a teacher's salary seemed rolling wealth to the girl who had never had a whole dollar in her life. The question of paying the next year's interest was for the time settled. The next morning the healthy young mind was much more largely concerned with the appearance ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger

... gentlemanly fellow of thirty-eight or forty. He was in the world and of it, but was little the worse, thus far, for that. He had been singled out for favours, to a very exceptional degree, by that monster of inconsistency and injustice, the Unearned Increment, but his intentions toward society were still fairly good. If he may be capitalized (and surely he was rich enough to be), he might be described as hesitating whether to be a Plutocrat or a Good Citizen; perhaps he was hoping ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller

... desire to get something for nothing. So does burglary and larceny. "The love of money is the root of all evil." This was said long ago, and it is not exactly what the wise man meant. He was speaking of unearned money. Money is power, and to save up power is thrift. On thrift civilization is builded. The root of all evil is the desire to get money without earning it. To get something for nothing demoralizes all ...
— The Call of the Twentieth Century • David Starr Jordan

... obtained. Therefore when I met his name in connection with this case I felt warranted in assuming he was the "promoter" of it. The use of his name was not forgery. He was deprived by it of nothing except, perhaps, an "unearned increment." ...
— Between the Lines - Secret Service Stories Told Fifty Years After • Henry Bascom Smith

... There would undoubtedly have been not a single cartridge capable of being discharged, and the Su-chen and her crew would by this time undoubtedly have been the prize of the pirates. And all this that some pampered mandarin or contractor might have a supply of unearned money wherewith to buy luxuries that he neither deserved nor ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood

... explained to him that young Harold was dying to go. "But I feel a certain duty is due to the firm, old man. What I mean is, that the boy's only just come here and I feel that in my position as a partner it wouldn't look well for me practically with my own hand to be paying out unearned salary to a chap who'd not been four months in the place. Don't you agree, ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson

... them out to find food for her at once, she went out and borrowed some from a neighbour, on the strength of her new acquisition, brought it home, cooked it, and laid it before them, with the information that it would be the last unearned ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood

... beautiful prairies I had crossed on my way to the Washitay. "Another visit to Darlington will not only furnish new material for my book of Indian stories, but enable me to survey and purchase a half-section of land," I explained to my father. "Like Henry George we both understand the value of unearned increment." ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland

... nothing else than this against such proposals—be logically possible, after ousting the peers who are large tax-payers from all control over the finances of the State, to create a new class of voters out of the female representatives of unearned wealth. ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright

... life can craft be learned, 'Where knowledge opens, and exalts the soul? 'Where Fortune lavishes her gifts unearned, 'Can selfishness the liberal heart controul? 'Is glory there achieved by arts, as foul 'As those which felons, fiends, and furies plan? 'Spiders ensnare, snakes poison, tygers prowl; 'Love is the godlike attribute of man. 'O teach a simple Youth ...
— The Minstrel; or the Progress of Genius - with some other poems • James Beattie

... cuckoo in many directions,' said the Nilghai, still chuckling over the thought of the dinner. 'Never mind. We had both been working very hard, and it was your unearned increment we spent, and as you're only ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling

... handsome salary by the way, paid in advance, you taking the risks of my dying or becoming incapacitated before it is earned, I will say no more of the matter. If not I must refuse to accept what is an unearned gift." ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard

... system as the best and most practical means of cooerdinating human effort. What spoils it is the large indigestible lumps of unearned money that, because of laws that originated in special privilege, are injected into the body politic, by inheritance ...
— 21 • Frank Crane

... Nevertheless, the English income tax, besides exempting a minimum, provides for graded reductions or abatements in favor of the possessors of small incomes above the minimum, and for a reduced rate on "unearned" income within certain limits. All this, however, makes necessary a declaration or complete statement of income from the persons claiming the benefit of those provisions, and also necessitates refunding a large ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor

... goodness which Thou hast laid up in store.' But whilst He gives all, the question comes to be: What do I receive? The measure of His gift is His measureless grace; the measure of my reception is my—alas! easily-measured faith. What about the unearned increment? What about the unrealised wealth? Too many of us are like some man who has a great estate in another land. He knows nothing about it, and is living in grimy poverty in a back street. For you ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren

... all. My reputation is unearned, though useful. Just before I came here, a young chap showed up from nowhere and loafed around Manzanita. He was a pretty kind of lad, and one night in the Sick Coyote some of the old-timers tried to put something over on him. When the smoke cleared ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... became a bore. His work was ludicrously perfunctory, and his listlessness when in the office was apparent to everybody. At the bottom of her heart, Sarah Maitland must have known that it was all a farce. Blair was worth nothing to the business; his only relation to it was the weekly drawing of an unearned "salary." Perhaps if Mrs. Richie had been in Mercer, to make again and again the appeal of confident expectation, that little feeble sense of duty which had started him upon his "career," might have ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland

... the new factory processes, that prices fell, even when stated in terms of gold. In a period of falling prices and appreciating currency, the gap between the poor and the rich was widened. The debtor carried a growing burden while the creditor harvested an unearned increase. Persons who lived on fixed salary or income profited by the fluctuations, but commercial transactions were made ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson

... again, and he looked up at Tim with a wicked twinkle in his eye, for he knew, the rascal, what trouble unearned riches bring upon one. Tim emptied his pockets of gold and precious stones, and flung them at the little ...
— Stories and Legends of Travel and History, for Children • Grace Greenwood

... ruination. You're not strong enough to stand up under nothing like that. With a few hundred unearned dollars in your pocket you—you'd go up ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst

... a weak world gets unearned profit often Enjoy his own generosity Had the slight flavour of the superior and the paternal He had only made of his wife an incident in his life He was in fact not a philosopher, but a sentimentalist He was not always sorry when his teasing hurt Lacks a balance-wheel. ...
— Quotations From Gilbert Parker • David Widger

... every district we should have a tax-gatherer. Probably further taxation would be necessary: in England at any rate the annual expenditure exceeds the rental by some twenty millions. Government, we may suppose, would grant leases of land: when the lease fell in, the rent would be raised for unearned increment, and lowered for decrement, but not raised for improvements effected by the tenant himself. In that case the tenant in two or three generations might be a quasi-proprietor, his rent being ridiculously small in comparison with the ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.

... source of social wealth? Does it produce anything for society? Does it perform a function for which our ideal administration would think it necessary to pay? I buy some railway stock at 110. A year or two later I seize a favourable opportunity and sell it at 125. Is the increment earned or unearned? The answer in the single case is clear, but it may be said that my good fortune in this case may be balanced by ill luck in another. No doubt. But, to go no further, if on balance I make a fortune or ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse

... Department this year. But let no one mistake him for a mere HORNE of Plenty, pouring out benefits indiscriminately upon the genuine unemployed and the work-shy. He has already deprived some seventeen thousand potential domestics of their unearned increment, and he promises ruthless prosecution of all who try to cheat ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 7, 1919. • Various

... Gervase Deane. Your servant, if you please." "Oh, Sir, indeed I know you, for your fame For exploits in the field has reached my ears. I did not know you wounded and returned." "But just come back, Madam. A silly prick To gain me such unearned Holiday making. And you, it appears, Must be Sir Everard's lady. And my fears At being caught a-trespassing ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell

... three hundred years the American people have been living on the unearned increment of the unoccupied land. But now that all our land has been staked out in homesteads and we cannot turn to new soil when we have used up the old, we must learn, as the older races have learned, how to keep up the supply of plant food. Only ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson

... Newport and other places where the drones of our social system disport themselves? What shall we say of the shocking state of affairs disclosed by the disgusting reports of our "Society Scandals," except that unearned riches corrode and ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo

... rag." The police were never quite sure whether to arrest him for treason or let him blow off steam and exhaust. They wisely chose the latter course. Prosperity came to the town. The man sold his small bit of real estate for something under a hundred thousand. He didn't stay to divide his unearned increment among his fellow agitators. He hied him to retire to the land where "the flag was a bloody rag." This, of course, proves nothing for or against Socialism as a system. There was a Judas among the apostles; ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut

... In truth, there is no portion of the economic field in which Mill's originality is less conspicuous than in that which deals with the land. His assertion of the peculiar nature of landed property, and again his doctrine as to the "unearned increment" of value arising from land with the growth of society, are simply direct deductions from Ricardo's theory of rent, and cannot be consistently denied by any one who accepts that theory. All that Mill has done ...
— John Stuart Mill; His Life and Works • Herbert Spencer, Henry Fawcett, Frederic Harrison and Other

... to fall under the influence of such a man cannot be told. Supplementing the blessing was the association with a number of the best of men among the church adherents. Hardly second to the great and unearned friendship of Dr. Stebbins was that of Horace Davis, ten years my senior, and very close to Dr. Stebbins in every way. He had been connected with the church almost from the first and was a firm friend of Starr King. Like Dr. ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock

... no private use of this unearned distinction; there is nothing in me of the charlatan that claimed mysterious power; but my subordinates, ever in growing numbers as my promotions followed, held me in greater respect, apparently, on that very account. The natives, especially, as I mentioned, attributed semi-deific properties to ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood

... While they think of themselves cannily as "practical" men, I think them the most impractical men I know, for in a world full of boundless riches they remain obstinately poor. They are unwilling to invest even a few of their dollars unearned in the real wealth of the earth. For it is only the sense of the spirit of life, whether in nature or in other human beings, that lifts men above the beasts and curiously leads them to God, who is the spirit both of beauty and of friendliness. I say truly, having now reached the point ...
— Great Possessions • David Grayson

... shutter. An awkward incident, of course, especially as it occurred in the dead of night, but scarcely enough to make half a novel out of. Naturally, in the end Leslie owns up about the heroism, and goes away to justify his unearned credit upon the stricken field; but I am afraid I must confess that the prospect of his return left me indifferent. I understand that The Reconnaissance originally appeared in The Daily Telegraph; this being so, the persistence with which ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 8, 1914 • Various

... unjustified; unentitled^, disentitled, unqualified, disqualified; unprivileged, unchartered. illegitimate, bastard, spurious, supposititious, false; usurped. tortious [Law]. undeserved, unmerited, unearned; unfulfilled. forfeited, disfranchised. improper; unmeet, unfit, unbefitting, unseemly; unbecoming, misbecoming^; seemless^; contra bonos mores [Lat.]; not the thing, out of the question, not to be thought of; preposterous, pretentious, would-be. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... equality suddenly and mysteriously disappears as soon as the schoolboy goes upon the school bench, or the rifleman goes upon the rifle ground. The militiamen of Canada show that a democratic people do not tolerate unearned superiority, but recognise the superiority given by training. I cannot let this opportunity pass without saying a last word as to the point of view from which I regard the importance of militia training in Canada. It is more perhaps ...
— Memories of Canada and Scotland - Speeches and Verses • John Douglas Sutherland Campbell

... taxation of unearned increment and fixity of tenure under fair rents fixed by judicial courts, with power to the community to buy up land at ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn

... must not be led away. Fifty thousand pounds, properly invested, is only two thousand a year. When you have deducted the income-tax—and the tax on unearned income is extremely high ...
— First Plays • A. A. Milne

... rises to tell the story. For the first time in Rome, a woman, famous in all history, turned the scale. The King's son, passionate, terrible, false, steals upon her in the dark. 'I am Sextus Tarquin, and there is a sword in my hand.' Yet she yielded to no fear of steel, but to the horror of unearned shame beyond death. On the next day, when she lay before her husband and her father and the strong Brutus, her story told, her deed done, splendidly dead by her own hand, they swore the oath in which the Republic was born. While father, husband and friend ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford

... myself a member in good standing. In view of this general recreancy and treason to the principles that our fathers established by the sword—having in constant observation this almost universal hospitality to the solemn nonsense of hereditary rank and unearned distinction, my faith in practical realization of republican ideals is small, and I falter in the work of their maintenance in the interest of a people for whom they are too good. Seeing that we are ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce

... stood loyally between its trader and the prison bars; but the old order had changed in the Northland. Young Lapierre's action was condemned and he was dismissed from the Company's service with a payment of three years' unearned salary whereupon, he promptly turned free-trader, and his knowledge of the methods of the H.B.C., the Indians, and the ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx

... in the nature of profitable operation. The unpleasant fact is that these dividends were paid with borrowed money merely to make the stock marketable. It is not unlikely that the padded construction accounts, already described, may have concealed large disbursements of money for unearned dividends. When the Metropolitan was listed in 1897, it immediately went beyond par. The excitement that followed forms one of the most memorable chapters in the history of Wall Street. The investing public, egged on by daring and skillful stock manipulators, ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick

... paradox. The field has for many years lain idle in the midst of a growing town because of a flaw in the title, and when eventually the title is quieted and the land is sold it pours wealth upon heads not educated to use it with wisdom. Here is unearned increment made flesh and converted into drama: the field that might have been home and garden and playground becomes a machine, a monster, which gradually visits evil upon all concerned. Then Adelle and her proletarian cousin, aware that the field through the corruption of a ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren

... jewelry, and robbed the Aborigines right and left. He wore the same shirt the year 'round, slept with his dogs and invested his groschens in such Manhattan dirt as he could conveniently transport upon his person. Thus he enabled his aristocratic descendants to wax so fat on "unearned increment" that some of them must forswear their fealty to Uncle Sam and seek in Yewrup a society whose rough edges will not scratch the varnish off their culchah. Mrs. Bradley-Martin does not exactly "look every ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... matrimony was a successful institution before the Circuit Theater was built, and a husband has rights. I intend to cure you of the work habit. You must learn to scorn it. Look at me. I'm an example of the unearned increment. We'll kiss this dinky flat a fond farewell—it's impossible, really—I refuse to share such a dark secret with you. To-morrow we leave it for the third and last time. What d'you say to the sunny side of the Ritz until we decide ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach

... it Field's endorsement. Among many pleasant utterances on this subject Field has said that but for the writer the Horatian verses would not have been given to the world—and this has been taken to mean more than was intended, and much unearned praise has been bestowed. But, in allusion to the original issue of the Odes, Field added, "in this charming guise," which places quite ...
— Echoes from the Sabine Farm • Roswell Martin Field and Eugene Field

... on now—you have got an eye for the rise in values. But I grant you your unearned increment, and you ought to be mighty glad that, to such a ...
— The Outcry • Henry James

... beneficially employed. The great abbeys vied with each other in architectural magnificence, in this more especially, but likewise in every branch of liberal expenditure, giving employment to great numbers, which was better than giving unearned food. They provided, as it became them, for the old and helpless also. That they prevented the necessity of raising rates for the poor by the copious alms which they distributed, and by indiscriminately feeding the indigent, has been inferred, because those rates ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey

... expressed the regret that the railways are not in the hands of the State.] There is a pretty steady determination, which I am convinced will become effective in the present Parliament to intercept all future unearned increment, which may arise from the increase in the speculative value of the land."[14] ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling

... were at the bunk-house, from which their voices came low and indistinct. Within the house the mother was coaxing little Jack to bed. Jimmy and Conny, at the farther end of the porch, were planning an extensive campaign against coyotes, and investing the unearned profits of their ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright

... by chastising him for practices which would likely enough never have been thought of, if they had not been forbidden. The boy enjoyed this kind of father at the time, and later he came to understand, with a grateful heart, that there is no richer inheritance in all the treasury of unearned blessings. For, after all, the love, the patience, the kindly wisdom of a grown man who can enter into the perplexities and turbulent impulses of a boy's heart, and give him cheerful companionship, and lead him on by free and ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke

... abolition of over-time, piece-work, and the employment of children under fourteen, (3) state provision for the ill, the invalid, and the aged, (4) free, non-sectarian education of all grades, (5) the extinction by taxation of unearned incomes, and (6) universal disarmament. To this programme has been added woman's suffrage, a second ballot in parliamentary elections, municipal control of the liquor traffic and of hospitals, and a number of other proposed innovations. At the elections of 1895 the party named ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg

... But there have come to me one or two times, dear, when I dared a little of the labor of things, and drank a drop or two of the wine of the spirit; and those times have lived to haunt me and make me at least not a happy man in my unearned ease. There come to me still just once in a while hours when I get sight of the gleam, hours that make me loathe all that in my hours of comfort I loved; and there comes over me then a kind of Titanic rage, that I should go down a beaten soul because I have not the iron strength of will ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair

... about the unearned increment from land, especially with a view to the large gains of landlords in old countries. The unearned increment from land has indeed made the position of an English land-owner, for the last two hundred years, the most fortunate that any class of mortals ever has enjoyed; but the present ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner

... surrender it for five years. He had learned that if he wanted to marry Charity he must persuade her over into New Jersey. It did not please Jim to have to follow the example of Zada and Cheever, and it hit him as a peculiar cruelty that he and Charity had to accept not only an unearned increment of scandal in the verdict of divorce, but also a marriage contrary to ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes

... they should call him; but that is, for beginning speech, a hard saying, embracing both a palatal and a liquid. Whereas Da-da—the syllables come almost unconsciously to the infant mouth. So he had encouraged it, and even felt an irrational pride in the honourable but unearned title. ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley

... doubt, the sureness has been a good servant in his business," returned the Judge. "Confidence in a weak world gets unearned profit often. But tell me about his wife—the Spanische. Tell me the how and why, and everything. I'd like to trace our little money-man wise ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... Among the Bakwains he would have been punished. My men would have stripped him of the wages which he wore on his person, but thought that, as we had always acted on the mildest principles, they would let him move off with his unearned gains. ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone

... call you friend, I wish you this— No gentle destiny throughout the years; No soft content, or ease, or unearned bliss Bereft of heart-ache where no sorrow nears, But rather rugged trouble for a mate To mold your soul against the coming blight, To train you for the ruthless whip of fate And build your heart up for ...
— Bobby of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace

... to explain one day how the revolution of the earth about the sun produces the seasons, and I succeeded only in proving that when it is winter in New York it is daylight in Buenos Ayres. Thereupon, Jack asked me what an unearned increment was. When I finished he said his teacher had told them that views like those I had just expressed were common among ill-informed people. The following day he came in and said to Harrington, "Papa, name six female characters in Dickens, in three minutes." ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky

... who in the morning time Sets forth upon his journey with no staff Shaped by another for his use. Who sees The imminent necessity for toil, And with each morning wakens to the thought Of tasks that wait his doing. Never yet Has unearned leisure and the gift of gold Bestowed such benefits upon the young As need and loneliness; and when life adds The burden of a duty, difficult, And hard to carry, then rejoice, O soul! And know thyself one chosen for high things. Behind thee walk the Helpers. Yet lead on! They ...
— Poems of Experience • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... gentlemen; it furnishes the people who have a great deal of superfluous cash with amusement. I was mortified because the mistake made by the cook's wife demonstrated to me distinctly the view which she, and all people who are not rich, must take of me: "He is flinging away his folly, i.e., his unearned money." ...
— The Moscow Census - From "What to do?" • Lyof N. Tolstoi

... Insurance: definition and kinds. The large element of luck in industry due to unavoidable chances has something of the same evil character as gambling. It brings unearned prizes to some and to others unmerited losses. It must therefore be a benefit to the community, if this element of unavoidable chance cannot be reduced as a whole, at least to regularize it and make it exactly calculable for any individual. ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter

... weekly progress with much the feeling one would have about a far-away little bit of property that was giving no trouble and coming on exceedingly well. We would take possession of Cecily at our convenience; till then, it was gratifying to hear of our unearned increment in dear little dimples ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan

... known tradition of royalty. The king business is usually the business of spending unearned money. Your royal spendthrift is a much more familiar figure than the royal miser. Moreover, nobody ever associates productive power with a king save in the big family line. His task is inherited and with it a bank account sufficient to meet all needs. This immunity from economic ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson

... generally placed in strict subordination to the University by their founders; but, in many cases, their endowment, consisting of land, has undergone an "unearned increment," which has given these societies a continually increasing weight and importance as against the unendowed, or fixedly endowed, University. In Pharaoh's dream, the seven lean kine eat up the seven fat ones. In the reality of historical fact, the fat Colleges ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley

... and as constant as those at their own fireside. The broad windows gave streaming panorama of town and country, hill and river, and the young wife accepted it all with the haughty air of one who is wearied with splendor, but inwardly the knowledge that it all came to Haney (as to her) unearned troubled her. Luck was his God, but she, while accepting from him these marvellous, shining gifts, had another God—one derived from her Saxon ancestors, one to whom luxury was ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland

... "The curse of unearned wealth," went on his friend. "Your life, Hiram, leaves to your children the injunction to work, to labor cheerfully and equally, honestly and helpfully, with their brothers and sisters; but your wealth—If you leave it to them, will it not give that injunction the lie, will it not ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips

... "pom-pom-peel-away" and similar games. Football, however, would take us to a vacant corner lot, some two streets away. Some absentee owner in the East was doubtless paying taxes on it with hopes of finally recouping himself through the unearned increment. Meanwhile it ran somewhat to rubbish and tin cans, to bare spots from which adjoining homemakers had removed irregular squares of turf, and to holes in the dry, brown earth where potatoes had been baked with ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller

... acquirements or hadn't, were creatures of no more consideration than so many animals, bugs, insects; whereas I had inherited the idea that human daws who can consent to masquerade in the peacock-shams of inherited dignities and unearned titles, are of no good but to be laughed at. The way I was looked upon was odd, but it was natural. You know how the keeper and the public regard the elephant in the menagerie: well, that is the idea. They are full of admiration of his vast bulk and his prodigious ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... the corporations contracted to provide when they accepted their charters, have been divided as construction profits, or, as in the case of the Santa Fe, Union Pacific, and many others, diverted to the payment of unearned dividends, while the public suffers from this failure ...
— The Railroad Question - A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and - remedies for their abuses • William Larrabee

... said. "I admit that. What with the extra tax on unearned income and the insurance of servants against accidents, and this infernal new unemployment insurance, ...
— General John Regan - 1913 • George A. Birmingham

... of international enmity in the world, but its expression in the war has made it peculiarly interesting. The grievance against England is first of all that England is great and prosperous, and lives in comfort upon the unearned fruits of empire, while the German has toiled hard through the centuries and has caught nothing. England is hated because in many ways she has stood squarely in the path of Germany's progress and because ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge

... those who ought to have fostered her. The power that might have gone forth in conceiving the noblest forms of action, in realizing the lives of the true-hearted, the self-forgetting, will go forth in building airy castles of vain ambition, of boundless riches, of unearned admiration. The imagination that might be devising how to make home blessed or to help the poor neighbour, will be absorbed in the invention of the new dress, or worse, in devising the means of procuring it. For, if she be not occupied with the beautiful, she will be ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald

... declamatory criticism of the official Liberal-Radical Programme announced at Nottingham in October, 1887, and a demand to replace it by the True Radical Programme, namely, adult (in place of manhood) suffrage, payment of Members of Parliament and election expenses, taxation of unearned incomes, nationalisation of railways, the eight hours day, and a few other items. "The above programme," it says, "is sufficient for the present to fill the hands of the True Radical Party—the New Labour Party—in a word, ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease

... the chlorotic daughter of drunken parents; married in 1863 to Louise de Mareuil, who dies childless the same year; succumbs to ataxia in 1873. A dissemination of characteristics. Moral prepotency of his father, physical likeness to his mother. Idle, inclined to spending unearned money. ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson

... the mass of our population has not sufficient surplus laid by to last over thirty days of such a calamitous interval. All the unearned increment of national prosperity the "System" has captured and capitalized. Not only have the people been deprived of the profits of their labor, but this capitalized prosperity is the stern instrument by which new burdens are laid on their shoulders ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson

... personal risk and hardship and bereavement to the members of that caste. But the capitalist who has shares in explosives and cannons and soldiers' boots runs no risk and suffers no hardship; whilst as to the investor pure and simple, all that happens to him is that he finds the unearned income obtainable on Government security larger than ever. Victory to the capitalists of Europe means that they can not only impose on the enemy a huge indemnity, but lend him the money to pay it with whilst the working classes produce and pay both ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various

... giving its official approval to the unearned fortune. In these days, when the worker is asking for a week of so many less hours and so many more shillings, the State would answer: "I can show you a better way than that. What do you say to no work at all, and L20 a week for it?" At a time ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne

... able to accumulate wealth without working,—because the laborer produces in his day's work an amount of wealth exceeding in value the wage he receives, and this surplus-product forms the gratuitous (unearned) profit of the capitalist. Even if we deduct from the total profits his pay for technical and administrative superintendence, this ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri

... of the obligations under which your extreme efficiency and your thoughtfulness in many matters have placed me. It is to you I owe my unearned profits from the transaction in oil, and it is to you I owe the 'Herald's' extraordinary present circulation, growth of power and influence. That power is still under my direction, and is an added responsibility which shall ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington

... you have but slumbered here, While these visions did appear; And this weak and idle theme No more yielding but a dream; Gentles, do not reprehend; If you pardon we will mend. And, as I am honest Puck, If we have unearned luck, How to escape the serpent's tongue, We will make amends ere long; Else the Puck a liar call, So good night unto you all, Give me your hands if we be friends, And ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce

... there was such immense significance even in the streets with tramways, though it was rather an atmosphere than anything of definite detail; but no such impression weighed upon the Malts. They took Rome at its face value and refused to recognise the unearned increment heaped up by the centuries. However, as we were divided in two carriages, none of us had all ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan

... interest is simply the "natural price" of capital representing the actual "productive power" of the capital, there is nothing further to say. You may have similar qualms over rent and the rightness and wrongness of it. The enormous "unearned increment" that accrues for the fortunate owner of land who toils not neither spins to obtain it, may seem difficult of justification. But after all, land is only one particular case of ownership under the one and the same system. The rent for which the owner can lease it, emerges simply ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock

... happy and contented democracy must be procured without encroaching on the minimum standard of life, and without hampering production. Indirect taxation must therefore be concentrated on those luxuries of which it is desirable that the consumption be discouraged. The steadily rising unearned increment of urban and mineral land ought, by appropriate direct taxation, to be brought into the public exchequer; "the definite teachings of economic science are no longer to be disregarded." Hence incomes are to be taxed above the necessary cost of family maintenance, private fortunes during ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... account for July, he said that it was enough to ruin any boy in the world. Indeed, I myself was conscious of the fact that I had not done a stroke of work all that month for those sixty-five and a half dollars; and in order that my father might be convinced of my determination not to let such unearned wealth lead me into dissipation, I at once offered to lend him fifty dollars to pay a debt due to somebody on the Freeport Baptist ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield

... which languages he could speak more purely than his native Russian. Our good-natured, corpulent host had emigrated, in the pioneer days, from the steppes of southern Russia, and had grown wealthy through the "unearned increment." ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben

... a cause of annoyance to Victoria, and a pretext for her repression. Importance flowed in on me unasked, unearned. To speak in homely fashion, she was always "a bad second," and none save herself attributed to her the normal status of privileges of an elder sister. Her wrath was not visited on me, but on those who exalted me so unduly; even while she resented my position she was not, as I have shown, ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope

... flattery and death. He will not make a bold and resolute attempt to recover his reputation, because that would imply that it was capable of being soiled or injured; or he no sooner meditates some desultory project, than he takes credit to himself for the execution, and is delighted to wear his unearned laurels while the thing is barely talked of. The chance of success relieves the uneasiness of his apprehensions; so that he makes use of the interval only to flatter his favourite infirmity again. Would you wean a man from sensual excesses by the inevitable consequences ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt

... is not false that yonder man lies dead and that you slew him, as you yourself admit. Learn now, and let all Egypt learn, that even an Israelite may not be murdered for no offence save that of weariness and of paying back unearned blow with blow. Your blood shall answer for his blood. Soldiers! Strike off ...
— Moon of Israel • H. Rider Haggard

... its origin from force;' so the legislature is entitled to interpose for the reclamation of rights unjustly usurped from the community; while, as economical science shows that the value of land rises from natural causes, the conclusion is that the State may confiscate the unearned increment. But it was not so easy to convince the hungry mechanic, by rather fine-drawn distinctions, that the capitalist had a better right to monopolise profits than the landlord; for the rise of value in manufactured commodities has very complex causes, some of them superficially ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall

... seat, while his figure seemed to tower until his head touched the cavern roof, "wouldst thou seize without pay the treasures gained through the hard labor of my Mountain Spirits! Hence! Get thee gone to thy place! Seek not here for unearned riches! Cast away thy discontented disposition and thou shalt turn stones into gold. Dig well thy garden and thy fields, sow them and tend them diligently, search the mountain-sides; and thou shalt gain through thine industry ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott

... later the City had spread two miles beyond the Swamp and Grandson was submerged beneath so much Unearned Increment that he began to speak with what sounded to him like an English Accent and his Shirts ...
— Knocking the Neighbors • George Ade

... foreign system of tenantry, there are few things of more importance to the West than to see to it that the public lands pass directly into the hands of the actual settler instead of into the hands of the man who, if he can, will force the settler to pay him the unearned profit of the land speculator, or will hold him in economic and political dependence as a tenant. If we are to have homes on the public lands, they must be conserved for the ...
— The Fight For Conservation • Gifford Pinchot

... will become at the dawn of this spiritual Commune. When the first full notes of the soul's "Marseillaise" burst upon his irritable eardrums, I can hear above them his savage snarl. I can see his malignant expression as he is forced to divide his unearned increment of fame with some of those Mitmenschen whom he, like a bad Samaritan, loved to lash with his tongue before pouring in oil of vitriol and the sour wine of sadness. And how like red-ragged turkey-cocks Lord Byron and Nietzsche and Napoleon will puff out when required to stand and deliver ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler

... workers forced to toil at the furnaces twelve hours a day for two dollars? Twelve hours a day and often seven days a week lest they starve! Why should these men fight for a flag that has waved, unashamed, over their misery and over the unearned and undeserved fortunes of their task masters, Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan? Why should the down-trodden miners in Colorado fight to perpetuate a John D. ...
— The Conquest of America - A Romance of Disaster and Victory • Cleveland Moffett

... Government must raise by taxation to meet its expenses for the year, together with the scheme of taxation proposed, are called the Budget. [3] In all cases where the owner of the land had himself done nothing to produce the rise in value, the Chancellor called that rise the "unearned increment," and held that the owner should be taxed for it accordingly. Most great landowners and many small ones execrate the man who made a practical ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery

... this amazing testimony you may detect a contempt of human life and justice, an indifference to suffering, an eager lust after unearned dollars, which are without parallel. The persons who play their part in this austere, begrimed tragi-comedy, come for the most part from oversea, and have but a halting knowledge of the language spoken by judges and senators. Yet their very ignorance stamps their speech ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley

... notable fact among the premises of his inquiry, that they have had a shorter course to cover and have therefore, in the sporting phrase, had the inside track. They measure from a higher datum line. Among the advantages which so have come, in a sense unearned, to the French people, is their uninterrupted retention, out of Roman—and perhaps pre-Roman—times, of the conception of a commonwealth, a community of men with joint and mutual interests apart from any superimposed ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen

... him there about 10 A.M., wrinkling his forehead in the perplexity of artistic temperament, batting a speculative eye at me meanwhile, but not in any spirit of resentment. In fact, he had nothing to resent. He had absorbed the unearned increment and I had my original capital, the bean poles, intact—and that's more than most of us realize on small investments, nowadays. So I dare say he thought I had nothing to feel grieved about. Later he would sally forth and carry out his artistic dreams on my Hubbard squashes. ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard

... you have gone the limit in the other direction. Of course, we might have known that you long ago abolished poverty, unearned wealth, pestilence, drunkenness and the other causes of premature death; but as for three and ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint

... in a prince's palace have I slept on golden bed, Never in a hermit's cavern have I eaten unearned bread. ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke

... uselessness for himself; across the Nile was the desolate quarry-camp for his love. In Memphis he had robed himself in fine linen and reveled, had eaten with princes and slept sumptuously—in his strength and his manhood and unearned idleness. And she, but a tender girl, had toiled for the quarry-workers and fasted and now faced death in the hideous extermination purposed ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller

... just this unearned increment of blows—this dash of bitter added to the regulation cup—that made Jack's gorge rise. He was not the sort of chap, it must be confessed, to be ruled with a feather. "An impudent rascal" at the best of times, he often "deserved ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson

... popular noise was soothing to her nerves, which had been badly strained by the excitement of the day. When she closed her eyes she had evil visions of Temistocle retreating at full speed down the stairs with his unearned bribe, or of Del Ferice's calm, pale face, as he had sat in her house that afternoon grasping the precious documents in his hand until she promised to pay the price he asked, which was herself. But she smiled at each new ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford

... she was worthy of his grandson's love. He began with the girl's mother. As soon as possible, he explained to her that money is a curse. She agreed that money is a curse if you haven't got it. In time, he confessed to her that he did not mean to curse his grandson with an unearned fortune, and that he intended to leave him in his will the trifling sum of fifty thousand dollars, thereby endowing him with the ambition and perhaps the energy to earn more and at the same time be of great benefit to the world in ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon

... the whole family to immediate privations, for which they were unprepared. They were injurious as well as useless and uncalled for, and had a ludicrous side. Acting for Mr. Carey, she dismissed the coachman and the gardener, paying them their month's wages which were unearned. She let the valuable horses take their chance of casual grooming and feeding, till they were sold off. She left the garden at the most critical time of the year, as the old gardener said with tears in his eyes, when the young vegetables were only coming into use, and ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler

... daughter found that being the daughter of a man who had made an honest living rendered her socially the unequal of the daughters of men who, acting on a free translation of 'The earth is the Lord's,' had done nothing but inherit unearned substance. ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter



Words linked to "Unearned" :   earned, unearned increment, unearned run



Copyright © 2024 Dictionary One.com