"Vagrancy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... as the teacher of a school, as the father of a family. As a shepherd tending not his own sheep but those of his master, he is answerable for those that stray, and that lose themselves by straying. But no man can be answerable for losses which he has not power to prevent, or for vagrancy which he has not ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... the court officials and the military men had to pawn their estates and sell their heirlooms in order to supply themselves with sufficiently gorgeous robes, and the sequel was the imposition of house taxes and land taxes so heavy that the provincial farmers often found vagrancy more lucrative than agricultural industry. Pawnshops were mercilessly mulcted. In the days of Yoshimitsu, they were taxed at each of the four seasons; in Yoshinori's time the same imposts were levied once a month, and ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... evidently have been bred in vagrancy, and the children, and, unless the law intervenes, their children are destined to continue the species. The whining voice of the woman and the outstretched hands of the boy let us know that they are eager and ready for any ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... Mr. Nicholl's report upon the subject. In his speech, his lordship first dwelt upon the benefits derivable to a country from a well-administered system of poor-laws; upon its tendency to preserve peace, prevent vagrancy, diminish crime, and establish harmony among all classes of society. Having dwelt on this subject at length, Lord John Russell then stated the leading provisions of the bill as recommended by the commissioner. With respect to the expense of ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... of light such as is Almaville this spirit obtains, it won't be long, they feel, before the Negro laborers of the South will be firmly in the grasp of a new form of slavery. They are also alarmed at the clamor of leading newspapers for a vagrancy law which will be invoked in times when the Negroes refrain from labor in the hope of advancing their pay. The presence in our ranks of the labor element representing the Negro masses will give striking evidence ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... Three years with any religious society that believes the marriage relation unlawful, in Massachusetts; and joining any such sect, in New Hampshire. When parties can not live in peace and union, in Utah. Vagrancy of the husband, in Missouri and Wyoming. Excesses, in Texas. Where wife by cruel and barbarous treatment renders condition of husband intolerable, ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... with the affecting death of Ophelia,—who in the beginning lay like a little projection of land into a lake or stream, covered with spray-flowers, quietly reflected in the quiet waters, but at length is undermined or loosened, and becomes a faery isle, and after a brief vagrancy sinks almost ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... sure that I shall not be damned!" This was said unawares while listening to the life of a saint. The reader will, therefore, understand that Father Hecker's inner trouble was not a state of mere aridity, a difficulty of concentration of mind on spiritual things, or a vagrancy of thought; it was a perpetual facing of his Divine Accuser and Judge, a trembling woe at the sight of Infinite Majesty on the part of one for whom the Divine love was the one necessary of life for soul and body. ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... little figure, pushing himself about on a small cart, which moves upon wheels, and wearing an apron to conceal the deformity of his legs. His whole height, including his vehicle, does not exceed two feet. To avoid the penalties attached to begging and vagrancy, he carries a few pens stuck between his coat and waistcoat, and declares that the dealing in those articles is the only trade to which he has been brought up. It is not improbable, that by means of this, and other arts and mysteries which he exercises, Andrew ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... regulations are based upon the assumption that labor is a public duty, and idleness and vagrancy a crime. No civil or military officer of the Government is exempt from the operation of this universal rule. Every enlightened community has enforced it upon all classes of people by the severest penalties. It is especially necessary in ...
— Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field • Thomas W. Knox
... the United States, from California to Boston, and up and down, returning to the Pacific coast by way of Canada, where I got into jail and served a term for vagrancy, and the whole tramping experience made me become a Socialist. Previously I had been impressed by the dignity of labour, and, without having read Carlyle or Kipling, I had formulated a gospel of work which put theirs in the shade. Work was everything. It was sanctification and salvation. ...
— The House of Pride • Jack London
... fragrant grass. Lindsay dropped beside her and they sat for a moment in silence. A cricket chirped noisily a few inches from them. Hilda put out her hand in that direction and it ceased. Sounds wandered across from the encircling city, evening sounds, softened in their vagrancy, and lights came out, topaz points ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... A. Mallin went to the central police station Wednesday night and asked to be locked up on a charge of vagrancy. He said he had been conducting an unsuccessful search for work for so long that he was sure he must be a vagrant. In any event, he was so hungry he must be fed. Police Judge Graham sentenced him to ninety ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... vision?" says Jacopone da Todi;[98] and this remains the only real test by which to separate day-dreams from the vitalizing act of contemplation. In the first we are abandoned to a delightful, and perhaps as it seems holy or edifying vagrancy of thought. In the second, by a deliberate choice and act of will, foreconscious thinking is set going and directed towards an assigned end: the apprehending and actualizing of our deepest intuition of God. In it, a great region of the mind usually ignored by us and left to chance, yet source ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... parish which she does not belong to, and drops her bastard there; the bastard shall, in the first case, be settled in the parish from whence she was illegally removed[g]; or, in the latter case, in the mother's own parish, if the mother be apprehended for her vagrancy[h]. The incapacity of a bastard consists principally in this, that he cannot be heir to any one, neither can he have heirs, but of his own body; for, being nullius filius, he is therefore of kin ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... committee recommended the abolition of whipping as a punishment unfit for free people, and most States accepted this principle. Even in 1865, the general disposition was to make uniform laws for both races, except in regard to violation of contracts, immoral conduct, vagrancy, marriage, schools, and forms of punishment. In some of these matters the whites were to be more strictly ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming
... Brooklyn, N. Y. Twenty-six years old. Single. Had no trade. Had lost track of his people. Had travelled a good deal by means of freight trains and had been in several jails for vagrancy. Had never worked in the country. Said when he could get money, he spent it in drink. Secured a bed that night through an acquaintance. Looked like a ...
— The Social Work of the Salvation Army • Edwin Gifford Lamb
... Rome was taken up for vagrancy in a great city. When brought before the court an austere judge said: ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... [Footnote: Hist. MSS. Commission, Report VII., App., 670.] They are asked to help collect subsidies and benevolences, to search for popish recusants, to oversee ale-houses, slaughter-houses, and the assize of bread and ale, to assist in the administration of poor relief and the suppression of vagrancy. [Footnote: Chetham Society, Lancashire Lieutenancy, I, Int., 19; Camden Society, Verney Papers, 37, 88.] In 1619 the Lords of the Council write to the lieutenant of Surrey asking him to urge co-operation in a lottery for the success of "the English colonies ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... of the convent; the other sets out from the convent to expire upon the scaffold, turning his eyes away from the crucifix.'[122] And yet how much alike in some important circumstances of their lives were these two men! Both wanderers, possessed by that spirit of vagrancy which is the outward expression of an inner restlessness. The unfrocked friar, the courtier out of service, had no home in Italy. Both were pursued by an oestrum corresponding to the intellectual perturbations which ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... "Maybe it's just as well. We'd have trouble proving anything illegal against him, though I could have had him held on a charge of vagrancy ...
— Larry Dexter's Great Search - or, The Hunt for the Missing Millionaire • Howard R. Garis
... Six Nations, once the owners and lords of the soil within the boundaries of the great Commonwealth of New York, there were many small remnants scattered over the western part of this State in a condition of wretched vagrancy; reduced by idleness and intemperance to poverty, and ready, for a trifling compensation, to have their names attached to any memorial, without regard to its objects, for a small sum of money they would lend themselves to the service of any artful intriguer ...
— Legends, Traditions, and Laws of the Iroquois, or Six Nations, and History of the Tuscarora Indians • Elias Johnson
... that he had sailed with Captain Clarke to the islands of Terceras and the Canaries. In 1596, he published his "Margarite of America," and he mentions that it was written in the Straits of Magellan, on a voyage with Cavendish. To this species of vagrancy, however, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... Catholic times; and a divine attributed the growing selfishness and harshness to the doctrine of justification by faith. The alteration in the condition of the poor was followed by severe enactments against vagrancy; and the Protestant legislature, after creating a proletariate, treated it as a crime. The conversion of Sunday into a Jewish Sabbath cut off the holiday amusements and soured the cheerfulness of the population. Music, singing, and dancing, the favourite relaxation of a contented ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... Booth in every land was a sojourner, as all his fathers were. Of Hebrew descent, and by a line of actors, he united in himself that strong Jewish physiognomy which, in its nobler phases, makes all that is dark and beautiful, and the combined vagrancy of all men of genius and all men of the stage. Fitful, powerful, passionate, his life was a succession of vices and triumphs. He mastered the intricate characters of dramatic literature by intuition, rather than by study, ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... take a man by the collar. "Where do you live? How do you get your living?" And if he could not answer, harsh penalties awaited him. Iron and fire were in the code: the law practised the cauterization of vagrancy. ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... through an entire century, taking up their ground and making good their tumultuous irruptions; with the power of moving had been conjoined a propensity to move. Rustic life, which must essentially have been maintained on the great area of German vagrancy, was more ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... practically all of our histories of that period are based altogether on the testimony of prejudiced whites and are written from their point of view. Some of these writers have aimed to exaggerate the vagrancy of the blacks to justify the radical procedure of the whites in dealing with it. The Negroes did wander about thoughtlessly, believing that this was the most effective way to enjoy their freedom. But nothing else could ...
— A Century of Negro Migration • Carter G. Woodson
... inductive reason a devil's machination. This method of intuition is to the more sober method of science as the romantic to the classical spirit in literature, permitting to the individual mind a licence of noble vagrancy. But it must be a law for the ordinary intelligence to exercise the two apart, else it will fall into sick fancies of excitement, and by abuse of wild analogies lose the vital art of balance and sane comparison. Only the greatest minds, endowed as it were with some divine genius ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... were gone. The silence was that of a common overwhelming disaster. No one spoke with his neighbor; no one observed the vagrant as he entered and made his way to a seat on one of the meanest benches, a little apart from the others. He had not sat there since the day of his indictment for vagrancy. The judge took his seat, and making a great effort to control himself, passed his eyes slowly over the court-room. All at once he caught sight of old King Solomon sitting against the wall in an obscure corner; and ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... promenade, constitutional, stroll, saunter, tramp, jog trot, turn, stalk, perambulation; noctambulation[obs3], noctambulism; somnambulism; outing, ride, drive, airing, jaunt. equitation, horsemanship, riding, manege[Fr], ride and tie; basophobia[obs3]. roving, vagrancy, pererration|; marching and countermarching; nomadism; vagabondism, vagabondage; hoboism [U.S.]; gadding; flit, flitting, migration; emigration, immigration, demigration|, intermigration[obs3]; wanderlust. plan, itinerary, guide; handbook, guidebook, road book; Baedeker[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... do work, and are not idle. Work for its own sake is not enough. It may turn men into machines—all clatter and monotony; or it may make them fussy nuisances. "A soulless activity," says Canon Ainger, "may save a man from vagrancy only by turning him into a thing; or it may keep him from idleness by making him an egotist." There is the man who, to use the common phrase, "sticks at it" with scarcely a competing thought or interest. He scorns ease, and lives laborious days. ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd
... a circus, already profanely suggested, was carried out by a straggling fringe of boys and half-grown men on the outskirts of the encampment, acrimonious with disappointed curiosity, lazy without the careless ease of vagrancy, and vicious without the excitement of dissipation. For the coarse poverty and brutal economy of the larger arrangements, the dreary panorama of unlovely and unwholesome domestic details always before the eyes, ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... intensely strong, and they are remarkably affectionate to each other, sharing with each other food, clothing, and all that they possess. There are no paupers among them but the lunatics and the lepers, and vagrancy is unknown. Happily on these sunny shores no man or woman can be tempted into sin ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... to put himself in direct touch with the inheritor. He had ample time in which to frame and shape his campaign, inasmuch as there remained for him yet to serve nearly eight long and painfully tedious weeks of a three-months' vagrancy sentence. Unlike most of those now manifesting their interest, he did not write a letter; but he dreamed dreams that made him forget the annoyances of a ball and chain fast on his ankle and piles of stubborn stones to be cracked ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... crumbs that fall from their tables, and sometimes they don't, because they are afraid he will take advantage of it to steal the spoons. Or else they take the lofty patriotic ground, and say that their principles forbid them to countenance vagrancy, and that Heaven helps those who help themselves. This is very consoling to Lazarus, and it always gives him pleasure to hear what good moral principles the Philistines—or Snobs—have got, even if he hasn't got any himself. From what they frequently say, you would not think ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... good. It carries them along somehow. But such members of the community are a burden and a source of weakness at all times. Therefore, for example, there are in most of our communities laws against vagrancy; that is, against willful and habitual idlers "without visible means of support," such as ...
— Community Civics and Rural Life • Arthur W. Dunn
... prevalence of whipping in England evidence is furnished by Andrews, in the chapter on "Whipping and Whipping Posts," in his book on ancient punishments. It existed from the earliest times and was administered for a great variety of offenses, to men and women alike, for vagrancy, for theft, to the fathers and mothers of illegitimate children, for drunkenness, for insanity, even sometimes for small-pox. At one time both sexes were whipped naked, but from Queen Elizabeth's time only from the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... barefooted, friendless, homeless, penniless; walked about the streets till afternoon, when he received a penny from a gentleman to buy a loaf; met, next day, some expert thieves in the Minories; went along with them, and continues in a course of vagrancy ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... culprit spend the night in limbo. The next morning Thoreau was released, the tax having been paid by some unknown person—Emerson, undoubtedly. This was a tame enough ending to what was rather an interesting affair—the hope of the best citizens being that Thoreau would get a goodly sentence for vagrancy. The townfolk looked upon Thoreau and Alcott with suspicious eyes. They both came in for much well-deserved censure, and Emerson did not go unsmirched, since he was guilty of harboring and encouraging ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... encountering with the mercantile Brown brought me ill-luck in my enterprise, thereby signifying the crosses and vexations of those who labour in the cheateries and overreachings which constitute the vocation of the world; so my meeting with the philosophical Cole, who has, both in vagrancy and rest, found cause to boast of happiness, authorities from his studies to favour his inclination to each, and reason to despise what he, with Sir Kenelm Digby, would ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... end of a week, after paying his bed and board, his fifty dollars had dwindled to thirty. He knew he could not afford to let it go much lower, otherwise the detectives, who seemed forever spying on him, would be arresting him on a vagrancy charge. Vancouver was chuck-full of detectives, many of whom Phil knew by sight, while the others he sensed. And he loathed and abhorred their ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... down to Rockhold to-morrow, and investigate this matter for myself. In my capacity of justice of the peace I shall issue a warrant to have that woman brought before me on a charge of vagrancy, and then I shall examine her on this point. But, Ryland, you are to be careful not to drop even a hint of ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... evil deed had been done. He heard the searching parties out all night, and it was a terrible sound! "It was too aisy fur a poor man to be laid by the heels fur a job he niver done, bedad, as was the case at present." He permitted himself, however, to be persuaded to let a charge of vagrancy be entered against him and go to jail, really to be held as a witness in the event of more developments in the Briscoe case; for the authorities desired that no arrests in that connection should be made public until the significance of the ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... waiter for another drink. "I guess I must have drifted around the city for two weeks or more before the police found me and picked me up for vagrancy. By that time the Valhalla had long since hoisted for Alpha C—and didn't I wish I was on it! Every night I used to dream I had gone back on the ship. But when I woke up I always found ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg
... leave their masters, for their masters composed the Plutocracy. They could not go to the cities, for there, also, the Plutocracy was in control. They had but one alternative,—to leave the soil and become vagrants, in brief, to starve. And even there they were frustrated, for stringent vagrancy laws were passed ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... apparent acts of benevolence, we should often see that the small act of sacrifice on our own part was by no means efficacious in promoting the 'greater good' of the recipient, and still less of society at large. A life of vagrancy or indolence may easily be made more attractive than one of honest industry, and well-meant efforts to anticipate all the wants and misfortunes of the poor may often have the effect of making them careless of the future and of destroying all elements of independence ...
— Progressive Morality - An Essay in Ethics • Thomas Fowler
... replied the leader; "it's a rule, sir. I wouldn't break through it. I act entirely upon principle! I can't encourage robbery and vagrancy. It's Quixotic." ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... must be a tough looking customer," grinned the boy, again climbing the fence and starting along the track. He fought shy of villages during daylight, fearing that he might be arrested for vagrancy and locked up. That would defeat ...
— The Circus Boys In Dixie Land • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... receiving few recruits from without, regulated by fixed usages, and confined to a particular groove. In England, on the contrary, the stage was an outlet for irregular talent, impatient of steady labor or severe restrictions, and captivated by the freedom and diversity of a career which, beginning in vagrancy, might lead at a single bound to a brilliant and enviable position. Hence the biographies of English players, taken collectively, offer a vast store of amusing anecdotes, illustrative not only of the history of the stage, but of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... that this is an idle old vagabond, who does no good to any one. We should be well advised, I think, to prosecute him for vagrancy. But that is not at this moment the matter in hand. Owing to the accident—scarcely fortunate—of this old man's passing with his lanthorn, it would certainly appear that citizens have been bitten by rodents. It is then, I fear, our duty to institute proceedings against ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... wont, threw in a lot of extraneous matter that had nothing to do with sugar. It was the extraneous matter, and not the sugar, that won him a wide audience on the Pacific Coast. During these months of "luxurious vagrancy" he described in the most vivid way many of the most notable features of the Sandwich Islands. Nowadays such letters would at once have been embodied in a volume. In his 'My Debut as a Literary Person', Mark Twain has described in admirably graphic style his great ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... land had lain under the grip of ruthless laws. Of these the sternest were repealed as no longer necessary. The Treasons Act disappeared; so did the old Acts against the Lollards; so did the Act of the Six Articles. A curious attempt was made to deal with the problem of vagrancy, the outcome of prevalent economic conditions, which the penalties of flogging and hanging had failed to repress. The vagrant was to be brought before the magistrates, branded, and handed over to some honest person as a "slave" for two years. ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... sometimes asserted that the increase of crime in the summer months is due to the large number of tramps who leave the workhouses after the winter is over and roam the country in search of employment. Many of these wanderers, it is said, are arrested for vagrancy; in summer they swell the prison population just as they swell the workhouse population in winter. This explanation of the increase of crime in summer contains so many elements of probability, that it has come to be rather widely accepted by students of criminal ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... about to be taken up under the act for the suppression of vagrancy, we flew out of the house, sprang into a canoe before the door, and paddled with might and main over to the opposite side ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... walk, promenade, constitutional, stroll, saunter, tramp, jog trot, turn, stalk, perambulation; noctambulation^, noctambulism; somnambulism; outing, ride, drive, airing, jaunt. equitation, horsemanship, riding, manege [Fr.], ride and tie; basophobia^. roving, vagrancy, pererration^; marching and countermarching; nomadism; vagabondism, vagabondage; hoboism [U.S.]; gadding; flit, flitting, migration; emigration, immigration, demigration^, intermigration^; wanderlust. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... twelve months next preceding, or he or his wife must own forty acres of land or real estate or personal property assessed at not less than three hundred dollars. A long list of disqualifying crimes was added, including wife-beating and conviction for vagrancy. As if this were not enough, after 1903 an applicant for registration might be required to state where he had lived during the preceding five years, the name or names by which known, and the names of his employers. Refusal to answer was ...
— The New South - A Chronicle Of Social And Industrial Evolution • Holland Thompson
... flower-hunter, the bird-fancier, the berry-picker, and many another variety of the modern ruralist. Hawthorne might easily have found a companion or two of similar wandering habits and half hermit-like intellectual life, though seldom so fortunate as to be able to give themselves entirely up to vagrancy of mind, like himself. Thoreau is, perhaps, the type, on the nature side; and Hawthorne was to the village what Thoreau was to the ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... every reader of even the early chapters of this extraordinary book, and they do not cover its first hundred pages in the common edition. Then his father dies and the born vagrant is set loose for vagrancy. He goes to London, with a stock of translations which is to make him famous, and a recommendation from Taylor of Norwich to "the publisher." The publisher exacted something more than his pound of ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... win the pence and applause guaranteed by the immense popularity of their entertainments. But the official eye learnt to look upon them with suspicion, and it was not long before they fell under condemnation as vagrants. In 1572 all but licensed companies were brought within the scope of the vagrancy laws. Those exempt were the few fortunate ones who had secured the patronage of a nobleman, and, greedy of monopoly, had pressed, successfully, for this prohibitory decree against their irregular rivals. From this date onwards we read only of such companies as the Queen's Company, ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... notes on the various possibilities of the district with regard to job-getting, we turned on to a discussion of the relative moralities of begging and stealing. But in this, I found, Mick was not vitally interested—both were too deeply immoral for him to touch. For Mick was a worker. He liked work. Vagrancy to him made no appeal. To "settle down" was his one definite desire. But jobs refused to hold him, and the road gripped him in spite of himself. So the problem presented itself to him in an abstract way only; to me there was ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors |
