"British Empire" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... self-acting galvano-hydraulic engine, which will entirely supersede the use of steam, and, by preventing the consumption of coal now going on, will avert, or at least postpone, the decline of the British Empire. Able men have calculated that, in the course of a couple of hundred years or so, our coal-beds will be exhausted. I have gone over their calculations and detected several flaws in them, which, when corrected, show ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... been his pride to note the increase in these exports. The development of the resources of his colony had been a work in which he had felt that the Colonial Secretary took an immediate interest. He had believed that he was one of the important wheels of the machinery which moved the British Empire: and now, in a day, he was undeceived. It was forced upon him that to the eyes of the outside world he was only a greengrocer operating on a large scale; he provided the British public with coffee for its breakfast, with drugs for its stomach, and with strange woods for its dining-room ...
— The Lion and the Unicorn and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... opinion of the majority of the soldiers when he said, "Oh, this bloomin' war will be over in three months." Not alone was this Bill's opinion, or that of the men only, but the opinion of the people of Canada, the opinion of the people of the whole British Empire. ...
— Private Peat • Harold R. Peat
... movement has never been a separatist movement. In the whole course of its career it has been a moderating, modifying movement, designed to secure the recognition of Irish claims within the circuit of the British Empire." ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous
... remembered in Secunderabad as Superintendent of the Cantonment Police before Mr. Crawford. A son of Colonel Hastings Fraser, one of the Frasers of Lovat, he has proved his possession of that nerve and courage which rises to the emergency of danger—on which qualities more than all else the British Empire in India has been built, and on which, after all is said, in the last resort, it must be still held to rest. To quote the graphic account of a correspondent, the escape was about as narrow as was ever had. Mr. Fraser was told by his orderly that the tiger was lying ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... progress—of seeing them as they existed before even the foot of the Red Man trod them—of seeing them without that physical toil which only a few hardy explorers can undergo. It is hard to realise that he who has not seen the vast unsettled tracts of the British Empire knows Nature only under the same aspect as she has been known by all the poets from Homer to our own day. And when I made the allusion to Pauline Johnson's poems which brought me such reward, I quoted "In the Shadows." The poem ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... our publishers and writers," I again said, "you'll see they'll be slow to let go their English market by making books that would be illegible throughout the British Empire." ...
— How Doth the Simple Spelling Bee • Owen Wister
... head and metropolis of England: called by Tacitus, Londinium; by Ptolemy, Logidinium; by Ammianus Marcellinus, Lundinium; by foreigners, Londra, and Londres; it is the seat of the British Empire, and the chamber of the English kings. This most ancient city is the the county of Middlesex, the fruitfullest and wholesomest soil in England. It is built on the river Thames, sixty miles from the sea, and was originally founded, as all historians ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton
... comforts of every Englishman; I shall feel too happy if they leave Europe untouched, and are not ultimately fatal to the destinies of America; but I am madly bent upon keeping foreign enemies out of the British empire, and my limited understanding presents me with no other means ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... simply abreast of the patriotic and socially constructive British Imperialism of Breeze and Westerton. And there were moods when the two things were confused in his mind, and the glamour of world dominion rested wonderfully on the slack and straggling British Empire of Edward the Seventh—and Mr. Rudyard Kipling and Mr. Chamberlain. He did go on for a time honestly entertaining both these projects in his mind, each at its different level, the greater impalpable one and the lesser concrete ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... was looking at a map in Stanford's window the other day, and it amused me. Who believes for a moment that England will remain satisfied with bits here and there? We have to swallow the whole, of course. We shall go on fighting and annexing, until—until the decline and fall of the British Empire. That hasn't begun yet. Some of us are so over-civilised that it makes a reaction of wholesome barbarism in the rest. We shall fight like blazes in the twentieth century. It's the only thing that keeps Englishmen sound; commercialism ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... other projects which passed before him when he halted at Denver; and it is set forth with most fulness and vigour in the opening chapters, which deal with a "Greater Britain" that is outside the British Empire—with the Britain that no longer ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... about, not only with the concurrence, but in obedience to the fierce demand of the majority. Protection to domestic industry, at home or colonial, is the unseen but strongly felt bond which unites together the far distant provinces of the British empire by the firm bond of ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... not deny the right of Parliament to regulate the trade of the whole British Empire, and to lay "external taxes"—customs duties—for the purpose of regulating trade. But this stamp tax was an "internal tax" for the purpose ...
— A Brief History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... exclusively to her navy. In the Seven Years' War it was the Prussian army which won the victories on land, while small British forces were enabled by the help of the navy to win an Empire from France in Canada, and to lay the foundations of the British Empire in India. In the war of American Independence, Great Britain for once stood alone, but this was the one conflict which contributed little or nothing towards establishing the ascendency of the British navy. Great Britain failed of her object because that ascendency was incomplete. ...
— Britain at Bay • Spenser Wilkinson
... the peace conference and to his close contact with President Wilson. On February 8, of this year, Premier Smuts and the South African party won a decisive victory at the polls over Gen. Hertzog and those who advocated the secession of South Africa from the British Empire. ...
— Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements • Frank B. Lord and James William Bryan
... negotiation with Lord Howe, Franklin reluctantly abandoned the situation and turned homeward. His last day in London was passed with Dr. Priestley, who has left an interesting record of their conversation. He says of Franklin that "the unity of the British empire in all its parts was a favorite idea of his. He used to compare it to a beautiful china vase, which, if ever broken, could never be put together again; and so great an admirer was he of the British constitution that he said he saw no inconvenience ...
— Benjamin Franklin • Paul Elmer More
... remarks of the same sort," Lutchester reminded her, "about the inhabitants of the British Empire—Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... this country have their counterpart in the Cuban Autonomistas. Referring to conditions in 1763, Mr. Channing states that "never had the colonists felt a greater pride in their connection with the British empire." Among the great figures of the pre-revolutionary period in this country, none stands out more clearly than James Otis, of Boston, and Patrick Henry, of Virginia. In an impassioned address, in 1763, Otis declared that "every British ...
— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson
... General Pershing and his staff occupied suites at the Savoy Hotel, and during the four or five days of the American commander's sojourn in the capital of the British Empire, a seemingly endless line of visitors of all the Allied nationalities called ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... and Peter lit a cigarette, while the others threw remarks at the man as to luggage. Then they all trooped off together in a crowd that consisted of every variety of rank and regiment and section of the British Empire, plus ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... loss of the fairest portion of his American possessions. Had Pitt been allowed to guide the public policy and direct the honest but stubborn mind of the king at the beginning of his long reign of half a century, these United States might have remained a part of the British Empire fifty years longer. But that great man, whose genius as a statesman, eloquence and wisdom as a legislator, and whose thorough knowledge of human nature and the past history of the world, made him peerless, and whose administration ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... propagandists and treat them as a terrier treats a rat. So this was a war for democracy! The bankers of Paris had for the last twenty years been subsidizing the Russian Tsars, who had shipped a hundred thousand exiles to Siberia to make the world safe for democracy! The British Empire also had gone to war for democracy—first in Ireland, then in India and Egypt, then in the Whitechapel slums! No, said Ashton, the workers were not to be fooled with such bunk. Wall Street had loaned some billions of dollars to the Allied bankers, and now the American people were ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... might not be. Unnecessary to go back to the ante-Scott age in order to perceive how the novel has aggrandised itself! It has conquered enormous territories even since Germinal. Within the last fifteen years it has gained. Were it to adopt the hue of the British Empire, the entire map of the universe would soon be coloured red. Wherever it ought to stand in the hierarchy of forms, it has, actually, no rival at the present day as a means for transmitting the impassioned vision of life. It is, and ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... mankind. Taking any one of these nations—our own for example—we can trace the steps by which the warring elements within it have become reconciled, until finally there has emerged that vast unitary corporation—the British Empire. So with all the others. What more is required therefore than one step further in the same direction, to join up all the States into a single world State. But I am bound to think we are too hasty in treating the unity ...
— Progress and History • Various
... of religious freedom, men pointed with a shudder to the condition of nations already speeding on the road to ruin, from which the two peninsulas at least had been saved. Yet the British empire, with the American republic still an embryo in its bosom, France, North Germany, and other great powers, had hardly then begun their headlong career. Whether the road of religious liberty was leading exactly to political ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... since he was capable of forming one. It was his opinion then as a legislator. It was his opinion as a colonial proprietor; and it was his opinion as an Englishman, wishing for the prosperity of the British empire. ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... Parliament of England, she will feel that her political right to refuse just protection to the British author will be a moral right only when she is able to forego the advantages of literary communion and fellowship with the British empire. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... after the arrival of the champions of the law! All depends upon that. For the question of shipwreck is no longer in doubt. Maitre, the solemn moment has come to make our wills. I leave all my real and personal estate to Holmlock Shears, a citizen of the British Empire.... But, by Jove, how fast they are coming, those champions of the law! Oh, the dear people! It's a pleasure to watch them! What precision of stroke! Ah, is that you, Sergeant Folenfant? Well done! That idea of the man-of-war's cutter was capital. I shall recommend you to your superiors, ...
— The Blonde Lady - Being a Record of the Duel of Wits between Arsne Lupin and the English Detective • Maurice Leblanc
... plenary meeting of the First Committee was held on the 2nd September, when Sir Littleton Groom (Australia) was elected Chairman, and M. Limburg (Netherlands) Vice-Chairman. Sir C. Hurst represented the British Empire. ...
— The Geneva Protocol • David Hunter Miller
... England, but not as big as the British Empire!" suggested Carnaby, feeling the conversation was drifting into ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... One is bewildered by the multitude of associations thronging on every side in a town in which, unlike other West Country ports, the pulse of life throbs as strongly as it did in the centuries long gone by. 'The sea-front of Plymouth,' says Mr Norway, 'is the most interesting spot within the British Empire, if not also the most beautiful. It is a large claim, but who ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... occasion in acts of thanksgiving with the spiritual heirs of Sts. Patrick, Augustine, Columba and St. Thomas of Canterbury. It is a noteworthy fact that the number of archiepiscopal and episcopal sees, together with vicariates-apostolic, &c., created by Pius IX. throughout the British Empire, is not less than one hundred ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... a History of the great events and movements of the present century, in our own country, throughout the British Empire, on the Continent of Europe, ...
— The Cockatoo's Story • Mrs. George Cupples
... these who were brothers, English by race, Afrikanders by birth, Boers by choice, I had some conversation. The war, they said, was going well. Of course, it was a great matter to face the power and might of the British Empire, still they were resolved. They would drive the English out of South Africa for ever, or else fight to the last ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... of course, that he hoped they would suffer from such evils. He believed we should get into such a snarl that the several states, one after another, would repent and beg on their knees to be taken back into the British empire. Frederick of Prussia, though friendly to the Americans, argued that the mere extent of country from Maine to Georgia would suffice either to break up the Union, or to make a monarchy necessary. No republic, he said, had ever long existed on so great a scale. The ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... aliens entering simply into the Roman empire, that is, under the domination of the Roman people. In just the same way today the Hindoos are not citizens but subjects of England; India is a part, not of England, but of the British Empire. ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... but during these years England's interest in North America was so largely expressed through the agency of the Virginia Company that its story constitutes one of the more significant chapters in the history both of the United States and of the British Empire. ...
— The Virginia Company Of London, 1606-1624 • Wesley Frank Craven
... visit and the life they are destined to lead. The fact is, Englishmen, as a body know nothing and care nothing about colonies. My own was merely the national ignorance. An Englishman's idea of a colony (he classes them altogether) is, that it is some miserable place — the Black-hole of the British empire — where no one would live if he were allowed a choice; and where the exiled spirits of the nation are incessantly sighing for a glimpse of the white cliffs of Albion, and a taste of the old familiar ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... character of any arrangements as to general disarmament require separate and detailed consideration. It would naturally be one of the subjects to be discussed by any League which may be formed. It is well to note from the outset (a) that a fleet is essential to the British Empire for purely defensive purposes, and for maintaining connection between the different parts of the Empire, but a great reduction in the size of the fleet may be possible by arrangement. The Allied Powers will ...
— Rebuilding Britain - A Survey Of Problems Of Reconstruction After The World War • Alfred Hopkinson
... several nations. Take as an example Switzerland which, although only a very small State, nevertheless comprises three national elements, namely German, French, and Italian. Another example is the British Empire, which is a world empire and comprises a ...
— The League of Nations and its Problems - Three Lectures • Lassa Oppenheim
... it), as the Trossachs. Little did Sir Walter suspect, when he penned the stirring iambics of The Lady of the Lake, that he was furnishing materials to the pedagogue which would be parsed, analysed, and dissected by myriads of pupils in all the schools of the British Empire. We shall all carry with us to the grave the leading passages of that romantic lay: the stag-hunt, the duel at Coilantogle Ford, the whistle that garrisoned the glen, and the episode of the Fiery Cross. Such lines, we may say, have gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... has taken place in our general health—an improvement in which science and religion have worked together, often without perceiving the association—and in the prolonging of youth which in countries like the British Empire and the United States is, within thirty or forty years, to ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... to be opposed to the federation of the British Empire. "The Labour party approaches Imperial problems with the politics of the industrious classes as guide on the one hand, and the internationalism of its nature as guide on the other."[485] Its "internationalism" apparently prevents it from approving of any practical scheme of Imperial Federation. ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... principal merchants of Boston, in defending and supporting the rights of America and the British Constitution, cannot fail to excite love and gratitude in the heart of every worthy person in the British empire. They discover a dignity of soul worthy the human mind, which is the true glory of man, and merits the applause of all rational beings. Their names will shine unsullied in the bright records of Panic to the latest ages, and unborn millions will rise ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... years, during which this peace was unbroken, a commander of the American navy, speaking at a banquet in the ancient Guildhall of London, was bold enough to predict: "If the time ever comes when the British Empire is seriously menaced by an external enemy, it is my opinion that you may count upon every man, every dollar, and every drop of blood of your kindred ...
— The Fight for a Free Sea: A Chronicle of the War of 1812 - The Chronicles of America Series, Volume 17 • Ralph D. Paine
... commonwealth of the British Empire in 1901. It was able to take advantage of its natural resources to rapidly develop its agricultural and manufacturing industries and to make a major contribution to the British effort in World Wars I and II. Long-term concerns include pollution, particularly depletion ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... rebellion. And this view was accepted by the leading political men of England. They held, all of them but a little band of republican- grounded sympathizers with the Patriots, that the principles announced by the Patriots went too far, and that, in clinging to them the Americans were endangering the British empire; and the only question among the public men of England was, whether the Crown or the Parliament was the proper instrumentality, as the phrase was, for reducing the Colonies to obedience. Lord Barrington, in his speech above cited, laid most stress on the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... it is a fine building, though partly in ruins. It is constructed entirely of granite, without any woodwork whatsoever; but its abounding interest lies not in its structure but in the fact that it was in this palace that the British Empire in India may be said ...
— The Story of Madras • Glyn Barlow
... apparent, that the invasion of Canada was never undertaken with a view to despoiling or injuring the people per se of that country; but for the simple purpose of making a descent upon a point of the British empire most accessible to the arms of the Republic of Ireland on this continent, in the hope of establishing a basis that would enable Irish Nationalists to operate successfully against a government that had for seven hundred years subjected their country, ...
— Ridgeway - An Historical Romance of the Fenian Invasion of Canada • Scian Dubh
... belief, is this year the power that Christianity has, or is fitted to have, to unite Christian denominations with one another, and also to unite races and nations, and different portions of that commonwealth of nations which we call the British Empire, and different classes within our own nation. A moment's reflection will shew that the question of unity between denominations of Christians derives special significance from being placed in connexion with all those other cases in regard to which the promotion ...
— The War and Unity - Being Lectures Delivered At The Local Lectures Summer - Meeting Of The University Of Cambridge, 1918 • Various
... paced to the light-house on the nose of the promontory, where the meteor flag, ringed by a bracelet of cannon, flies in the breeze. And then I meandered back, and began to ask myself, had Marryat aught to do with the sponsorship of this outpost of the British Empire? Shingle Point, Blackstrap Bay, the Devil's Tower, O'Hara's Folly, Bayside Barrier, and Jumper's Bastion—the names were all redolent of the Portsmouth Hard; and I almost anticipated a familiar hail at every moment from the open door of "The Nut," ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... City has been reflected upon the whole nation, and there are none so mean as not to have heard of the wealth, magnificence, and genial hospitality of the free-born citizens of the metropolis of the British empire. ...
— The Corporation of London: Its Rights and Privileges • William Ferneley Allen
... happened in the British ministry, and then he was suffered to relapse into his original obscurity. Admiral Matthews, though he did not undertake any expedition of importance against the maritime towns of Spain, continued to assert the British empire at sea through the whole extent of the Mediterranean. The Spanish army under don Philip was no sooner in motion, than the English admiral ordered some troops and cannon to be disembarked for the security of Villa-Franca. Some stores having been landed at Civita-Vecchia, for the use of the Spanish ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... apparently, on some private and incommunicable grief. Higher up are the business quarters, a few sky-scrapers in the American style without the modern American beauty, but one of which advertises itself as the highest in the British Empire; streets that seem less narrow than Montreal, but not unrespectably wide; "the buildings are generally substantial and often handsome" (the too kindly Herr Baedeker). Beyond that the residential part, with quiet streets, ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... study for Americans to-day is the spirit of nations as shown in this war, and great lessons for the United States may be found in the finance, business, patriotism, and justice that stand forth in the British Empire as never before. She is rolling up a tremendous war-power within her empire and throughout Europe, encircling the German war-power. But she is likewise looking to her own people and her own workers, filling her own factories and every laboring hand to the full that she may keep her business ...
— The Audacious War • Clarence W. Barron
... Great Britain would accept the opportunity to make a friend of the United States, the captures went on; and England added the impressment of American seamen from American merchant vessels. The idea that a subject of the British Empire could change his allegiance and become the citizen of another nation seemed to England a dangerous novelty. Still, if the great sea-power had been willing to pay a little more wages to her men-of-warsmen, she could have filled her ships by enlistment. If she had been content to "press" men from ...
— The Mentor: The War of 1812 - Volume 4, Number 3, Serial Number 103; 15 March, 1916. • Albert Bushnell Hart
... opened with the din of preparation throughout America for defensive war. It now was found that vigorous measures must be pursued to oppose the torrent which was preparing to overwhelm the colonies, which had now been dissevered from the British empire, by the declaration of independence. The continental army was now raising, and great numbers of American youth volunteered in the service of their country. A large army of reinforcements was soon expected from England to ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.
... little green motor cars carry "Pawnbrokers' Lists" to every police station to be distributed by hand. The Police Gazette goes out twice a week to the whole police forces of the British Empire. ...
— Scotland Yard - The methods and organisation of the Metropolitan Police • George Dilnot
... diplomacy as a whole are few. J. W. Foster's "Century of American Diplomacy" (1901) ends with 1876. C. R. Fish in "American Diplomacy" (1915) gives a narrative from the beginning to the present time. W. A. Dunning's "The British Empire and the United States" (1914) is illuminating and interesting. Few countries possess so firm a basis for the understanding of their relations with the world as J. B. Moore has laid down in his "Digest of International Law," ...
— The Path of Empire - A Chronicle of the United States as a World Power, Volume - 46 in The Chronicles of America Series • Carl Russell Fish
... particulars of the contest between these parties, and of the history of legislation on the subject, will be found in Porter's Progress of the Nation and McCulloch's Commercial Dictionary and Statistical Account of the British Empire; and more particularly in Bischoff's History of Wool (1842). The wool trade is now free from either import or ...
— The Natural History of Wiltshire • John Aubrey
... Germany would not mind it. A very large number of people in that country would welcome it, as it would be the only hope of preserving the existing order of things. The objection would not come from Germany, but from our own countries. Neither the British Empire nor America would agree to occupy Germany. France by itself could not bear the burden of occupation. We should therefore be driven back on the policy of blockading the country. That would inevitably mean Spartacism from the Urals to the Rhine, with its inevitable consequence of a huge red army ...
— Peaceless Europe • Francesco Saverio Nitti
... it is upon the direct representation of the electors, has appealed with greater force to English-speaking peoples; it has its advocates in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, as well as in England, and as a common electoral method for the British Empire is a desideratum in itself, the balance of advantage, at least for English-speaking peoples, would appear to be with ...
— Proportional Representation - A Study in Methods of Election • John H. Humphreys
... dominions are nothing without sufficient sea power, naval and mercantile, to win, to hold, and foster them. But Tudor England was gradually forming those naval and merchant services without which there could have been neither British Empire nor United States. ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... that was the great practical pressing question with which they were brought face to face. Ordination, Confirmation, and the government of the Church must of need be secured. Nor can we greatly wonder if what no entreaties had been able to obtain while the colonies were a part of the British Empire, seemed now to many an almost hopeless undertaking. The surrender at Yorktown in 1781 was to many American churchmen the death-blow to their hopes for an American Episcopate. There were men enough to see the difficulties and discouragements, to talk ...
— Report Of Commemorative Services With The Sermons And Addresses At The Seabury Centenary, 1883-1885. • Diocese Of Connecticut
... allowed from domestic toils, and may, perhaps, have little claim to the attention of the public, save that of throwing a faint light upon the manners and customs of that little-known, though interesting, appendage of the British empire. A long residence in that colony having given me ample means of knowing and of studying them in all their varying hues of light and shade. There, in the free wide solitude of that fair land whose youthful ...
— Sketches And Tales Illustrative Of Life In The Backwoods Of New Brunswick • Mrs. F. Beavan
... powerful support for the assembly and continuance of such a world congress as this could be easily and rapidly developed in North and South America, in Britain and the British Empire generally, in France and Italy, in all the smaller States of northern, central, and western Europe. It would probably have the personal support of the Czar, unless he has profoundly changed the opinions with which he opened his reign, the warm accordance of educated ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... must rest on a compromise of interests and abstract rights. Who would listen to the county of Bedford, if it were to declare itself disannexed from the British empire, and to ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... at length obtained internal quiet, and a settled Government under the Directory, and secured the alliance of Spain and Holland, prepared for a decisive blow against Great Britain. The condition of the British empire was at that time peculiarly critical. Of her allies, some had joined the enemy, and the others had proved unequal to resist him. In the East, the most powerful of the native princes were preparing to subvert her authority. At home, Ireland ...
— The Life of Admiral Viscount Exmouth • Edward Osler
... from his grave and see how his granddaughter is honored at your hands to-night, why, I think he would return whence he came, thanking God that his efforts to enslave us, in which for eight long years he drained the resources of the British Empire, ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... is obviously time that they quitted their posts. Three weeks later Mr. Wyndham resigned, but Sir Antony, who had had the refusal of the Governorship of Bombay—the third greatest Governorship in the British Empire—retained his position, though his presence at Dublin Castle had been described by some fervent Orangemen as a menace to the loyal and law-abiding inhabitants of Ireland, and by the Irish Attorney-General ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... and Mr. Alfred de Rothschild were present. The members of the bar mustered in force, and the reserved seats were chiefly occupied by ladies. Mr. Hardinge Gifford, Q.C. (now Lord Chancellor of the British Empire), and Mr. Watkin Williams, Q.C. (instructed by Messrs. Freshfield, the solicitors of the bank), appeared as counsel ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... polluted with no blood and sullied by no crime, were effected by the salutary agitations of the public mind, first set in motion by the masterspirit of O'Connell, and spreading from around him to every portion of the British empire like the undulations from the disturbed ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... yoked to the service of a great ideal. He was animated every day of his Sovereignty by the thought that he was at once the head and the chief servant of that vast complex organism which we call the British Empire. He recognized in the fullest degree both the powers and the limitations of a Constitutional Monarch. Here, at home, he was, though no politician, as every one knows, a keen Social Reformer. He loved his people at ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... remarks will be wholly misunderstood if they are taken to imply any spirit of Little Englandism on the part of the writer. On the contrary, he is ardently convinced of the mighty rle that will be played among the nations by the British Empire, and has had much good reason in going to and fro in the world to ponder on its unique achievement in the past. When fully organized on some terms of partnership as demanded by the growth of the Colonies, it will go even farther in ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... kind of half-way house between Britain and the United States. He understands Canada by right of birth; he can sympathise with the American spirit through the closest knowledge born of contiguity; his history makes him understand Britain and the British Empire. He is, therefore, a national interpreter between the two sundered ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... into two or three lines of good clear prose. Naturally the young man had undergone no sentimental troubles; he had not yet talked of marrying, and cared only for the society of mature women who took common-sense views of life. His religion was the British Empire; his saints, the men who had made it; his prophets, the politicians and publicists who held most firmly the ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... which we embark for Kut, a day's journey in a fast boat, is a large camp, and quite a town for Mesopotamia, captured from the Turks, early in the war, by sheer bluff. The Turkish commandant surrendered to a naval launch under the impression that about half the sea-power of the British Empire lay in the offing. As a matter of fact no other help of any kind arrived until the next day, and all the surrendered forces were kept on good behaviour by a Lieutenant and a marine—I think ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell
... glorious pile of structures devoted to religious and lofty objects, than London, Paris, and St Petersburg united can now boast. The Decapolis was a small and remote mountain district of Palestine, not larger in proportion to the Roman than Morayshire is in proportion to the British empire; yet it contained, as its name indicates, and as their remains still attest, ten cities, the least considerable of which, Gebora, contains, as Buckingham tells us in his Travels beyond the Jordan, the ruins of more sumptuous ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... the worst enemy. That was wealth, comfort, quiet business, lack of big disturbances and of great sufferings. The English Church still succeeded in preventing all the misuses and abuses of life under such circumstances. This success can be appreciated only if the British Empire is compared with an antique Pagan Empire. Where in this Empire is there a Lucullus or a Caracalla? The astonishing luxury, the bestial, insatiable passions? Or the furious competitions in petty things with which the social life of Rome was daily intoxicated? Yet English Christianity ...
— The Religious Spirit of the Slavs (1916) - Sermons On Subjects Suggested By The War, Third Series • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... do all this without departing in any way from those great principles of Free Trade, Industrialism, and Individual Liberty which have made our towns the largest, most crowded, and wealthiest under that sun which never sets over the British Empire. We do but need to see this great problem steadily and to see it whole, and we shall achieve this revolution in our national life without the sacrifice of a single principle or a single penny. Believe me, gentlemen, we shall yet eat ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Swiss Confederation: And by a strange combination of circumstances one method for depriving the predominant partner of legitimate authority may seem to a Home Ruler to lie near at hand. Raise the cry of 'Home Rule all round,' or of 'Federalise the British Empire.' Turn England into one State of a great federation, let Wales be another, Scotland a third, the Channel Islands a fourth, and for aught I know the Isle of Man a fifth. Let the self-governing Colonies, and British ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey
... believing that such barbarities could be practiced within the British Empire, were it not for the fact that Mr. Plaatje not only quotes from the act in extenso but quotes also from the debates in the Colonial Parliament to show that the intention of the legislators was to restrict the ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... old ladies who sit bewildered terrified.] They won't be here for more than a few minutes—they can't be. I want you to be nice to them—both of you. They are friends of mine. [She turns to the Doctor.] They're the girls I used to act with. We went all over Europe—twelve of us—representing the British Empire. They are ...
— Fanny and the Servant Problem • Jerome K. Jerome
... of the very few instances in history, of a nation whose political representation was so grossly defective as not merely to distort but absolutely to conceal its opinions. It was habitually looked upon as the most servile and corrupt portion of the British Empire; and the eminent liberalism and the very superior political qualities of its people seem to have been scarcely suspected to the very eve of the Reform Bill of 1832. That something of that liberalism existed at the outbreak of the American war, may, I think, be inferred from the very significant ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... we want of a hobby? We cannot ensure, even for the British Empire, an eternity of durability: nations decay and fashions change. Some day even stamp collecting may be superseded by a more engrossing hobby. The indications, however, are all in favour of its growing hold upon its universal public. The wealth invested in it is immense, its trading interests ...
— Stamp Collecting as a Pastime • Edward J. Nankivell
... great autobiographies ever written by a soldier) could fail to be impressed by his light touch. A delicate sense of the incongruous seems to have pervaded him; he is at his whimsical best when he sees himself in a ridiculous light. Lord Kitchener, one of the grimmest warriors ever to serve the British Empire, warmed to the man who made him the butt of a practical joke. There is the unforgettable picture of Admiral Beatty at Jutland. The Indefatigable has disappeared beneath the waves. The Queen Mary had exploded. The Lion was in flames. Then word came that the Princess Royal was blown up. ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... "THE British empire, sir," exclaimed an orator, "is one on which the sun never sets."—"And one," replied an auditor, "in which the tax-gatherer never ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... in partibus is not to be denied. That letters of these Inquisitors are laid before the Roman Inquisition is equally certain. Even in the time of Leo XII, when the church of Rome was far less active in the British empire than it is now, some particular case was always decided on Thursday, when the Pope, in his character of universal Inquisitor, presided in the congregation. It cannot be thought that now, in the height of its exultation, daring and aggression, this congregation has fewer emissaries, or ...
— Life in the Grey Nunnery at Montreal • Sarah J Richardson
... all the circumstances was often a matter of great astonishment even to himself. In his letters urging the imperial government to find an immediate remedy for this unfortunate condition of things, he acknowledged that there was "something captivating in the project of forming this vast British Empire into one huge Zollverein, with free interchange of commodities, and uniform duties against the world without; though perhaps without some federal legislation it might have been impossible to carry it out."[9] Undoubtedly, ...
— Lord Elgin • John George Bourinot
... against us, and the true inner significance of the struggle. And yet all that is worth living for depends upon the outcome of this war—for ourselves the future of the democratic ideal in these islands and in the British Empire at large, for the peoples of Europe deliverance from competing armaments and the yoke of racial tyranny. But before our future can be secured, sacrifices will be required of every citizen, and in a free community sacrifice can only spring from knowledge. Moreover, ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... of His Majesty's paternal solicitude for the welfare of his loyal subjects in the Province, and that, laying aside all groundless distrusts, they would cheerfully cooeperate with the King and the Lieutenant-Governor in advancing the prosperity of "that interesting and valuable portion of the British Empire." ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... poverty and misfortune, loyalty and devotion to the British Empire, have brought into the Dominion of Canada the people who, within a comparatively short period of time, have won from the wilderness a country whose present condition is the best evidence of their industrial activity. Religion ...
— The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People • John George Bourinot
... Nations may not be competent to banish from South-Eastern Europe. A certain number of people, who seem to expect us to take them seriously, assert that an English writer is disqualified from passing adverse comment on Italy's imperialistic aims because the British Empire has received, as a result of the War, some Turkish provinces and German colonies. It is said that, in view of these notorious facts, the Italian Nationalists and their friends cannot bear to be criticized by the pens of British authors and ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... the especial benefit of constable just ahead: "Wars for democracy and small nations! And that's the only way they can keep us in the British empire. Brute force. Nice exhibition for the American ...
— What's the Matter with Ireland? • Ruth Russell
... infantile affection. I understand that there was a lively scene over the purchase of a doll, the cost of which—clad only in its birthday dress—was reported to me as 'a fair affront.' Even after all these years Mary jibs at Continental prices. It is her way of keeping up the prestige of the British Empire, bless her. An overcharge, in her opinion, is a deliberate twist of the ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... Prime Minister; I shall bow. That was a failure. He looked at me like a fish. How rude the Cabinet makes people! The Cabinet always goes about with the British Empire pick-a-back. At least, it thinks the British Empire is pick-a-back. The Empire doesn't. About Lord Lindfield. He's turning grey over the temples, and I think that is so frightfully attractive. Of course, he's awfully old; he must be nearly forty. He's dining to-night, ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... If a man said that all boundaries between clans, kingdoms, or empires were nonsensical or non-existent, that would be a fallacy, but a consistent and philosophical fallacy. But when Mr. Bernard Shaw says that England matters so little that the British Empire might very well give up these islands to Germany, he has not only got hold of the sow by the wrong ear but the wrong sow by the wrong ear; a mythical sow, a sow that is not there at all. If Britain is unreal, the British Empire must be a thousand times more unreal. It is as if one said, ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... Ireland to be made the cat's-paw, of Germany. If war should come before the settlement of my business, this is the position I should take. I would cross to Dublin, and I would tell every Nationalist Volunteer to shoulder his rifle and to fight for the British Empire, and I would go on to Belfast—I, David Bullen—to Belfast, where I think that I am the most hated man alive, and I would stand side by side with the leader of those men of Ulster, and I would beg them to fight side by side with my Nationalists. And when the war was over, if my rights ...
— The Double Traitor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... meant by it, I think I can show you also some very funny passages in it. These things, for example, that you say about Canada and the colonies,—yes, here it is, page 148,—'In the event of war the loosely-joined British Empire will break into pieces, and the colonies will consult their own interests,'—excellently funny,—and this again,—'Canada will not permanently retain any trace of the English spirit,'—and this too,—'the Colonies can be completely ignored so far as the European theatre of war is ...
— Moonbeams From the Larger Lunacy • Stephen Leacock
... people born in Australia. The members of the "Australian Natives' Association" (A.N.A.), founded April 27, 1871, pride themselves on being Australian-born and not immigrants. Mr. Rudyard Kipling, in the 'Times' of Nov. 1895, published a poem called " The Native-Born," sc. born in the British Empire, but outside Great Britain. As applied to Plants, Animals, Names, etc., the word Native bears its original sense, as in "Native Cabbage," "Native Bear," "Native name for," etc., though in the last case it is now considered more correct to say in Australia "Aboriginal name ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... and that, therefore, if he allowed cyanide to leave Germany for the United States or Mexico the English would capture it and would use it to work South African mines, thus adding to the stock of gold and power in war of the British Empire. It was a long time before the German manufacturers and I could convince this gentleman that cyanide sufficient to supply all the British mines was manufactured near Glasgow, Scotland. He then reluctantly ...
— My Four Years in Germany • James W. Gerard
... tone and the breezy freshness of his work. His boy-heroes are neither prigs nor milk-sops, but in their strength and weakness they are the stuff which ultimately makes our best citizens and fathers; they are the boys who, later in life, with healthy minds in healthy bodies, have made the British Empire ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... Thames, 50 m. from the sea, the capital of the British Empire, is the most populous and wealthiest city in the world. An important place in Roman times, it was the cap. of the East Saxons, and has been the metropolis of England since the Norman Conquest; it possesses, therefore, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... faction, for the purpose of throwing the present Government out of office. Whenever I join in a vote to put Gentlemen opposite out of office, it shall be for something that the country will clearly understand—something that shall offer a chance of good to some portion of the British empire—something that shall offer a chance of advancing distinctly the great principles for which we—if we are a party at all on this side of the House— ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... in his cuttings he has followed the edition of the British Empire Shakespeare Society. But the performance in Kristiania has demanded more, "and my adaptation could not be so wonderfully ideal. As You Like It is, probably more than any other of Shakespeare's plays, ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... various colonies surrendered back to France by the treaty of Amiens, and assisted in compelling the dwindled army which Leclerc had commanded to evacuate St. Domingo. Buonaparte, on the other hand, despised utterly the distinction between the British Empire and Hanover—a possession indeed of the same prince, but totally unconnected with the English Constitution, and, as belonging to the Germanic Empire, entitled, if it chose, to remain neutral—and having first marched ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... in exchange is, we observe, spoken of as 'unprecedented'. The following extract from a work entitled, 'The British Empire in America,' written in 1740, shows that we are as yet far from having attained ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... say that there is no reason to fear the overthrow of the British Empire in India, because there are seventy-five thousand white troops in the peninsula, and they are fully able ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 38, July 29, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... been any question of attempting to apply it to anyone else. Now, however, it was pressed into requisition in order to compass the ruin of as loyal a subject as could have been found throughout the wide expanse of the British Empire; who had resided in Upper Canada for a continuous period of nearly eighteen months; who was no more an alien than the King upon the throne; and whose only real offence was that he would not stand calmly by while rapacious ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... Cheon relieved his grinning waitresses, we assured him collectively, and individually, and repeatedly that never had any one seen anything in Pine Creek so glorious as even the dimmest shadow of this feast; and as we reiterated our assurance, I doubt if any man in all the British Empire was prouder or more justified in his pride than our Cheon. Cook and gardener forsooth! Cheon was Cheon, and only Cheon; and there is no word in the English language to define Cheon or the position he filled, simply because there ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... of Tsar Alexander II. But none of those countries were given the chance to develop their powers and their resources as they would have been able to do, had England been less anxious about the fate of the Sultan, whose domains were necessary to the safety of the British Empire as a bulwark against ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... the American Republic effacing"—he smiled a little—"the old Queen's head and the new King's oath? Or is it to be our own stamp and character, acquired in the rugged discipline of our colonial youth, and developed in the national usage of the British Empire?"... ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... named after some of their own pirates, which is here and there designated by a gibbet; a singular object, be sure, to greet the eye of a stranger on entering the grand watery avenue of the capital of the British empire. But there is no room for disputing concerning our tastes. The reach where our prison was moored was about three miles below Chatham; and is named from the village of Gillingham. Now whether reach or stretch be the most proper term for an effort ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... association that evolved from the British Empire and that seeks to foster multinational ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... levying taxes on the colonies without asking their leave. In no remote way the fall of French Canada, by removing a near menace to the English colonies, led to this new conflict and to the collapse of that older British Empire which had sprung from the ...
— The Conquest of New France - A Chronicle of the Colonial Wars, Volume 10 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • George M. Wrong
... it is possible that they might have succeeded, had not an untimely death overtaken him. Holland, with bitter recollections of two recent wars with England, might have welcomed a chance to break up the British Empire and regain her lucrative tobacco trade. In its essential points it was the same plan which brought independence to America a century later ...
— Bacon's Rebellion, 1676 • Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker
... the economic situation. No moment could have been less fitting: no man more disinclined. That Lord Elgin's Viceroyalty and the Famine year should have been marked by the greatest Frontier War in the history of the British Empire in India, vividly displays how little an individual, however earnest his motives, however great his authority, can really control the course of ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... but since the beginning of human history. Neither the artificial combination of Alexander of Macedonia nor the ancient Roman Empire, neither Spain of Charles V. nor Napoleon's ephemeral dominion were nearly so great as the British Empire of to-day. Never has a nation possessed so much sea and so much land as the British. This wonderful Empire includes people of every race, countries of every climate, human societies of every degree of civilisation, ...
— Serbia in Light and Darkness - With Preface by the Archbishop of Canterbury, (1916) • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... help you to understand the state of Britain in those old days if you think of India to-day. India forms part of the British Empire, but the people who live there are not British. They are still Indians who speak their own languages, and have their own customs and religions. ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... contest was waged over the forcible retention of some eight hundred seamen among one hundred and forty-five thousand employed in British service. Granting the number were twice as great, he continued, "would the House believe that there was any man so infatuated, or that the British empire was driven to such straits that for such a paltry consideration as seventeen hundred sailors, his Majesty's government would needlessly irritate the pride of a neutral nation or violate that justice which was due to one country from another?" If Liverpool's argument explained the causes ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... of the Gospel, in the Missionary College of St. Augustine's, at Canterbury. This college, built on the site of the ancient monastery of St. Augustine, was established in 1848, for the reception of students intended for the work of the sacred Ministry in the colonies and dependencies of the British Empire, as well as among the heathen. The College, to which the Queen gave a charter of incorporation, owes its origin chiefly to the munificence of A. J. B. Beresford Hope, Esq., who purchased the ground, and gave the site. The College Chapel was consecrated on the morning of St. Peter's Day, June 29th, ...
— Kalli, the Esquimaux Christian - A Memoir • Thomas Boyles Murray
... will substitute an immediate and lasting peace for the disorders which Lord North's measures have created. The unbought loyalty of a free people, thus secured, will give us more revenue than any coercive measure. Indeed, it is the only cement that can hold together the British Empire." ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... the habit of the free, and such an explosion appeared as irrational and excessive as that of a powder-magazine in reply to nothing more than the light of a spark. It was known that a valorous General of the Algerian wars proposed to make a clean march to the capital of the British Empire at the head of ten thousand men; which seems a small quantity to think much about, but they wore wide red breeches blown out by Fame, big as her cheeks, and a ten thousand of that sort would never think of retreating. Their spectral advance on quaking ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith |
