"Chicanery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Master Pothier dit Robin was, of course, very great among the habitans, as he travelled from parish to parish and from seigniory to seigniory, drawing bills and hypothecations, marriage contracts and last wills and testaments, for the peasantry, who had a genuine Norman predilection for law and chicanery, and a respect amounting to veneration for written documents, red tape, and sealing-wax. Master Pothier's acuteness in picking holes in the actes of a rival notary was only surpassed by the elaborate intricacy of his own, which he boasted, not without reason, would ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... which Jadwin spoke was the legendary operation of the Board of Trade—a mammoth corner in September wheat, manipulated by this same Hargus, a millionaire, who had tripled his fortune by the corner, and had lost it by some chicanery on the part of his associate before another year. He had run wheat up to nearly two dollars, had been in his day a king all-powerful. Since then all deals had been spoken of in terms of the Hargus affair. Speculators said, "It was almost as bad as the Hargus deal." "It was like the ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... discovered it. They have pretty sharp distinctions of the fluctuating and the permanent. "Lightly come, lightly go," is a proverb, which they can very well afford to leave, when they leave little else, to the losers. They do not always find manors, got by rapine or chicanery, insensibly to melt away, as the poets will have it; or that all gold glides, like thawing snow, from the thief's hand that grasps it. Church land, alienated to lay uses, was formerly denounced to have this slippery quality. But some portions of it somehow ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... short the thread of this shocking series of corruption, oppression, fraud, and chicanery, which lasted for upwards of four years: Paterson remains without employment; the inhabitants of great provinces, whose substance and whose blood was sold by Mr. Hastings, remain without redress; and the purchaser, Debi Sing, that corrupt, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... peered into the hands, although she had already made up her mind what to say. Her faculties, sharpened by years of chicanery, told her from the look which Miss Greeby had given when Lambert followed Chaldea, that a desire to marry the man was the wish in question. And seeing how indifferent Lambert was in the presence of the tall lady, Mother Cockleshell had no ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... by side, not fused into one, not subject either to the other, but the Romans labouring at the arts of peace, the Goths wielding for their defence the sword of war. Over all was to be the strong hand of the King of Goths and Romans, repressing the violence of the one nation, correcting the chicanery of the other, and from one and all exacting the strict observance of that which was the object of his daily and nightly cares, CIVILITAS. Of this civilitas—which we may sometimes translate 'good order,' sometimes 'civilisation,' sometimes 'the character of a law-abiding citizen,' but ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... Quarrels of those who (professionally) live upon their labour. It is indeed astonishing that the awakening has been so long in coming; but surely it cannot be greatly delayed now. Underneath all the ambitions of certain individuals and groups; underneath all the greed and chicanery of others; underneath the widespread ignorance, mother of prejudice, which sunders folk of different race or colour-deep down the human heart beats practically the same in all lands, ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... dissimulation could not delude the sagacity of Count Markof, who was, therefore, soon less liked by the Minister than by the First Consul. All kind of low, vulgar, and revolutionary chicanery was made use of to vex or to provoke the Russian Ambassador. Sometimes he was reproached with having emigrants in his service; another time protection was refused to one of his secretaries, under pretence that he was a Sardinian subject. Russian travellers were ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... whose name seems to have been lost sight of amid much discussion and some chicanery with regard to the possession of the chateau, was a wise man in his day and instead of attempting to unite the feudal fortress and the hunting seat, as Le Nepveu was doing at Chambord, he was content to make of Azay-le-Rideau a palace of pleasure. Indeed, he seems to have allowed his fancy free ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... subjection. He broke no law of nations if, without notice, cause or provocation, he made war upon his neighbor in an attempt to conquer and subdue additional territory. He violated no principle of government if in carrying out his purpose he resorted to trickery, chicanery, and dishonesty. The result was that every ruler was suspicious ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... labor vote." Some rainbow promises of what they would do, together with a few scraps of legislation now and then— this constituted the bait held out by the politicians. That adroit master of political chicanery, President Van Buren, hastened to issue an executive order on April 10, 1840, directing the establishment of a ten-hour day, between April and September, in the navy yards. From the last day of October, however, until March 31, the "working ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... army in the cotton fields and workshops of the south? There are to-day as many houseless, homeless, poor, wandering, idle white men here as there are negroes in the same condition, yet no arrangements are made for their working. All the trickery, chicanery and political power possible are being brought to bear on the poor negro, to make him do the hard labor for the whites, ...
— Report on the Condition of the South • Carl Schurz
... himself in his church-building; that von Stein discerned vaguely; that William I emphasized in his cold-blooded, clear-eyed manner of the soldier; that von Sybel fought for; that scores, nay, hundreds and thousands of noble men and women, utterly apart from political chicanery, did indeed long for with all the fervor of their earnest God-fearing German nature; Bismarck stands in the centre, here ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... probably be. Let no man or woman say, 'If only circumstances were more favourable, oh, what a saint I could be; but how can I be one, with all these unfavourable conditions? How can a man keep the purity of his Christian life and the fervour of his Christian communion amidst the tricks and chicanery and small things of Manchester business? How can a woman find time to hold fellowship with God, when all day long she is distracted in her nursery with all these children hanging on her to look after? How can we, in our actual circumstances, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... they realised that they were safer in the immediate neighbourhood of a peaceful settlement than they would have been had they remained a prey to unscrupulous adventurers like Shan O'Neill. A member of the legal profession must feel shame and sorrow in recording the fact that the chicanery of the lawyers added much to the harshness of the politicians. That, however, is only another way of saying that the humane policy of the nineteenth century was unknown in the seventeenth. Had courts been established in Ireland like the native land courts ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous
... real ruler of Lalpuri State was the Dewan or Prime Minister, a clever, ambitious, and unscrupulous Bengali Brahmin, endowed with all the talent for intrigue and chicanery of his race and caste as well as with their hatred of the British. He had persuaded himself that the English dominion in India was coming to an end and was ready to do all in his power to hasten the event. For he secretly nourished ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... regard to means. His own people were tortured and executed by the thousand. By this savage policy he stamped out heresy, placed freedom of thought under a ban, and put an end to the intellectual progress of the country. In his dealings with other nations his diplomacy included all the arts of chicanery and deceit. ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot
... have trusted the integrity and discernment of his Praetorian praefects, he often placed himself by their side on the seat of judgment. The acute penetration of his mind was agreeably occupied in detecting and defeating the chicanery of the advocates, who labored to disguise the truths of facts, and to pervert the sense of the laws. He sometimes forgot the gravity of his station, asked indiscreet or unseasonable questions, and betrayed, by the loudness of his voice, and the agitation ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... competition, renders it a struggle to obtain a livelihood. It is notorious that thousands of men in America are obliged, as it were, to succumb to this influence or become paupers, and are thus driven out of the paths of strict rectitude and honesty of purpose, and compelled to resort to all sorts of chicanery to enable them to make two ends meet. In no instance is this more observable than in the "selling" propensities of the Americans. "For sale" seems to be the national motto, and would form an admirable ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... it matter, so all came right in the end! She would justify herself, if she had the chance. She was sick of conspiracy, and danger, and chicanery—and blood. She wanted her chance. She had been badly shaken in the last days in Spain, and she shrank from more worry and misery. She wanted to have a home and not to wander. And here was a chance—how good a chance she was not sure; but it was a chance. She would not hesitate to make ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... hurled at the aged singer, the conclusion of his sons was greeted by a general roar of laughter, the populace apparently recognising the picture of their own chicanery with amusement ...
— Punch Among the Planets • Various
... too late to meet them. Now I must inquire what you are doing, and how you are. Mamma and I hope that you are quite well. I am still in my very happiest humor; my head feels as light as a feather since I got away from that chicanery. ...
— The Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, V.1. • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
... conditions under which the Church of England now exercises that right of electing her chief pastors which has been from the beginning the heritage of Christendom. It would be difficult to imagine a more dexterous use of chicanery, preserving the semblance but carefully precluding the reality of a free choice. We all know something of Deans and Chapters—the well-endowed inhabitants of cathedral closes—and of those "greater Chapters" which consist of Honorary Canons, longing for more substantial preferment. It would ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... many taunts and jeers as Saint Jacques had the honour of receiving in Compostella, but the poor fellow took it so to heart, that at last they tried rather to assuage his grief. These artful compeers by a species of legal chicanery, decreed that the good man was not a cuckold, seeing that his wife had refused a consummation, and if the planter of horns had been anyone but the king, the said marriage might have been dissolved; but the amorous spouse was wretched unto ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... edition, and gouty blades of the highest degree. The great dorophages, bribe-mongers, have on their hands occupation enough, and enough on the hooks for their venison. There may they follow their prey; here is no garbage for them. You pettifoggers, garblers, and masters of chicanery, speak not to me, I beseech you, in the name of, and for the reverence you bear to the four hips that engendered you and to the quickening peg which at that time conjoined them. As for hypocrites, much less; although they were ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... miser of the first water who could be enticed neither to court nor into the houses of his neighbours. He was continually scraping money together and was not over particular in the choice of his scraper. By adroit chicanery he acquired possession of the gold mines of Verespatak, which he exploited with immense advantage, and by means of money lending and mortgages got into his hands the vast estate of Hatszegi in the counties of Hunyad and Feher, so that when he died it took thirty heavy wagons to convey ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... jumped to the conclusion of chicanery. At first there seemed no other explanation. "He stole it," she cried, rousing vehemently from her inertia—"mine—mine. He stole ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... poetic element in Morrison—something beyond the ken of the ordinary Philistine—and it had come to this. Fenwick remembered him among the drawings he had collected. Real taste—real sense of beauty—combined no doubt with the bargaining instinct and a natural love of chicanery. Moreover, Fenwick believed that, so far as a grasping temper would allow, there had been a genuine wish to help undiscovered talent. He thought of the hand which had given him the check, and had a vision of it holding the ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... allude merely to those caitiff scouts who, in these latter days of evil, infest the skirts of the profession, as did the recreant Cornish knights of yore the honorable order of chivalry; who, under its auspices, commit flagrant wrongs; who thrive by quibbles, by quirks and chicanery, and like vermin increase the corruption in which ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... chamber that lurks somewhere in every man's make-up, he felt that classic tradition had armed him with all the preparation necessary for heroic achievement. He, Chamberlain, was unexpectedly called upon to act as an agent of justice against chicanery and violence, and it was not in him to shirk the task. His labors, which, for the greater part of his life, had been expended in tracing the evolution of blind fish in inland caves, had not especially fitted him for dealing with the details of such a case as ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... almost incredible that such lawlessness and outrage and chicanery can exist in America—many of the outrages would disgrace Russia or Turkey—yet every episode related here has ten prototypes in Life, in Fact; not of twenty years ago, or yesterday, or the day before yesterday, but to-day. For instance, the number of sheep destroyed is given as ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... cases in which it comes of pure greed, and is of the same kind as any other injustice the capability of exercising which is more generally distributed. Why should a thief be unknown in a class, a proportion of the members of which is capable of wrong, chicanery, oppression, indeed any ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... of words or phrases has its parts separated by commas:— "Lying, trickery, chicanery, perjury, were natural to him." "The brave, daring, faithful soldier died facing the foe." If the series is in pairs, commas separate the pairs: "Rich and poor, learned and unlearned, black and white, Christian and ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... best clothes in view of an important bargain that was to be made. He had cunning little eyes, and a mouth that seemed to have acquired from many ancestors, and from the habits of a lifetime, a concentrated expression of rustic chicanery which told me that no business was to be done with him without ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... and his efforts in behalf of his country's interests were understood and appreciated. He returned to the United States with the firm conviction, which his Republican friends shared, that he had been made the victim of Federalist chicanery. In the following year he published an elaborate defense which served admirably as a popular campaign document in the ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... a family of distinction in Ireland; but as she expressed it, "she had been deprived of her birthright by the chicanery of law." In her former hours of tranquillity she had published some elegant odes, had written a tragedy and comedies—all which remained in MS. In her distress she looked up to her pen as a source of existence; and an elegant genius and a woman of polished ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... against a man's trying to assist himself by reasonable means to weather a financial storm or (looking at it from Shannon's point of view) having any sympathy with such means, if they bore about them the least suspicion of chicanery, jugglery, or dishonest manipulation of any kind. As both Shannon and Steger in due course observed for themselves in connection with this jury, it was composed of that assorted social fry which the ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... sir, that I will ever hire myself to chicanery, and be the willing promoter of fraud? If I do, may I ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... after building it; but himself he never blamed; people never do; it is so much easier to blame others,—and so much more comfortable. Mr. Macdermot thus regarded his creditor as a vulgar, low-born blood-sucker, who, having by chicanery obtained an unwarrantable hold over him, was determined, if possible, to crush him. The builder, on the other hand, who had spent a long life of constant industry, but doubtful honesty, in scraping up a decent fortune, looked on his debtor as one who gave himself ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... 'Such petty chicanery is not viewed, as with us, in the light of an offence, since, from the exceeding low value of the Chinese cash—twenty-seven being only equivalent to a penny—those must be bad indeed which will not pass current with the rest; and, accordingly, the inferior sorts, when used in moderation, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 439 - Volume 17, New Series, May 29, 1852 • Various
... shall see how long your—your TRICK will prevent the child's going where she belongs. I wish you to understand that I shall continue this fight to the very last. I—I am not one to be easily beaten. Simpson, you and Thomas come with me. This night's despicable chicanery is only the beginning. This is bad business for you, Cy Whittaker," he snarled, his self-control vanishing, "and"—with a vindictive glance at the schoolmistress—"for those who are with you in it. That appointment was ...
— Cy Whittaker's Place • Joseph C. Lincoln
... that Kent took Ormsby into his confidence when the campaign was fairly opened. She put it diplomatically on the ground of charity to an exiled millionaire, temporarily out of a job; but her real reason went deeper. From its inception as a one-man fight against political chicanery in high places, the criticism of the Bucks formula was beginning to shape itself in a readjustment of party lines in the field of State politics; and Miss Van Brock, whose designs upon Kent's future ran far in advance of her admissions ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... upon—the established order of things destroyed homes broken up the people impoverished, and hordes of unscrupulous adventurers swarmed up from the South and overrun the country in pursuit of schemes of political chicanery and personal ambition, peculation and plunder, as was the South after ...
— History of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, • Edumud G. Ross
... distinguished himself most honourably as the fearless advocate of honest government, and the pronounced enemy of those underhand dodges and wire-pulling machinery which are too often the disgrace of American politics. He was opposed to all corruption and chicanery, especially to the bad system of rewarding political supporters with places under Government, which has long been the chief blot upon American republican institutions. As a person of stalwart honesty and singleness of purpose, he made himself respected by both ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... only increased by his imperial utterances, which show utter unconsciousness of the impending doom. In the assassination all the complicating forces—the self-confidence of Caesar, the unworldly patriotism of Brutus, the political chicanery of Cassius, the unscrupulousness of Casca, and the fickleness of the mob—bring about an event which changes the lives of all the characters concerned and threatens the stability of the Roman nation. The death of Caesar is the climax of the physical action of the ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... the society of so devout a companion. He entertained his good friends, the merry little man, by dressing up as a woman, a role his smooth face and effeminate features well fitted him to play. If business were alluded to, the merry gentleman railed at the delay and chicanery of lawyers; it was that alone that postponed the liquidation of the Duplessis inheritance; as soon as the lawyers could be got rid of, the purchase-money of his new estate would be promptly paid up. But as ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... declared they meant to give me up my farm, and would not keep it any longer upon lease. I not unnaturally complained, but they retorted by ostentatiously unfolding the deed; and I found myself without any defense against their chicanery. When it came to this, I told them that Duke and Prince of Florence would not suffer folk to be so infamously massacred in their cities. That menace worked so forcibly upon their minds that they once more despatched Raffaello Schegcia, ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... after his death) was soon disgusted and disappointed with the ordinary avocations of the Forum,—its low standard of virtue, and its diversion of what is ennobling in the pure fountains of natural justice into the turbid and polluted channels of deceit, chicanery, and fraud; its abandonment to usurious calculations and tricks of learned and legalized jugglery, by which the end of law itself was baffled and its advocates alone enriched. But what else could be expected of lawyers ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... clear, they would gladly have led a forlorn hope in Don Lovell's interests. Agitation over the matter was maintained at white heat for several days, as we again angled back towards the Cimarron. Around the camp-fires at night, the chicanery of The Western Supply Company gave place to the best stories at our command. "There ought to be a law," said Runt Pickett, in wrathy indignation, "making it legal to kill some people, same as rattlesnakes. Now, you take a ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... wry face. He wanted the Seals. It was a long-cherished desire. A teacher of law under the Empire, he gave, in cafes, lessons that were appreciated. He had the sense of chicanery. Having begun his political fortune with articles skilfully written in order to attract to himself prosecution, suits, and several weeks of imprisonment, he had considered the press as a weapon of opposition which every good government should break. Since ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... contracts. It is a wrong system from the start. We ought to have a competitive system and award our contracts to the lowest bidder who will do good work. Instead of that, there seems to have been some sort of chicanery by which McAlister was given all these little contracts,—on every one of which he makes a big profit,—while the other bidders were not ...
— A Woman for Mayor - A Novel of To-day • Helen M. Winslow
... the integrity of the Pontiff had now failed; and Henry saw with alarm that the thunder, which he had so long feared, was about to burst on his dominions. A plan of adjustment had been arranged between his envoys and Alexander; and to defeat the chicanery of his advisers, it was accompanied with the threat of an interdict if it were not executed within the space of forty days. He consented to see the Archbishop, and awaited his arrival in a spacious meadow near the town of Freitville on ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... with a little patience, the fort would surrender without firing a shot, as Toolajee was already in their hands and ready to treat. Alarmed at the great armament coming against him, and cowed by recent reverses, Toolajee had come as a suppliant into the Mahratta camp to try if, by finesse and chicanery, he might escape utter destruction, while, in Gheriah, he had left his brother-in-law with orders to defend it to the last. The Peishwa's officers, on their side, were anxious to get the place into their hands without ...
— The Pirates of Malabar, and An Englishwoman in India Two Hundred Years Ago • John Biddulph
... working-man—he who consumed it—was ruined upon the other. But between the two, the great operators, who never saw the wheat they traded in, bought and sold the world's food, gambled in the nourishment of entire nations, practised their tricks, their chicanery and oblique shifty "deals," were reconciled in their differences, and went on through their appointed way, ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... beginning, not as a system of persecution, but as masterpieces of the most subtle and refined politics. And to say the truth, these laws, at first view, have rather an appearance of a plan of vexatious litigation and crooked law-chicanery than of a direct and sanguinary attack upon the rights of private conscience: because they did not affect life, at least with regard to the laity; and making the Catholic opinions rather the subject of civil regulations ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... festival of the Bromo is celebrated to-day, when Siva, the Third Person of the Hindu Triad, is propitiated by a living sacrifice. Goats and buffaloes were flung into the flaming crater long after the offering of human victims was discontinued, but, alas for the chicanery of a degenerate age! even the terrified animals thrown into the air by the sacrificing priest never reach the mystic under-world, their downward progress being arrested by a skilled accomplice, who catches them at a lower level, and risks great Siva's wrath by preserving ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... is going to give me his vise [i.e. the French term for "visa"] of my passport through France after repeated applications in Paris, but this is subject to all manner of chicanery, which is disgusting to me, and must be got out of the way, so that in future I may be able to pass without difficulty and at any time through and into France. I shall therefore pay a visit to the ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... vassals, the king of England. Whilst Edward was doing his best to bring Scotland into subjection by open war, Philip was doing his best to disturb Edward in his hold upon Aquitaine by secret intrigues and legal chicanery. Ill-feeling increased on both sides. Philip welcomed David Bruce and gave him protection in France, and in 1336 French sailors attacked English shipping and landed plunderers in the Isle of Wight. In 1337 Edward determined to resist, and the long war roughly ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... arrest yesterday evening, what did I do but hurry away to find the Cointets and try to obtain such concessions as might satisfy you. If you try to keep the discovery to yourselves, you will continue to live a life of shifts and chicanery. You must give in, or else when you are exhausted and at the last gasp, you will end by making a bargain with some capitalist or other, and perhaps to your own detriment, whereas to-day I hope to see you make a good one with MM. ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... subject—inventiveness is a personal matter, beyond all formulas—the true general must be able to take in, deceive, decoy, delude his adversary at every turn, as the particular occasion demands. In fact, there is no instrument of war more cunning than chicanery; (6) which is not surprising when one reflects that even little boys, when playing, "How many (marbles) have I got in my hand?" (7) are able to take one another in successfully. Out goes a clenched fist, ...
— The Cavalry General • Xenophon
... head. But the movement would not come. His thoughts were of the game, and ere yet the last words of the money-lender had ceased to sound, he was captured. The satanic cunning of the proposal was lost upon his sodden intellect. It was a contemptible, pitiable piece of chicanery with which Lablache sought to trap the old man into giving his consent and assistance. The money-lender had no intention of losing the game. He knew he must win. He was merely resorting to this means because he knew the gambling spirit of the rancher. He knew that "Poker" ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... openness of their cheat. A more commonplace imposture has never been offered for acceptance, even to the most ignorant of mankind. It appeals neither to reason nor romance. The one is insulted by the very shallowness of its chicanery, while its rank plebbishness disgusts the other. Even the nomenclature, both of its offices and office-bearers, has a vulgar ring that smacks of ignoble origin. The names "twelves," "seventies," "deacons," "wifedoms," "Smiths" (Hiram and Joseph), Pratt, Snow, Young, Cowdery, and the like—coupled ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... act with a free hand. By a piece of chicanery he managed to get a legal decision acknowledging the dispensing power of the king.(1576) He established an Ecclesiastical Commission Court, with the infamous Jeffreys at its head, the first act of which was to suspend the Bishop of London for upholding the Protestant faith. ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume II • Reginald R. Sharpe
... prayer. "Heresiarch recant, or leave the school:" A recantation proved the knave no fool.[2] Behold him later in another sphere, Where thieves abound and murderers appear; Tricked out in low and meretricious art, He plays with skill the pettifogger's part; Chicanery's brought to succor darkest crime, Too basely foul t' expose in decent rhyme. Oh! shades of Littleton and Murray rise, Where Webster trod and Choate all honor'd lies— Rise to behold the satyr in their place, Who points the moral of his clime and race; And if decay and shame may ...
— The American Cyclops, the Hero of New Orleans, and Spoiler of Silver Spoons • James Fairfax McLaughlin
... miserably hampered. The new rulers have come down to Washington very much in the spirit of the Goths when they captured Rome. Every one is on the make. The contract system is something beyond the wildest excesses I ever read of in pillage and chicanery. Shoes by the million have been accepted that melt as soon as they are wet; garments are stacked mountain-high in the storehouses that blow into rags so soon as the air goes through them. Food, moldy, filthy, is accumulated ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... administration or in housekeeping. From this springs the profound truth that the constitutional system is infinitely dearer than the monarchical system. For a nation as for a household, it is the government of the happy balance, of mediocrity, of chicanery. ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... tolerating the inspectors only as a matter of form, but heroic, generous, faithful, distributing the pension offered to himself among six wounded captains under his command, mediating for poor litigants in the mountain, driving off his grounds the wandering attorneys who come to practice their chicanery, "the natural protector of man even against ministers and the king. A party of tobacco inspectors having searched his curate's house, he pursues them so energetically on horseback that they hardly ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... place a big dog, which falls upon him when he opens the sack." It is to be noted that the cycle as here outlined consists really of two parts,—the "biter biting" and the "biter bit." Cosquin (2 : 209) believes that the last two episodes—the maiden gained by chicanery, and the substitution of an animal for her in the sack—form a separate theme not originally a part of the cumulative motive; and, to prove his belief, he cites a number of Oriental tales containing ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... disposal of the government. Moreover, there is a manifest disposition, on the part of architects everywhere, to help in this matter all they can. The danger dwells in the possibility that their advice will not be heeded, their services not be fully utilized, but through chicanery, ignorance, or inanition, we will relapse into the tentative, "expensively provisional" methods which have governed the housing of workers hitherto. Even so, architects will doubtless recapture, and more ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... fraternal enormities of the Factory and Poorhouse,—the Barracks and Hospital. And the final law in this matter is that, if you require edifices only for the grace and health of mankind, and build them without pretense and without chicanery, they will be sublime on a modest scale, and ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... on board an American merchant-man. However, there is now, or was but lately, a boarding-house keeper in San Francisco whose Christian or first name had been abolished in favour of "Shanghai." I had the very doubtful honour of knowing him, and could easily believe any stories told of his chicanery ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... papers. Mr. Bordacsi, for that was his name, had an extraordinary faculty for so identifying himself with any complicated case he might take up as to absolutely live and breathe in it. Any attempt at sophistry or chicanery made him downright venomous, and he only recovered himself when, by dint of superior acumen, he had enabled the righteous cause to triumph. He was also far-famed for his incorruptibility. Whoever approached him with ducats was incontinently kicked out-of-doors, and if any pretty woman visited him ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... the wrappings from grandiose things. Public crimes are no less crimes because they are committed to the sound of trumpets, and the chicanery of crowned intriguers is morally the same as the tricks of hedge bandits. It is privilege of genius to get down to fundamentals. Behind the stately speech of international pourparlers and the ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... results are concerned, there is not much difference between them for the innocent investor. They both lead him to failure. They are unlike only in this, that the pathway of the one is lined with deception, crookedness and chicanery; of the other, with blasted hopes based upon good intentions but bad information. Both lead to the self-same sepulcher which in the distance looks white and beautiful but when reached is filled with ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Third Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... all the graphic art of a novelist, a wellnigh incredible story. Chicanery, fraud, blackmail, bribery of a legislature and of a judge, systematic pillage of investors ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... Cynthie whilst she tended the fire. We made good whiskey," he said neither boastfully nor modestly. "We sold it for an honest price. That's the way we learnt Ben to do. But, hi crackies, what takes my hide and taller is when a son o' mine turns out yaller. I never raised my boy for no chicanery." Old Jorde's voice raised in indignation. However, when he spoke again there was a note of tolerance even pity in ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... commissioners.—Here is no hint that can be tortured into a glance at fox-hunters, or game-preservers, of the society for promoting rural deans, at your double system of contradictory law, at special pleading at quarter-sessions,{C} at the technical rigour of your institutions, at the delay, chicanery, and expense of your judicial proceedings, at the refinement, ease, wit, gayety, and disinterested respect for merit, which, as every body knows, distinguish your social character; nothing is said of the annual meeting of chemists, geologists, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... consented to do, and did as follows: "This, sire," I said gravely, "is an old and brave soldier; who formerly served your Majesty to good purpose in Normandy, but has been cheated out of the recompense which he there earned by the trickery and chicanery of one of your Majesty's counsellors, the ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... tempting prospect. Our position in the matter is quite plain: so long as Great Britain insists on maintaining the Act of Union she must do so consistently in the sense that it is a contract, albeit secured by chicanery, to the breach of any term of which the consent of the party which it trammelled at least is necessary. It will be answered that the Disestablishment of the Irish Church made a breach in a clause of as binding a solemnity as that which guaranteed 100 members in the Imperial Parliament "for ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... heart leads you to truth; because the precision and extent of your legal knowledge enables you to find the right way of doing the right thing; because a thorough knowledge of legal art and legal form is, in your hands, not an instrument of chicanery, but the plainest, easiest and shortest way to the end of strife.... I hope you will weigh these observations, and apply them to the business of the ensuing week, and beyond that, in the common occupations of your profession: always bearing in your minds the emphatic words of the text, and often ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... was my inmost thought as I noted his cool and calculating eye. "But very dangerous chicanery," I added. Was the ring upon whose immediate capture I now saw that a life, if not lives, depended, in his possession, or in that of Madame, or in that of the Quaker-like girl sitting a few seats from me? How impossible to tell, and yet how imperative ...
— The Bronze Hand - 1897 • Anna Katharine Green (Mrs. Charles Rohlfs)
... unaccommodating, the features of his character had the hardihood of antiquity. His august mind overawed majesty; and one of his sovereigns thought royalty so impaired in his presence, that he conspired to remove him, in order to be relieved from his superiority. No state chicanery, no narrow system of vicious politics, sunk him to the level of the vulgar great; but, overbearing, persuasive, and impracticable, his object was England, his ambition, fame. A character so exalted, so unsullied, so various, ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... but now that will not do," shouted Lebedeff's nephew, his voice dominating all the others. "The matter must be clearly stated, for it is obviously not properly understood. They are calling in some legal chicanery, and upon that ground they are threatening to turn us out of the house! Really, prince, do you think we are such fools as not to be aware that this matter does not come within the law, and that legally we cannot claim a rouble from you? But we are also aware that if actual ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... necessities as food, shelter, clothing, leisure and reasonable comfort, but towards the creation of unnecessary luxury and artificial frippery, towards the piling up, by means of advertisement, monopoly, exploitation and every kind of chicanery of unproductive ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... nobleness; why act holily and nobly in it either, if there were no holy, noble, and divine principle or ground for it? And thus grew up, both in Egypt, Syria, and Byzantium, a chaos of profligacy and chicanery, in rulers and people, in the home and the market, in the theatre and the senate, such as the world has rarely seen before or since; a chaos which reached its culmination in the seventh century, the age of Justinian and Theodora, perhaps the two most hideous sovereigns, worshipped by ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... features of his character had the hardihood of antiquity, his august mind overawed majesty, and one of his sovereigns thought royalty so impaired in his presence that he conspired to remove him, in order to be relieved from his superiority. No state chicanery, no narrow systems of vicious politics, no idle contest for ministerial victories sunk him to the vulgar level of the great; but, overbearing, persuasive, and impracticable, his object was England,—his ambition was fame; ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... civilisation of the Old World. The United States cannot claim to be exempt from manifestations of economic slavery, of grinding the faces of the poor, of exploitation of the weak, of unfair distribution of wealth, of unjust monopoly, of unequal laws, of industrial and commercial chicanery, of disgraceful ignorance, of economic fallacies, of public corruption, of interested legislation, of want of public spirit, of vulgar boasting and chauvinism, of snobbery, of class prejudice, of respect of ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... draw a conclusion, you must not let it be foreseen, but you must get the premisses admitted one by one, unobserved, mingling them here and there in your talk; otherwise, your opponent will attempt all sorts of chicanery. Or, if it is doubtful whether your opponent will admit them, you must advance the premisses of these premisses; that is to say, you must draw up pro-syllogisms, and get the premisses of several ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy • Arthur Schopenhauer
... poetic light had shone about them, where indeed they had not glowed in a halo of sanctification. Now, by some chance, this light was gone, and he saw them instead as untutored and unwashed barbarians, filled with animal lusts and ferocities, struggling by violence and foul chicanery to secure a foothold in a country which did not belong to them—all rude tramps and robbers of the ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... Were they a wild degeneration from a principle originally noble? Or, on the contrary, this life and this death, were they alike the expression of a base mercenary selfishness, caught and baffled in the meshes of its own chicanery? The life, if it could be appreciated in its secret principles, might go far to illustrate the probable character of the death. The death, if its circumstances were recoverable, and could be liberated from the self-contradictory details in the received ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... in the simplest and most rudimentary forms of life. Under the systems which we call patriarchal, the modern distinction between sins and crimes had no existence. All gross sins were offences against society, as it then was constituted, and, wherever it was possible, were punished as being so; chicanery and those subtle advantages which the acute and unscrupulous can take over the simple, without open breach of enacted statutes, became only possible under the complications of more artificial polities; and the oppression or injury of man by man was ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... interesting to outline the procedure as a social document in chicanery, or social surgery, as one wills to ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... was Zenteno, who, previous to the revolution, had been an attorney at Conception, and was a protege of General San Martin—carrying with him into State Administration the practical cunning of his profession, with more than its usual proportion of chicanery. As he was my bitter opponent, obstructing my plans for the interests of Chili in every possible way, it might ill become me to speak of him as I then felt, and to this day feel. I will therefore adduce the ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 1 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... sell his connection. Desroches, our friend Desroches, understood the full resources of a trade carried on in a beggarly way enough by poor devils; he would buy up causes of men who feared to lose the day; he plunged into chicanery with a fixed determination to make money by it. He was right; he did his business very honestly. He found influence among men in public life by getting them out of awkward complications; there was our dear les Lupeaulx, ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac
... asked for an increase of salary. But have I ever CABALLED for it? No, you would be wrong in thinking so, my dearest one. HOW could I ever have done so? You yourself have had many opportunities of seeing how incapable I am of deceit or chicanery. ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... the law discovered by Darwin, that the female surrenders herself to the fittest male, to him who knows how to adapt himself to the medium in which he lives, and to live in Manila there was no other like Pelaez, who from his infancy had had chicanery at his finger-tips. Lent passed with its Holy Week, its array of processions and pompous displays, without other novelty than a mysterious mutiny among the artillerymen, the cause of which was never disclosed. The houses of light materials ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... from some distaste or disability, could never so much as understand the meaning of the word POLITICS, and has given up trying to distinguish Whigs from Tories; but take her on her own politics, ask her about other men or women and the chicanery of everyday existence - the rubs, the tricks, the vanities on which life turns - and you will not find many more shrewd, trenchant, and humorous. Nay, to make plainer what I have in mind, this same woman has a share of the ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a legal fiction a mine that yields a million annually is simply a robbery of the commonwealth. The robbery of the commonwealth and the toiler is our chronic condition. The urban population, strong in capital and skilful in combination and chicanery, has drained the agricultural regions, until agriculture,[4] toil, and poverty, are closely associated, while urban wealth displays its ostentatious ease, and farmers are driven by the million into a desperate political struggle ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... of this financial depression were several. One morning he awoke to find himself deprived, by political chicanery, of the income of a custom-house surveyorship which for some while past had served to support his small family. Now, some men could have gone on writing stories in the intervals between surveying ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... Burn complained,[80] was often a petty tyrant: his aim was to depopulate his parish; to prevent the poor from obtaining a settlement; to make the workhouse a terror by placing it under the management of a bully; and by all kinds of chicanery to keep down the rates at whatever cost to the comfort and morality of the poor. This explains the view taken by Arthur Young, and generally accepted at the period, that the poor-law meant depopulation. Workhouses had been started in the seventeenth ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... or public measures, the casting a vote, which is the result of that study and estimate, certainly have in themselves nothing to degrade the most delicate and refined nature. The violence, the fraud, the crime, the chicanery, which, so far as they have attended masculine struggles for political power, tend to prove, if they prove anything, the unfitness of men for the suffrage, are not the result of the act of voting, but are the expressions of course, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... warmed into regrettable outbursts of opinion that were reactionary in the extreme. Thus when he discussed with Gideon and Harvey D. the latest number of the magazine—containing the fearless exposure of Washington's chicanery—he spoke in terms most slighting of Emmanuel Schilsky. He meant his words to lap over to Merle Whipple, but as the others were still proud—if in a troubled way—of the boy's new eminence, he did not distinguish him too pointedly. He pretended to take it all out on Emmanuel, whom he ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... unpleasantly upon the Virginia lordling's ear, and he echoed it with a suspicion of a frown upon his brow. "I am not an adept in chicanery!" ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... but preferred the pleasanter occupation of making money at home. He had converted the power of his great place, that of Speaker of the House of Representatives, into lucre, and was exposed. By mingled chicanery and audacity he obtained possession of his own criminating letters, flourished them in the face of the House, and, in the Cambyses vein, called on his people to rally and save the luster of his loyalty from soil at the hands of rebels; and they came. From all the North ready acclaims ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... democracy, a disposition to lose faith in it because of its undoubted weakness and inconvenience in a struggle with States autocratically governed; there is even a sort of secret reaction to autocracy. On those lines there is no way out of a future of bitter rivalries, chicanery and wars, and the probable total failure of our civilisation. The only cure which I can see lies in democratising the whole world and removing the present weaknesses and shams of democracy by education of the individual ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... believes that this basic law can be applied by breaking the laws of his society in secret. What he fails to see is that such lawbreaking requires such a fantastic network of lies, subterfuges, evasions, and chicanery that the structure itself eventually breaks down and his guilt is obvious to all. The very steps he has taken to keep from getting caught eventually become signposts that point unerringly at the ...
— The Highest Treason • Randall Garrett
... arduous. Directors of theatres and concert halls, furious to see a part of their public tempted away, raised the cry of immorality against the new-comers, and called to their aid every resource of law and chicanery. At the end of the first year Salis found himself with over eight hundred summonses and lawsuits on his hands. After having made every effort, knocked at every door, in his struggle for existence, he finally conceived the happy ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... regarded them as a guarantee for the submission of the nation and as a chain by which he held it captive. Accordingly, he left no expedient untried to evade the persevering importunity of the states, who demanded the withdrawal of these troops; and for this end he exhausted all the resources of chicanery and persuasion. At one time he pretended to dread a sudden invasion by France, although, torn by furious factions, that country could scarce support itself against a domestic enemy; at another time they were, he said, to receive his son, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... the obligations under which the Burra people bend, introducing discord into families, restraining the energies of the fishermen, and tending to a deeply rooted aversion towards the lessees and their service, but producing systems of chicanery and deceit subversive of moral principle and destructive of all efforts in the proper training ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... freed from the endless wars and perils of the African jungle. Moreover, they were needed to develop the South, while in the trade, the hardy and daring sailors were trained, who in time would make the American navy the great power of the deep. Political chicanery in Congress reinforced the clamor from without, and though act after act for the destruction of the traffic was passed, none proved to be enforcible—in each was what the politicians of a later day called a "little joker," making it ineffective. But in 1820 a law ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... our nature. I arrived at Laurvig, and found myself in the midst of a group of lawyers of different descriptions. My head turned round, my heart grew sick, as I regarded visages deformed by vice, and listened to accounts of chicanery that was continually embroiling the ignorant. These locusts will probably diminish as the people become more enlightened. In this period of social life the commonalty are always cunningly attentive to their own interest; but their faculties, confined ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... real worth the possession of this knowledge. Knowledge of Indian character has too long been synonymous with knowledge of how to cheat the Indian—a species of cleverness which, even in the science of chicanery, does not require the exercise of the highest abilities. I fear that the Indian has already had too many dealings with persons of this class, and has now got a very shrewd idea that those who possess this knowledge of his character have also ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... have gone to the courts, which, according to the Governor's judgment when he was appealing to me to be sustained, would require one year for decision. Meantime the State was overflowed, the Levee boards tied up by political chicanery, and nothing done to relieve the poor people, now fed by the charity of the Government and ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... now, Vincent,' Mabel said. 'Mark, you never would see anything so very bad in the trick Harold played Dolly about that wretched stamp—see if this doesn't alter your opinion.' And she told them the whole story, as it has been already described, except that the motives for so much chicanery were necessarily dark to her. A little comparison of dates made it clear beyond a doubt that an envelope with the Ceylon stamp had been burnt just when Vincent's letter should in the ordinary course ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... like blocks of wood. At last Pierre met with a stroke of luck which enabled him to return the ten thousand francs to his son. When, however, he wanted to reckon up accounts with him, Aristide interposed so much chicanery that he had to let the couple go without deducting a copper for their board and lodging. They installed themselves but a short distance off, in a part of the old quarter called the Place Saint-Louis. The ten thousand francs were soon consumed. They had everything to get for their new ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... of dates he discovered that the bridegroom had brought his bride to the house on the day he had quitted Raynham, and this was enough to satisfy Adrian's mind that there had been concoction and chicanery. Chance, probably, had brought him to the old woman: chance certainly had not brought ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... attention to the support of a very formidable military power, exerted very extraordinary endeavours in cultivating the civil interests of his country. He reformed the laws of Brandenburgh, and rescued the administration of justice from the frauds of chicanery. He encouraged the arts of agriculture and manufacture; and even laid the foundation of naval commerce, by establishing an East-India company in the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... singular thing to see the farmers suddenly begin to ask themselves why they should stand quietly by while the townsmen monopolized all the offices and defied the farmers to make a change. They laughed at the charges of chicanery in office, and openly said that "no man with corns on his hands and hayseed in his hair can be elected to office in the county." This speech was of the greatest value to the young champions. ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... and looked about her with a courageous and encouraging eye. "It is embarrassing," she said. "Judge Briscoe, we are contemplating 'a piece of the blackest treachery and chicanery.' We are going to give Mr. Halloway the—the go-by!" The embarrassment fell away, and everybody ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... to do them any good? Are not their very creeds pretexts for slaughter and persecution and fraud? Do they not support even their holiest truths, their sincerest beliefs, by organised systems of deceit and chicanery? Chut! I tell you that the very vesture which men compel Truth to wear, is lined and stiffened with lies! The mysteries of life are so terrible, and its sadness so profound, that blatant tongues do not become philosophers. Words only serve to rend ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... confessions of his son, the result of a deep-laid plot for his entrapment and ruin, and could only believe his malady to be the result of a collusion on the part of Miss Williamson and her father, by whose joint wiles and chicanery the young man's peace of mind had been destroyed, and he driven from the land. In the firm belief of this, he wrote to Mr. Williamson, adverting in the strongest terms to the injury he conceived himself to have sustained at his hands, couching his epistolary invective in ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... looking on as a spectator, he had seen sentenced and sent to the guillotine. The man was the same, with his obstinate, opinionated look; the procedure was the same. He gave his answers in a cunning, brutish way that ruined the effect even of the most convincing. His cavilling and chicanery and the accusations he levelled against his subordinates, made you forget he was fulfilling the honourable task of defending his honour and his life. Everything was uncertain, every statement disputed,—position of the armies, total of forces engaged, ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... believe it is the duty of the Senate of the United States, as it regards its own honor and the future of our country, never the leave this matter in its present condition, to be believed by some and disbelieved by others, to be made the subject of party contest and party chicanery, but let us have a fair, judicial, full investigation into the merits of these accusations. If they are false, stamp them with the brand of ignominy; if they are true, deal with the facts proven as you think is just ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... is the only alternative of wretched and humiliating imprisonment. An entire change of habit ensues: ease and elegance of manners dwindle into coldness and neglect, liberality to meanness, and good-natured simplicity to chicanery and cunning. In society, too, how changed; once the gay table companion, full of gallantry and wit, now solitary and dejected, with the weeds of discomfort and despair rankling around his heart. If fortune ever enable him to regenerate from such obscurity, perhaps custom may have ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 277, October 13, 1827 • Various
... me," said Serviss, profoundly moved. "The girl seems too fine for such chicanery. ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... auditors, and rob the poor slave of the benefits of his labors, his character was defamed, his life was sought, and he at last driven from our Republic, as a fugitive. But was Thompson disgraced by all this mean and contemptible and wicked chicanery and malice? No more than was Paul, when in consequence of a vision he had seen at Troas, he went over to Macedonia to help the Christians there, and was beaten and imprisoned, because he cast out a spirit of divination from a young damsel which had brought much gain to her masters. Paul was as ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... to our unscrupulous but not indictable wiles; and my heart tinkled with the hansom bell. I thought of the good that we had done for once, of the undoubted wrong we had contrived to right by a species of justifiable chicanery. And I forgot all about the youth whose battle we had fought and won, until I found myself ordering his breakfast, and having his cricket-bag taken out to ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... subscription for civil war sent for signature to all the fanatics, all the idiots, all permanent slaves. Fathers of the country! there is here such complicated ingratitude and abuse of confidence, of contradiction and chicanery, of prevarication and treason, that profoundly indignant at so much wickedness concealed beneath the cloak of philosophy and hypocritical civism, we say to you—Your decree has saved the country, ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... doctrine; and spies were found willing to dog the steps and to discover the meeting-places of the converts. Many quailed before the prospect of death, and purchased immunity from persecution by again repairing to the altars of idolatry. But, notwithstanding all the arts of intimidation and chicanery, the good cause continued to prosper. In Rome, in Antioch, in Alexandria, and in other great cities, the truth steadily gained ground; and, towards the end of the second century, it had acquired such strength even in Carthage—a place far removed from the scene of its original proclamation—that, ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... advantage? Where now shall the wretched people resort in behalf of their civil and judicial interests? Must they now again, after being for twelve years accustomed to judgment at hand, go and suffer, like petty colonists, the delays and chicanery of the tribunals of Lisbon, across two thousand leagues of ocean, where the sighs of the oppressed lose all life and all hope? Who would credit it, after so many bland, but deceitful expressions of reciprocal equality ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... his end contenting him, he began to scheme a campaign for the day that was simple enough in prospect: a little chicanery with Stanistreet, a personal appeal to Crane to restore the passports of Monsieur Andre Duchemin which must have been found on Ekstrom's body, a berth on some steamer sailing for Europe, then the ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... great sincerity; and I venture to say that, if he once enters into a treaty, he will steadily adhere to it." But in the same letter the Ambassador thought it necessary to hint to his master that the diplomatic chicanery which might be useful in other negotiations would be all thrown away here. "I must venture to observe to Your Majesty that the King of England is very sharpsighted, that his judgment is sound, and that, if we try to spin the negotiation out, he will ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... patronized, with flattering and being flattered, with fawning and being fawned upon, with deceiving and being deceived, with bluffing and being bluffed, with splurging, with pretending, with every trick and artifice and sham and chicanery that society and politics know, or ...
— The Cab of the Sleeping Horse • John Reed Scott
... substantially the guardianship of the same interests for which the State, the county, the township and the individual exercise concern. Government has lost its mystery: even diplomacy has somewhat changed from lying and chicanery to common-sense dealing. The qualities that are required in the government—industry, economy, integrity, knowledge of men and affairs—are precisely those which are of value to every individual citizen, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... are further details of those abominations on which our rising young aspirant may turn an envious eye. He cannot but acquaint himself with the whole horrid list of chicanery, since its items are rungs of the ladder on which he himself may hereafter seek to mount. If he aims to be a great Wall Street spider he must perforce fully acquaint himself with what material will go toward the spinning of that baleful tissue, his proprietary web. It must be woven, this ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... time; his face is strangely colored, and he has some frightful scars. He has not danced once since Barbara's wedding. The time for mazourkas and cracoviennes is past: they have been replaced by law cases, pleading, chicanery, and all its tiresome accompaniments; his language is so learned that one ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... our house alone, gratuitously, on her own volition, sat within a few feet of our entire family and two of our neighbors, having no cabinet or any paraphernalia which are always required by those charlatans who have associated the fair name of spiritualism with fraud and chicanery. In about one hour there appeared in our parlor, in full view of us all, more than thirty forms; some tall as were ever seen on earth, others little children, the forms of our offspring who were "still born"; my brother Joshua, who had been in spirit life a little over one year came fully materialized ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... still only to the shifting of the incidence of competition. Socialists tell us that hitherto the labourer has not had his fair share of the produce of industry. The existing system has sanctioned a complicated chicanery, by which one class has been enabled to live as mere bloodsuckers and parasites upon the rest of society. Property is the result of theft, instead of being, as Economists used to assure us, the reward of thrift. It is hoped that these evils may be remedied ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... he said to himself, "there must be good in the man. I wish I knew his history. Perhaps he had to fight for every step he has risen in the world. Perhaps he has been baffled and defeated by deception; overcome by chicanery until his faith died within him. My faith would die within me were it not that when I meet a Mayence I encounter also the virtue of a Cologne, and the bluff honesty of a Count Palatine. How marvelous is this world, where the trickery of a Kurzbold and a Gensbein ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr
... difficulties, and that enclosures, while adding greatly to the food supply of the nation, had for the most part told against the independence of the poorer villagers. But this was largely due to the expense and chicanery consequent on the passing of parochial Acts of Parliament; and what objections were there to facilitating the enclosure of wastes and open fields by parishes where everyone desired it? In such a case it was the bounden duty of Parliament to ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... she cried with almost tearful vehemence, "there's only one condition on which I'll even think of giving you back your mine, and that is that Rimrock shall run it. Mr. Jepson must be fired, Mr. Jones must have full charge, and all this chicanery must stop; but if Rimrock goes away without taking his mine I'll—I'll make ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge
... whose fibre of ambition the years had burned out selfishness, greed, graft, and chicanery was a different proposition. His words sounded as though he meant what he said. And when he asked the chairman if he had any objection to offer to a system of administration that carried out exactly what the party had put in ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... accurately remembers his own particular indebtedness, but woe to him if he pays the putwarrie the value of a 'red cent' without taking a receipt. Certainly there may be a really honest putwarrie, but I very much doubt it. The name stands for chicanery and robbery. On the one hand the landlord is constantly stirring him up for money, questioning his accounts, and putting him not unfrequently to actual bodily coercion. The ryot on the other hand is constantly inventing ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... practical point of view with the old dynasties and their chicanery, Alexander had not only eschewed the idea of a reconstructed Poland, but had become indifferent to the territorial lines of all ancient Europe, and momentarily dreamed of Napoleon as his twin emperor. To this end he too must likewise be a conqueror. Finland he had gained, but at the price of adhesion ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... and of evil times evil men are the natural fruit. In nearly all respects Asgill was as unscrupulous a man as the time in which he lived and the class from which he sprang could show. Following in the steps of a griping, miserly sire, he had risen to his present station by oppression and chicanery; by crushing the weak and cajoling the strong. And he was prepared to maintain his ground by means as vile and a hand as hard. But he loved; and—strange anomaly, bizarre exception, call it what you will—somewhere in the depths ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... Savile's Act, passed in the last century; at Lord Tenterden's Act, passed in our own time. Every one of those Acts was retrospective. Every one of them barred claims arising out of past transactions. Nor was any objection ever raised to what was so evidently just and wise, till bigotry and chicanery formed that disgraceful league against which we are now contending. But, it is said, it is unreasonable to grant a boon to men because they have been many years doing wrong. The length of the time during which they have enjoyed property not rightfully their own, is an aggravation of the injury ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... state of society in which a man can contract a debt for a cow, or his household goods, and laugh at his creditor when he seeks his pay, on the one hand; and on the other, legislators and executives lending themselves to the chicanery of another set, that are striving to deprive a particular class of its rights of property, directly in the face of written contracts! This is straining at the gnat and swallowing the camel, with a vengeance; and all ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... sort of thing that goes on in my unhappy country all the time, Mr Frobisher—theft, bribery, corruption, all manner of petty chicanery, especially in matters connected with the Army and Navy; and then they expect us unfortunate officers to do our work with any old material that the high officials have not thought it worth while to pilfer! It is heart-breaking. There, in order to replenish the pockets of Prince Hsi, lies ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood
... filling the office of the Pope, and this infallibility rests altogether with the pulling power that the candidate for Pope exercises over the cardinals, as it is an indisputable fact that there is as much political chicanery in the election of a Pope as there is in the election of a justice of the ...
— Thirty Years In Hell - Or, From Darkness to Light • Bernard Fresenborg
... untiring energy, a keen taste for public affairs, and a special aptitude for chicanery and intrigue. These were not qualities likely to advance him in the ministry, and he wisely refused to adopt that profession. With a young man's love for adventure and a dissenter's hatred for Roman Catholicism, he took part in the Duke of Monmouth's rebellion (1685) against ...
— History of the Plague in London • Daniel Defoe
... temper of the people, a prayer for the spirit of forgiveness and fortitude would not have been out of place, but it is to be feared that it was wholly a matter of form. It is noticeable that at political conventions, on the eve of conflicts in which personal ambition and party chicanery play prominent parts; on the inauguration of great business enterprises in which local interests meet in the determined strifes of selfishness, and at a thousand gatherings whose objects leave God forgotten and right and justice out of consideration, the blessing ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... imperturbable as a bank cashier may appear to the outside public, he is a man under constant strain during business hours. Each person with whom he is unacquainted that confronts him at his post is a possible robber who at any moment may attempt, either by violence or chicanery, to filch the treasure he guards. The happening of any event outside the usual routine at once arouses a cashier's distrust, and this sudden flight of a stranger with money which did not belong to him quite justified ...
— A Rock in the Baltic • Robert Barr
... And this is just what would take place between Germany and other nations. A mass of vexatious questions would be settled by the tribunal, and the sovereign and his government would thus be relieved from parliamentary chicanery based, not upon knowledge, but upon party tactics or personal grudges or ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... Seni recocto. Horace applies this epithet to one who has served the office of quinquevir, or proconsul's notary, and who was therefore master of all the arts of chicanery. These are his words, ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... situation. If we do, our objects are plain and compassable. Why should we resolve to do nothing, because what I propose to you may not be the exact demand of the petition, when we are far from resolved to comply even with what evidently is so? Does this sort of chicanery become us? The people are the masters. They have only to express their wants at large and in gross. We are the expert artists, we are the skilful workmen, to shape their desires into perfect form, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... the familiar chicanery of the popular leader, the justification of expediency, that Stephen had always found most repugnant as a political theory; and while he drew back, repelled and disgusted, he asked himself if the national conscience, the moral integrity of the race, was ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow |
