"Inefficient" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and fully aware of the danger and of the smallness of their forces, were debating whether they should yield to the demand of the Russian troops, and give up the town without any defence, or, with twelve hundred garrison troops, two rusty cannon, a few thousand wounded soldiers, and an inefficient body of citizens, give battle to the twelve thousand irregular troops of General Tottleben, who would soon he reenforced by the army of General Tschernitscheff, twenty thousand strong, and fourteen thousand Austrians under Count Lacy, who, as they well ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... principle; he would compromise cheerfully on a method which did not mean surrender of the principle. He perceived that there were in political life many bad men who were thoroughly efficient and many good men who would have liked to accomplish high results but who were thoroughly inefficient. He realized that if he wished to accomplish anything for the country his business was to combine decency and efficiency; to be a thoroughly practical man of high ideals who did his best to reduce those ideals to actual practice. This was the choice that he made in ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
... makes but a feeble diluent. It swashes everywhere, but to deluge, not to benefit. Precipitate it, and you have the salt of the earth. Political opposition, inorganic, is but a blind, cumbrous, awkward, inefficient thing; but construct a platform, and immediately it becomes lithe, efficient, powerful. Even before they set foot on these rude shores, our forefathers made a compact, and a nation was born in that day. It is on creeds that strong men are nourished, and that which nourishes the leaders into ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... least judgment, in the next. As he said, Lapham had dealt fairly by his partner in money; he had let Rogers take more money out of the business than he put into it; he had, as he said, simply forced out of it a timid and inefficient participant in advantages which he had created. But Lapham had not created them all. He had been dependent at one time on his partner's capital. It was a moment of terrible trial. Happy is the man for ever after who can choose the ideal, the unselfish part in such an exigency! Lapham could not rise ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... with men not in the most serious matters, but precisely in those matters in which they most resent interference. It may be illogical for men to accept cheerfully unpardonable public scandals, benighted educational systems, bad sanitation, bad lighting, a blundering and inefficient system of life, and yet to resent the tearing up of a telegram or a post-card; but the fact remains that the sensitiveness of men is a strange and localised thing, and there is hardly a man in the world who would not rather ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... in the saloon opposite and thought he could distinguish Cheyenne's voice. Bartley wondered what would happen in there, and when things would begin to pop, if there was to be any popping. He felt foolishly helpless and inefficient—rather a poor excuse for a partner, just then. Yet there was that husky rider, back there in the straw. He was even more helpless and inefficient. Bartley licked ...
— Partners of Chance • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... very much reduced territory and earldom that David succeeded in 1206, as Earl of Caithness. We hear almost nothing of him, save that for the latter part of the eight years of his rule,[1] more or less inefficient probably through ill health, he shared the earldom and what had been left to him of its lands with his younger brother John. David died without issue in 1214[2] probably soon after Hugo Freskyn, and David was succeeded by his brother John in the jarldom of Orkney and in the reduced earldom ...
— Sutherland and Caithness in Saga-Time - or, The Jarls and The Freskyns • James Gray
... to enter the city, banishment from which was a part of the sentence of such as were destined to be cropped. But they often found it easier to fabricate false ears than to gain a livelihood away from the arena of their exploits; and this measure, severe and cruel as it was, was found inefficient to rid the capital of ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... suppose it may be efficient, and perhaps sufficient, to make slight improvements and repairs in harbors already in use and not much out of repair. But if I have any correct general idea of it, it must be wholly inefficient for any general beneficent purposes of improvement. I know very little, or rather nothing at all, of the practical matter of levying and collecting tonnage duties; but I suppose one of its principles must be to lay a duty for the improvement ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... for the right to talk to him as a mother should. For, seeking to emulate those whom he so unstintedly admired, Bud Lee and Carson and the rest of the hard-handed, quick-eyed men in the service of the ranch, Hampton was no longer the careless, frankly inefficient youth who had escorted his guests here. He went for days at a time unshaven, having other matters to think of; he came to the table bringing with him the aroma of the stables. He wore a pair of trousers as ...
— Judith of Blue Lake Ranch • Jackson Gregory
... mind if they are not perfect. Never mind if their theology is out of date. This only means that were they efficient they would do very much more. The safety of all we have is due to the churches, even in their present inefficient and inactive state. By all that we hold dear, let us from this very day give more time, money and thought to the churches, for upon these the value of all we own ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... what not—who has done good work in his day, and hopes to do some more, sitting by your old mother, who has done good work in her day—among the rest, that heaviest work of all, the bringing you into the world and keeping you in it till now—honest, kindly, cheerful folk enough, and not inefficient in their own calling; though an average Northumbrian, or Highlander, or Irish Easterling, beside carrying a brain of five times the intellectual force, could drive five such men over the cliff with his bare hands. It is not a sad sight, I say, to see ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... considerably sadder and duller since its abandonment; and her father insisted on her reading less, and taking more exercise. She had his companionship no longer; I esteemed it a duty to supply its lack, as much as possible, with mine: an inefficient substitute; for I could only spare two or three hours, from my numerous diurnal occupations, to follow her footsteps, and then my society was obviously less desirable ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... demands, but not to subvert the constitution or to change the dynasty. They were afraid of serving the purposes of those fierce and determined enemies of monarchy, who now began to show themselves in the lower ranks of the party. The war was, therefore, conducted in a languid and inefficient manner. A resolute leader might have brought it to a close in a month. At the end of three campaigns, however, the event was still dubious; and that it had not been decidedly unfavourable to the cause of liberty was principally ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... relatives and their immediate friends were abundantly able to minister to his wants, so that any outside proffers would seem but officiousness. On the contrary, his relatives were poor, sickly, and, doubtless because of sickness, inefficient people. However strange, it is nevertheless true, that members from two of these Union families, some of them attendants on the aid society, and all loudly patriotic people, ridiculed the attention of the one Union family who did try to cheer the suffering soldier, expressing the sentiment that they ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... almost universally employed in the education of the young, had neither been derived from science, nor from experience of their own inherent power; and they would, from the beginning, have been found perfectly inefficient, had they not been aided, as before noticed, by the stimulant of religious persecution.—The state of education, at the time we speak of, is still fresh on the memory of living witnesses who were its victims; and some of the absurdities which were ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... witness how the "Horse of the Pyrenees" would behave himself at Sadler's Wells. From the piece so called we anticipated no amusement; we thought the regular company would make but sorry equestrians, and, like the King of Westphalia's hussars, would prove totally inefficient, from not being habituated to mount on horseback. Happily we were mistaken; nothing could possibly go better than both the animals and the piece. The actors acquitted themselves manfully, even including the horses. The mysterious Arab ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... blackest and most iniquitous political profligacy and oppression. For about a month after the first night of the unsuccessful pursuit after Reilly, the whole country was overrun with military parties, and such miserable inefficient police as then existed. In the meantime, Reilly escaped every toil and snare that had been laid for him. Sir Robert Whitecraft, seeing that hitherto he had set them at defiance, resolved to glut his vengeance on his property, since he could not arrest himself. A description of his ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... the conditions of divorce, like the conditions of marriage, must be such as best serve the interests of the race. This means, in the first place, that both partners in a marriage must have the assurance that when the moral conditions of the contract are broken, or through any reason become inefficient, they can be liberated, without any shame or idea of delinquency being attached to the dissolution. "Divorce is relief from misfortune and not a crime," to quote from the admirable statute-book of Norway, a saying which should be one of universal application in divorce. ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... wedges, and levers, were applied by my brother workmen; and simple and rude as I had been accustomed to regard these implements, I found I had much to learn in the way of using them. They all proved inefficient, however, and the workmen had to bore into one of the inferior strata, and employ gunpowder. The process was new to me, and I deemed it a highly-amusing one: it had the merit, too, of being attended with some such degree of danger as a boating or rock ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... drunk sitting, the guests rising from their recumbent postures in honor of it. The chairman's opening address was almost wholly a plea for the enlargement of the Athenian navy: the implication that the republic had been saved, in spite of its inefficient armament, was accepted as the finest possible compliment to the guest of the evening. The note of all the other speeches was their exquisite impersonality. They got further and further from the occasion of the evening, until the effort of Demosthenes closed the ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... out of the gangway, the doctor glanced at each new comer's face, and then seizing him by the wrist uncovered it. Since this took him two or three seconds, one could have fancied that he either possessed peculiar powers, or that the test was a somewhat inefficient one. Then he looked at the official, who made a sign, ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... of departing from the fundamental laws, or the laws of the Twelve Tables. The people held them in such consideration, that they rarely enacted laws contrary to their provisions; but as some provisions were found inefficient, others opposed to the manners of the people, and to the spirit of subsequent ages, the praetors, still maintaining respect for the laws, endeavored to bring them into accordance with the necessities of the existing ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... expected that the Romans would here have made a stand. The siege of a fortified place by cavalry is ridiculous, if we understand by siege anything more than a very incomplete blockade. And the Parthians were notoriously inefficient against walls. There was a chance, moreover, that Artavasdes might have been more successful than his ally, and, having repulsed the Parthian monarch, might march his troops to the relief of the Romans. But the soldiers were thoroughly dispirited, ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson
... tomato roots is that the period of their active life is short. When young they are capable of transmitting water and nutritive material very rapidly, but they soon become clogged and inefficient to such an extent as to result in the starvation and death of the plant. If the branches of such an exhausted plant be bent over and covered with earth they will frequently start new roots and produce a fresh crop of fruit, or if plants which have made a crop in the greenhouse be transplanted ...
— Tomato Culture: A Practical Treatise on the Tomato • William Warner Tracy
... may be influenced in his official actions through desire to secure a second term; (3) the commercial depression that usually exists during a campaign would thus come less frequently. These arguments may be used in opposition to such a change: (1) in the case of an inefficient President, the short term is to be preferred; (2) the Presidential campaign is of value, in that the attention of Americans generally is for a time fixed on the problems connected with the conduct of our government. It furnishes the opportunity for imparting to ...
— Our Government: Local, State, and National: Idaho Edition • J.A. James
... Paul Montague with all her heart, and she despised herself for loving him. How weak he was;—how inefficient; how unable to seize glorious opportunities; how swathed and swaddled by scruples and prejudices;—how unlike her own countrymen in quickness of apprehension and readiness of action! But yet she loved him for his very faults, telling herself that there ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... the shelter of the hut waited, and only Buck and Blue Grass Pete stood near the blanket-covered doorway. There was little enough confidence in the inefficient shelter of the hut, but it was their natural retreat and so they accepted it. Then the moment of tension passed, and Buck, glancing swiftly round the hut, seized a hammer and hastily secured ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... Maestricht in 1632. He was supported, in these last operations, by Louis XIII, who, prompted by Richelieu, took this opportunity of humiliating the Hapsburg dynasty. The Spanish commander, the Marquis of Santa Cruz, proved so inefficient that some Belgian patriots tried to take matters into their own hands and to deliver their country from a foreign domination which was so fatal to its interests. It soon became clear, however, that any step taken against ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... the first greetings were over, "Truth's Palace might be a not ineligible residence were not the inmates necessitated not merely to know the truth but to speak it, and did not all innocent embellishments of her majestic person become entirely inefficient and absolutely nugatory. For example, the number of my wife's grey hairs speedily confounded me; and how should it be otherwise, when the excellent dye she had brought with her had completely lost its virtues? She on her part found herself continually obliged ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... the non-supporter has less courage, initiative and aggressiveness than the deserter. "He is less deliberately cruel—for at least he 'sticks around.'" He has not the roving disposition, but is apt to be intemperate and industrially inefficient as compared with the deserter. Often the married vagabond, as he has been called, is a "home-loving man who simply shirks responsibility and dislikes effort." He may "sometimes feel parental responsibility ...
— Broken Homes - A Study of Family Desertion and its Social Treatment • Joanna C. Colcord
... its effect, politically, upon the country. I will not pretend to believe that all the wisdom, or all of the patriotism of the country, died with General Taylor. But we know that wisdom and patriotism, in a public office under institutions like ours, are wholly inefficient and worthless, unless they are sustained by the confidence and devotion of the people. And I confess my apprehensions, that in the death of the late President, we have lost a degree of that confidence and devotion which will not soon again pertain to any successor. Between public measures regarded ...
— The Life and Public Service of General Zachary Taylor: An Address • Abraham Lincoln
... to beat anything sensible through the shells of them quahaugs?" snarled Captain Candage, with 'longcoast scorn for the inefficient. ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... and no daughters; she always had a companion of some sort, and was never satisfied with the one she had. In Holland, as in England, it seemed posts were not easy to fill satisfactorily, for those often in want of employment were also constitutionally inefficient. ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... the same with motor acts. On a certain day, a baseball pitcher falls into an inefficient way of handling the ball, and, try as he may, cannot recover his usual form. He has to give up for that day, but after a rest is as good as ever. Shall we say that his subconscious mind has been practising pitching during the rest interval? It is much more likely that here, as in the preceding case, ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... most eventful in its consequences. The former had gained the ground for which they contended; but, if a victory, it was more disastrous and humiliating to them than an ordinary defeat. They had ridiculed and despised their enemy, representing them as dastardly and inefficient; yet here their best troops, led on by experienced officers, had repeatedly been repulsed by an inferior force of that enemy,—mere yeomanry,—from works thrown up in a single night, and had suffered a loss rarely paralleled in battle with the most veteran soldiery; for, according to their own returns, ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving
... civilian judge-advocates in an army in the field would be a first-class nuisance, for technical courts always work mischief. Too many courts-martial in any command are evidence of poor discipline and inefficient officers. ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... canyon. The gray face of a man-made wall rose sheer a hundred feet above the original bed of the stream, leaving it in part revealed; and this barrier checked and stayed the once resistless flood against which an entire mountain range had proved inefficient. Presently for hundreds of miles each way the transmission lines would carry out power to those seeking light, to those employing labor; and the used water would irrigate ...
— The Sagebrusher - A Story of the West • Emerson Hough
... of form and application usual with us, but the firm claims that while it uses the true corundum emery of Naxos, the American article is only a refractory iron ore, which soon loses its sharpness and becomes inefficient. This is a question of efficiency or of veracity which we leave to the trade. The machine adapted as a tool-grinder has six emery-wheels for varying characters of work. Four are assorted for gauges of different radii, for moulding-irons, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... that he was of a virtuous and austere renown—that he wrote a great number of verses, as little durable as his laws [98]. As for the latter—when we learn that they were stern and bloody beyond precedent—we have little difficulty in believing that they were inefficient. ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... efficiency of seamen when landed in any considerable number depends most materially upon a proper system of organization and training previous to their being landed, and without which they are inefficient, ...
— Ordnance Instructions for the United States Navy. - 1866. Fourth edition. • Bureau of Ordnance, USN
... hampered in the same way, and in December, 1810, offered Sweden the coveted land as the price of her alliance. When we recall the early republicanism of Bernadotte, his repeated failures in critical moments,—as on the Marchfeld and elsewhere,—the impatient and severe reproofs administered to the inefficient and fiery Gascon by his commander, we are not amazed that the crown prince Charles John, as his style now ran, began immediately after his installation at Stockholm to vent his spleen on Napoleon. Though there was no declared ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... see that type after type was condemned and perished because it was inadequate, or inadequately equipped—because it did not harmonise with its environment.(1) For these series of experimental creations and inefficient evolutions vast spaces of time were required, according to the Aztec and Indo-Aryan philosophies. It is not impossible that actual floods and great convulsions of nature may have been remembered in tradition, and may have lent colour and form to ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... thing to have a church full of inefficient, licensed preachers with no hope of ever entering actively into the ministry, but in most cases are just a worry of the flesh to a progressive pastor. When a man comes before a board for a license he ought to be given to understand that this license will be granted only on condition ...
— The Demand and the Supply of Increased Efficiency in the Negro Ministry - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 13 • Jesse E. Moorland
... and extending her beneficent work, and is destined to see a future which shall eclipse all her glory in the past. Heaven pity the fate of the man who looks upon the General Synod as having been a curse to the Church, or an inefficient worker in it—who imagines that Lutheranism would be stronger if the General Synod were weaker, or that truth would be reared upon the ruins of what she has been patiently laboring for nearly forty years to build." ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 2: The United Lutheran Church (General Synod, General - Council, United Synod in the South) • Friedrich Bente
... how puny! how inefficient for all good purposes are the tools and implements of policy, compared with these mighty engines of Nature!—There is no middle course: two masters cannot be served:—Justice must either be enthroned above might, and the moral ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... may raise money enough to tunnel a mountain, but you cannot raise money enough to hire a man who is minding his own business. An efficient and valuable man does what he can, whether the community pay him for it or not. The inefficient offer their inefficiency to the highest bidder, and are forever expecting to be put into office. One would suppose that they ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... the impression bequeathed by Slavery in regard to these Southern blacks, that they are sluggish and inefficient in labor! Last night, after a hard day's work (our guns and the remainder of our tents being just issued), an order came from Beaufort that we should be ready in the evening to unload a steamboat's cargo of boards, being some of those captured by ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... the Rose of Jericho. As it was, the conventionality around me, the intellectual drought, gave me no opportunity of outward growth. They did not destroy, but they cooped up, and rendered slow and inefficient, that internal life which continued, as I have said, to live on unseen. This took the form of dreams and speculations, in the course of which I went through many tortuous processes of the mind, the actual aims of which were futile, ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... supposed to see, involves such a quantity of the hateful incredible, that all our reverence for the author cannot hinder us from perceiving such gross attempts upon the senses to be in the highest degree childish and inefficient. Spirits and fairies cannot be represented, they cannot even be painted,—they can only be believed. But the elaborate and anxious provision of scenery, which the luxury of the age demands, in these cases works a quite contrary effect to ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... said the General impatiently, "but we cannot wait until we get an answer from your very slow and inefficient State Department. We must have a reply before tomorrow night at 12 o'clock. Have you nothing to say, Mr. Edestone? You are perhaps personally the most deeply interested, because I tell you," he grinned cruelly, "we will get your secret if we have to put you on the rack and go back five ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... in this country, by some drunken country loafer or ward heeler, who, all ignorant of the law, has been "elected" county coroner, and one who is more anxious to procure free passes on the road than he is concerned for the victim murdered by the neglect or parsimony of inefficient railway officials. ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... tenth of the Cabbage Patch. The submersion was mainly one of dirt and disorder, but Miss Hazy was such a meek, inefficient little body that the Cabbage Patch withheld its blame and patiently tried to furnish a prop for the clinging vine. Miss Hazy, it is true, had Chris; but Chris was unstable, not only because he had lost one leg, but also because he was the wildest, noisiest, most thoughtless youngster ...
— Lovey Mary • Alice Hegan Rice
... the cost of labor [to the capitalist] is high or low. The reverse of this would be oftener the truth: the cost of labor is frequently at its highest where wages are lowest. This may arise from two causes. (1.) In the first place, the labor, though cheap, may be inefficient. ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... his lips were making words out of wood, and that the words were fatuously inefficient compared with what he should have said, or acted, ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... "Well do I recall a later night. We played Under the Gaslight; Charlie feared to trust him with a part, so he kept the young man off stage to help with the train noise when the down express should dash across. But even in this humble station he proved inefficient. When the train came on he became confused, seized the cocoanut shells instead of the sand-paper, and our train that night entered to the sound of a galloping horse. The effect must have been puzzling ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... fragments. He had lost a great deal of blood, and he was still bleeding from a large artery, in spite of the efforts of a number of soldiers round who were applying tourniquets without much success. The ordinary tourniquet is probably the most inefficient instrument that the mind of man could devise—at least, for dealing with wounds of the thigh out in the field. It might stop haemorrhage in an infant, but for a burly soldier it is absurd. I tried two of the ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... navigable from thence to the city of New Sarum." (See Hatcher's History of Salisbury, pp. 460, 497.) The works thus made were afterwards destroyed by a flood, and remained in ruins till 1771. Some repairs were then executed, but they were inefficient; and the navigation is now given up, except at the mouth of the river; and even there the bar of Christchurch is an insurmountable obstacle except at spring tides.-(Penny Cyclopdia, art. Wiltshire.) As the Bishop dug the first spitt, or spadeful of earth, and drove the first wheelbarrow, that necessary ...
— The Natural History of Wiltshire • John Aubrey
... are quite inefficient. If a man who is poor commits murder and is taken, he will be imprisoned, and perhaps even shot; but if he is rich and has friends, he may rely on it no very severe consequence will ensue. It is curious that the most respectable inhabitants of the country invariably assist ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... penalties, necessarily inefficient in themselves, were rendered doubly so by the dissolute code of morals, les moeurs Italiennes, as they were called under Mazarin, that obtained in all classes of society. Under Louis XIV, an ordinance of 1684, drawn up by ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... have left in England a safe and tranquil state of life; and, if it be possible to discourage one set of people, and to encourage another, I would earnestly request that for a few years, the helpless and inefficient may be kept from the settlement; whilst, as to the active, industrious, and intelligent they may be assured with confidence of a fair ...
— A Source Book Of Australian History • Compiled by Gwendolen H. Swinburne
... ago, before the Indian towns were broken up along the valley of the Genesee, a clan of the Senecas resided at Canawangus, in the vicinity of the present town of Avon. The chief of the clan was a good, easy man, named Hot Bread. He was a hereditary sachem, not having risen by merit, was weak and inefficient, and of gluttonous habits. On a certain occasion, when Mr. George Hosmer was accompanying Red Jacket to an Indian council, in the course of general conversation he inquired the chief's opinion of Hot Bread. ...
— An account of Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha - Red Jacket and his people, 1750-1830 • John Niles Hubbard
... cannot take the place of the Organized Class. Where it does, it is temporary, hurrah-in-character, inefficient and harmful. The Sunday school is educational in purpose. The Boys' Department must ...
— The Boy and the Sunday School - A Manual of Principle and Method for the Work of the Sunday - School with Teen Age Boys • John L. Alexander
... and covered with soft green moss, where I could lie unseen in the most perfect comfort. There I was stretched when you, my dear Watson, and all your following were investigating in the most sympathetic and inefficient manner the circumstances of ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... is not changed, and if the new management should prove to be inefficient, it can be placed in more ...
— Business Hints for Men and Women • Alfred Rochefort Calhoun
... that these nimble-footed firemen do almost miraculous work, considering the material they have at command - an assertion which I think is not at all unlikely; but the wonder is that destructive fires are not much more frequent, when the fire department is evidently so inefficient. In addition to the regular police force and fire department, there is a system of night watchmen, called bekjees, who walk their respective beats throughout the night, carrying staves heavily shod with iron, with which they pound the flagstones ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... other hand, each convoy is usually provided with some guard of its own, though it is often absurdly inefficient. These valleys and ravines which branch out of the main pass are alive with Afridis and Pathans, who are keen robbers as well as religious fanatics. I wonder they don't swoop down on some of our caravans. They could plunder them and get back to their mountain fastnesses before we could interfere ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle
... mouthed—a fetching tribe! A cross between Acroceraunian bandits and Samaritans. One may stare at a taxi scooting by and think with no incongruity of Carlyle's "Night of Spurs"—with Louis and his harried Antoinette flying the guillotine. And of other things which our inefficient memory prevents us from jotting down at this moment. But ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... braid, which showed off the silver and the set of delft—her great and never-ending joy—to great effect. Then she tied her apron about her, and went into the kitchen to make the mayonnaise dressing for the potato salad, to slice the ham, and to help the cook (a most inefficient Irish person, taken on only for that month during the absence of the family's beloved and venerated Sing Wo) in the matter of preparing ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... Under Maximilian's inefficient son, the country went asunder. One branch of the family carried out the Counter-Reformation in Styria; while, north of the Danube, the majority of the inhabitants was either Lutheran or Utraquist, that is, attached to Communion under both kinds, which had been ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... ordered Bramante to construct the necessary scaffoldings, but the latter did it in so inefficient a manner that Michelangelo was obliged to dispense with his assistance, and construct the whole machinery himself. He had sent for some of his fellow-students from Florence, not, as Vasari, by some strange aberration, states, because he was ignorant ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... in their present divided condition. This multiplication of churches in the country is lamentable chiefly because it registers the divided state of country life. It is true that divided churches are religiously inefficient, but it is vastly more important that divided churches are embodiments of what one country minister calls "the tuberculosis of the ...
— The Evolution of the Country Community - A Study in Religious Sociology • Warren H. Wilson
... bright remarks that we non compree but enjoy just the same, for we know you are wishing the doughboy good luck. How droll your antics when hard luck surprises. We swear and you grimace or paw wildly the air. And we share a common dislike for the asperity shown by the untactful, inefficient, ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... unpleasant contentions and perpetual jealousy. Two of them were murdered by some of the crew, but on what grounds, or by whom particularly, it is said, could not be discovered. The circumstance led to much apprehension of an attempt to revenge, and measures were accordingly taken to render it inefficient, but they were seemingly unnecessary. The dangers at sea were much more formidable, and far less easily provided against. It is perhaps quite enough to say of them, that the ships were for a considerable time in the greatest ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... case, what wonder is it that a million and a half of Christians in the United States should be so inefficient? Inefficient, I say, for what do this million and a half of professed Christians accomplish? By their vows they are bound to be as self-denying, as spiritual and devoted, as though they were missionaries ...
— Thoughts on Missions • Sheldon Dibble
... concessions; but always if you will trace far enough, eventual money gain. Or again it takes the form of graft and even direct loot. The losses that are sustained through a lowered citizenship, through inefficient service, through a general debauchery of public institutions, through increased taxation to make up for the amounts that are drawn off in graft and loot are well nigh incalculable—and for the sole reason that you and I, average citizens, do not take the ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... and fortitude. Many of the refugees were of the class called "the poor white trash" of the South, filthy, ragged, proud, indolent, ill-mannered, given to the smoking and chewing of tobacco, often diseased, inefficient, and either unwilling or unable to conform to the necessary regulations of the Home, or to do their own proper share of the work of the household, and the keeping of their apartments in a state ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... good-sense. With such belief, or, rather, knowledge, it is sorrowful to see our fatal complacence, our as yet undisciplined folly, in sending to our State Legislatures and to that general business office of ours at Washington a herd of mismanagers that seems each year to grow more inefficient and contemptible, whether branded Republican or Democrat. But I take heart, because often and oftener I hear upon my journey the citizens high and low muttering, "There's too much politics in this country"; and we ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... conclusions, they have already confirmed and emphasized the general impression that the organization of the departments is often faulty in principle and wasteful in results, while many of their business methods are antiquated and inefficient. There is every reason why our executive governmental machinery should be at least as well planned, economical, and efficient as the best machinery of the great business organizations, which at present is not the ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... husband's household. She had, too, worldly possessions of bedding and furniture, enough to fill a four-horse wagon. She made her husband put a floor, a door, and windows to his cabin. From the day of her advent a new spirit made itself felt amid the belongings of the inefficient Thomas. Her immediate effort was to make her new husband's children "look a little more human," and the youthful Abraham began to get crude notions of the simpler comforts and decencies of life. All agree that she was a stepmother to whose credit it is to be said that she manifested ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... race of life, the only advantages allowed being not those of rank or station, but solely of innate capacity. And the reason the Socialist desires this is, because he believes, rightly or wrongly, that many inefficient men are, at present, only artificially protected from betraying their inefficiency; and that many efficient men are only artificially prevented from showing their efficiency; and that the fair start he proposes would not result in keeping all men on a dead level, but ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... And now—she had escaped. Aunt Mary, helpful under the most trying circumstances, was putting her articles in a bag, the initials on which she did not recognize—H. L. S.—Honora Leffingwell Spence; while old Catherine, tearful and inefficient, knelt before her, fumbling at her shoes. Honora, bending over, took the face of the faithful ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the open road, would hurriedly snatch as they fled. And the people made his heart ache, even to the deadening of his own sorrow, as he noted their wobegoneness. For these were the sick, the infirm, the poor, the inefficient, who had been unable for one reason or another to migrate with the main body of the Saints earlier in the season. Many of them were now racked by fever from sleeping on the damp ground. These bade fair not to outlast ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... example the Persians, the Macedonians, the Grecian states, and above all, the Romans, undoubtedly did much to give to their armies the power of united masses, controllable by one will, and not liable to be broken down and rendered comparatively inefficient by the irregular movements of individuals. But it is the introduction of fire-arms which has, most of all, contributed to change the original character of war, and the elements of the strength of armies. Where it is merely one field ...
— John Rutherford, the White Chief • George Lillie Craik
... you coming. Anybody can see you coming, Daddy. That's why you ought to be so careful. I shall make you wear a hard hat. Those squashy hats of yours are hopelessly inefficient. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... thought,] "was ideally best, but for many reasons impossible." [But the] "conjoint scheme" [recommended in the report appeared to punish the efficient medical authorities for the abuses of the inefficient. Moreover, if the examiners of the Divisional Board did not affiliate themselves to any medical authority, the compensation to be provided would be very heavy; if they did,] "either they will affiliate without further examination, which will give them the pretence ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... Inefficient servants have a disagreeable habit of running in and out of the dining-room in search of something that should have been in readiness; therefore the lady of the house had better see beforehand that French rolls are placed under every napkin, and a silver basket full of them ready in ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... of that kind has been long since considered," was the answer. "Our alliances have all failed; and we are now reproached, not simply with the folly of paying for inefficient help, but with the cruelty of dragging the states of Europe into a contest, where to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... of Western Canada is yet very limited. We cannot afford to scatter our forces and multiply our institutions. One university for all Western Canada would be sufficient to meet the present requirements. The multiplication of inefficient universities is a calamity for genuine higher education. This has been the contention of "Catholic" in a recent series of brilliant articles in the "Casket." The policy would therefore be for all to agree on one college as the non-Catholics ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... up to the balcony, but, seeing no chance of a shot, were withdrawn, and only the look-out man left there. There was some idea that the enemy might have gone away, and no one would have been sorry; for the wells inside the zereba were very inefficient, the water being soon exhausted, and a tedious waiting entailed before the wells filled again. Already the men had to be put on an allowance, and in that country, where the throat is always parched, any stint of water is the greatest ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... monsieur, I just put my toe out—so—and give the rebellious circumstance a little secret push, without noise, which sends it the way I wish, and I am successful after all, and nobody has seen my expedient. So, when teachers or masters become troublesome and inefficient—when, in short, the interests of the school would suffer from their retaining their places—I mind my knitting, events progress, circumstances glide past; I see one which, if pushed ever so little awry, will render untenable the post I wish to have vacated—the deed ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... my suspicions that my cousin was at least inefficient were aroused long since. I have repeatedly asked an explanation of the diminished revenues, and plenty of excuses have been made, but they do not seem to ...
— Making His Way - Frank Courtney's Struggle Upward • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... punishment of death: the lawgiver, who sets out with little knowledge (and therefore little veneration) of human nature, is perpetually invoking the thunders of the law to compensate the internal weakness of his own laws: and the same spirit of levity disposes inefficient teachers to put in motion the weightiest machinery of the mind for the most trifling purposes: but we are convinced that this law should be engraven on the title page of all elementary books—that the memory is degraded, ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... seamen, and he was staring at the tumult as if he regarded noise as a mutiny of inferiors against his preference for calm. By his side a short-sighted steward bent interminably over his ticket. "The silly gowk!" fumed Ellen. "Can the woman not read? It looks so inefficient, and I want him to think well of the movement." Presently, with a suave and unimpatient gesture, he took his ticket away from the peering woman and read her the number. "I like him!" said Ellen. "There's many would have ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... and they do not cultivate Masonry, with a cultivation, determined, resolute, and regular, like their cultivation of their estate, profession, or knowledge. Their Masonry takes its chance in general and inefficient sentiment, mournfully barren of results; in words and formulas and ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... Messrs. T. C. Clarke and Julius W. Adams believed, that, in the present state of public opinion, the above method would be impracticable, and feared, that, if inspectors were appointed, it would be by political influence, and that the result would be worse than at present, as the inspectors would be inefficient, and yet, to a great extent, would relieve the owners of bad bridges from legal responsibility. They held that the best that could be done would be to provide means, in case of disaster, to fix plainly the responsibility, and recommended, First, that the standard for ...
— Bridge Disasters in America - The Cause and the Remedy • George L. Vose
... tone, were now so much relaxed by vice that he was utterly incapable of selfdenial or of strenuous exertion. The vulgar courage of a foremast man he still retained. But both as Admiral and as First Lord of the Admiralty he was utterly inefficient. Month after month the fleet which should have been the terror of the seas lay in harbour while he was diverting himself in London. The sailors, punning upon his new title, gave him the name of Lord Tarry-in-town. When he came on shipboard he was accompanied ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the oncoming tide of the economic independence of women, but it will not be possible to force the business world to accept permanently the service of the inefficient in place of that of the alert and intelligent. To carry on the economic life of a nation with its labor flotsam and jetsam is loss at any time; in time of storm ...
— Mobilizing Woman-Power • Harriot Stanton Blatch
... much doing in this Country, but in a disjointed, expensive, inefficient manner. Instead of one all-pervading, straight-forward, State-directed system, there are three or four in operation, necessarily conflicting with and damaging each other. And yet a vast majority really desire the Education of All, and are willing to ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... boats, except against the wheelhouses; they were so arranged as to let down on deck when desired. When ready for service, with guns and stores on board, these boats drew from five to seven feet of water; but they were so weakly built as to be dangerous and comparatively inefficient vessels, quickly "disabled," as is apt to be the case with such preparations for war as are postponed to the time of its outbreak. The contingency of civil war on our inland waters was not indeed to be anticipated nor prepared for; but what was the history of the ocean navy, ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan
... that morning. Another boy entered, and left it open. Mr. Cipher was angry, and spoke to the whole school: "Any one who comes in to-day and does not shut the door, will get a flogging. Now remember!" Being very awkward in his manners, inefficient in government, and shallow-brained and vain, he commanded very little ...
— Our Young Folks—Vol. I, No. II, February 1865 - An Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... drawn up to meet them, in which case they relied on their own superior discipline and tactics for such a victory as should reassure the supremacy of Rome. But Arminius was far too sage a commander to lead on his followers, with their unwieldy broadswords and inefficient defensive armor, against the Roman legionaries, fully armed with helmet, cuirass, greaves, and shield, who were skilled to commence the conflict with a murderous volley of heavy javelins hurled upon the foe when a few yards distant, and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... their own tongue what they have to say, but cover it up and conceal it in commonplace, so that we get, not what they themselves behold and what they think, but a hieroglyphic or symbol invented as the representative of a certain class of objects or emotions, and as inefficient to represent a particular object or emotion as x or y to set forth the relation of Hamlet to Ophelia. He would even exercise his children in this art of the higher truthfulness, and would purposely make them give him an account of ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... a draught of cold water should have cured thee when the most precious drugs failed," said the Hakim, "thou mayest reason on the other mysteries attendant on this matter. For myself, I am inefficient to the great work, having this morning touched an unclean animal. Ask, therefore, no further questions; it is enough that, by sparing this man's life at my request, you will deliver yourself, great King, and thy servant, ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... Wyandot and Shawnee chiefs, during the whole period of the Revolutionary War; and early in the spring of 1782, these savage incursions became so frequent and galling, and the common mode of fighting the Indians on the line of frontier, when forced to do so in self-defense, proved so inefficient, that it was found absolutely necessary to carry the war into the country of the enemy. For this purpose an expedition against the Wyandot towns on the Sandusky, was gotten up in May, and put under the command of Colonel William Crawford, a ...
— Life & Times of Col. Daniel Boone • Cecil B. Harley
... admiration, but it is not possible to even faintly like or hesitatingly pity a cowardly Robert Herrick, whose self-pity is so strong, and who from first to last is, as his creator intended him to be, a thorough inefficient. Half-hearted in his wickedness, self-saving in his repentance, he somehow fails to interest one; and even his lower-class associates, the horrible Huish and the American captain, are almost less detestable. Huish is quite diabolical, but he, at least, has the courage of his iniquities. Attwater ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black
... likely to forsake their one-thousand-to- fifteen-thousand-ton billets for the Snark with her ten tons net. The Snark has had to cull her navigators from the beach, and the navigator on the beach is usually a congenital inefficient—the sort of man who beats about for a fortnight trying vainly to find an ocean isle and who returns with his schooner to report the island sunk with all on board, the sort of man whose temper or thirst for strong waters works him out ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... at length reached Charleston. The journey from Greensborough had been a tedious one; besides the annoyance of slow travelling, through the inefficient state of the line, which was so defective that the carriages frequently left the rails, the noisome effluvia arising from the swamps we had to pass through, which harbour innumerable alligators and other reptiles, had the ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... were returned from their situations. It was well managed; the inmates being divided into three classes, and treated with more or less kindness accordingly. True, at one time, even after the erection of this factory, from the management being entrusted to inefficient hands, a scene of disorder and misrule had prevailed; but that had been promptly and firmly repressed. Hard labor and strict discipline had succeeded in reducing the temporary confusion to something like ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... against those who make the most court to you Have no pleasures but your own If you will persuade, you must first please Improve yourself with the old, divert yourself with the young Indiscriminately loading their memories with every part alike Insipid in his pleasures, as inefficient in everything else Labor more to put them in conceit with themselves Lay down a method for everything, and stick to it inviolably Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote Let nobody discover that you do know your own value Let them quietly enjoy their errors ...
— Widger's Quotations from Chesterfield's Letters to his Son • David Widger
... two or three attempts to redeem myself from a habit, which I knew was at best useless and foolish, if not prejudicial. But they were feeble and inefficient. Once, indeed, I thought I was sure that the giving up the use of tobacco injured my health, and I finally gave up all hopes of ever ...
— An Essay on the Influence of Tobacco upon Life and Health • R. D. Mussey
... an anxious face; on the contrary, he seemed plumply content as he replied to the ranger's greeting. He represented very well the type of officer which these disorderly communities produce. Brave and tireless when working along the line of his prejudices, he could be most laxly inefficient when his duties cut across his own or his neighbor's interests. Being a cattle-man by training, he was glad of the red herring which the Texas officer had trailed across the ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... neglected, being all along unsubdued at heart, smites at the proper season, especially when the enemy makes a false step. By employing trusted agents of his own, such a foe would also render the other's forces inefficient by producing disunion. Ascertaining the beginning, the middle and the end of his foes,[309] a king should in secret cherish feelings of hostility towards them. He should corrupt the forces of his foe, ascertaining everything by positive proof, using the arts of producing disunion, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... Revolution. Planned first by Carnot, it was carried out by Dubois Crance and others in 1798. But in 1793 the days of large armies had not dawned. It was usual to maintain small forces of professional soldiers, together with a more or less inefficient militia. In England methods not unlike those of the age of Falstaff still held good. War was an adventure, not a science. In France first it became an intensely national effort. The Jacobins evoked the popular enthusiasm; the Committee of Public ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... on the prizes of the service going by interest and by favour, were highly objectionable; but those methods did have the advantage that commanders in the field, whether they turned out to be efficient or to be inefficient, were at least fairly young in years as a rule. Wellington himself, and all his principal subordinates other than Graham and Picton, were well under fifty years of age at the end of the Peninsular War; Wellington was forty-five, Beresford was forty-six, Hill was forty-two, Lowry Cole was forty-two. ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... an Auctarium, into which he hooked almost every writer he could find, whether ecclesiastical or not. It is a large book, still remaining in manuscript at Bonn, as it was written out for him by two very inefficient novices. The date of its composition is abundantly indicated by the notes with which he terminates his notices of living authors: 'Viuit adhuc anno quo hec scribimus 158' or 159.[13] Such a compilation, in ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... condition of domestic labor in private houses is not confined to any special city or country; it is universal. Each year the difficulty of obtaining women to do housework seems to increase and the demand is so much greater than the supply, that ignorant and inefficient employees are retained simply because it is impossible to find others more competent to ...
— Wanted, a Young Woman to Do Housework • C. Helene Barker
... children, her manners—they are all on an even plane with her spiritual accomplishments; at no point does she sink, or rise, beyond that level. They are not as common as they seem to be, these harmoniously inefficient females. ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... she was humbled in her own eyes. It was as if a veil had been torn from the last two years, and she saw her motives at last. For two years she had endured an ignorant, inefficient servant simply because his strength and good looks had ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... the town, but a little sheltered by a thicket of trees covered with gigantic pink blossoms, stood a drinking-place—a cluster of tables set round an open grass-plot. Here he brought me a platter of some light inefficient cakes which merely served to make hunger more self-conscious, and some fine aromatic wine contained in a triple-bodied flask, each division containing vintage of a separate hue. We broke our biscuits, sipped that mysterious wine, and talked ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... machine ship is working at a lathe. An officer of the company comes into the shop, a gentleman in white collar and good clothes! He stands behind the mechanic and "curses him out" because his work is inefficient. When he turns away, the man at the lathe says, "Who was that guy anyway? What business has he to teach me my job?" Instead of accepting the criticism, he resents what he considers unwarranted interference by a ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... listen to Me who am the absolute utterance of God, who spake by the prophets, who spake through Christ,—who speaks through Christ and all things still,—your little systems, your uncertain churches, your inefficient creeds, your quarrelsome sects, shall crumble away into dust and ruins! For humanity is waiting for the true Church of Christ; the one pure House of Praise from which all sophistry, all superstition and vanity shall have fled, and ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... brought to Lincoln, he said it was too bad about the men. Someone suggested that it was a pity the generals had been taken, but Lincoln said that did not matter much, as he could make some more. Joffre has made it uncomfortable for the inefficient generals in France. Many of them have lost their commands and most of them live in fear of ...
— A Journey Through France in War Time • Joseph G. Butler, Jr.
... inconvenient peoples in narrow "reserves," may appear hard; but it is the only solution of the race-question that is worthy of humanity.... Thus alone can the over-population of the earth be controlled: the efficient peoples must secure themselves elbow-room by means of war, and the inefficient must be hemmed in, and at last driven into "reserves" where they have no room to grow ... and where, discouraged and rendered indifferent to the future by the spectacle of the superior energy of their conquerors, they may crawl slowly towards the ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various
... loose fingerboard, an old fashioned and very clumsy, inefficient way of fastening it after glueing, was to tie some string round it, which of course getting much glue upon it during progress had, when dry, to be torn or washed off. The modern, simplest and best way is to have ready a soft wood mould with a square ...
— The Repairing & Restoration of Violins - 'The Strad' Library, No. XII. • Horace Petherick
... enterprise. He based this doctrine partly on natural rights grounds, partly on the belief that there was a pervasive natural and self-operating harmony, providentially established, between individual interest and the interest of the community, partly on the empirical ground that government was generally inefficient, improvident, and unintelligent. ...
— A Letter to Dion • Bernard Mandeville
... then kept itself within the terms of its contract, juries would not enforce the payment of the tax. Besides, the agreement to be taxed would probably be entered into but for a year at a time. If, in that year, the government proved itself either inefficient or tyrannical, to any serious degree, the contract would not be renewed. The dissatisfied parties, if sufficiently numerous for a new organization, would form themselves into a separate association for mutual protection. If not sufficiently numerous for that ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... have been established and supplied with good teachers and text-books, they have rendered efficient service in improving the condition of the people. The lack of text-books has caused many of the rural schools to prove very inefficient, one textbook often having to serve as many as three pupils, Then there are yet large sections of some of the southern states in which there are no public schools for ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... "he was very much agitated when we got here—dismissed me rather curtly at the door. He was quite upset about something—spoke English none too well and said something about a warning and damned our Secret Service as inefficient." ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... criticise Seward, claiming that the former, who had held office under Buchanan, though an excellent official, was not a Republican. This proved so deep a thrust, arraying office-seekers and their friends against the Secretary and Thurlow Weed, that Greeley kept it up, finding some appointees inefficient, and the Republicanism of ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... indicates that the almshouse paupers are a rapidly shifting group. This population, probably of several hundred thousand persons, who drift into and out of almshouses, can hardly be characterized accurately, but in large part it must be considered at least inefficient and probably of mentally ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... with it industrial opportunity and social justice. This they cannot attain until they be permitted to enter the higher pursuits of labor. Two reasons are given for failure to enter these: first, that Negro labor is unstable and inefficient; and second, that white men will protest. Organized labor, however, has done nothing to help the blacks. Yet it is a fact that accustomed to the easy-going toil of the plantation, the blacks have not shown the same efficiency as that of the whites. Some employers report, however, that they are ...
— A Century of Negro Migration • Carter G. Woodson
... a Beethoven was spared the tormenting question of texts for composition. It is fortunate for posterity that he did not exhaust his energies in setting inefficient libretti, that he did not believe that good music would suffice to command success in spite of bad texts. The majority of his works belong to the field of purely instrumental music. Beethoven often ...
— Beethoven: the Man and the Artist - As Revealed in his own Words • Ludwig van Beethoven
... have been secured that are possible on machines limited by the standard gauge of the track, 4 feet 8 1/2 inches, and the curves which present railway lines and conditions of construction demand. Now, withal, the steam locomotive mechanically considered is inefficient, as it must take with it a large weight of fuel and water which must be transformed into steam under fixed conditions. If for example, we have one train a day working over a certain line, there would be no question of the economy of a steam locomotive, but with a number, we are simply ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro
... spontaneous act of thoughtfulness. It has degenerated into a perfunctory habit, but it should not be so. Excellent service deserves a recompense just as slip-shod service does not. And no one has a right to spoil a waiter (or any one else) by tipping him for inefficient work. In hotels and restaurants the standard fee is ten per ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... scheme for the extinction of those rights, which would serve the double purpose of rendering practicable a reorganization of the service, and a reduction in the number of superior officers, at present too large. This reduction would give the opportunity of dispensing with such men as are inefficient, and of retaining those only likely to be useful. The Company are under no covenants in ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... expected, the inefficient diplomacy displayed in the preparations for the world war brought down severe criticism of our diplomatic abilities, and if the intention at the Ballplatz was to bring about a war, it cannot be denied that the preparations for it were ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... North. Meanwhile the Government of Great Britain, from the very first appearance of the cloud of civil war, had focused its attention on the point of what the events in America portended to British interests and policy. This is the business of governments, and their agents would be condemned as inefficient did they neglect it. But did British governmental policy go beyond this entirely justifiable first thought for immediate British interests to the point of positive hope that England would find an advantage in the breaking up of the great American Republic? American opinion, both then ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... rats came brazenly and picked up the grains of rice I dropped in my inefficient handling of chopsticks, and in scaring off these hardened, hungry vermin I accidentally upset tea over my bed, whilst at the same moment a clod-hopping coolie came in with an elephant tread, with the result that my European reading-lamp lost its balance ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle |
