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Misgovernment   /mɪsgˈəvərnmənt/   Listen
Misgovernment

noun
1.
Government that is inefficient or dishonest.  Synonym: misrule.






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"Misgovernment" Quotes from Famous Books



... than the words of the men of Israel."[*] But the king soon found, that the happiness chiefly of the allusion had tempted the preacher to employ this text, and that the covenanting zealots were nowise pacified towards him. Another preacher, after reproaching him to his face with his misgovernment, ordered this ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume

... the Cyprus Convention, Britain's responsibility for assuring a minimum of good government for the Christians of Asiatic Turkey is undeniable. Unfortunately it admits of no denial that the duties which that responsibility involves have not been discharged. The story of the misgovernment and massacre of the Armenian Christians is one that will ever redound to the disgrace of all the signatories of the Treaty of Berlin; it is doubly disgraceful to the Power which framed the ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose

... the finger of scorn at the notorious misgovernment of American cities, at the manner in which foreigners were herded to the polls by party bosses to vote as they were paid. The cases of a Louisiana judge impeached for issuing bogus certificates of citizenship to four hundred aliens and of New York ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut

... most of the materials from which we are able to reconstruct in detail that first of Carrier's drownings on a grand scale, conceived as an expeditious means of ridding the city of useless mouths, of easing the straitened circumstances resulting from misgovernment. ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini

... and the latter, taking astute advantage of this mood, secured her endorsement of territorial transfers which brought to the Yamato Court nothing but the enmity of Kudara's rivals. By these errors of statesmanship and by the misgovernment of officials like Keno, conditions were created which, as will be seen hereafter, proved ultimately fatal to Japan's sway in the peninsula. Meanwhile, every student of Japanese ancient annals cannot but be struck by the ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi

... engaged in the agreeable task of reaping the proverbial crop. There was a political revolution. The Whigs swept the country by an immense majority, the great Democratic party was crushed to the earth, and the ignorant misgovernment of Andrew Jackson found at last its fit reward. General Harrison, as soon as he was elected, turned to the two great chiefs of his party to invite them to become the pillars of his administration. ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge

... who pay wages ought not to be the political masters of those who earn them, for laws should be adapted to those who have the heaviest stake in the country, for whom misgovernment means not mortified pride or stinted luxury, but want and pain and degradation, and risk to their own lives and to their ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... of the term; in the first because conquest was the Turk's only trade—he desired to live out of taxes wrung from a conquered people, to exploit them as a means of livelihood, and this conception was at the bottom of most of Turkish misgovernment. And in the larger sense its cause is economic because in the Balkans, remote geographically from the main drift of European economic development, there has not grown up that interdependent social life, the innumerable contacts which in the rest of Europe ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell

... find words to express their horror of the cruelties of the King of Dahomey because he sacrificed 2,000 human beings yearly, but why don't those persons who pretend such virtuous indignation at the misgovernment of other countries look at home, and see if greater crimes than those they charge against other governments are not committed by themselves or by their sanction. Let them look at London, and see the thousands that want bread there, while those aristocrats ...
— The Dock and the Scaffold • Unknown

... movement to their own benefit, and by their intrigues overthrew the National Congress, and established a new government with the elder of them as its head. So much dissatisfaction was caused by the corruption and misgovernment of the Carreras, that the Spaniards endeavoured ...
— With Cochrane the Dauntless • George Alfred Henty

... Justinian say, speaking of the Roman eagle.[99] His Ghibellinism, though undoubtedly the result of what he had seen of Italian misgovernment, embraced in its theoretical application the civilized world. His political system was one which his reason adopted, not for any temporary expediency, but because it conduced to justice, peace, and civilization,—the three ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell

... hall, longing for the moment when the breath would leave his body. He had lived an evil life, and he was to die a loathsome death; yet he had borne himself before men as a stately monarch. Though his people had suffered in a thousand ways from his misgovernment, he was still Louis the Well Beloved, and they blamed his ministers of state for all the shocking ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr

... in the age of Mencius, arose out of the rival statements of two almost contemporary philosophers, Mo Ti (Maw Tee) and Yang Chu. The former taught a system of mutual and consequently universal love as a cure for all the ills arising from misgovernment and want of social harmony. He pointed out, with much truth, that if the feudal states would leave one another alone, families cease to quarrel, and thieves cease to steal, while sovereign and subject ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles

... Southern army. Seventy thousand men deserted east of the Mississippi between October 1, 1864, and February 3, 1865. They were not recalled: the government could not feed them. The Confederacy was starved out by its own people—rather by its own hideous misgovernment, for the people were loyal to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various

... to pacify the burghers and urge them to go on with the fortifications. "Complaints and curses" were uttered on all sides against the company's misgovernment; resistance was declared to be idle; "The letter! the letter!" was the general cry. To avoid a mutiny Stuyvesant yielded, and a copy, made out from the collected fragments, was handed to the burgomasters. In answer, ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Vol. II - The Planting Of The First Colonies: 1562—1733 • Various

... seventy dollars a year to bring one visitor, whose absence would have been much more agreeable to us than his presence. Extend this calculation to the number of seven persons, and the other expenses of our misgovernment, and perhaps some other expenditures not mentioned, and see what a sum our tax ...
— Indian Nullification of the Unconstitutional Laws of Massachusetts - Relative to the Marshpee Tribe: or, The Pretended Riot Explained • William Apes

... years of misgovernment, during which John had enraged the barons and excited general discontent by endless impositions, matters were brought to a climax by his submission to the pope, it was in the city of London that the first steps ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe

... Gothic from over the Alps, and then of the Renaissance which built the palaces of her merchants in a giant bulk and of a brutal grandeur. She had not the political genius of Venice, the oligarchic instinct of self-preservation from popular misgovernment and princely aggression. Her story is the usual Italian story of a people jealous of each other, and, in their fear of a native tyrant, impatiently calling in one foreign tyrant after another and then furiously expelling him. When she would govern herself, she first made her ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells

... impediments which, it was alleged, concealed or thwarted their operation in the Old World. He delineated the results of the republican principle in a new state, without a hereditary nobility, established church, or national debt; unfettered by primogeniture, pauperism, or previous misgovernment; surrounded by boundless lands of exceeding fertility, with all the powers of European knowledge to bring them into cultivation, and all the energy of the Anglo-Saxon race to carry out the mission of Japhet—to replenish the earth and subdue it. The world had never seen, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various

... to his daughter Mary, now wife of the Prince of Orange, Stadtholder of Holland. The prospect of the accession in the near future of a Protestant and freedom loving Prince and Princess had reconciled the people to the misgovernment of their present despotic and Catholic sovereign. The appearance upon the stage of an infant prince gave a wholly different look to affairs, and, as we have said, destroyed all hope of matters being righted by the ordinary course ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers

... abomination. Drunkenness, smoking, dicing, card-playing, and every kind of licence were permitted, or connived at; and the stronger prisoners were allowed to plunder the weaker. Such was the state of things in the Fleet Prison at the period of our history, when its misgovernment was greater than it had ever previously been, and the condition of its inmates ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 2 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth

... At the time when he arrived at manhood, and was tending his father's flocks and herds like other peasants' sons, the Saxons and the Danes were at war. It seems that one of Alfred's descendants, named Ethelred, displeased his people by his misgovernment, and was obliged to retire from England. He went across the Channel, and married there the sister of a Norman chief named Richard. Her name was Emma. Ethelred hoped by this alliance to obtain Richard's assistance ...
— King Alfred of England - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott

... throughout Italy for Italian independence and union. The infamous measures adopted by the King of Naples to repress in his own dominions every aspiration after freedom, only succeeded in making the people more determined and the liberty for which they sighed surer in the end. His system of misgovernment went on for a few years longer and was the promoting cause of the revolutionary movements which continually disturbed the whole Italian peninsula. A conference was held in Paris upon the Italian question, which failed to accomplish anything, against which failure ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook

... rhyming: in the verses of his father's Maitre d'Hotel, Eustache Deschamps, which treated of "l'art de dictier et de faire chancons, ballades, virelais et rondeaux," along with many other matters worth attention, from the courts of Heaven to the misgovernment of France. (5) At this rate, all knowledge is to be had in a goody, and the end of it is an old song. We need not wonder when we hear from Monstrelet that Charles was a very well educated person. He could string ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson

... lived more than two thousand years ago, and never had the opportunity of seeing our unrivalled civilisation. And yet it is possible that, were he to come back to earth and visit us, he might have something to say to Mr. Balfour about his coercion and active misgovernment in Ireland; he might smile at some of our philanthropic ardours, and shake his head over many of our organised charities; the School Board might not impress him, nor our race for wealth stir his admiration; he might wonder at our ideals, ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde

... chain of events brought on a crisis which involved the kingdom in tribulation. It was the struggle between the unbridled despotism of Epsicopacy, and the sturdy liberty of Puritanism. For although the immediate cause of the civil wars was gross misgovernment—arbitrary taxation without the intervention of Parliament, monopolies and patents, to the ruin of trade; in fact, every abuse of the royal power—still, without the additional spur of religious persecution, the spirit of the people would never have proved invincible and overpowering. The efforts ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... of Jalaun also were officers under the Maratha Government of the Peshwa up to 1817. In consequence of gross misgovernment, an English superintendent was appointed in 1838, and the state lapsed to the British Government, owing to failure of heirs, in 1840 (ibid. ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman

... are Not to be nam'd my lord, not to be spoke of; There is not chastity enough in language Without offence, to utter them: Thus, pretty lady, I am sorry for thy much misgovernment. ...
— Much Ado About Nothing • William Shakespeare [Knight edition]

... the front parlour was at an end; and, as Mr. Tipping was about to turn upstairs to the little back room where he mended his shoes, Henry emerged upon him from the kitchen. They had had some talks on books and the general misgovernment of the universe,—for Mr. Tipping really was something of an "atheist,"—on Henry's occasional visits, and were no ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne

... Lord North would have avoided giving occasion for the existence of a force which the utter absence of any other had made masters of the situation. The Volunteers even boasted that they had been called into existence by English misgovernment. In the words of one of their most eloquent advocates, "England had sown her laws like dragons' teeth, and they had sprung up ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge

... was that he (Mr. Gladstone) should consent to an amended form of his second resolution, declaring more simply and categorically that the Turk by his misgovernment had ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn

... and protector of the abominable Bomba, and her support alone enabled him to defy the sentiment of the civilized world, and to indulge in cruelties such as would have added new infamy to the name of Ezzelino. She upheld the misgovernment of the Papal States, which has made Rome the scandal of Europe. All the nominal rulers of the Italian States, with the honorable exception of the King of Sardinia, were her vassal princes, and were no more free to act without her consent than were the kings the Roman ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various

... was one of no common difficulty: the country they had to traverse was untrodden even by the feet of former missionaries, inhabited by wild, roving tribes, beggared by Chinese extortions, rendered barren by long misgovernment, and lastly, infested in many parts by bands of armed robbers. These latter are, it is true, far different, in manner at least, from what their name would lead most of our readers to expect, and exercise their uncourteous ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various

... would do the slightest good.... It must embitter the Irish against England, for which there is no need. Nothing can be more shocking than the continual outrages and murders in Ireland; but it is the penalty we pay for a long course of misgovernment, and from which nothing but a long course of mild and good government can set us free; certainly not severe indiscriminate measures which mark out Ireland still more as an unhappy conquered province, instead of a part of the nation. Such are my sentiments, dearest, on this subject, which ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell

... is a picture of tyranny and misgovernment sufficiently appalling to justify the resistance of any people, but more especially that of a people which had long been accustomed to even a licentious freedom, which was proud of its national honour and ancient renown; which entertained such a veneration for ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, Number 489, Saturday, May 14, 1831 • Various

... unflagging labours, out of Parliament, for the public good. His great abilities, rendered all the more prominent by the cruel persecution to which he had been and still was subjected, made him a leading champion of the people during the turmoil to which misgovernment at home, and the distracted state of foreign politics, gave ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, G.C.B., Admiral of the Red, Rear-Admiral of the Fleet, Etc., Etc. • Thomas Cochrane, Earl of Dundonald

... that a democratic revolution was not to be accomplished in England by a rising of the people, but that forcible resistance even to the point of civil war was necessary to guard liberties already won, or to save the land from gross misgovernment. But always the forcible resistance, when successful, has been made not by revolutionaries but by the strong champions of constitutional government. The fruit of the resistance to John was the Great Charter; of Simon of Montfort's war against Henry III., ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton

... peace, and many other important appointments were held by English officers. The old monopoly of trade with Brazil had been broken down in favour of the English, to the ruin of not a few Portuguese merchants. These grievances, the continued absence of the Court in Brazil, and the general misgovernment of the country, had caused widespread discontent. Matters became critical after the outbreak of the Spanish revolution in January 1820. In the spring of that year Beresford went out to Brazil to lay the ...
— The Surrender of Napoleon • Sir Frederick Lewis Maitland

... one of the worst legacies which the rebellion bequeathed to the nation. It has been the prime cause of more misgovernment in the South than any other one cause, not even the insatiable rapacity of the carpet-bag adventurers taking precedence of it. It has not only served as a provocation to peculation and chicanery, but it has nerved the courage of the assassin and made merry the midnight ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune

... manner of his death scenes, till he had wearied the reader with pathos. Confronted with such a tragedy he would have given the rein to emotion. Mr. Hardy, we may guess, would be impressed less by the pathos of the scene, than by the savagery of Achilles and the misgovernment of a universe in which such things were possible, and he would not have let these morals escape his readers. By small touches, by stressing suitable incidents, he would have made the tragedy more ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various

... discontent that was a valuable ally to the modern Whigs, too long excluded from that periodical share of power which is the life-blood of a parliamentary government and the safeguard of a constitutional monarchy. The misgovernment of Ireland became therefore a stock topic of the earlier Opposition of the present century; and advocating the cause of their clients, who wished to become mayors, and magistrates, and members ...
— Lord George Bentinck - A Political Biography • Benjamin Disraeli

... democratic consulate, and was indirectly a formidable attack both on the oligarchic administration of the provinces and on the senatorian jury-panels, in whose hands the Sullan constitution had placed the only check upon misgovernment. The defence of Verres was undertaken by Hortensius; the selection of Cicero as chief counsel for the prosecution by the democratic leaders was a public recognition of him as the foremost orator on the Pompeian side. He threw himself into the ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail



Words linked to "Misgovernment" :   misgovern, governing, governance, administration, government, government activity



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