"Speculator" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of Sweden; and, in our own days, Great Britain, involved in a long and losing war with her American colonies. Every-day life, too, is full of such examples." I asked her to mention some. "Thou canst see one," she answered, "in the speculator, whose anxiety for sudden wealth has reduced his family to indigence; and in the girl who leaves her plain country home, and sacrifices her health, and perhaps her virtue, in a city workshop. Disputatious ...
— Godey's Lady's Book, Vol. 42, January, 1851 • Various
... Guillaume de Lorris was a refined and graceful exponent of the conventional doctrine of love, a seemly celebrant in the cult of woman, an ingenious decorator of accepted ideas; Jean de Meun was a passionate and positive spirit, an ardent speculator in social, political, and scientific questions, one who cared nothing for amorous subtleties, and held woman in scorn. Guillaume addressed an aristocratic audience, imbued with the sentiments of chivalry; Jean was a bourgeois, ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... in which Froude fully shared, breaks out with amusing vigour. "If," wrote the younger historian, "the tendency of trade to assume a form of mere self-interest be irresistible," etc. "And is it?" comments the elder. "Let us all get prussic acid, then." A recent speculator preferred cyanide of potassium. But if "mere self-interest" comprises fraudulent balance-sheets, it cannot claim any support from political economy. When Carlyle drew up a petition to the House of Commons for amending the law of copyright, he was guided ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... taught Wagner something more than the use of certain instruments, the bass-clarinet, for instance. The old operatic speculator indubitably was responsible for Wagner's grand demands upon the scene-painter and the stage-carpenter. His pompous spectacles fired the younger man not only with "Rienzi." They indubitably gave him the courage to create an operatic art that celebrated ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... may well be prefaced by an extract from Herbert Spencer on the treatment of offspring. He first supposes that some future philosophic speculator, examining the course of education of the present period, should find nothing relating to the training of children, and that his natural inference would be that our schools were all for monastic orders, who have ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... enter heaven at the very same moment? Is heaven in the atmosphere? He who asserts it is a very bold speculator. Is it out in the ether? If so, where? And how is it our telescopes cannot detect it? If heaven is a place, as it must be if it exists at all, it cannot very well be within the astronomical universe. Now ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... him to his society in order to make use of him in the world, just as a bold speculator employs a confidential clerk. The friendship, real or feigned, of De Marsay was a social position for Paul de Manerville, who, on his side, thought himself astute in exploiting, after his fashion, his intimate friend. ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... the doctrine of evolution, but is actually based upon the fundamental proposition of evolution." ... "The teleological and the mechanical views of nature are not necessarily mutually exclusive; on the contrary, the more purely a mechanist the speculator is, the more firmly does he assume a primordial molecular arrangement, of which all the phenomena of the universe are the consequences; and the more completely thereby is he at the mercy of the teleologist, who can ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... the majority of instances he or his agent met with speculators who were ready to engage him for so many lectures, and secure to the lecturer a certain fixed sum. But in his later transactions Artemus would have nothing to do with them, much preferring to undertake all the risk himself. The last speculator to whom he sold himself for a tour was, I believe, Mr. Wilder, of New York City, who realised a large profit by investing in lecturing stock, and who was always ready to engage a circus, a wild-beast show, or a ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... of the pedler's morals, he certainly did not see but that the necessity and pressing danger of his situation somewhat sanctioned the deceit. He suggested this idea to Bunce, but when he came to talk of the propriety of returning the animal the moment he was fairly in safety, the speculator failed entirely to perceive the moral ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... ridgepole cautiously sidled the two men of the other company, dragging their hose. Keith now recognized them. One was a vivid, debonair, all-confident, magnetic individual named Talbot Ward, a merchant, promoter, speculator, whom everybody liked and trusted; the other a fair Hercules of a man, slow and powerful ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... account of it, they much mistook the man. He entertained their principles sincerely and not the less that they were found impracticable; for the miscarriage of his experiment no more converts the political speculator, than the explosion of a retort undeceives an alchymist. But Bletson was quite prepared to submit to Cromwell, or any one else who might be possessed of the actual authority. He was a ready subject in practice to the powers existing, ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... hard fight geology has had. A generation after Newton's death fossils were referred for their origin to a certain "plastic power" in Nature—mere idle whittlings of bone that had never known an outfit of flesh and blood. Then came a long and motley procession of cosmogonies, every speculator, from John Wesley down to Pye Smith, insisting warmly on what seemed good in his own eyes. The last stand was made on the antiquity of man, and it is only a dozen years since the ablest of British—perhaps since Cuvier of modern—geologists, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... during our stay Captain Gillespie rejoiced all hands by rewarding them for their pluck in fighting and floating the ship again with the present of a month's wages for a spree ashore. "Old Jock" could well afford to be liberal, too; for a native speculator gave him a better price for the balance of his marmalade than he would have realised if he had fed the men on it throughout ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... there general considerations, worth stating and pondering, though not to be pushed too violently. He who would cast the horoscope of humanity, or of any human activity, must neither neglect history nor trust her overmuch. Certainly the neglect of history is the last mistake into which a modern speculator is likely to fall. To compare Victorian England with Imperial Rome has been the pastime of the half-educated these fifty years. "Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento," is about as much Latin as it is becoming in a public schoolman ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... which would have been of interest to the kind of young man he appeared to be. Sometimes he had listened absorbedly, and on a few occasions he had asked a few questions which laid him curiously bare in his role of speculator. If he had no practical knowledge of the ways and means of great mining companies, he at least professed none. At all events, if there was any little matter he preferred to keep to himself, there was no harm in making oneself familiar ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... apply this argument to the farmer, the merchant, the professional man, and to all classes except the speculator or the debtor who wishes to lessen the burden of his obligations; ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... about five hundred acres on the Monongahela. Twelve years later, in 1798, he was neither richer nor poorer than at the time of his investment. The entire amount of claims which he held with Savary he sold in 1794, without warranty of title, to Robert Morris, then the great speculator in western lands, for four thousand dollars, Pennsylvania currency. This sum, his little farm, and five or six hundred pounds cash were then his entire fortune. In 1794, the revolution in Switzerland having driven out numbers of his compatriots, he formed a plan ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... daring, urging that the aerolites were neither of telluric nor selenitic origin, nor yet children of the sun, as the old Greeks had, many of them, contended, but that they are visitants from the depths of cosmic space. This bold speculator was the distinguished German physicist Ernst F. F. Chladni, a man of no small repute in his day. As early as 1794 he urged his cosmical theory of meteorites, when the very existence of meteorites was denied by most ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... what I am doing, stand or fall, will never be my undoing—I am no speculator. How do your silver mines go on, Sir Ulick? I hear all the silver mines in Ireland turn ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... 233—Speculator, No. IX. [An article on the drama. Many references to the German drama. "Goethe," Lessing, Schiller, Leisewitz, "Garstenberg," Unzer and Klinger mentioned; also, ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... seat, the judge on his bench, scarcely holds a position so important, so truly honorable, as that of the intelligent, devoted, faithful American wife and mother, wisely governing her household. And what are the interests of the merchant, the manufacturer, the banker, the broker, the speculator, the selfish politician, when compared with those confided to the Christian wife and mother? They are too often simply contemptible—a wretched, feverish, maddening struggle to pile up lucre, which is any thing but clean. Where ...
— Female Suffrage • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... termed squatting, that is, taking possession of land belonging to government and cultivating it: such was the custom of the back-woodsmen, and, for want of this law, it often happened that after they had cultivated a farm, the land would be applied for and purchased by some speculator, who would forcibly eject the occupant, and take possession of the improved property. A back-woodsman was not to be trifled with, and the consequences very commonly were that the new proprietor was found some fine morning with a rifle-bullet through his head. To prevent ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... interest in his welfare, and also warranted his putting the question, as to what were Alexander's views and intentions in visiting the Cape: for Mr. Fairburn knew from the letter that he was heir to Sir Charles Wilmot, and therefore that he was not likely to be going out as a speculator or emigrant. ...
— The Mission • Frederick Marryat
... duties, a high rate of postage, and the heavy deposits of caution-money required by the government as security for good behavior, is within the reach of all who care to pay for it, and has turned the fourth page of every journal into a harvest field alike for the speculator and the Inland Revenue Department. The press restrictions were invented in the time of M. de Villele, who had a chance, if he had but known it, of destroying the power of journalism by allowing newspapers to multiply till no one took any notice of them; but he missed ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... calling seems to corrupt them; for they usually have to deal with the most refractory and brutal of the slave population, since good and honest slaves are rarely permitted to fall into the unscrupulous clutches of the speculator.... [He] is outwardly a coarse, ill-bred person, provincial in speech and manners, with a cross-looking phiz, a whiskey-tinctured nose, cold hard-looking eyes, a dirty tobacco-stained mouth, and shabby dress.... He is not troubled evidently with a conscience, for ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... when he knew, but offered no comment. In fact, he treated the affair so lightly that Mr. Harley felt relieved; that latter speculator had been somewhat disturbed in his mind concerning Storri's opinion of what, to give it a best description, evinced niggard distrust of Storri, and cast in negative fashion a slur ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... preaching unsound doctrine on the Trinity, like Peter Martyr Vermigli, who had been properly hissed out of Oxford a quarter of a century earlier. When Bruno arrived and lectured, their worst prognostications were fulfilled. Did he not maintain a theory of the universe which even that perilous speculator and political schemer, Francis Bacon, sneered at ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... frowned, and Cynthia vanished, to be replaced by the Wall Street speculator who had "made a pyramid in Milwaukees." Whence, then, had Cynthia telephoned? Of course, his alert mind hit on a missed mail as the genesis of the run to Hereford early on Sunday, but he asked himself why he had not been told of a changed ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... existence in the mind of others, as to perceive and appropriate them. Beyond this it would be difficult to advance our speculation with any degree of certainty; but if speculation may be at all indulged in such a question, it might, perhaps, be allowed to a sanguine speculator to surmise that, possibly, the mind in that state may be put en rapport with not only the ideas and emotions of another particular mind, but with the whole of the external world, and with all its minds. Another step would carry us ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... to resist with fury the philanthropic invaders, and to perish in thousands before they are convinced of their mistake. The inevitable gap between conquest and dominion becomes filled with the figures of the greedy trader, the inopportune missionary, the ambitious soldier, and the lying speculator, who disquiet the minds of the conquered and excite the sordid appetites of the conquerors. And as the eye of thought rests on these sinister features, it hardly seems possible for us to believe that any fair prospect is approached by ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... knowledge is most certain, when he agitates subjects, which experience cannot enable him to examine, that escape all his senses, that have no model, that are above reason? Each individual, each legislator, each speculator, each nation, has ever formed to himself different ideas of these things; each believes, that his own peculiar reveries ought to be preferred to those of his neighbours; which always appear to him an ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... divided into two parts by a mark which looked very much like a sabre-cut, would have made his face that of a brigand, had not the harshness of his features been tempered by the assumed amenity and the servile smile of a speculator who has many dealings with the public. He was dressed in very cleanly fashion in a cinnamon-coloured jacket embroidered with silk of the same colour, gaiters of the same stuff, a white vest adorned with buttons like chamomile flowers, a ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... critic. A literary man or a flunkey, as you like. He is in the pay of a local speculator here, and so is bound to praise everything and be ecstatic over every one, though for his part he is soaked through and through with the nastiest venom, to which he does not dare to give vent. I am afraid he's an awful scandalmonger; he'll run at once to tell every one I'm in ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... place, it provided no safeguards against speculation in the public domain, which had so long scourged the Western States and Territories, and was still extending its ravages. Our pioneer settlers were offered homes of one hundred and sixty acres each on condition of occupancy and improvement, but the speculator could throw himself across their track by buying up large bodies of choice land to be held back from settlement and tillage for a rise in price, and thus force them further into the frontier, and on to less ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... police spirit, the regularizing spirit of the Kulturstaat with the individual initiative of the capitalist entrepreneur, methodical habits of administration with the love of risk characteristic of the speculator, all this constitutes imperialism, German imperialism, distinct from every other, because to a definite object, economic conquest, it adds another, less precise, in which the moral satisfaction dear to aristocracy, the pleasure of dominating, ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... reason few people keep large gardens. Another thing that accounts for the smallness of the gardens attached to middle and working-class houses, which are often no more than patches, is the speculation in land. The smaller the portions into which the speculator cuts up his building sections, the more he gets for them. I myself on one occasion bought an eight-acre section of land in one block for L1,100, cut it up into blocks of an eighth of an acre each, and resold it within ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... a faint croaking came from the vicinity of Louis Stout, who throughout had been as appreciative a listener as though he were occupying an orchestra chair and had bought his seat from a speculator. ...
— Elkan Lubliner, American • Montague Glass
... may at first appear of keeping such a commodity for a voyage of probably a hundred days in such latitudes, I am informed the speculator is assured, that with an ordinary run, enough of his cargo may be landed to pay ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... of the world, how was it with them? But one thought, one desire, filled their hearts; one object, one intention, was their aim. What of the speculator and extortioner of the South, Christian as well as Jew, Turk as well as Infidel! From the hour that the spirit of avarice swept through the hearts of the people, the South became a vast garden of corruption, in which the pure and uncorrupted were as pearls among rocks. From the hour ...
— The Trials of the Soldier's Wife - A Tale of the Second American Revolution • Alex St. Clair Abrams
... character, and especially his subsequent history, show that he was entirely mercenary and selfish himself in seeking her hand. If we can ever, in any instance, pardon the caprice and wanton cruelty of a coquette, it is when these qualities are exercised in thwarting the designs of a heartless speculator, who is endeavoring to fill his coffers with money by offering in exchange for it a mere worthless ...
— History of King Charles II of England • Jacob Abbott
... sometimes attended the land sales the squatters had little respect; so they "Resolved that for the purpose of garding our rights against the speculator we hereby pledge ourselves to stand by each other and to remain on the ground until all sales are over if it becomes necessary in order that each and every setler may be secured in the claim or claims to which he is ...
— History of the Constitutions of Iowa • Benjamin F. Shambaugh
... otherwise known as "The Innocent" of Sandy Bar. He had met him some months before over a "little game," and had, with perfect equanimity, won the entire fortune—amounting to some forty dollars—of that guileless youth. After the game was finished, Mr. Oakhurst drew the youthful speculator behind the door and thus addressed him: "Tommy, you're a good little man, but you can't gamble worth a cent. Don't try it over again." He then handed him his money back, pushed him gently from the room, and so made a devoted slave ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... even a little alarmed for poor old Cal. After all, the man had done me a service; had got me a job. As for her, she struck me as a potentially dangerous person. One couldn't tell, she might be some adventuress, or if not that, a speculator who would damage Cal's little schemes. I put it to her plainly afterward; and quarrelled with her as well as I could. I drove her down to the station. Callan must have been distinctly impressed or he would never have had ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... has to pay for overtime, which provokes quarterly discussion. Is it not strange that very generous men often have such serious objections to the long-distance tails to their telephone bills, and insist upon investigating them with vigour, when they pay a speculator an extra dollar for a theatre ticket without a murmur? They must remember that telephones, whatever may be said to the contrary, are one of the modern aids to domesticity and preventives of gadding, while still keeping one not only in touch with a friend but within range of the voice. Surely there ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... but this business, honest enough in itself, only veiled the man's real trade, in which he defied alike the laws of honesty and of his country. The other was by turns a gentleman of property, a merchant, a cattle owner, or a speculator, in all of which characters he acted excellently, and succeeded in making the acquaintance of men whom he designed ...
— Do and Dare - A Brave Boy's Fight for Fortune • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... to them when harvested, they did not exert themselves to produce what they could. They often abandoned their crops before harvest, knowing that they had already spent them. In cases, however, where the Negro tenants had acquired mules, horses or tools upon which the speculator had a mortgage, the blacks were actually bound to their landlords to secure the property. It was soon evident that in the end the white man himself was the loser by this evil system. There appeared ...
— A Century of Negro Migration • Carter G. Woodson
... of that eagerness for gain and rage for improvement which keep our people continually on the move, and our country towns incessantly in a state of transition. There the magic phrases, "town lots," "water privileges," "railroads," and other comprehensive and soul-stirring words from the speculator's vocabulary, are never heard. The residents dwell in the houses built by their forefathers, without thinking of enlarging or modernizing them, or pulling them down and turning them into granite stores. ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... with Mr. Fiske that we have here "the most subtle conclusion now within the ken of the scientific speculator, reached without any disregard of the canons prescribed by the doctrine of relativity," I would like to point out to minds less clear-sighted than his, that this same "doctrine of relativity" effectually debars us from using ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... fact not because I'm in... hm! Well, anyway, I won't say why, I daren't.... But we all saw to-day when he came in that that man is not of our sort. Not because he had his hair curled at the barber's, not because he was in such a hurry to show his wit, but because he is a spy, a speculator, because he is a skin-flint and a buffoon. That's evident. Do you think him clever? No, he is a fool, a fool. And is he a match for you? Good heavens! Do you see, ladies?" he stopped suddenly on the way upstairs to their rooms, "though ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... evaporated, and he began to laugh to himself as he thought of the difficulty he had had in restraining his rage against the speculator and how frightened that person would have been had he known how angry ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... in twenty-four hours Mr. Enville, from being an unscrupulous speculator who had used his official position to make illicit profits out of the sale of land to the town for town improvements, had become the very mirror of honesty and high fidelity to the noblest traditions of local government. Without understanding the situation, and before even she ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... be made a product of speculation. The hungry mouths of women and children shall not go unfed that the stock broker and the grain speculator ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... The speculator, whose name was well known in financial circles, took it, examined the seal and signatures curiously, and ...
— The White Lie • William Le Queux
... Kentuck. A man kept me to breed chil'en for market, and sold 'em as fast as they got big enough; last of all, he sold me to a speculator, and my ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... at him. "No," she said; "you certainly wouldn't while I had any say in the matter. You're rather a good farmer, but I haven't met one yet who made a successful speculator. Some of our friends have tried it—and you know where it landed them. I expect those broker and mortgage men must lick their lips when a nice fat woolly farmer comes along. It must be quite ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... veiled panorama, unrolling itself at a hand-gallop. At Miranda, which was crowded with soldiers, there was a diligence that plied to San Sebastian by tacit arrangement with the knights of the road—that is, the adherents of Don Carlos. As the fares were very expensive, I suspect the speculator who ran the coach was heavily taxed for the privilege, and recouped himself by shifting the imposition to the shoulders of passengers. The day was fine, the roads were good, the vehicle was well-horsed, and we got away from the boundary of republican civilization at a rattling pace. My fellow-voyagers ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... through to the front ranks. In many respects those were singular and unusual elements which had gone to the making of his success. His had not been the victory of honied falsehoods, of suave deceit, of gentle but legalised robbery. He had been a hard worker, a daring speculator with nerves of iron, and courage which would have glorified a nobler cause. Nor had his been the methods of good fellowship, the sharing of "good turns," the camaraderie of finance. The men with whom he had had large dealings he had treated ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... them. But it was long before they had, at any time, the profusion which our modern arts enable us to enjoy the whole year round, and in the hard beginnings the orchard and the garden were forgotten for the fields. Their harvests must pay for the acres bought of the government, or from some speculator who had never seen the land; and the settler must be prompt in paying, or else see his home pass from him after all his toil into the hands of strangers. He worked hard and he fared hard, and if he was safer when peace came, it is doubtful if he were otherwise ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... over the Lincoln home. Mr. Lincoln was interested, as a speculator, in some mines in Montana, and by a peculiar manipulation of the stocks of these mines he lost every dollar of his hard-earned savings. He was an over-sensitive man, and these losses preyed upon his mind until he was affected mentally, and had to ...
— Young Auctioneers - The Polishing of a Rolling Stone • Edward Stratemeyer
... winter trousseau—and, wrapping it carefully, placed the ostensible change in the pocket of confiding juvenility. Setting the youngster's face homeward, and patting him benevolently on the back—for Chicken's heart was as soft as those of his feathered namesakes—the speculator quit the market with a profit of 1,700 per cent. on his ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... I do not mean book-speculator, does not smoke a pipe? I refuse to believe that any book-lover could possibly sit in an easy chair before the fire and pore over Browne's 'Hydriotaphia,' Sidney's 'Arcadia,' More's 'Utopia,' or Cotton's 'Montluc' (all in folio, ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... for the murdered inhabitants will soon evaporate. I hope, however, and believe that the war for the present is at an end. But the peace will only be temporary, for the rapacity of the avaricious land speculator will not be satisfied until the red man is deprived of ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... speculator," she said, "who bought and sold negroes, and kept dogs to chase runaways; old Mr. Fetters—you must remember old Josh Fetters? When I was a child, my coloured mammy used him for a bogeyman for me, ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... born without freedom, to labour for the men who have grasped all, shall I hold my peace? The Boer and the Englishman who have been in this land, have not always loved mercy, nor have they always sought after justice; but the little finger of the speculator and monopolist who are devouring this land will be thicker on the backs of the children of this land, black and white, than the loins of the Dutchmen and ...
— Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland • Olive Schreiner
... inherited his slaves with the rest of his property, he became possessed of them without any consultation or wish of his own. He would neither buy nor sell slaves, and was exceedingly careful, in letting them out, that they did not find oppressive and tyrannical masters. No slave speculator ever dared to cross the threshold of this planter of the Old Dominion. He was a constant attendant upon religious worship, and was noted for his general benevolence. The American Bible Society, the American Tract Society, and the cause of the Foreign Missions, found in him a liberal friend. ...
— Clotelle - The Colored Heroine • William Wells Brown
... however, went the speculator. It has been remarked that "from the time when Joliet and La Salle first found their way into the heart of the great West up to the present day when far-off Alaska is in the throes of development, 'big business' has been engaged in western speculation." * In pre-revolutionary days this speculation ...
— The Old Northwest - A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond, Volume 19 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Frederic Austin Ogg
... India. Sir Theodore Morison would have couped up all Indians in German East Africa. The result was that both the proposals went by the board and the expected has happened. The greed of the English speculator has prevailed and he is trying to squeeze out the Indian. What will the Government of India protect? Has it the will to do so? Is not India itself being exploited? Mr. Jehangir Petit recalled the late Mr. Gokhale's views that we were not to expect a full satisfaction regarding the status ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi
... the fact, that Scipio stood in varied relations to the Latins and was their patron in the political feuds of the time.(23) He was thus precluded from a public life, and he disdained the career of a speculator—he had no desire, as he once said, to "cease to be Lucilius in order to become an Asiatic revenue-farmer." So he lived in the sultry age of the Gracchan reforms and the agitations preceding the Social war, frequenting the palaces and villas of the Roman grandees and yet not ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... breath, however, she wished that daddy could send her more money. For Lottie Drugg had gone to Boston. Her father had given over the violin to Joe Bodley, and that young speculator paid the storekeeper the remainder of the hundred dollars agreed upon. With this hundred dollars Hopewell started for Boston with Lottie, leaving his wife to take care of the store for the few days he expected to be absent. Janice went ...
— How Janice Day Won • Helen Beecher Long
... the tenement houses of the city, and accommodate fully two-thirds of the entire tenement-house population. When the number of families living under one owner exceeded ten, it was found that such owner was engaged in the keeping of a tenement-house as a business, and generally as a speculator. It is among this class of owners that nearly all the evils of the tenement-house system are found. The little colony exhibit in their rooms, and in the little areas around their dwellings, extreme want of care. The street ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... reward the princely estate of Bohemia Manor. Arnoldus van Hardenberg, another merchant, had been a victim of judicial oppression by both Kieft and Stuyvesant. Jacob van Couwenhoven had come out in 1633 and resided at first at Rensselaerswyck; he was afterward of note as speculator and brewer in New Amsterdam. Oloff Stevensz van Cortlant had been store-keeper for the Company and deacon of the church; later he was burgomaster of New Amsterdam. Michiel Jansz and Thomas Hall were farmers, the latter, the first English settler in New York State, having come to Manhattan ...
— Narrative of New Netherland • Various
... lose it. This time the slump was really unexpected by all, even by the magnates—the mysterious and all-powerful "they" of Freeman's—so that the loss of the second fortune did not reflect on Gilmartin's ability as a speculator, but on his luck. As a matter of fact, he had been too careful and had sinned from over-timidity at first, only to plunge later and ...
— The Tipster - 1901, From "Wall Street Stories" • Edwin Lefevre
... there resting, pillaging, and devouring amidst the heaped-up spoils. And the pity of it was that the old hero, the paralytic, motionless father beheld it all—beheld the degeneration of his son, the speculator and ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... it is," said Grant without seeing Howard, a man can't get out of it during his lifetime, and l don't know that he'll have any chance in the next-the speculator'll be there ahead ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... use in talkin', I had a good mistress. I never was sold. Old mistress wouldn't sell. There was a speculator come there and wanted to buy us. When we was free, old mistress say, "Now I could a sold you and had the money, and now you is goin' to leave." But they didn't, they stayed. Some stayed with old mistress till she died, but I didn't. I married the ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, Arkansas Narratives, Part 4 • Works Projects Administration
... owners, and to the policy of free land grants announced by Simcoe, land was sold at a very low price. In some cases two hundred acre lots were sold for a gallon of rum. In 1791 Sir William Pullency, an English speculator, bought 1,500,000 acres of land in Upper Canada at one shilling an acre, and sold 700,000 acres later for an average of eight shillings an acre. Under these circumstances it was not surprising ...
— The United Empire Loyalists - A Chronicle of the Great Migration - Volume 13 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • W. Stewart Wallace
... violate a promise. But he was subject to the danger of inactivity, the greatest torment of active and strong minds. As an ambitious man examines with great uneasiness the path which leads him to power, as the speculator contemplates the capricious whims of fortune, as the young officer waiting orders looks in every direction for action, did Ireneus. More than once he resolved to join his fortunes with those of the exiled princes in the arena of public opinion. They however had submitted to ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... west of Starkville, Mississippi on a pretty tolerable large farm. My folks was bought from a speculator drove come by. They come from Sanders in South Ca'lina. Master Charlie Cannon bought a whole drove of us, both my grandparents on both sides. He had five farms, big size farms. Saturday ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume II, Arkansas Narratives, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... of the matter was that Major Waldron said he would himself take the children to the speculator's camp; and accordingly, as soon as dinner was over, they all started off in high glee— the three little girls and the three little negroes— leaving Mammy standing at the top of the stairs, muttering to herself, "Er catchin' uv ...
— Diddie, Dumps, and Tot • Louise-Clarke Pyrnelle
... the grass is growing the horse is starving;" and thus, while the new district is becoming peopled the funds of the small shopkeeper are gradually eaten up, and he puts up his shutters just at the time when a more cautious speculator steps in to profit by the connection already formed, and to take advantage of the new improved condition of the locality. It seems, therefore, desirable for the small capitalists rather to run the risk of a more expensive rent, in a well-peopled district, than to resort to places ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... mean cash," the woman said. "It is a good thing for the wife of a speculator to be in possession of a lot of fine diamonds. It would have been a precious good thing for us, too, if Reggie had not lost his ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... speculator favored his brother with an indulgent laugh. "I guess they were all right," he enlightened casually. "As for me, I didn't see 'em—any more than the Wall-street men see the ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... family group were three other children, two girls and one boy, who was the oldest. When questioned regarding the birthplace and the movements of his parents, Mr. Bland stated that his father was born in Hancock County, Ga. His mother along with her mother was brought to Georgia by the speculator with a drove of other slaves. The first thing that he remembers of his parents is when he was quite small and was allowed to remain in the Master's kitchen in the "big house" where ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume IV, Georgia Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... war, and a great facility of conversing on military topics, made even the Emperor Joseph conceive a high opinion of this officer; but it has long been proved, and experience confirms it every day, that the difference is immense between the speculator and the operator, and that the generals of Cabinets are often indifferent captains when in the camp ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... with the Speculator of John a Windor, a scrivener, sometimes living in Newbury. This Windor was club-fisted, wrote with a pen betwixt both his hands. I have seen many bonds and bills wrote by him. He was much given to debauchery, so that at ...
— William Lilly's History of His Life and Times - From the Year 1602 to 1681 • William Lilly
... "I will never again ask you to give him a single penny. That must be altogether between you and him. He is what they call a speculator. Money is not safe ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... worked a second and some a third time, since located. At the present time [1857] there is not an acre of original growth of swamp standing, having all passed away before the resistless sway of the speculator or the consumer. "Beesley's "Sketch of Cape ...
— The Quaker Colonies - A Chronicle of the Proprietors of the Delaware, Volume 8 - in The Chronicles Of America Series • Sydney G. Fisher
... pounds—I have personally known instances when it exceeded five hundred. The cases arrive in England—and not a living thing therein! A steamship company may reduce its charge under such circumstances, but again and again it will happen that the speculator stands out of a thousand pounds clean when his boxes are opened. He may hope to recover it on the next cargo, but that is still a question of luck. No wonder that men whose business is not confined to orchids withdrew from the risks of importation, returning to ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... latitudinarianism of those times more than Dodwell. Yet no man had more reason to rejoice in it. For, in the earlier part of the seventeenth century, a speculator who had dared to affirm that the human soul is by its nature mortal, and does, in the great majority of cases, actually die with the body, would have been burned alive in Smithfield. Even in days which Dodwell could well remember, such heretics as himself would have been ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the Fourth, obtained leave to bring in a bill for the purpose of preventing the spread of canine madness." Again, as the Alderman is a hop-factor, why observe "he is said to have realized a considerable fortune by his fortunate speculations in hops." This describes him as a mere speculator, and not as an established ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 536, Saturday, March 3, 1832. • Various
... commonplaces of English constitutional practice; the discontents of that day have vanished as completely as those of 1630: but Burke's pamphlet still holds a high place in every course of English literature, and is still read and pondered by every student of constitutional history and by every speculator ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... idea of the swallowing myth. Now in some of the stories the night is obviously conceived of as a big beast which swallows all things. The notion that night is an animal is entirely in harmony with savage metaphysics. In the opinion of the savage speculator, all things are men and animals. 'Ils se persuadent que non seulement les hommes et les autres animaux, mais aussi que toutes les autres choses sont animees,' says one of the old Jesuit missionaries in Canada. {55b} 'The wind was formerly a person; ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... 25, 1835, to President Jackson: "Governments, like corporations, are considered without souls, and according to the code of some people's morality, should be swindled and cheated on every occasion." Linton gave this picture of "a notorious speculator who has ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... Be that as it may, in several parts of the States, as well as in Canada, enormous pits exist full of this curious oil. It is obtained by boring in the ground in those spots where the oil is likely to be found. Often, however, the speculator, after spending time and capital in the experiment, finds that no oil ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... was here for a speculator! Never, perhaps, before or since, has such an opportunity occurred. Williams, with his unrivalled influence over the Maoris, might have bought up large tracts of land near the new site. If the charges against him are true, this is what he would have done. As a matter of fact, he never acquired ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... of every type that can be imagined. Men who have been defrauded of their ideas and patents; others who have been the victims of unjust legislation, the dupes of the speculator, the betrayed friends of men who have ridden to fortune on the backs of those who ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... me for a moment, Sibley. Thank God!" he murmured, while the care-wrinkled face of the veteran speculator looked at him with a faint ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... timber as the world produces, the cause of Portland's growth and prosperity is the trade which it has as the center of collection and distribution of this great wealth of natural resources, and it has attracted, not the boomer and speculator, who find their profits in the wild excitement of the boom, but the merchant, manufacturer, and investor, who seek the surer if slower channels of legitimate business and investment. These have come from the East, most of them within the last few ...
— Oregon, Washington and Alaska; Sights and Scenes for the Tourist • E. L. Lomax
... be kept in suspense. There was no more need of a car track along Lafayette avenue than there was need of one from the top of Trinity Church steeple to the moon! The greater facility of travel, the greater prosperity! But I am opposed to all railroads, the depot for which is an unprincipled speculator's pocket. ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... literary contribution, some powerful and popular work, a new despotic of combustion in that mighty mine on which stood in thin and fatal security the throne of France. Rousseau, the most impassioned of all romancers, the great corrupter of the female mind. Buffon, a lofty and splendid speculator, who dazzled the whole multitude of the minor philosophers, and fixed the creed of Materialism. Moutesquieu, eminent for knowledge and sagacity in his "Spirit of Laws" striking all the establishments ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... makes such a change, the discarded arms are usually bought up by some large speculator or dealer in such things. And in the course of time they find their way to the military goods dealers who ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre
... interest lasted more than two and a half years. In September, 1891, there was a corner in the local market which forced the September price up to seventeen and one-quarter cents. George Kaltenbach, a wealthy speculator living in Paris, combining with three operators in Havre, Hamburg, and Antwerp, succeeded in breaking the corner, forcing the price down to ten and eight-tenths cents. They then changed to the bull side, buying heavily in all markets of the world. This was continued until early ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... and what connection could he have with Bill Lacy's gang? The row last night had revealed a mutual interest between the men, but what was its nature? To Westcott's judgment the burly New Yorker did not resemble an Eastern speculator in mining property; he was far more typical of a Bowery rough—a tool rather than an employer in ...
— The Strange Case of Cavendish • Randall Parrish
... logic of victorious combinations will be revealed to me on the first night of my solitude. I am about to start; address me no longer at Paris. Railways were invented for the benefit of love affairs. A lover laid the first rail, and a speculator laid the last. Happily Rouen is a faubourg of Paris! This advantage of rapid locomotion will permit me to pass two hours at Richeport with you, and have the delight of pressing Raymond's hand. Two hours of my life gained by losing them ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin |
