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Unemployed   /ˌənɛmplˈɔɪd/   Listen
Unemployed

noun
1.
People who are involuntarily out of work (considered as a group).  Synonym: unemployed people.



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"Unemployed" Quotes from Famous Books



... Sir William Young proposed to send the unemployed labourers round to the parishioners to get work, their wages being paid by their employers and by the parish. This method of obtaining work was ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler

... had been possessed in vain if it had never been exerted; and it was not my custom to let any arts of jocularity remain unemployed. My impatience of applause brought me always early to the place of entertainment; and I seldom failed to lay a scheme with the small knot that first gathered round me, by which some of those whom we expected might be made subservient to our sport. Every man has some favourite topick of ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson

... two rooms. One was 18 feet by 10, the other 10 feet by 9. Adjoining these two rooms, devoid of fire-grate or windows, were two cells, each 5 feet by 6 feet high. The prisoners in this dreadful place, were herded together, unemployed in any way, and dependent entirely upon their friends for food. It was a disgrace to humanity. It was damp, dirty, and ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian

... had acquired a most singularly advantageous influence over them. But of this he was always glad; throughout his twelve years' service under the Emperor's flag, he had only found those moments in which he was unemployed intolerable; he would willingly have been in the saddle from dawn ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]

... properly called poetry, I see; still it will tend to keep present to my mind a view of things which I ought to indulge. These 6 lines, too, have not, to a reader, a connectedness with the foregoing. Omit it, if you like.—What a treasure it is to my poor indolent and unemployed mind, thus to lay hold on a subject to talk about, tho' 'tis but a sonnet and that of the lowest order. How mournfully ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas

... Bruges face to face with the 'question of the unemployed' in a very aggravated form. How to provide for the poor became a most serious problem, and so many of the people were reduced to living on charity that almshouses sprang up all over the town. God's ...
— Bruges and West Flanders • George W. T. Omond

... crape-clad widows of eminent officials who required a sewing machine or a piano to save them from starvation; the gentlemen who would be forced to put a bullet through their brains if they did not procure the money to pay a debt of honor; or the unemployed clerks who had eaten nothing for days, and who all had a sick wife and from six to twelve children (all small) at home crying for bread; or the foreigners who could find no work in Berlin, and would return to their native countries if he ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau

... of the services of the only kind of plant and material to which their skilled efforts are applicable. It is probable that one result of the formation of each of these larger trusts has been to throw out of employment several thousands of workers, and to place them either in the ranks of the unemployed or in some other branch of industry where their previously acquired skill is of little service, and where their wages are correspondingly depressed. From the account given above of the changes in organisation of production under the Trust it might appear that the ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson

... religionists, whom disgust of persecution had early driven into the voluntary exile of the colonies, was more than an usual proportion of men of character and education. The reckless and the gay, younger sons, soldiers unemployed, and students from the inns of court, early sought advancement and adventure in the more southern provinces, where slaves offered impunity from labor, and where war, with a bolder and more stirring policy, oftener gave rise to scenes of excitement, and, of course, to ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper

... through municipal aid and supervision, large tracts of vacant land in and about the city for the growing of potatoes and other vegetables and then, in conjunction with the board of poor commissioners, assigning it in small lots to families of the unemployed, and furnishing them with seed for planting. This plan served an admirable purpose through three years of industrial depression, and was copied in other cities; it was abandoned when, with the renewal of industrial activity, the necessity ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various

... against the integrity of the Republic, that nothing unfriendly lurked behind the franchise demand, but that necessity dictated it for general good and the preservation of peace. Nor were other diplomatic means left unemployed to ensure the acceptance of the franchise reform. In addition to firmness of attitude and a display of actual force, most of the other Powers, including the United States of America, were induced to add their weight ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas

... what Mrs. Welland called "provided for." The melancholy possibility of having to "kill time" (especially for those who did not care for whist or solitaire) was a vision that haunted her as the spectre of the unemployed haunts the philanthropist. Another of her principles was that parents should never (at least visibly) interfere with the plans of their married children; and the difficulty of adjusting this respect for May's independence with the exigency of ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton

... and some farthings, with which he seemed endeavouring to make a composition with his creditor for twelve shillings in the pound; when Mrs. Clan's patience finally becoming exhausted, she turned towards Mr. Cudmore, the only unemployed person she could perceive, and ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 2 • Charles James Lever

... employment. These are added to the very large number that at all seasons of the year are hunting for work. Thousands, too, from the country, thinking to escape the dreary frost-bound months of rural life, flock to the city and join the enormous army of the unemployed. All want work, and there is little or no work to be had. It is the season of the year when few changes are made by employers other than to dispense with the services of those not actually needed. To be sure, a few employees die, and leave vacancies to be filled. Others prove unfaithful, ...
— The Boy Broker - Among the Kings of Wall Street • Frank A. Munsey

... undertake the responsibilities of family headship and provider; to-night he had sundered himself from his means of support. He was jobless. He belonged to the unemployed.... In the office he had heard without concern of this man or that man being discharged. Now he knew how those men ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland

... are those of degeneracy and decay. So with the prepuce, the luxury and idleness, voluptuousness and consequent feasting incident to its being supplanted in its original functions by the perineal cloth, which left it thenceforth unemployed, led it in the pathway of disease and death. This first innovation in civilization was to the prepuce the beginning of its decay and fall. Like Belshazzar in his great banquet-hall in ancient Babylon, the prepuce might have read the hand-writing on the wall, "Mene, Mene, ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino

... for an hour or more. After luncheon he again worked over despatches, received burghers on leave of absence from the front and foreigners who sympathised with his people's cause. He never allowed himself to be idle, and, in fact, there was no opportunity for him to be unemployed, inasmuch as almost all the leading Government officials were at the front, while many of their duties remained behind to be attended to by some one. Kruger himself supervised the work of all the departments whose heads ...
— With the Boer Forces • Howard C. Hillegas

... London, population fluctuates rapidly, sometimes rolling away from one quarter, always developing itself in fresh quarters; in London all ranks do not dwell side by side within sight and sound of each other: but the rich and the poor, the employed and the unemployed, dwell apart, work apart, and are but too often out of sight, out of mind. These, and many other reasons, make it impossible for the mere parochial system to bring out the zeal and the liberality of London ...
— Town and Country Sermons • Charles Kingsley

... discontented you were to bring to a head?" d'Albigny retorted, remembering with relief another head of complaint, on which he had been charged to deliver himself. "The old soldiers and rufflers whom the peace has left unemployed, and with whom the man Grio was to aid you? Surely waiting will not help you with them! There should be some in Geneva who like not the rule of the Pastors and the drone of psalms and hymns! Men who, if I know them, must be on fire for a change! Come, Monsieur ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman

... further. I would have a portion of the building fitted up with scenery and a stage, for the getting up of tableaux or dramatic performances, and thus give scope for the exercise of that histrionic talent of which there is so much lying unemployed ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various

... the domestic machinery. The servants, thus directed, were as those untroubling inventions of which she had complained. Since she was not devoted to the distraction of social gaieties, Cicily found an appalling amount, of unemployed time on her hands. She was blest with an excellent education; but, with no great fondness for knowledge as such, she was not inclined to prosecute any particular study with the ardor of the scholar. To rid herself of the boredom ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan

... less wages in proportion to its receipts than the traffic in intoxicants. If therefore the capital which is now invested in the manufacture and sale of these liquors could only be turned into other channels there would be no difficulty in finding an honest wage for an honest day's work for every unemployed laborer in the land. Let us illustrate this. In a blue book on wages and production, issued from the Board of Trade in 1891, it was stated that for every L100 received in mining, L55 went in labor; of every L100 in shipbuilding, L37 went in labor; of every L100 in ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation

... Napoleon. The richest emigrants imitated this pernicious example; and, as Napoleon remarked, the luxury of the table was almost the only kind, on which encouragement was not spared. The result of this economical system was, that the produce of our manufactories remained unemployed, and ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. I • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon

... miserere, and the sullen crowd thickening round them,—a crowd, which, if it had its will, would stiletto every soldier that pipes to it. And in the recesses of the porches, all day long, knots of men of the lowest classes, unemployed and listless, lie basking in the sun like lizards; and unregarded children,—every heavy glance of their young eyes full of desperation and stony depravity, and their throats hoarse with cursing,—gamble, and fight, and snarl, and sleep, hour ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin

... semblance of a sex-relationship from the marked divergence of the friends in physical and psychic qualities, and the nervous development of one or both the friends is sometimes slightly abnormal. We have to regard such relationships as hypertrophied friendships, the hypertrophy being due to unemployed sexual instinct. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... act is the final triumph of the vice it pretends to repress. There is one remedy and one alone, for the White Slave Traffic. Make it impossible, by the enactment of a Minimum Wage law and by the proper provision of the unemployed, for any woman to be forced to choose between prostitution and penury, and the White Slaver will have no more power over the daughters of labourers, artisans and clerks than he (or under the New Act she) will have over ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley

... V. Unemployed persons of color, vagrants and camp loafers, will be arrested and employed upon the public works, by the Provost Marshal's Department, without other pay than ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson

... the service is 13,600. Great activity and vigilance have been displayed by all the squadrons, and their movements have been judiciously and efficiently arranged in such manner as would best promote American commerce and protect the rights and interests of our countrymen abroad. The vessels unemployed are undergoing repairs or are laid up until their services may be required. Most of the ironclad fleet is at League Island, in the vicinity of Philadelphia, a place which, until decisive action should be taken by Congress, was selected by the Secretary of the Navy ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 6: Andrew Johnson • James D. Richardson

... she on her own account, but whenever she could snatch a moment half a dozen clubs and societies claimed her for their own. She had really a wide personal knowledge of the working-women of London, employed and unemployed. ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler

... architect had tried to look doggish in a huge black silk tie and only looked more like a rabbit than ever, and there was a steady driftage of small boys and girls, nurses with perambulators, cab touts, airing grandfathers and similar unemployed people towards the promise of the awning, the carpet and the flowers. The square building in all its bravery of Doulton ware and yellow and mauve tiles and ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells

... believe in them but was afraid of them. It is not recorded what Benjamin Constant, her unhappy lover, thought about them. Nowadays things have changed and ghosts and the personal devil have joined the ranks of the unemployed, or only obtain employment with Mr Stead ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"

... hoarseness. The attendance was very slight. The general public takes little interest in these proceedings, knowing as it does that they are merely a diversion for the scions of old families whose energies are unemployed except in time of war. It is the general feeling, moreover, that the King may be depended upon to govern the kingdom properly without the interference of these ...
— King Arthur's Socks and Other Village Plays • Floyd Dell

... at this christening between Mr. Bennet and myself, but our eyes were not unemployed. Here, madam, I first felt a pleasing kind of confusion, which I know not how to describe. I felt a kind of uneasiness, yet did not wish to be without it. I longed to be alone, yet dreaded the hour of parting. I could not keep my eyes off from the object which caused my confusion, ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding

... and hospitable neighbour. Sir Edward Giles was famed for his uprightness and generous disposition, and was looked up to by all the neighbourhood. He succeeded to 'a large park and very handsome house,' whose existence was partly due to the problem of the unemployed that was perplexing the benevolent more than three hundred years ago; for John Giles, 'to the honour of his memory ... began building of the house, and setting up the walls about his park, in the time of a very great ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote

... End of London or the corresponding quarters of any of our large towns) of idlers and futile people, who are a burden to the nation. With our extraordinary industrial system—or want of system—it commonly happens that the abundance of ill-paid or unemployed workers at one end of the social scale, by reducing the rates of wages and so increasing the rates of dividends, actually creates a greater abundance of unemployed rich at the other end; but neither excess points in itself to over-population —only to a diseased state ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter

... of the senseless mischief, and the Lords of the Treasury offered a further reward of the same amount for their apprehension; but all was in vain to stop the growing evil. The agricultural interest was in a very depressed state, and the number of unemployed labourers so large, that apprehensions were entertained that the combinations for the destruction of machinery might, if not at once checked, take dimensions it would be very difficult for the Government to control. When Parliament opened in 1830, the state of the agricultural districts had ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie

... be made Commandant; he conquered in Thermidor. Some, what is more to the purpose, bethink them of the Citizen Buonaparte, unemployed Artillery Officer, who took Toulon. A man of head, a man of action: Barras is named Commandant's-Cloak; this young Artillery Officer is named Commandant. He was in the Gallery at the moment, and heard it; he withdrew, some half hour, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... carding and combing wool, navvies are digging irrigation canals, chemists are manufacturing saltpetre and gunpowder, armourers are making or mending firearms. Tailors, shoemakers, bricklayers, potters, millers, sawyers—every kind of labourer or artisan is here to be found. There are no idlers, and no unemployed. Everybody, from the humblest convert up to the bishop himself, is occupied in some sort of manual labour. It is a curious and interesting sight—a society so industrious and sober, so peaceful and well-regulated, yet built up of such divers elements ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot

... are arms allowed to be kept promiscuously, as among the other German nations: but are committed to the charge of a keeper, and he, too, a slave. The pretext is, that the Ocean defends them from any sudden incursions; and men unemployed, with arms in their hands, readily become licentious. In fact, it is for the king's interest not to entrust a noble, a freeman, or even an emancipated slave, with the custody ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus

... him as he approached, allowing the man's thoughts to enter his own consciousness. They were none too complicated. The man was a free swordsman, his sword unemployed at the moment. He still had sufficient money to enjoy the forest houses for a time, then he would seek service with the Earl of Konewar, who was rumored ...
— Millennium • Everett B. Cole

... neighboring countries, and the peaceful resolution of interethnic disputes; some ethnic Albanian groups in neighboring countries advocate for a "greater Albania," but the idea has little appeal among Albanian nationals; the mass emigration of unemployed Albanians remains a problem for developed ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... fresh. If Madame had been about to leave her apartments with that strangeness of manner, he would have followed her; but she was returning to them; there was nothing to be done, therefore he turned upon his heel like an unemployed heron, appearing to question earth, air, and water about it; shook his head, and walked away mechanically in the direction of the gardens. He had hardly gone a hundred paces when he met two young men, walking arm in arm, with their heads ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... including our God-given King Louis XVIII, as poor as the proverbial church mice and as eager for a bit of comfort and luxury as a hungry dog is for a bone; the year which saw the army disbanded and hordes of unemployed and unemployable men wandering disconsolate and half starved through the country seeking in vain for some means of livelihood, while the Allied troops, well fed and well clothed, stalked about as if the sacred soil of France was so much dirt under their ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... as I humbly conceive; since sound sleep is one of the greatest nourishers of nature, both to the once young and to the twice young, if I may use the phrase. And I the rather approve of this rule, because it keeps the nurse unemployed, who otherwise may be doing it the greatest mischief, by cramming and stuffing its little bowels, till ready to burst. And, if I am right, what an inconsiderate and foolish, as well as pernicious practice it is, for a nurse to waken the child from its nourishing sleep, ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson

... metropolis, have been partially invaded by the omnivorous builder; nor are those portions of them which are still open available to the commonalty for purposes of pastime and sport. Under such circumstances who can wonder that they should lounge away their unemployed time in the skittle-grounds of ale-houses and gin-shops? or that their immorality should have increased with the enlargement of the town, and the compulsory discontinuance of their former healthful and harmless pastimes? It would be wise to revive, ...
— Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 475 - Vol. XVII, No. 475. Saturday, February 5, 1831 • Various

... never know the misery of the Spanish monarch. When children are occupied, they are independent of other people, they are not obliged to watch for casual entertainment from those who happen to be unemployed, or who chance to be in a humour to play with them; they have some agreeable object continually in view, and they feel satisfied with themselves. They will not torment every body in the house with incessant requests. "May I have this? Will you give me that? May I go out to see such a thing? ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth

... under his misfortune from the sense of having brought it on himself, and the cloud soon passed away. A man so fertile in expedients, and ready, according to his own ideal of a thoroughbred trader, to turn himself to anything, could not long remain unemployed. He had various business offers, and among others an invitation from some merchants to settle at Cadiz as a commission agent, "with offers of very good commissions." But Providence, he tells us, ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto

... the homogeneous to the heterogeneous. For how, without any action from without, can any heterogeneity emerge from perfect and absolute homogeneity? But as it was necessary to get rid of every kind of creation, "the unemployed engineer turned metaphysician," as Papini called him, invented the theory of the instability of the homogeneous, which is more ... what shall I say? more mystical, and even more mythological if you like, than the creative ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno

... strong body of police here, and some of their powers are autocratically autocratic: thus, a person once committed as a vagrant is liable to be re-imprisoned by them if met in the street unemployed. Now, as it is impossible to expect that people in business will take the trouble to hunt up vagrants, what can be conceived more cruelly arbitrary than preventing them from hunting up places for themselves? Yet such is the ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray

... that there were no purchasers in the shop, and she felt herself the centre of innumerable unemployed eyes as she moved forward between long lines of show-cases glittering with ...
— Bunner Sisters • Edith Wharton

... the characteristic lassitude of the unemployed digger and the surging life of a town suddenly thronged with the adventurous men of the earth blended in a strange medley. Men were lounging everywhere, talking and smoking, or merely sunk in a state of abstraction. The talk was all of digging. The miners were ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson

... possibly inexact. One can only be sure of one's own experience (even if one can be sure of that), and I can do no more than urge a fact or two further in behalf of my observations. After we returned to London, in September, I used to stroll much among the recumbent figures of the unemployed on the grass of Green Park, where, lulled by the ocean roar of the omnibuses on Piccadilly, they drowsed away the hours of the autumnal day. These fellow-men looked more interesting than they probably were, either asleep ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells

... on this subject. By the last page of No. X, you will perceive that I have this day dropped "The Watchman". On Monday morning I will go "per" caravan to Bridgewater, where, if you have a horse of tolerable meekness unemployed, you ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull

... churches has begun. The red flag was recently carried into the City Temple by a band of unemployed, although several of their number objected to its presence in the church. An attempt to sing "The Red Flag" was also suppressed by ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster

... has swung to its extreme. At every depression of business, armies of the unemployed perish in sight of the land they abandoned in the hope of a brighter future. Their children have forgotten the traditions of the soil, and the energies of our people must now be concentrated to reverse ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall

... to be established is, that sponging depends not merely on perceptions, but on perceptions regularly employed. Nothing simpler. The perceptions on which other arts are based frequently remain unemployed by their owner for days, nights, months, or years, without his art's perishing; whereas, if those of the sponger were to miss their daily exercise, not merely his art would perish, but he ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata

... have elapsed since the time above alluded to, have already had their effect. The proud and angry spirits which then roamed about Paris unemployed begins to recover its old channels, though worn deeper by recent torrents. The natural urbanity of the French begins to find its way, like oil, to the surface, though there still remains a degree of roughness and bluntness of manner, partly real, and partly affected, by such as imagine it ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving

... affected to be busy in all schemes of diversion, and endeavoured to make others pleased with the state, of which he himself was weary. But pleasures never can be so multiplied or continued, as not to leave much of life unemployed; there were many hours, both of the night and day, which he could spend, without suspicion, in solitary thought. The load of life was much lightened: he went eagerly into the assemblies, because he supposed the frequency of his presence necessary to the success of his purposes; he retired gladly ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson

... a competent unemployed local stenographer, he inserted an advertisement in a Louisville paper. The answers he received were varied and in some instances amusing. One or two sent their pictures. Several desired in advance to know the age of their prospective employer and whether he was blonde or brunette. One even asked ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt

... Thereupon Madame d’Aiguillon approached, and addressed the Cardinal. ‘It is truly well, sir, that you do something for this man. I have heard him spoken of as a thoroughly honest and learned man, and it is a pity he should remain unemployed. Then he has a son who is very learned in mathematics, although as yet only fifteen years of age.’ The Cardinal assured me once more that I might tell you to return in all safety; and as he seemed in such good humour, I asked him further that you might be allowed ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch

... saw the first shearers. They dress like the unemployed, but differ from that body in their looks of independence. They sat on trucks and wool-bales and the fence, watching the train, and hailed Bill, and Jim, and Tom, and asked how those ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson

... has given more than is necessary to unreasoning beings; she has caused a gleam of freedom to shine even in the darkness of animal life. When the lion is not tormented by hunger, and when no wild beast challenges him to fight, his unemployed energy creates an object for himself; full of ardor, he fills the re-echoing desert with his terrible roars, and his exuberant force rejoices in itself, showing itself without an object. The insect flits about rejoicing in life in the sunlight, and it is certainly not ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... such guides here in New York, if I knew where they were to be found and had the time to look for them. You are much younger than I am. You might almost be my son! Moreover, you will not mind my saying that I fancied you were unemployed and possibly were looking for employment. You can hardly help seeing the ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan

... fairly typical in the modern business world. The period leading up to a crisis is one of relative prosperity; then occurs a crisis in which prices fall, at first rapidly, and afterward for a while going slowly lower. When prices are at the lowest point many factories are closed, and much labor is unemployed. Let us start at that point. Conditions are worse in some industries than in others. General economy and great caution prevail; few new enterprises are undertaken. For those persons having available funds this is a good time ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter

... some good, perchance great work, he never would have accomplished at home." And the young friar drew himself up to his full height, while his frame seemed to expand with the struggling energies that were shut up unemployed ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen

... Minister of England and had come down from London with various other dignitaries to honor the enterprise. Church bells rang, cannon boomed, and horns and whistles raised a din of rejoicing. But everywhere among the throng moved a large group of unemployed laborers who had returned from the Napoleonic wars in a discontented frame of mind and resented the use of steam machinery. They were on edge for trouble and if there were none they were ready to make it. So strong was the resentment of this element against the government that it seemed ...
— Steve and the Steam Engine • Sara Ware Bassett

... did not accord with the love of action and desire of human sympathy, characteristic of youth. Neither the care of my flock, nor the change of seasons, were sufficient to tame my eager spirit; my out-door life and unemployed time were the temptations that led me early into lawless habits. I associated with others friendless like myself; I formed them into a band, I was their chief and captain. All shepherd-boys alike, while our flocks were spread over the pastures, ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley

... amounted to about three hundred pounds, which we set aside as a joint fund for speculation. Bob, in a series of learned discourses, had convinced me that it was not only folly, but a positive sin, to leave this sum lying in the bank at a pitiful rate of interest, and otherwise unemployed, whilst every one else in the kingdom was having a pluck at the public pigeon. Somehow or other, we were unlucky in our first attempts. Speculators are like wasps; for when they have once got hold of a ripening and peach-like project, they keep it rigidly ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various

... him to do whatever he could to encourage the Company to proceed with this work. Unfortunately, as was usual at that time of the year (Mr Rushton's voice trembled with emotion) the town was full of unemployed. (The Mayor, Alderman Sweater, and all the other Councillors shook their heads sadly; they were visibly affected.) There was no doubt that the starting of that work at that time would be an inestimable boon to the working-classes. ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell

... firmly fixed in the ceiling easily raised and lowered by means of a windlass—all these thousand and one contrivances which I had so laboriously prepared in spite of the railleries of those who envied me, and which I felt desolate at seeing unemployed, were going to find their use! Unexpected circumstances had arisen at last to procure me such a subject for experiment, as I had in vain endeavored to procure, while I was attempting to reduce to torpidity dogs, rabbits, sheep and other ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About

... labor at that, which could carry them far. We all know that they have a marked genius: great gifts of their own. In a civilization of super-ants or bees, there would have been no problem of the hungry unemployed, no poverty, no unstable government, no riots, no strikes for short hours, no derision of eugenics, no thieves, perhaps no crime ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day Jr.

... till at length it was altogether lost to sight. Here we were in this small boat tossing on the waves out of sight of land, and not knowing where we were going. Perhaps Ali knew better than I did. He, at all events, did not seem to be alarmed, and when unemployed, he continued humming melancholy Malay airs, which certainly did not tend to raise my spirits. There is a great difference in reading of an adventure and going through it. I confess I should have felt less anxiety had Oliver been with me; but as I ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston

... Pompey's veterans. There was money enough and to spare in the treasury, which they had themselves brought home. Out of the large funds which would still remain land might be purchased in other parts of Italy for the rest, and for a few thousand of the unemployed population which was crowded into Rome. The measure in itself was admitted to be a moderate one. Every pains had been taken to spare the interests and to avoid hurting the susceptibilities of the aristocrats. But, as Cicero said, the very name of an agrarian law was intolerable to them. It ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude

... feed him by putting the victuals by bits into his mouth. This was once the case when, in order to finish a 7-foot mirror, he had not taken his hands from it for sixteen hours together. In general he was never unemployed at meals, but was always at those times contriving or making drawings of whatever came in his mind. Generally I was obliged to read to him whilst he was at the turning-lathe, or polishing mirrors—Don Quixote, Arabian Nights' ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge

... for a young gentleman with the high notions and arrogant vanity of Francis Vivian,—his ambition already soaring far beyond kid gloves and a cabriolet! The idea was hopeless; and, perplexed and doubtful, I took my way to Vivian's lodgings. I found him at home and unemployed, standing by his window with folded arms, and in a state of such revery that he was not aware of my entrance till I had touched him on ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... those who really want it," one of you complacently informs me. Are you quite sure? In a city like this we are traversing I have seen fifty thousand men who "really wanted work," and could not find it. Fifty thousand unemployed, destitute and desperate people in one city. I was one of the number. Why didn't they scatter? you will ask. Whither should they go, and how? Take to the snow-clad country, be arrested as vags, and herded as criminals? For my part I did "scatter,"— tramped one ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... and unhelped on the streets to starve, it might as well not exist as far as she is concerned; and the problem of unemployment remains unsolved at its most painful point. Yet if it finds honest employment for her and for all the unemployed wives and mothers, it must find new places in the world for women; and in so doing it must achieve for them economic independence of men. And when this is done, can we feel sure that any woman will consent to be a wife and mother (not to mention ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw

... business man, announced that he intended to send a petition to Washington wearing boots so that it could not be conveniently shelved by being stuck away in a pigeonhole. He thereupon proceeded to lead a march of the unemployed, which started from Massillon on March 25, 1894, with about one hundred men in the ranks. These crusaders Coxey described as the "Army of the Commonweal of Christ," and their purpose was to proclaim the wants ...
— The Cleveland Era - A Chronicle of the New Order in Politics, Volume 44 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Henry Jones Ford

... Shakespeare, Dante, Degas, Rousseau, Tolstoi, Maeterlinck, Strindberg, Zola, Whistler, Leopardi, Emerson, Carlyle, Swedenborg, Rabelais). Socialism, its various schools, its past and its future; Anarchism: bombs. Labour questions: the Eight Hours' Day, the Unemployed, the Living Wage, etc., etc. Mr. Gladstone's career. Shall members of Parliament be paid? Chamberlain's position; ditto for every statesman in every country, to-day and in all past ages. South Africa, ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill

... great use of, as the human agency which he was determined to find somehow. We had examined the ruins very closely at the time of these occurrences; but afterwards, when all was over, as we went casually about them one Sunday afternoon in the idleness of that unemployed day, Simson with his stick penetrated an old window which had been entirely blocked up with fallen soil. He jumped down into it in great excitement, and called me to follow. There we found a little hole,—for it was more ...
— The Open Door, and the Portrait. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant

... man, who looked more like a drover than a sailor, and the crew bore a greater resemblance to the unemployed than to any other body we know of, except that they looked a little more independent. They seemed clannish, too, with an unemployed or free-labour sort of isolation. We have an idea that they regarded our personal ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson

... of silence, on Racine's part, had elapsed, when Madame de Maintenon, the wife of Louis XIV., asked the unemployed poet to prepare a sacred play for the use of the high-born girls educated under her care at St. Cyr. Racine consented, and produced his "Esther." This achieved a prodigious success; for the court took it up, and an exercise written for a girls' school became the admiration of ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson

... me sick whenever I saw him." To which proposition Fitzner and Boekel eagerly acceded, and Boekel declared that, for his part, he could stand such a fellow just as little as the forester himself; so that danger was averted. But the unemployed sentinels were engaged in anxious conversation. The castle forces were contrasted with those of the enemy, and finally the slight nature of the palings in the yard became the leading object of a searching criticism. It was clear that the next attack would be directed against them, and ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag

... the coral-fisher, his lot still remains hard enough, even in the present days of grace; whilst any employment that saps the workman's strength during the hot summer months and leaves him idle or unemployed in winter time cannot well be described as a desirable trade. Yet the temptation to obtain a considerable sum of money in advance, as is the case in this particular industry, often proves overwhelming to the young ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan

... surrounded it. Among the latter belong the preference of bodily over intellectual development, and the unlimited faith in the goodness of human nature. Exercise the body, the organs, the senses of the pupil, and keep his soul unemployed as long as possible; for the first, take care only that his mind be kept free from error and his heart from vice. In order to secure complete freedom from disturbance in this development, it is advisable ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg

... huge and growing armies of absolutely unemployed men; the insistence of the populace, and particularly the business people, upon the disbandment of regiments, and upon great naval and military reductions, involving further unemployment; the voting of considerable sums for distribution among the unemployed; violent opposition to the mere suggestion ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson

... growth. Much of the government's stock in enterprises has been sold. Drops in production had been severe since the breakup of the Soviet Union in December 1991, but by mid-1995 production began to recover and exports began to increase. Pensioners, unemployed workers, and government workers with salary arrears continue to suffer. Foreign assistance played a substantial role in the country's economic turnaround in 1996-97. Growth was held down to 2.1% in ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... Cross, the government offices of a fifth of mankind were all within an hour's stroll, great economic changes were going on under our eyes, now the hoardings flamed with election placards, now the Salvation Army and now the unemployed came trailing in procession through the winter-grey streets, now the newspaper placards outside news-shops told of battles in strange places, now of amazing discoveries, now of sinister crimes, abject squalor and poverty, imperial splendour and luxury, Buckingham Palace, Rotten Row, Mayfair, the ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells

... this. I must. I cannot see you suffer with the power in my hands unemployed to help ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu

... much more numerous peasantry would be required on the land. This would be physically, economically, morally, better for the nation. It is obvious that national health would be improved with a considerably larger proportion of hardy country yeomen. The percentage of poor and unemployed people in large cities would be reduced, their labor being required on the soil, where, being in more natural, salutary, harmonious surroundings the moral element would have better opportunity for development than when confined in the unhealthy, ...
— No Animal Food - and Nutrition and Diet with Vegetable Recipes • Rupert H. Wheldon

... German, hard-fisted, bullet-headed—editor of an East Side labor-paper. Some one spoke of working-men losing their votes through being unemployed and cast adrift; and Thyrsis remembered this man's grim comment, "They lose their votes, but they don't lose their voices!" There came a young man, fair as an Antinous, who with his verbal battering-ram shook the institutions of society so as to frighten ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair

... some adventurous collector called upon Mrs. Crook to solicit a subscription. She had always something to say against the object for which money was asked. If it were for the sufferers by an accident in a coal mine or for the unemployed at ...
— Our Young Folks at Home and Abroad • Various

... after all, humbling as this fact may be to our clamorous vanity, only so many agents and instruments, blind, and scuffling vainly in our blindness, in the perpetual law of progress. As a soul never dies, so it is never useless or unemployed. The Deity is no more profligate in the matter of souls than he is in that of seeds. They pass, by periodical transitions, from body to body; perhaps from sphere to sphere; and as the performance of their trusts have been praiseworthy or censurable, ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms

... wished you best. I hope that you will continue to pursue it vigorously and constantly[65]. You gain, at least, what is no small advantage, security from those troublesome and wearisome discontents, which are always obtruding themselves upon a mind vacant, unemployed, and undetermined. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell

... for herself occupation, there was still space in which to muse and to torment herself with her thoughts. Whilst her hands were engaged she craved for leisure in which to think; when unemployed, the ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould

... the election day appeared, their news from the United States was such a terrible chapter of accidents as has rarely fallen to the lot of journals to publish in one day. The President had been shot at in New York by an unemployed foreign artisan, the night before, while leaving a mansion on Fifth Avenue. Troubles between labor and capital, which had been brewing for some time, had broken out in several manufacturing centres, and were threatening to ...
— The Dominion in 1983 • Ralph Centennius

... healthy woman really needs to keep her in health. In case, however, of those slight illnesses to which all are more or less liable, and which, if neglected, often lead to graver ones, the advantage is still on the side of domestic service. In the shop and factory, every hour of unemployed time is deducted; an illness of a day or two is an appreciable loss of just so much money, while the expense of board is still going on. But in the family a good servant is always considered. When ill, she is carefully nursed as one of the family, has the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various

... producing lays of love, satiric fables, sacred legends, fabliaux, and metrical romances. Some of the bards were poor, and recited their songs from court to court; but many of them sang merely for pleasure when their swords were unemployed. This poetry was essentially chivalric; ideal love for a chosen lady, the laments of disappointed affection, or the charms of spring, formed the constant subjects of their verse. They generally sang their own compositions, and accompanied themselves on the harp; yet some even among the titled minstrels ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta

... Shadows Lengthen gives an account of the different institutions founded by the Salvation Army in the United States. There are sixty-five Industrial Homes, where unemployed of all classes can apply for work. In these Homes refuse and worn-out articles collected from individual homes of their respective towns are disinfected and transformed into useful articles, which are sold at low prices to the neighbouring poor, thus ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero

... hardly undertake; and besides, he would make his hands, if not himself, absolutely unfit for the entertainment on Thursday. On which Harold asked if there were no such thing as water. Eustace implored him to give it up and send half-a-dozen unemployed men, but to this he answered, "I ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge

... mornings she spent with Tempie in the excitements of completing her most comprehensive culinary education and the amount of badinage she exchanged upon the subject with David Kildare occupied many of his unemployed minutes. His demands for the most intricate and soul-trying concoctions she took a perfect joy in meeting and his enthusiasm stimulated her to the attempting of the most ...
— Andrew the Glad • Maria Thompson Daviess

... branches of production without the defense of protective duties if the pay rolls are equalized; but the conflict that stands between the producer and that result and the distress of our working people when it is attained are not pleasant to contemplate. The Society of the Unemployed, now holding its frequent and threatening parades in the streets of foreign cities, should not be allowed to acquire an ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume IX. • Benjamin Harrison

... discouragement in the many unsuccessful experiments in cooperation which were carried on in Chicago during the early nineties; a carpenter shop on Van Buren Street near Halsted, a labor exchange started by the unemployed, not so paradoxical an arrangement as it seems, and a very ambitious plan for a country colony which was finally carried out at Ruskin, Tennessee. In spite of failures, cooperative schemes went on, some of the same men appearing in one ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams

... diseases below the fetlock. If it is caused by overworking the animal, the first indication, of course, will be rest. Line firing has proved very efficacious in these cases. The animal must be turned loose and left unemployed. Careful attention should be given to the condition of his feet and to the manner of shoeing, while time is allowed for the tendons to become restored to their normal state and the irritation caused by excessive stretching has subsided. A shoe with a thick heel ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture

... which his retainers had been so unceremoniously ejected. He had, indeed, marched a strong force through them; but the Welsh had entirely withdrawn, and it would be necessary to keep so large a force unemployed, were he to reoccupy the land, that he abstained from taking any decisive action, prior to the return of the messenger whom he had despatched to inform the king of the forcible measures that Glendower had taken to recover the estate. It would have ...
— Both Sides the Border - A Tale of Hotspur and Glendower • G. A. Henty

... hard hit by the war. Among those I talked to I found a keeper of bathing-machines, a publican's assistant, clerks, shop assistants, three clergy—these latter going home for their Sunday duty, and giving their wages to the Red Cross—unemployed architects, and the like. ...
— The War on All Fronts: England's Effort - Letters to an American Friend • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... have contributed to the Indian unrest. That that system has been productive of much good few will deny, but few also can be so blind as to ignore the fact that it tends on the one hand to create a semi-educated proletariate, unemployed and largely unemployable, and on the other hand, even where failure is less complete, to produce dangerous hybrids, more or less superficially imbued with Western ideas, and at the same time more or less completely divorced from the realities of Indian life. Many other circumstances ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol

... him unto God, into heaven, where he should see strange mysteries, which were not lawful to be seen by any other man. He prayed him, then, to get upon Alborak; but the beast, having lain idle and unemployed from the time of Christ to Mahomet, was grown so mettlesome and skittish, that he would not stand still for Mahomet to mount him, till at length he was forced to bribe him to it by promising him a place in ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward

... and Director of Transportation to the Army in France, and now Shipbuilder-in-Chief to the nation. Everyone seemed pleased, with the notable exception of Mr. HOGGE, who cannot understand why all these appointments should be showered upon Sir ERIC GEDDES, when there are other able Scotsmen still unemployed. A late hon. Admiral of the Fleet, now residing at Potsdam, is believed to share ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 23, 1917 • Various

... that were England to adopt compulsory military service in some shape or form, we should hear a great deal less of the unemployed and "don't-want-work" demonstrations. ...
— Argentina From A British Point Of View • Various

... giving consistency to his laws; in establishing his morals upon solid foundations; in spreading a wholesome education among his fellows. He would, unquestionably, have been much wiser, more fortunate, if he had agreed to let his idle, unemployed guides quarrel among themselves unheeded; if he had permitted them to fathom those depths calculated to astound the mind, to amaze the intellect, without intermeddling with their irrational disputes. But it is the essence of ignorance, to attach ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach

... willing—why not? They went back to the lodging-house where Bill lived, and he tied up his worldly goods in a gunny-sack—the greater part of the load consisting of a diary in which he had recorded his adventures as leader of an unemployed army which had started to march from California to Washington, D.C., some four years previously. They took the trolley, and getting off in the country, walked along the banks of the river, Jimmie still sobbing, and Bill in the grip of one of ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair



Words linked to "Unemployed" :   unemployed people, jobless, discharged, idle, people, out of work, pink-slipped, employed, fired, laid-off, plural, plural form, dismissed



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