"Landless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... now for the blessing! Of little account, You know, is the old one they heard on the Mount. Its giver was landless, His raiment was poor, No jewelled tiara His fishermen wore; No incense, no lackeys, no riches, no home, No Swiss guards! We order ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... certain is my sister's son; Bid him cum quick and succour me! The king cums on for Ettricke Foreste, And landless men ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... great fresh-water lochs. Loch Nahuagh was his port; here he received Clan Ranald, whose desolate keep, Castle Tirrim, stands yet in ruins, since "the Fifteen." Glenaladale (whose descendants yet hold their barren acres), Dalilea, and Kinlochmoidart (now, like Clan Ranald, landless men) met him with discouraging words. But, seeing a flash in the eyes of a young Macdonald, of Kinlochmoidart, Charles said, "You will not forsake me?" "I will follow you to death, were no other sword ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... sometimes—all because she loved him more than the others—more indeed than she cared to show, for fear of exposing 'an old woman's ridiculous fancy,' as she called her predilection.—'A lang-leggit, prood, landless laird,' she would say, with a moist glimmer in her loving eyes, 'wi' the maist ridiculous feet ye ever saw—hardly room for the five taes ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... the name of the applicant. On one occasion he gave fifty dollars each to all the old maids and widows he could get knowledge of in the State of New York—six hundred of them in all. He gave away nearly three thousand small farms, from fifteen to seventy-five acres each, most of them to landless colored men. ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... is, if it lie along a tolerably accessible coast, or if any other reasonable retreat is afforded them. It is only when a leaky vessel is in some very out of the way part of those waters, some really landless latitude, that her captain begins to feel a little anxious. Much this way had it been with the Town-Ho; so when her leak was found gaining once more, there was in truth some small concern manifested by several of her company; especially by radney the mate. ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... we are making here to-day, springing up by hundreds and thousands in each county and state, during the next thirty years, what may we expect? The last remaining serf will have been emancipated. The hopeless tenant and the landless farmer can no longer be found. No one can be induced to toil, for owners of the monopolistic farm. The owners will not and cannot work themselves. The experience of a few unprofitable years will urge them to sell their lands to the co-operators at such prices as they may be ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... to live till I maybe contented to 'rest and be thankful' in the Upper House; and I should not like to be a landless peer." ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... rising current of commercialism, and the rich men and landlords to turn their attention to the production of profit instead of the production of livelihood; the gild-less journeyman and the landless labourer slowly came into existence; the landlord got rid of his tenants all he could, turned tillage into pasture, and sweated the pastures to death in his eagerness for wool, which for him meant ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... walks, meetings at the stile, harvest homes of long ago, and many a romantic narrative of human experience widely read in both hemispheres. They will run on for ever, carrying with them the same associations. They are the inheritance of landless millions, who have trodden them in ages past at dawn, noon, and night, to and from their labor; and in ages to come the mowers and reapers shall tread them to the morning music of the lark, and through Spring, Summer, Autumn, ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... almost unknown suddenly increased to alarmingly large proportions. Cattle roaming in the woods were killed and the meat sold to the army. Prosecutions were instituted in many cases. It was found that the perpetrators were generally, but by no means always, landless men, not infrequently refugee slaves, who had come to the province from the United States. The offence was punishable with death:[42] and convictions were not hard to obtain. But the punishment of death was not in practice ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... to travel with you, Mr. Fitzgerald," said Breitmann musingly. "You would be good company. Some day, perhaps, I'll try your prescription; but I'm only a poor devil of a homeless, landless baron." ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... despair irritated the landless classes, and some of them were mean enough to remind us that Martial Law forbade the use of water for gardening purposes. But the reminder only furnished the workers with a fresh incentive; it made their work a real as well as an ideal pleasure. The ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... him one morning like a clap of thunder that he was responsible for about as much as the acres of Whitethorn would retrieve, besides the trifling morsel to whet his appetite in the loss of his loose thousands. Harry Jardine was likely to know himself as "landless, landless," as ever ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... Murguia tried to look. But they saw nothing. Except for the booming of the surf, they might have been on a landless sea, alone in the black night. Don Anastasio was shaking at such a rate that his two companions in the dark wheelhouse were conscious of it. He cursed the quartermaster for a pessimist. The skipper, though, was ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... As e'er was proof of soldier's thew or theme for minstrel's lay! Here, Hubert, bring the silver bowl, and liquor quantum suff., I'll make a shift to drain it yet, ere I part with boots and buff;— Though Guy through many a gaping wound is breathing forth his life, And I come to thee a landless man, my fond ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... dependants. In the parable which is now under review, we have a picture equally distinct, but representing another class of countrymen. This is neither on the one hand a great proprietor, nor on the other a landless labourer. Here is a man who has a stake in the country, a portion of ground of size sufficient to provide for the wants of his family; but his farm cannot afford employment and remuneration to a gang of labourers; the work must be all done by ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... that may be adopted by such state government, in relation to the freed people of such State, which shall recognize and declare their permanent freedom, provide for their education, and which may yet be consistent, as a temporary arrangement, with their present condition as a laboring, landless, and homeless class, will not be objected to by the national executive. And it is suggested as not improper that, in constructing a loyal state government in any State, the name of the State, the boundary, the subdivisions, the constitution, and the ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... Queen may never bear a child; I think that I may be some time the Queen, Then, Queen indeed: no foreign prince or priest Should fill my throne, myself upon the steps. I think I will not marry anyone, Specially not this landless Philibert Of Savoy; but, if Philip menace me, I think that I will play with Philibert, As once the Holy Father did with mine, Before my father married my good mother,— For ...
— Queen Mary and Harold • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... not having been consulted, for though kept in strict discipline by his uncle, it had always been with every courtesy due to his rank as a king's grandson; and the cousins, from whom he had suffered, were of the same rank with himself. Did this wandering landless knight, now he had him in his power, mean to disregard all that was his due? But when Sir James turned round his face sparkling with good-humour and amusement, and laughed as he said, 'Now then for the humours of a Scottish fair!' all his ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... heard to peal from Saint Dunstan's. "Well banged, brave hammers!" said Lord Dalgarno, in triumph.—"The estate and lands of Glenvarloch are crushed beneath these clanging blows. If my steel to-morrow prove but as true as your iron maces to- day, the poor landless lord will little miss what your peal hath cut him out from.—The papers—the papers, thou varlet! I am to-morrow Northward, ho! At four, afternoon, I am bound to be at Camlet Moat, in the Enfield Chase. To-night most of my retinue set forward. The ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... confinement indeed. Friedrich is aware of this Vienna Order; which is a kind of comfort in the circumstances. The intentions of the hungry Russians, too, are legible to Friedrich; and he is much resolved that said Order shall be impossible to Daun. "Were it to be possible, we are landless. Where are our recruits, our magazines, our resources for a new Campaign? We may as well die, as suffer that to be possible!" Such is Friedrich's fixed view. He ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... absolutely perfect, and whose place was one of the finest in England, at once historical; romantic, and home-like: a picturesque architectural outgrowth from an abbey, which had still remnants of the old monastic trunk. Diplow lay in another county, and was a comparatively landless place which had come into the family from a rich lawyer on the female side who wore the perruque of the restoration; whereas the Mallingers had the grant of Monk's Topping under Henry the Eighth, and ages before had held the neighboring lands ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... that the appetite for reform by taxation will grow, and that the taxation will be increased and the exemptions diminished until all the rent will be taken and the land practically confiscated, according to the proposals of Henry George. But the landless man, when he becomes a landholder, ceases to be a single taxer, and is strongly opposed to Socialism. The land legislation of New Zealand, although apparently Socialistic, is producing results directly opposed to Socialism by converting a lot ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... estates; but even in this sphere there are wide differences of opinion as to the proper methods and policy to be employed, especially with regard to the division of grasslands and the migration of landless men. Its other remedial work (part of which is now taken over by the Department of Agriculture under the Land Act of 1909), in encouraging fisheries, industries, and farm improvements out of State money, is open to criticism on the ground of its tendency to pauperize ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... very much more specific. The number of persons, he said, who had any interest as owners in the soil of their mother country was not more than 30,000—or, to put the matter in terms of families, thirty-four out of every thirty-five were "landless." The New Domesday Book showed that the number of proprietary interests, instead of being only 30,000, was considerably more than a million; or, in other words, the number of the "landless" as Bright stated it was greater than the actual ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... is a bold cape of black lava on the extreme easterly point of the group. Beyond this cape stretches the limitless, landless Pacific. Against its fissured sides seethes and booms the swell from the ocean, in a dash of foaming spray. Piles of rocks mark the visits of chiefs to this sacred spot, and tombs of the dead abut ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... universal and the true proletariat or landless class will disappear. It may be that the holding of land will become a prerequisite to active citizenship. Industrial production being for use not profit, the great city becomes a thing of the past, and life is rendered simpler through the elimination ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... labour leaders who break faith and incite to violence; they are the I. W. W.; they are the Black Hand, the Camorra; they are the penniless who would slay and rob; the landless who would kill and seize; the ignorant, nursing suspicion; the shiftless, brooding crimes to bring them ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... ignorant, honest Negro buy and pay for a farm in installments three separate times, and then in the face of law and decency the enterprising American who sold it to him pocketed the money and deed and left the black man landless, to labor on his own land at thirty cents a day. I have seen a black farmer fall in debt to a white storekeeper, and that storekeeper go to his farm and strip it of every single marketable article,—mules, ploughs, stored crops, tools, furniture, bedding, clocks, looking-glass,—and ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... brothers Robert and William setting the example by stripping their youngest brother, Henry, of the castle he had purchased with his father's legacy. One knight, two squires, and a faithful chaplain, alone would abide by the fortunes of the landless prince. The chaplain, Roger le Poer, had been chosen by Henry, for a reason from which no one could have expected the fidelity he showed his prince in his misfortunes, nor his excellent conduct afterward when sharing ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... of these Munchausen-like anecdotes, just to show the reader how well-advised I have been in suppressing the series. On one occasion, when camped about ten miles from Ship Mountain, one of my friends among the Balala [Landless and weaponless waifs who wander over uninhabited tracts. Lit., "people who are dead."] came in to report that a very fine tsessaby bull was to be found in a kloof some four miles away. The meat of the tsessaby is more delicious than that of any other game, so I went forth without delay. ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... their frequent schemes for free land, Southerners and their sympathetic Northern henchmen were furthering a scheme that aimed at the purchase of Cuba. From the impatient sneer of a Southerner that the Northerners sought to give "land to the landless" and the retort that the Southerners seemed equally anxious to supply "niggers to the niggerless," it can be seen that American history is sometimes better summed up by angry politicians than ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... Among the free men there was equality in all but wealth and the social standing that cannot be separated therefrom. The thrall was a serf rather than a slave, and could own a house, etc., of his own. In a generation or so the freeman or landless retainer, if he got a homestead of his own, was the peer of the highest in the land. During the tenth century Greenland was colonised from Iceland, and by end of the same century christianity was introduced into Iceland, but made at first little difference in arrangements of society. In ...
— The Story of the Volsungs, (Volsunga Saga) - With Excerpts from the Poetic Edda • Anonymous
... lure such a gamester strongly. As matters stood with us in that wan summer of exhaustion and defeat, the king's cause waxed and grew more hopeful day by day. And in event of final victory a landless baronet, marrying Margery's dower of Appleby Hundred, might snap his fingers at the Jews who, haply, had ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... relief; and who, until the last 20 years, had not even a right to be educated unless by the charity of their "betters." The class which, without figure of speech or flights of rhetoric, is homeless, landless, property less in our chief cities— that I call the proletariat. Of the proletariat he declared there were hundreds of thousands growing up outside ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... invested in business or industry, or who receive salaries or incomes proportionate in value to such real estate as investment; and as 75% of the population is classed as illiterate, and a great majority of the labouring classes is landless, badly paid, and miserably poor, it is apparent that political sovereignty in Chile is the well-guarded possession of a small minority. The dominant element in this minority is the rich landholding interest, and the constitution and the laws ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... zenith; the ice-covered sea And Darien shall bound-mark the Land of the Free. Behold how the landless, the poor and oppressed, Flock in on our shores from the East and the West! Let them come—bid them come—we have plenty of room; Our forests shall echo, our prairies shall bloom; The iron horse, puffing his cloud-breath of steam, Shall course every valley and leap every stream; New cities ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... book was written; and it will be recollected that the ring, taken by Drood to be given to his betrothed only if their engagement went on, was brought away with him from their last interview. Rosa was to marry Tartar, and Crisparkle the sister of Landless, who was himself, I think, to have perished in assisting Tartar finally to unmask and ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... we should hang any landless fere, The first we would begin with thee.' 'Now welladay!' said the heir of Linne, 'Now ...
— Ballads of Scottish Tradition and Romance - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Third Series • Various
... Neither north nor south is yours, You've no kingdom that endures! Wandering every fall and spring, With your ruby crown so slender, Are you only a Pretender, Landless king? ...
— Songs Out of Doors • Henry Van Dyke
... windows, the darkness seemed to deepen at that moment, a step was heard coming heavily down a stairway; and having named the inn to you, gentle reader, it is time for me to name the young man also, the landless lord of the Valleys of Arguento Harez, as the step comes slowly down the inner stairway, as the gloaming darkens over the first house in which he has ever sought shelter so far from his father's valleys, as ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... for the latter at least cover several countries, and can be tested by the impressions of very different districts. And in some preliminary respects the comparison is really useful. Both races are in different ways landless, and therefore in different ways lawless. For the fundamental laws are land laws. In both cases a reasonable man will see reasons for unpopularity, without wishing to indulge any task for persecution. In both cases he will probably recognise the reality of a racial fault, while admitting ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... I looked over this I became sure that they had seen somewhat in me which their charge could not love, so that they would keep me from her altogether. And I made up my mind to that at last, not wondering that it was so, for I was but a warrior and a landless thane with nought to be proud of but skilful weapon play, and some scars to show that I had been in a fight or two where blows were falling. And I minded how I had told Ailwin that I held myself free, and ...
— King Olaf's Kinsman - A Story of the Last Saxon Struggle against the Danes in - the Days of Ironside and Cnut • Charles Whistler
... twenty millions in money and twenty millions in land have been given for the construction of a railway! Some doubtless there are in this chamber who are ready to contend that we had better give these fifteen millions of acres of land to become homesteads for the landless and homeless. What is this twenty millions in money, and how is it to be paid? It is supposed that the road cannot be constructed in less than five years. In that event, bonds of the government to the amount of four millions of dollars will issue annually. Probably the road will not be ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... I have long hoped that the time would some day come that I should ask you for the hand of Mistress Aline, but though I have been fortunate, and have won rank and some distinction, I was but a landless knight, and in no position to ask for your daughter's hand. That obstacle has now been removed, and I pray you to give her to me. I love her very truly. My thoughts have never wandered for a moment from her, and I trust that I shall be able to make her happy. Unless the banner ...
— A March on London • G. A. Henty
... be worthy of such a wife; I am a mere foundling, living on thy father's bounty. It is not in the course of nature that such as I should wed a king's daughter, for there can be no equal match between a princess and a landless squire." ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... Queen was bent on winning for her son the hand of Mademoiselle, a granddaughter of France, and the greatest heiress there. If all were indeed lost in England, he would thus be far from a landless Prince, and her wealth might become a great assistance to the royal cause in England. But Mademoiselle was several years older than the Prince, and was besides stiff, haughty, conceited, and not much to his taste, so he answered rather sullenly ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... caste—her father being a drunkard and landless (though grandson of a Lord Sahib), living by horses and camels menially, out-casted, a jail-bird. Formerly he had carried the mail through the desert, a fine rider and brave man, but sharab[1] had loosened the thigh in the saddle and palsied hand and eye. On ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... characteristic note of their utterances on this theme. "Rather," says the ghost of Achilles to Odysseus in the world of shades, "rather would I live upon the soil as the hireling of another, with a landless man who had no great livelihood, than bear sway among all the dead that are no more." [Footnote: Od. xi 489.—Translated by Butcher and Lang.] Better, as Shakespeare ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... Rahere. "Witless, landless, nameless, and, but for my protection, masterless, he can still make shift to bide his doom ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling
... attempt anything of this kind, to fix a limit below which it would not allow the owner to sell or the purchaser to buy. I believe that you can establish a class of moderate proprietors, who will form a body intermediate between the great owners of land and those who are absolutely landless, which will be of immense service in giving steadiness, loyalty, and peace to the whole population of the island. The noble Lord, the Chief Secretary, knows perfectly well at what price he could lend that money, and I will just state to the House one fact which will show ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... security, and the sons and daughters of secure people, by marrying insecurity or by wild extravagance or flagrant vice, would sink into the life of anxiety and insufficiency which was the ordinary life of man. The rest of the population was landless and, except by working directly or indirectly for the Secure, had no legal right to exist. And such was the shallowness and insufficiency of our thought, such the stifled egotism of all our feelings before the Last Days, that very few indeed of the Secure ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... own counsel," said the falconer, "but methinks a shrewd guess might be made at the purport of the gathering. It was but three days since that his foresters were beaten back by the landless men, whom they caught in the very act of cutting up a fat buck. As thou knowest, my lord though easy and well-disposed to all, and not fond of harassing and driving the people as are many of his neighbors, is yet to the full as fanatical anent his forest privileges as the ...
— The Boy Knight • G.A. Henty
... setting down may help English readers to form some notion of the structure of society in those southern districts of Scotland. When Satchells wrote, he boasted that Buccleuch could summon to his banner one hundred lairds, all of his own name, with ten thousand more—landless men, but still of the same blood. The younger sons of these various lairds were, through many successive generations, portioned off with fragments of the inheritance, until such subdivision could be carried no farther, and then the cadet, of necessity, either adopted the profession ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... soil Wallace says: "The ingenuity of lawyers and direct landlord legislation steadily increased the powers of great landowners and encroached upon the rights of the people, till at length the monstrous doctrine arose that a landless Englishman has no right whatever to enjoyment even of the unenclosed commons and heaths and the mountain and forest wastes of his native country, but is everywhere in the eye of the law a trespasser whenever he ventures off a public road ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... pronounced it "an obsolete idea"; and I totally repudiated the land policy of the Whigs, having at that early day espoused the principle that the public lands should cease to be a source of revenue, and be granted in small homesteads to the landless poor for actual settlement and tillage. But on the subject of slavery, though it had escaped my attention in the hurrah of 1840, I was thoroughly aroused. This came of my Quaker training, the speeches of Adams and Giddings, the anti-slavery ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... of the Round Table; but when Dukes and Counts, and great Marquesses and Barons swarm like mayflies by a trout stream, what chance is there that a poor, landless exile will have a ...
— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge
... lads is Legion, and Miss Broughton's dogs, with THEIR friend Sara, and Mrs. Moberley, welcome the casual visitor with hospitable care. Among the kindly children of a later generation one may number a sailor man with a wooden leg; a Highland gentleman, who, though landless, bears a king's name; an Irish chevalier who was out in the '45; a Zulu chief who plied the axe well; a private named Mulvaney in Her Majesty's Indian army; an elderly sportsman of agile imagination or ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... clear at once that, theoretically at least, there was no room in such a community for the modern landless labourer. Where all the workers were paid by their tenancy of land, where, in other words, fixity and stability of possession were the very basis of social life, the fluidity of labour was impossible. Men could not wander from place to place offering ...
— Mediaeval Socialism • Bede Jarrett
... was not a single acre which he could call his own. And he had no money with which to purchase a farm of those speculators, into whose hands most of the lands had fallen. Could the good old man now rise from his grave, a Kentucky Legislature would not long leave him landless. There is scarcely a cabin or a mansion in the whole State, where Daniel Boone would not meet with as hospitable a reception as grateful hearts ...
— Daniel Boone - The Pioneer of Kentucky • John S. C. Abbott
... Winchester for his succession, and the importunity of selfish clerks, clamouring for grants to their churches. He died on May 14, clad in the habit of the Knights of the Temple, in whose new church in London his body was buried, and where his effigy may still be seen. The landless younger son of a poor baron, he had supported himself in his youth by the spoils of the knights he had vanquished in the tournaments, where his successes gained him fame as the model of chivalry. The favour of Henry, the "young king," gave him political importance, and his ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... masses of non-slaveholding Southerners were hardly less enthusiastic. The earlier jealousy and fear of the planters had everywhere weakened as the new lands of the South and West gave opportunity to the more ambitious to rise in the social and economic scale. The sons of small farmers and landless men in the old South had built the cotton kingdom of the lower South, and were now drawing aristocratic Virginia and the Carolinas into a close union with the new region. The widening of the area of slavery was equivalent to the opening of a social safety valve to the older and stratifying ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... on the south border of Kansas there camped a landless and homeless multitude. They looked longingly over the fertile prairies of the Cherokee Strip country, stirred the camp-fire embers emphatically, and sent another dispatch to Washington asking for a chance to get in. Congress ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... race possessed no more and knew no more as freedmen than they had possessed or known as slaves. Yes, they possessed themselves and the hard hands which God had given them for their support. But being landless and moneyless they were dependent for employment on the old master class. This put them at an immense economic disadvantage as a labor class on the threshold of their new life of freedom, and in the power of the old master class. The ...
— The Ultimate Criminal - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 17 • Archibald H. Grimke
... interested in real estate propositions. He liked land. He considered it a sound investment providing you did not get too much of it. He had never invested in any, or scarcely any, solely because he had not been in a realm where real estate propositions were talked of. As it was he was landless and, in a ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... ever since the elder Jean Setain displeased the then Seigneur of the de Vaudrey estate, the affairs of the tenant family had gone to wrack and ruin until the middle-aged son was little more than a landless beggar and an ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... very afternoon she went with her friend, the Hon. Margaret Neville, to visit Saint Ruth's Social Settlement, in Whitechapel. And there she met John Landless. The ...
— Old Valentines - A Love Story • Munson Aldrich Havens
... Gilbert, "being made homeless and landless by Stephen, I chose rather to cut a fortune out of the world than to beg one of the Queen, who has none left ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... exceeding steep, so that in five hours' time they were at the mountain-top, and coming over the brow beheld beneath them fair green slopes besprinkled with trees, and beyond them, some three or four miles away, the blue landless sea and on either hand of them was the sea also, so that they were nigh-hand at the ending of a great ness, and there was naught beyond it; and naught to do if they missed the Well, but to turn back by the way ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... many people are landless and forced to live on and cultivate flood-prone land; waterborne diseases prevalent in surface water; water pollution, especially of fishing areas, results from the use of commercial pesticides; ground water contaminated by naturally occurring arsenic; intermittent water shortages ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... the object religious liberty. With them there was no antipathy or animosity to the English. There was the Pope's Nuncio and his party, thinking most of papal interests, and there was the national party, who had been, or were likely to be, made landless. The king, then at Oxford, was importuned by the confederation on the one side and the Puritans on the other; one petitioning for freedom of worship, the other for the suppression of popery. Pending these appeals there was a long ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... I live but for thy service. Think'st thou this Moscovite or his affairs Concern my thoughts? 'Tis thou, thou and thy glory For which I will adventure life and all. For me no fortune blossoms; friendless, landless, I dare not let my hopes aspire to thee. Thy grace I may not win, but I'll deserve it. To make thee great be my one only aim; Then, though another should possess thee, still Thou wilt be mine—being what ...
— Demetrius - A Play • Frederich Schiller
... old lady resumed, '"to get our little affair of business off my mind. I have spoken with my two wards, Neville and Helena Landless, on the subject of their defective education, and they give in to the plan proposed; as I should have taken good care they did, whether they ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... long it lasted. Maybe the reason for that is not far to seek, for I could not tell what more I might see of Gerda when it ended. For I knew only too well that I had naught to offer her, being but a landless man, with nothing but my sword for heritage. And as the days passed, it seemed to me that in some way Gerda kept herself afar from me, being more ready to speak with Hakon and Bertric than myself, though again at times she was as ever with ...
— A Sea Queen's Sailing • Charles Whistler
... penny post, and the halfpenny paper, together with the centralization of general opinion and all government which has resulted therefrom. But above all reasons were the loss of the qualifying ancestral lands, a link with the soil; and the ennobling of landless men. Once divorced from its influence over some countryside a peerage resting on heredity was doomed; for no one can defend a system whereby men of no exceptional ability, representative of nothing, are legislators by inheritance. Should we summon ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... underlies class disunion: whose sons, from days long before the Conquest, have always desired to go to sea when the cuckoo sang, and to come home again when they were tired of the hail and salt showers, because they could not bear to be landless and ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... could have left Rose the auld hurley-house, and the riggs belanging to it.—And yet,' said he, resuming more cheerfully, 'it's maybe as weel as it is; for, as Baron of Bradwardine, I might have thought it my duty to insist upon certain compliances respecting name and bearings, whilk now, as a landless laird wi' a tocherless daughter, no one can blame ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... muskinu exactly. The term came in time to mean "a beggar" and with that meaning has passed through Aramaic and Hebrew into many modern languages; but though the Code does not regard him as necessarily poor, he may have been landless. He was free, but had to accept monetary compensation for corporal injuries, paid smaller fees and fines, even paid less offerings to the gods. He inhabited a separate quarter of the city. There is no reason to regard him as specially connected with the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... that followed the close of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 were in many senses years of unexampled misery. The accumulated burden of the war lay heavy upon Europe. The rise of the new machine power had dislocated the older system. A multitude of landless men clamored for bread and work. Pauperism spread like a plague. Each new invention threw thousands of hand-workers out of employment. The law still branded as conspiracy any united attempt of workingmen to raise wages or to shorten ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... groups and leaders: Landless Worker's Movement; labor unions and federations; large farmers' associations; religious groups including evangelical Christian ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... industrial and mining facilities is divided among private interests - including several multinationals - and the government. Most large agricultural holdings are private, with the government channeling financing to this sector. Conflicts between large landholders and landless peasants have produced intermittent violence. The COLLOR government, which assumed office in March 1990, launched an ambitious reform program that sought to modernize and reinvigorate the economy by stabilizing prices, deregulating the economy, and opening ...
— The 1993 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... districts bereft of labour, and landowners were compelled to offer higher wages if agriculture was to go on. In vain Parliament passed Statutes of Labourers to prevent the peasant from securing an advance. These Acts of Parliament expressly forbade a rise in wages; the landless man or woman was "to serve the employer who shall require him to do so, and take only the wages which were accustomed to be taken in the neighbourhood two years before the pestilence." The scarcity of labour drove landowners to compete for the services of the labourer, ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... report of Scipio's landing, Massinissa immediately arrived in the camp of the general, whom not long before he had confronted as an enemy in Spain; but the landless prince brought in the first instance nothing beyond his personal ability to the aid of the Romans, and the Libyans, although heartily weary of levies and tribute, had acquired too bitter experience in similar cases to declare at once for the invaders. So Scipio began the ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... on the sea, as prairie cocks in the prairie; he hides among the waves, he climbs them as chamois hunters climb the Alps. For years he knows not the land; so that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another world, more strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman. With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... demesne the lord was coming to rely more on the labour of his tenants, and consequently the labour services of the villeins were being augmented.[35] The agricultural labourer as we understand him, a landless man working solely for wages in ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... They had continued to hold the theory that the effective soldier must be a man of means—a belief inherited from the simple days of border warfare, when each conscript supplied his panoply and the landless man could serve only as a half-armed skirmisher. For ages past the principle had been breaking down. The vast forces required for foreign wars demanded a wider area for the conscription; but this area, as defined by the old conditions of service, so far from increasing, ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... them to make them seek such a meeting. It was one of my mother's matches. Mistress Cicely would have cleaved to him more closely, though I am glad you saw through the fellow too well to give her to him. She would be a landless widow, whereas this Ratcliffe wife has a fair portion for ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... abundance of free land to entice the ambitious and the dispossessed. Early in the century, as good land became scarce in the older towns of New England, and proprietors began to deny the commons to the landless, venturesome and discontented men, accepting the challenge of a savage-infested wilderness, moved northward along the rivers into Maine and New Hampshire, or beyond the original Connecticut settlements into the valley of ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... Douglas, "those whom you grace with your presence bring followers to aid your cause, wealth to support your state,—can offer you halls in which to feast, and impregnable castles for your defence. I am a houseless and landless man—disinherited by my mother, and laid under her malediction—disowned by my name and kindred—who bring nothing to your standard but a single sword, and the poor life of ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... property is not for him, but for all; and that the nation is to enjoy what he takes from it and vainly thinks to keep from it. Parks, pleasaunces, gardens, set apart for kings, are the play-grounds of the landless poor in the Old World, and perhaps yield the sweetest joy of privilege to some state-sick ruler, some world-weary princess, some lonely child born to the solitude of sovereignty, as they each look down from their palace windows upon the leisure of overwork taking its little holiday amidst ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... America; and shows his sincerity and consistency by parcelling off from time to time such portions of these lands as are available, in lots of forty or fifty acres each, and presenting the deeds thereof, free of charge, to the deserving landless men, white or black, in the region where the lands in question are located. He also long since vacated the splendid Peterboro' mansion, into possession of which he came on the death of his father; and now resides, himself and family, in a simple cottage near Peterboro', ...
— The American Prejudice Against Color - An Authentic Narrative, Showing How Easily The Nation Got - Into An Uproar. • William G. Allen
... are hundreds of others in a neighbouring town who have no land at all? The passing of the Land Acts of 1881 and 1887 made it inevitable that sooner or later a fresh agitation would be commenced by "landless men." And fifthly, when an excitable, uneducated people realize that lawlessness and outrages will be rewarded by an Act remitting debts and breaking contracts, they are not likely in future to limit their operations to land, but will apply the same ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous
... not enough to account for the great disparity in births and deaths between the two classes of families. For, allowing for this difference, births are two and one-third times as numerous in the working and landless class as among the landowners; and deaths are almost three and a half times as many among the landholders as ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... character cast over the fierce and restless spirits of his age. Prince- Duke of Friedland, Mecklenburgh, and Sagan, Generalissimo of the armies of the House of Austria,—to this height had the landless and obscure adventurer risen, in envy's despite, as his motto proudly said, not by the arts of a courtier or a demagogue, but by strength of brain and heart, in a contest with rivals whose brains and hearts ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... which I doubt not you two older men will well remember, and we were unfortunate enough to have our lands confiscated by that tyrant, King Henry the Eighth, and, from a state of prosperity and the possession of all we could reasonably wish, my family found itself landless, without money, and even without a home. Besides myself, there were two other children, both girls; and what worried my poor parents most was the problem of what to do with us three children. Fortunately an uncle of my mother—a man whose religious convictions had a habit of ...
— Across the Spanish Main - A Tale of the Sea in the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... venerable town; whose Bishop, famous in old times, is like an Archbishop, and "gets his pallium direct from the Pope,"—much good may it do him! "Is bound, however, to give up his Territory, if the Kaiser elected is landless,"—far enough from likely now. And so you are at last fairly in the Mayn Valley; River Mayn itself a little step to north;—long course and many wide windings between you and Mainz or Frankfurt, not to speak of Rotterdam, and the ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... propose, I gather, to make of her a camp-follower, a soldier's drab. Come, come, messire! you and I are conversant with warfare as it is. Armies do not conduct encounters by throwing sugar-candy at one another. What home have you, a landless man, to offer Melicent? What place is there for Melicent among ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... and bound in bondage fast to fear, What should it do to love thee? what hath he, The man that hath no country? Gods nor men Have such to friend, yoked beast-like to base life, Vile, fruitless, grovelling at the foot of death, Landless and kinless thralls of no man's blood, Unchilded and unmothered, abject limbs That breed things abject; but who loves on earth Not friend, wife, husband, father, mother, child, Nor loves his own life for his own land's sake, 1060 But only this thing most, more this than all, He loves ...
— Erechtheus - A Tragedy (New Edition) • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... Vellancoose pew (where he). But at the end of the year she came to me and told me she had given her word to a young farmer of Goldsithney, John Magor by name. In a worldly way this was a far better match for her than to take a nameless and landless man. Nor knew I anything against John Magor beyond some stray wildness natural to youth. He came of clean blood. He was handsome, almost as the other; tall, broad of chest, a prizewinner at wrestling-matches; and of an age when a good wife ...
— News from the Duchy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... sharp break with the past. There is now no one who is responsible for food and clothing. For a time all is in confusion. The war had wiped out the capital of the country. The whites were land poor, the Negroes landless. It so happened that at this time the price of cotton was high. The Negro knew more about cotton than any other crop. Raise cotton became the order of the day. The money lenders would lend money on cotton, even in advance, for it had a certain and sure ready sale. ...
— The Negro Farmer • Carl Kelsey
... arraigned for its silence in the presence of threats of secession made by its own members. The doctrine of encouragement to domestic industry was announced; the sale of the public lands was condemned; the coming measure of securing homesteads for the landless was approved; and a pledge of protection was given to all citizens, whether native or naturalized, and whether at home or abroad. The party was again pledged to the construction of a railway to the Pacific Ocean, and to the improvement ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... sons waxed wild and wrathful, and our daughters learned to grieve. Then we fell to the working of metal, and the deeps of the earth would know, And we dealt with venom and leechcraft, and we fashioned spear and bow, And we set the ribs to the oak-keel, and looked on the landless sea; And the world began to be such-like as the Gods would have it to be. In the womb of the woeful earth had they quickened ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... am free. Ye holy gods, but it is fine for a man to own himself and call none other lord! No man ever more shall hold me slave to him. Henceforth we be rovers, this star of my life and I. Come thou with us, friend! If thou stay here, thou'lt be held no better than erro, a landless, masterless wanderer, who is fair game for the law and for all men. Had my lord stayed, thou knowest that I too should have remained faithful. He being gone, we must fend for ourselves ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... know what things befall men in these distracted times, when faction wages war with faction, and men pillage and burn and imprison, first on this side, then on that. Many a son of a noble house may find himself homeless and landless, and, chased by the enemy, may have no refuge but the fastnesses of the mountains. Thank God, our lovely Italy hath a noble backbone of these same mountains, which afford shelter to her ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... man was forced to be a tramp along the roads and to sleep in the open. That retreat was perceived; and that retreat was cut off. A landless man in England can be punished for behaving in the only way that a landless man can behave: for sleeping under a hedge in Surrey or on a seat on the Embankment. His sin is described (with a hideous sense of fun) as that of having no visible ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... left. So when Sir Peter—against my counsel, staking his all upon that usurping rogue Richard, who had promised to advance him, and meanwhile took his money—was killed at Bosworth, leaving you landless, penniless, and out of favour, I offered you a home, and you, being a wise man, put off your mail and put on woollen and became a merchant's partner, though your share of profit was but small. Now, again you have changed ...
— Fair Margaret • H. Rider Haggard
... of Tuskegee. On the recommendation of General Armstrong, of Hampton Institute, a young colored man, Booker T. Washington, a recent graduate of and teacher at the Institute, was called from there to take charge of this landless, buildingless, teacherless, and studentless ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... the mound A charmed bead of flint was found. Some woman surely in this place Covered with flowers a little baby-face, And laid the cowrie on the cold dead breast; And, weeping, turned for comfort to the landless West?" ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... entourage,—though he was careful to make his various changes slowly, so that they should not be too freely noticed and commented upon. Great nobles, whether possessed of vast wealth and estates, or altogether landless, were summoned to take their rightful positions at the Court, where Vantine the wine-grower, and Jost the Jew, no more obtained admittance;—men of science, letters and learning, were sought out and honoured in various ways, their wives and daughters receiving special ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... the mind of the king that 'persons of quality' as well as peasants should be induced to make their homes in New France. There were enough landless gentlemen in France; why should they not be used as the basis of a seigneurial nobility in the colony? It was with this idea in view that the Company of One Hundred Associates was empowered not only to grant large tracts of land in the wilderness, but to give the rank of gentilhomme ...
— The Seigneurs of Old Canada: - A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism • William Bennett Munro
... the people and should not be sold to individuals nor granted to corporations, but should be held as a sacred trust for the benefit of the people and should be granted in limited quantities, free of cost, to landless settlers." [Footnote: Free-Soil ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... needest. But,' as tokens of impatience manifested themselves among the rude escort, 'take thou this,' giving him the little service- book, as he knelt to receive it, scarce knowing why. 'One day thou wilt be able to read it. Poor child! whose lot it is to be fatherless and landless for me and mine, I would I could do ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Still others entirely lost their land and became attached, even as menial servants, to the households of their richer neighbours. (Thus Gerwazy was a servant, though not quite a menial, of the Pantler.) The great land owners (or magnates), by gathering around them hordes of gentle-born, landless dependents, were able to support private armies, and to exercise a preponderating influence on the affairs of the country. Hence the Constitution of May 3, 1791, excluded szlachta not holding land from the right to vote.—In English works on Poland the words szlachta and szlachcic ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... but wholly obedient, twenty archers of the Earl's guard, commanded by old John of Abernethy, called Landless Jock, fell in at ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... in the prairie; he hides among the waves, he climbs them as chamois hunters climb the Alps. For years he knows not the land; so that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another world, more strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman. With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... of Beli and his sons, referred to in the Mabinogi of Branwen, where one of them, Caswallawn, usurps the throne, and thus makes Manawyddan, like MacGregor, landless. In the Dream of Maxen, the sons of Beli are Lludd, Caswallawn, Nynnyaw, and Llevelys.[403] Geoffrey calls Beli Heli, and speaks of an earlier king Belinus, at enmity with his brother Brennius.[404] But probably Beli ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... religious programme with one or other of these two movements that he could have any hope of success. At first, impressed by the strength of the popular party as manifested in the net-work of secret societies then spread throughout Germany, and by the revolutionary attitude of the landless nobles, who were prepared to lead the peasants, he determined to raise the cry of civil and religious liberty, and to rouse the masses against the princes and kings, as well as against their bishops ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... king, "your fortunes are now in your own hands; and it depends on your own conduct whether you become a mighty thane or a landless outcast. Remember, it is always in the power of a virtuous son to blot out the reproach which the crimes of a wicked parent may have cast upon ...
— The Children's Portion • Various
... watch or a home, means infusing one's personality into it. A man who possesses significant things has a new body through which his soul can work; this body trains his powers; and it should give him life more abundantly. A landless man must become a soulless man. Of course, we are not here speaking of legal ownership. Many people own legally things into which they have never infused themselves; sometimes they have so many things that no individual could possibly infuse himself ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes
... morning, sleeping at night on bundles of straw, each person in the single garment that he wore through the day, and at convenient intervals breaking fast on black bread, salt meat, and home-brewed beer. There was no inducement for a landless serf to spend care or labor upon houses or surroundings; pigs and babies were permitted ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... waves; he climbs them as chamois hunters climb the Alps. For years he knows not the land; so that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another world, more strangely than the moon would to an earthsman. With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows, so at nightfall the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.—Herman Melville's ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal Vol. XVII. No. 418. New Series. - January 3, 1852. • William and Robert Chambers
... it," he said, "land ought not to be the subject of purchase and sale, for if land can be sold, then those who have money will buy it all in and charge the landless what they please for the use of it. People will then be compelled to pay for the right to stand on the earth," ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... was read by men dissatisfied with their lot in the Old World, it aroused hope. With his usual good judgment, Selkirk had engaged several men whose training fitted them for the work of inducing landless men to emigrate. One of these was Captain Miles Macdonell, lately summoned by Lord Selkirk from his home in Canada. Macdonell had been reared in the Mohawk valley, had served in the ranks of the Royal Greens during the War of the Revolution, and had survived many a hard fight on the New York ...
— The Red River Colony - A Chronicle of the Beginnings of Manitoba • Louis Aubrey Wood
... knew, though I was then but a lad, that she would never give over fretting herself at the thought that I was to be lord of all the broad acres and wide moors of Beechcot, and that Jasper would be but a landless man. And so, though she never dare flout or oppress me in any way, for fear of Sir Thurstan's displeasure, she, without being openly unfavorable, wasted no love on me, and no doubt often wished ...
— In the Days of Drake • J. S. Fletcher
... and other luxuries came by every ship from Boston; until for a long interval ships came no more. One of these days, when the power of the priests had abated, and the jealousy which would keep all Californians landless but themselves was counterbalanced by a great increase in population, he meant to have a ranch down in the south where the sun shone all the year round and he could ride half the day with his vaqueros after the finest ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... Johannesburg was, however, very strange. In Johannesburg, as in Pretoria, the last ten years have seen the development of special locations where the lowest class of Dutch people reside. For the most part these are the families of landless Boers. Until recent years they lived as squatters on the farms of their more thrifty compatriots. Their life then was one of progressive degradation. Under the Kruger policy hundreds of such families were encouraged to settle in the neighbourhood ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... psychology to a fraction. These people are more ignorant than our worst educated agricultural labourers. They own and live on huge tracts of land, in most cases as large as a great English estate. Their method of living is many stages below that of our landless farm labourer. Their ignorance is colossal, their cupidity and cunning the envy of the Armenians, who openly confess that in a bargain the Russian peasant beats the Jew to a frazzle. The order of the Soviet Government to the peasants to take possession of the landowners' estates and property ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward
... card to be printed "Mr. Mortimer:" he did not intend because he was landless, and but for his uncle's bounty almost penniless, to forego the little portion of dignity which belonged ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... style of the Renaissance and known as the Wampolder Hof. At one time it belonged to the lord of Wampold, a wealthy noble of Mainz, who had appointed as castellan a kinsman of his, himself a nobleman, though landless and poor and no longer able to uphold his former dignities. In his youth the keeper had lived a gay and careless life, but now he was old and infirm and cared no longer for worldly vanities. His sole pride was his ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... threatened by the new development of things economic in the cities. The guilds were becoming crystallized into close corporations of wealthy families, constituting a kind of second Ehrbarkeit or town patriciate; the numbers of the landless and unprivileged, with at most a bare footing in the town constitution, were increasing in an alarming proportion; the journeyman workman was no longer a stage between apprentice and master craftsman, but a permanent ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... course, entirely dependent upon the land for their living. They till the soil and rear cattle, and the greatest calamity that can come upon any family is that their land shall be taken from them. To be landless involves degradation as well as poverty, and very severe hardship is the lot of men who have been deprived of this means of subsistence. For those who own no land, but who are merely tenants of the Tu-muh,[S] there seems to be no security of tenure; but still, if the wishes and demands of the ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle |
