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Arson   Listen
noun
Arson  n.  (Law) The malicious burning of a dwelling house or outhouse of another man, which by the common law is felony; the malicious and voluntary firing of a building or ship.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Arson" Quotes from Famous Books



... were diversified by various attempts at arson—the latest, with aid of gunpowder, being successful. On the first of last February, the British minister's residence at Yedo was burned to the ground by armed incendiaries, who made their work more sure by laying trains of gunpowder, which caused a tremendous explosion; but as it was, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... when the man-hunt began. The newspapers from coast to coast, our worthy New York Times not excepted, howled for their blood, raved about an Anarchist plot to blow up Chicago, seize the government, murder, arson, pillage, rape—the whole program which William Randolph Hearst has made only too ...
— Labor's Martyrs • Vito Marcantonio

... machinery.—Henceforth these constitute the new leaders: for in every mob it is the boldest and least scrupulous who march ahead and set the example in destruction. The example is contagious: the beginning was the craving for bread, the end is murder and arson; the savagery which is unchained adding its unlimited violence to the limited revolt ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... in its character, and therefore came within the treaty proviso of nonsurrender. The Mexican contention was that the exception only related to purely political offenses, and that as Guerra's acts were admixed with the common crime of murder, arson, kidnaping, and robbery, the option of nondelivery became void, a position which this Government was unable to admit in view of the received international doctrine and practice in the matter. The Mexican Government, in view of this, gave notice January 24, 1898, of the termination ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... was passed which made a woman punishable for the crime of arson, even though the property set fire to might belong to ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various

... addicted to arson, We can't recommend a wooden parson: But if the Church any such appoints, They'd better at least have iron joints. In parts, not much by Protestants haunted, A figure to look at's all that's ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al

... the young man came running to the physician's house in a great perturbation. "What is the meaning of this?" he cried. "Here was I to be set free from the bondage of sin; and I have just committed forgery, arson, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson

... feud was bought off. The gradual encroachment of the composition may be traced in the Anglo-Saxon laws, /1/ and the feud was pretty well broken up, though not extinguished, by the time of William the Conqueror. The killings and house-burnings of an earlier day became the appeals of mayhem and arson. The appeals de pace et plagis and of mayhem became, or rather were in substance, the action of trespass which is still familiar to lawyers. /2/ But as the compensation recovered in the appeal was the alternative ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

... having. They wouldn't look at bacon, unless you'd guarantee that the pig had been killed on a moonless Friday with the wind in the North, and as for pulled figs, if you couldn't swear that the box had been crossed by a one-eyed man whose father had committed arson in a pair of brown boots, you could go and bury them ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates

... Britain and the United States. This by Article X provides that "the United States and Her Britannic Majesty shall, upon mutual requisitions ... deliver up to justice all persons ... charged with murder, or assault with intent to commit murder, or piracy or arson or robbery or forgery or the utterance of forged paper...." Power was given to judges and other magistrates to issue warrants of arrest, to hear evidence and if "the evidence be deemed sufficient ... it ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various

... to stop the slave trade each nation was to keep a squadron (carrying at least eighty guns) cruising off the coast of Africa. (2) It was agreed that any person who, charged with the crime of murder, piracy, arson, robbery, or forgery, committed in either country, shall escape to the other, shall if possible be seized and given up to the authorities of the ...
— A Brief History of the United States • John Bach McMaster

... Government, yet in view of the imminent peril which threatened the fugitives and solely from considerations of humanity they were afforded shelter by our naval commander, and when afterwards demanded under our treaty of extradition with Salvador for trial on charges of murder, arson, and robbery I directed that such of them as had not voluntarily left the ship be conveyed to one of our nearest ports where a hearing could be had before a judicial officer, in compliance with the terms of the treaty. On their arrival at San Francisco ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Volume 8, Section 2 (of 2): Grover Cleveland • Grover Cleveland

... by misadventure. Shooting at a pullet, without any design to take it away, is manslaughter; and with a design to take it away, is murder. 6 Sta. tr. 222. To shoot at the poultry of another, and thereby set fire to his house, is arson, in the opinion of some. Dalt. c. 116 1 ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson

... Luigi, the Gonfalonier, speaking for the signory, asked; 'What do you yet want? At your request we have taken all power from the opposition; we have restored to the admonished the power to hold office. You demanded that those participating in the riots and guilty of robbery and arson be pardoned; even this to our shame, we have granted. Yet continuously you appear before us making new demands, continue rioting and by numbers and threats seek to intimidate our body. You have so terrorized the people that no business is transacted. Where will it all end? ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt

... void of principle, and was degraded into the sport and instrument of political parties; which can the less be excused, seeing that this procedure, while especially applied to political crimes proper, was applicable also to others, such as murder and arson. The evil was aggravated by the clumsiness of that procedure, which, in concert with the haughty republican contempt for non-burgesses, gave rise to a growing custom of tolerating, side by side with the more formal process, a summary criminal, or rather police, procedure against slaves ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... can now correct it - we had a visitor - Baker of Tonga. Heard you ever of him? He is a great man here: he is accused of theft, rape, judicial murder, private poisoning, abortion, misappropriation of public moneys - oddly enough, not forgery, nor arson: you would be amused if you knew how thick the accusations fly in this South Sea world. I make no doubt my own character is something illustrious; or if not yet, there ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson

... a terrific thing—there is no denying that. If he had been proven guilty of theft, arson, licentiousness, infanticide, and defiling graves, I believe they would have ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner

... of a peer having been accused of arson, of which offence he was generally believed guilty, but acquitted on a point of insufficiency of evidence to sustain the indictment, was tried before Lord Norbury. The young gentleman met the judge next at the Lord-Lieutenant's levee in the Castle. Instead of avoiding the ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton

... with considerable of the portable property of other people concealed about their persons, had gone into the Bill Dalton business under the direct guidance—as they claimed—of their Deity, and were for some time eminently successful. Wholesale murder and robbery became their only industry, arson and oppression their recognized amusement. They had swiped up several cities—"leaving not a soul alive"—and were now grinding the snickersnee for Moab and Midian. The people of the petty nations of Palestine—whom God's anointed ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... elections of civil officers, with legislative enactments in ordinary form, with trials, suits at law, legal arguments, and decisions of judges. It is impossible here to sketch in detail this strange phantasmagory of arson, ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse

... th' best five-cint see-gar that money can buy; yet, whin a good frind iv mine wants to make me a prisint f'r Christmas, he goes to a harness shop an' buys a box iv see-gars with excelsior fillin's an' burlap wrappers, an', if I smoked wan an' lived, I'd be arristed f'r arson. I got a pair iv suspinders wanst fr'm a lady,—niver mind her name,—an' I wurruked hard that day; an' th' decorations moved back into me, an' I had to take thim out with pumice stone. I didn't lose th' taste iv th' paint f'r weeks ...
— Mr. Dooley in Peace and in War • Finley Peter Dunne

... more apparent toward the close of his work, when he begins to show signs of fatigue and exhaustion. Nay, it is to be feared that we are still suffering from the outrage committed on Victorian literature by Mr. Mill's incendiary housemaid. We may yet note marks of arson in the restored volume. At the same time, there are large parts of his work which are as true historically as they are poetically brilliant. Part I.—"The Bastille"—is almost perfect. The whole description of Versailles, ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison

... was convulsed with industrial dissensions. Labor was striking here, there, and everywhere; and where it was not striking, it was being turned out by the capitalists. The papers were filled with tales of violence and blood. And through it all the Black Hundreds played their part. Riot, arson, and wanton destruction of property was their function, and well they performed it. The whole regular army was in the field, called there by the actions of the Black Hundreds.* All cities and towns were like armed camps, and laborers were shot down like dogs. ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London

... whispered vows Underneath the linden boughs; Murder, bigamy, and theft; Travelers of goods bereft; Rapine, pillage, arson, spoil,— Everything but honest toil, Are the deeds that best define ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte

... Square—the one belonging to the Sardinian, the other to the Bavarian Minister—were attacked, plundered, set fire to, and almost entirely destroyed. The military were sent for; they arrived too late to prevent the arson, but thirteen of the malefactors were seized and committed to Newgate, and for the night the mob was dispersed. It was not a bad day's work for the rioters. Parliament had been insulted, the Government and the very Throne menaced. In two parts of the town ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy

... imprecations, the fact that half a dozen people, inmates and attendants, joined in the confusion as if by magic, all this was nothing to Jones, nor was the subsidiary fact that one of the inmates, a quiet mannered clergyman, with a taste for arson, had taken advantage of the confusion and was patiently and sedulously at work, firing the thatch of the summer house in six different places, with a long concealed box ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole

... documents, records, etc., giving an account of events that had been taking place in southern and western Russia during a period of nine months, between April and December of 1880. We do not need to recall the sickening details. The headings will suffice: outrage, murder, arson, and pillage, and the result,—100,000 Jewish families made homeless and destitute, and nearly $100,000,000 worth of property destroyed. Nor need we recall the generous outburst of sympathy and indignation from America. "It is not that ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus

... highway robbery, cruelty to children and animals, obtaining money under false pretences, forgery, embezzlement, misappropriation of public money, betrayal of public trust, malingering, mayhem, corruption of minors, criminal libel, blackmail, contempt of court, arson, treason, felony, mutiny on the high seas, trespass, burglary, jailbreaking, practice of unnatural vice, desertion from armed forces in the field, perjury, poaching, usury, intelligence with the king's enemies, impersonation, criminal assault, manslaughter, wilful and ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... handkerchiefs to our faces. This floor is appropriated for such crimes as assault and battery; assault and battery, with intent to kill; refractory seamen; deserters; violating the statutes; suspicion of arson and murder; witnesses; all sorts of crimes, varying from the debtor to the positive murderer, burglar, and felon. We should have enumerated, among the rest, all stewards, (colored,) whether foreign or domestic, who are ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams

... enacted severe penalties against robbery, murder, false coining, arson; and ordained that these crimes should be punished by the amputation of the right hand and right foot [r]. The pecuniary commutation for crimes which has a false appearance of lenity, had been gradually disused, and seems to have been entirely abolished by the rigour of these statutes. The superstitious ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume

... novelists. 'Every now and then,' he says, referring to the extreme of this type, 'I read a book with perfect comfort and much exhilaration, whose scenes the average Englishman would gasp in. Nothing happens; that is, nobody murders or debauches anybody else; there is no arson or pillage of any sort; there is not a ghost, or a ravening beast, or a hair-breadth escape, or a shipwreck, or a monster of self-sacrifice, or a lady five thousand years old in the whole story; "no promenade, no band of music, nossing!" as Mr. Du Maurier's Frenchman said of the ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne

... English camp in that region for the purpose of entertaining themselves. In reality no lunatic projector, not Cleombrotus leaping into the sea for the sake of Plato's Elysium, not Erostratus committing arson at Ephesus for posthumous fame, not a sick Mr Elwes ascending the Himalaya, in order to use the rarity of the atmosphere as a ransom from the expense of cupping in Calcutta, ever conceived so awful a folly. Oh, playful Sir John Mandeville, sagacious Don Quixote, modest and ingenious Baron ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various

... Mr. MacTaggart, on whatna charge?" asked the writer, taking a confident, even an insolent, tone, now that he was on his own familiar ground. "Rape, arson, forgery, robbery, thigging, sorning, ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro

... And mad as hell. But he'll get along. It's too bad. We've pinched him three times on suspicion of arson, but we couldn't make it stick. Something ought to happen to make that guy stop playin' ...
— The Ambulance Made Two Trips • William Fitzgerald Jenkins

... they were wearing. These ladies were the Countess Orloff-Strelwitz, and a young girl, Theodorica, Grand Duchess of Esthonia.... I did what I could for them. After a while, in the course of other duty, I found out that the Bolsheviki had had nothing to do with the arson and robbery, but that the crime had been perpetrated by Jose Quintana's gang of international ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers

... active in disseminating libels upon Napoleon; they charged him in their books and pamphlets with murder, arson, incest, treason, treachery, cowardice, seduction, hypocrisy, avarice, robbery, ingratitude, and jealousy; they said that he poisoned his sick soldiers, that he was the father of Hortense's child, that he committed the most atrocious ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field

... and the woodbox, and Jim had his wooden leg through a knot hole in the floor and couldn't get it out, and they've both gone to law about it. Jim says he's goin' to git out a writ of corpus cristy fer the Deacon, and the Deacon says he's goin' to prosecute Jim for bigamy and arson and have him read out ...
— Uncles Josh's Punkin Centre Stories • Cal Stewart

... can't do it, Bud, don't ever believe it. In this state ten years is the extreme limit for manslaughter, and the only complication is that if your train should happen to burn up they might soak you an extra ten years for arson; but a despatcher is usually handy around a penitentiary and can get light work in the office, so that he's thrown more with wife poisoners and embezzlers than with cutthroats and hold-up men. Then, too, you can earn nearly as much in State's prison as you can at your trick. ...
— The Daughter of a Magnate • Frank H. Spearman

... homes and families of the masters who were fighting with the army that barred their way to freedom. If "Uncle Tom's Cabin" had portrayed the rule of slavery rather than the rarest exception, not all the armies that went to the field could have stayed the flood of rapine and arson and pillage that would have started with the first gun of the civil war. Instead of that, witness the miracle of the slave in loyalty to his master, closing the fetters upon his own limbs—maintaining and defending the families of those who fought against his freedom—and at ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly

... the taxes thereon. He also lived and throve in bodily health in spite of evil ways, and his children were many. There seemed no way to dispose finally of Jim Simmons and his house except by murder and arson, and the village was a peaceful one, and such ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... murders which for a time filled the newspapers, existed nowhere else; and the men who were reported slain, usually turned up after a short period to enjoy the eulogies which their martyrdom had elicited. But arson, theft and disgraceful scenes of disorder did really exist, and bands of armed men indicated the approach of actual hostilities. What was the Government to do? Perhaps you will say, call out the militia. But that ...
— Speeches of the Honorable Jefferson Davis 1858 • Hon. Jefferson Davis

... was the infernally odd coincidence of the name; and then I only saw her off and on, you know, and I never heard her voice. Then, you know, I was mad with jealousy; and so I made myself worse and worse, till I was ripe for murder, arson, assasination, and all that sort ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille

... dismissed. What had he better do to cut that fellow's claws? There was hope, of course, that he had worked off his spleen in firing the tannery, and also that a wholesome fear of being caught and convicted of arson might cool his spirit! ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston

... little thing, with the yellow head? Shouldn't you say she looks like an angel, and ought to be put on the altar to hear the prayers of sinners? Would you believe she is a mother? Arson is her hobby. She is a regular 'fire-bug'. She was adopted by a German couple, and one night, when the old farmer had come home with the money paid him for his sheep and hogs, she stole the last cent he had, pocketed all the oold frau's silver spoons, poured kerosene ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... door and talk—but talk with the ignorance, naivete, brutal simplicity of an utterly abandoned baby. Nothing mystical or beautiful about the Rat. He did not disguise from me in the least that there was no crime that he had not committed—murder, rape, arson, immorality of the most hideous, sacrilege, the basest betrayal of his best friends—he was not only savage and outlaw, he was deliberate anarchist and murderer. He had no redeeming point that I could anywhere discover. I did not in the least mind his entering ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole

... token Saint-Pol might be a liar. He saw that he must by all means find Saint-Pol, and find him at once. He began to shout for Gaston. 'To horse, to horse, Gaston!' The court rang with his voice; to the clamour he made, which might betoken murder, arson, pillage, or the sin against the Holy Ghost, out came the vassals in a swarm. 'To horse, to horse, Bearnais! Where out of hell is Gaston of Bearn?' The devil of Anjou was loose in ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett

... at the mercy, of a brutal mob of Secession sympathizers, who made day and night hideous with their drunken bellowings, terrorized everybody even suspected of love for the Union, plundered and burned dwellings, including a Colored Orphan Asylum, and added to the crime of arson, that of murdering the mob-chased, terror-stricken Negroes, by hanging them to ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan

... who have probably never placed any restraint upon their passions, nor hesitated at anything, and it occurs to me that in all likelihood they have sought refuge in this cavern, where they fancy they can continue to defy the law with impunity, after a long series of crimes—robbery, murder, arson, and excesses of all descriptions committed together. In this case Back Cup is nothing but a lair of pirates, the Count d'Artigas is the leader of the band and Serko and ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne

... think, who ever lived in literature. They are people in whose lives a slight fall of snow is an event. Louisa Musgrave's jump on the Cobb at Lyme Regis produces more commotion in the Jane Austen world than murder and arson do in an ordinary novel. Her people do not even seem, for the most part, to be interested in anything but their opinions of each other. They have few passions beyond match-making. They are unconcerned about any of the ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd

... of the capital sins, and you who say it is 'the modern facilities of distribution' are like men who cannot read large print without spectacles; or again, you are like men who should say that their drunkenness was due to their drink, or that arson was ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc

... blotter as R. Hood, F. Tuck, and Cass O'Weary—the last Hood spelled with the utmost care for the scowling turnkey—and charged with attempt to commit burglary and arson. ...
— The Madness of May • Meredith Nicholson

... murder, treason, and arson of John Brown? I have never known of his acts being approved or palliated by any other person than a Republican. Thousands of them have done it and are now doing it. In charging this dark catalogue of crime against this organization, I would not be unjust. I have no doubt that ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall

... possible an underlying, fundamental principle. It is at work in countless ways, in everybody's life, nearly all the time. Personal impulses and inclinations may be very short-sighted, very unlovely, very unworthy. Greed, murder, arson, lust, theft, lying, betrayal—are only a few samples of the variety of impulses which may come and do come frequently to various ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)

... white. It seems clear, also, that the exceptional ferocity of the forty years of uninterrupted war with the Indians that ensued was due in part to the long dereliction by the Quaker government of its duty of protecting its citizens and punishing murder, robbery, and arson when committed ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon

... anybody here but a fellow named Baker," he said. "I deported him from the Ellice Islands for sedition, bigamy, selling gin to the natives, suspected arson and receiving stolen goods. If he called himself a Deputy Commissioner he was a rank impostor, and had no more authority to annex ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne

... this proverb. The soldier who enters the house for theft and plunder, you condemn; but you acquit the general who devastates a whole town, and in the arrogance of his victory wishes to make himself, like Erostratos, immortal by incendiarism and arson." ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach

... against men and things to the need of destroying them. Sometimes the individual turns upon himself the revolutionary frenzy that he cannot otherwise exercise. Russia is full of these madmen, who, not content with committing arson or throwing bombs at hazard into the crowd, finally mutilate themselves, like the Skopzis and other ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon

... there ever was one. They have the shrewdest lawyers in the country, and they get away legally with things that are flagrantly illegal, such as freezing out competitors, stealing patents, and the like. Report has it that they do not stop at arson, treason, or murder to attain their ends, but as Prescott said, they never leave ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby

... all: but can any one, who has read of the American doings in the late frontier troubles, and the daily disputes on the slave question, praise the GOVERNMENT of the States?—a Government which dares not punish homicide or arson performed before its very eyes, and which the pirates of Texas and the pirates of Canada can brave at their will? There is no government, but a prosperous anarchy; as the Prince's other favorite government is a prosperous slavery. What, ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray

... A baker's dozen of captains, six hundred odd lieutenants, and five hundred who dropped by the way. German propaganda had taken contrary suggestion and forced the Negro to this point of moral advantage. Plunder, arson, lynching and burning at the stake were employed against him to break his morale or incite him against America. But he held on. Seven hundred of the "sub-species, dark of skin, wooly of hair, long of head, with dilated nostrils, thick lips, thicker cranium, flat feet, prehensile ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller

... I mean," nodded Lidgerwood. "It will come to a show-down sooner or later, if we can't nip the ringleaders. Young Rufford and a dozen more of the dropped employees are threatening to get even. That means train-wrecking, misplaced switches, arson—anything you like. At the first break there are going to be some very striking examples made of all the wreckers and looters we ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde

... his life. He began to think about Miriam, remotely and impersonally. He remembered many things that had been neglected by his conscience during the busier times, as, for example, that he had committed arson and deserted a wife. For the first time he looked these long neglected facts ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells

... of women to penal servitude." That would be indeed awkward for the Government if penal servitude were easily procurable. Unfortunately, the women must first qualify for it, and their crimes would disembarrass the Government. Mrs. Leigh could have been safely left to starve had her attempted arson of that theater really come off, especially with loss of life. Thus violence may be "militant," but it is not "tactics." And violence against society at large is peculiarly tactless. George Fox would hardly occupy so exalted a niche ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor

... old chum: Dad and I got here three days ago, and have begun to enjoy life. We didn't leave home a minute too soon, as we would have been arrested for running over that banana peddler, and for arson in setting a load of hay on fire and destroying the farmer's pants in our automobile accident. Ma writes that a policeman and a deputy sheriff have camped on our front doorstep ever since we left, waiting for dad and I ...
— Peck's Bad Boy With the Cowboys • Hon. Geo. W. Peck

... without the sequence of natural cause and effect at all. A conflagration, to take a parallel, may be the work of an incendiary, or the result of a flash of lightning; nor would a jury think it safe to find a man guilty of arson, if a dangerous thunderstorm was raging at the very time when the fire broke out. In like manner, upon the hypothesis that a miraculous dispensation is in operation, a recovery from diseases to which medical science is equal, may nevertheless in matter of fact have taken place, not by natural ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman

... success, we should not discipline ourselves, which is the German lesson, so much as we should riot in the moral license of the German creed. Americans would worship at the altar of that queer "old German god," who apparently encourages rape, murder, arson, and tyranny in his followers. For in young America, with every social tradition in it seething blood, there is already an insidious tendency to accept this new-old religion of triumphant force. American "Big Business" can understand the Kaiser's philosophy, can reverence his "old German ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick

... the old man any time these seven years; what a chance for a judicial blunder! 'But no,' thought Morris, 'they cannot, they dare not, make it murder. Not that. But honestly, and speaking as a man to a man, I don't see any other crime in the calendar (except arson) that I don't seem somehow to have committed. And yet I'm a perfectly respectable man, and wished nothing but my due. Law is a ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne

... her child, and would go through the fire for me. I had a good deal of trouble the other day to prevent her strangling the false railway porter. I picked her out of three or four thousand convicts. She had been convicted of infanticide and arson. I would bet a hundred to one that, during the three years that she has been in my service, she has not even thought of robbing me of so much as ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau

... space between the rampart and the canal, among the chaos of already abandoned baggage. It was exposed there to a vicious jezail fire poured into it by the Afghans, who abandoned the pleasures of plunder and arson for the yet greater joy of slaughtering the Feringhees. When the rear-guard moved away in the twilight, an officer and fifty men were left dead in the snow, the victims of the Afghan fire from the rampart of the cantonment; and owing to casualties in the gun teams it had been found necessary ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes

... York the unterrified democracy went to arson and murder, hand in hand with the immense majority of Irishry. Meagher, Nugent, Corcoran and thousands like you, are exceptions. The O'Connors, O'Gormans, etc., are the unterrified. For these bloody saturnalia the wedding was consecrated ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski

... out of lith. Now befalleth it to me to joust, said Mordred, for Sir Mador hath a sore fall. Sir Launcelot was ware of him, and gat a great spear in his hand, and met him, and Sir Mordred brake a spear upon him, and Sir Launcelot gave him such a buffet that the arson of his saddle brake, and so he flew over his horse's tail, that his helm butted into the earth a foot and more, that nigh his neck was broken, and there he lay long in ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume I (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory

... Territorial capital, Elise Layton, nee Lebrun, was held without bail because it couldn't be had, charged with obtaining money under false pretenses, bigamy as a side issue, and arson as a possible backstop. The sleep-walking theory, as advanced in favor of Mrs. Plume, had been reluctantly abandoned, it appearing that, however dazed and "doped" she may have been through the treatment of that deft-fingered, unscrupulous ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King

... Foreign Office didn't do something to suppress the league immediately, he would burn down the place. The next day Marten and his co-workers went to the Royal Administration of the Superior Court, No. 1, in Berlin, and through his attorney lodged a criminal charge of "threat of arson" ...
— Germany, The Next Republic? • Carl W. Ackerman

... concerning the power of the spiritual and temporal authorities and the possession of earthly goods and rights which before in Bohemia, and now with us, have called forth revolt and rebellion, plunder, arson, and murder, and have shaken to its foundations the whole commonwealth. The poison of these false doctrines has been long flowing from Bohemia into Germany, and will produce the same desolating ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax

... chilling regard of a lean, yellow-faced priest. "Wonder what I'm booked for?" Idiotically, he recalled being summoned before a traffic court, years back. "Guess I don't get off with vagrancy; it'll probably be everything from speeding to mayhem, with maybe arson and well-poisoning ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various

... ornami. Arrears, in malantauxe. Arrest aresti. Arrival alveno. Arrive (on foot) alveni. Arrive (by vehicle) alveturi. Arrogance aroganteco. Arrogant aroganta. Arrow sago. Arsenal armilejo. Arsenic arseniko. Arson brulkrimo. Art arto. Artery arterio. Artful ruza. Arthritic artritulo. Artichoke artisxoko. Article artikolo. Article (commerce) komercajxo. Articulate elparoli. Articulation (anat.) artiko. Artifice artifiko. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes

... calendar. In the Seine basin, along the Rhone Valley, wherever the Teuton is in evidence, on the other hand, there is less respect for property; so that offenses against the person, such as assault, murder, and rape, give place to embezzlements, burglary, and arson. It might just as well be argued that the Teuton shows a predilection for offenses against property; the native Celt an equal propensity ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... Heptarchy is one of murder, arson, rapine, assault and battery, breach of the peace, petty larceny, and the embezzlement ...
— Comic History of England • Bill Nye

... fellow-subjects are butchered? The distribution of Church property, you tell us, is unjust. Perhaps I agree with you. But what then? To what purpose is it to talk about the distribution of Church property, while no property is secure? Then you try to deter us from putting down robbery, arson, and murder, by telling us that if we resort to coercion we shall raise a civil war. We are past that fear. Recollect that, in one county alone, there have been within a few weeks sixty murders or assaults with intent to murder and six hundred burglaries. Since we parted last ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... murder, and it ain't arson, that's flat," observed that functionary; "but we don't draw no such fine distinctions in our profession. If we did, the judges would have nothing ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant

... for August; able, they, to disperse all manner of enthusiastic Polish Chivalry; which indeed, we observe, usually stands but one volley from the Russian musketry; and flies elsewhither, to burn and plunder its own domestic enemies. Far and wide, robbery and arson are prevalent in Poland; Stanislaus lying under covert; in Dantzig,—an imaginary King ever since the equinox, but well trusting that the French will give him a plumper vote. French War-fleet is surely under ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... destruction of several ricks and an empty cowshed, occurred in the early morning of Thursday on the home farm of Sir Gerald Malloring's estate in Worcestershire. Grave suspicions of arson are entertained, but up to the present no arrest has been made. The authorities are in doubt whether the occurrence has any relation with recent similar outbreaks ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... the chief of police, "I arrest you for murder, burglary, arson, and conspiracy. You put up a splendid fight, old man, and I am only sorry that it is our painful ...
— Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock

... requisition by them, or their ministers, officers, or authorities, respectively made, deliver up to justice all persons who, being charged with the crime of murder, or assault with intent to commit murder, or piracy, or arson, or robbery, or forgery, or the utterance of forged paper, shall seek an asylum, or shall be found within the territories of the other; provided that this shall only be done upon such evidence of criminality as, according ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various

... intended to prevent fires. Yet almost every forest community sees fire after fire set through ignorance, carelessness or purpose, and so far from punishing the offenders accords them every privilege of business and society. In cities, however insignificant the damage, arson leads to the penitentiary. A forest fire may destroy millions and the cause not even be investigated. If, aggravated by a particularly inexcusable case of malice or carelessness, some property holder (seldom ...
— Practical Forestry in the Pacific Northwest • Edward Tyson Allen

... ten years ago," he began, "Jeff Rand had a client who was guilty of the crime he hired Jeff to investigate. It was an arson case; this guy set fire to his own factory, and then got Jeff to run down a lot of fake clues he'd planted. I know about that; I was on the case, myself. That's where I first met Jeff, and he saved me from making a jackass out of ...
— Murder in the Gunroom • Henry Beam Piper

... buildings and tearing up railroad tracks amounted to, anyway. I didn't enlist as a section hand, nor a railroad wrecker, and there was nothing in my enlistment papers that said anything about my being compelled to commit arson. The recruit-officer who, by his glided picture of the beauties of a soldier's life, induced me to enlist as a soldier, never mentioned anything that would lead me to believe that one of my duties would ...
— How Private George W. Peck Put Down The Rebellion - or, The Funny Experiences of a Raw Recruit - 1887 • George W. Peck

... an' theft, For battery, arson and hate, >From breakin' the Sabbath to coveting cows, An' false affidavits an' perjurin' vows, I'm adept at whatever the law disallows, And the gallowsmen gape at the noose that I left, For I flit while the bally ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy

... punishable by death; but as this offense is defined and made punishable by the laws of the United States, not all the states take cognizance of it. If committed in such states, it is tried in the courts of the United States. In New York, murder, treason, and arson in the first degree, are punishable by death. Few states make more than these crimes thus punishable. In two or three states, the penalty of death has been abolished, and ...
— The Government Class Book • Andrew W. Young

... might have elucidated the mystery; but he had been kidnapped, and sent to the plantations. After many years he returned to England, and on his deathbed left a written statement, implicating Sir Hugh in the double crime of arson and murder. But long ere this the culprit had appeared before a tribunal which admits of no prevarication, and the pretty boy with the golden curls had become lord of Dangerfield Hall. The long corridor had been ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville

... stupefied by the suddenness of the calamity, the rapidity with which destruction rushed upon them, the flames leaping from house to house, spanning chasms of emptiness, darting hither and thither like lizards or winged scorpions, or breaking out mysteriously in fresh places, so that already the cry of arson had arisen, and the ever-growing fire was set down to fiendish creatures labouring secretly at a work ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon

... railroad wrecks, automobile collisions, runaways, explosions, mine disasters, strokes of lightning, drownings, floods, storms, shipwrecks, etc. In the list of crime will be placed murders, assaults, suicides, suspicious deaths, robberies, embezzlements, arson, etc. Of the accident class, the method of writing a fire story may be taken as a type ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer

... this day made oath before me, a justice of said court, that William Hohan Zollern, alias Wilhelm, has at various times and places between July, 1914, and November, 1917, committed murder, assault, and arson upon the bodies of various people and sundry properties, against the peace and dignity of the Government of the United States, the State of Virginia and ...
— Best Short Stories • Various

... Jews had occurred here and there, but were of so general a nature that they failed to impress the imagination. They never evoked pictures of the terrible scenes which actually occurred: men murdered, women outraged, infants butchered—arson, ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith

... Josie. "He must be in fine fettle this morning, since his propaganda of murder and arson has been ...
— Mary Louise and the Liberty Girls • Edith Van Dyne (AKA L. Frank Baum)

... to military law who commits manslaughter, mayhem, arson, burglary, robbery, larceny, embezzlement, perjury, assault with intent to commit any felony, or assault with intent to do bodily harm, shall be punished as ...
— Manual for Noncommissioned Officers and Privates of Infantry • War Department

... the free negro who comes there is a felon, though a discharged soldier, and wounded in our battles. A white man in Kentucky may keep a gun; if a black man buys a gun he forfeits it, and pays a fine of five dollars if presuming to keep in his possession a musket which he has carried through the war. Arson of public buildings, if committed by a white man, is punished by imprisonment in the penitentiary for a term of from seven to twenty-one years; if committed by a black man, the punishment is death. Arson of a warehouse, etc., ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes

... appeased. So he chooses between his wife and his chapel and does execution on the latter. He goes out into the storm and sets the thing alight. His conscience is thus purified by fire, the gale being favourable to arson. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 21, 1914 • Various

... paper of the early days: "There have been moments in the lives of various kind-hearted and respectable citizens of California and Nevada, when, if Mark Twain were before them as members of a vigilance committee for any mild crime, such as mule-stealing or arson, it is to be feared his shrift would have been short. What a dramatic picture the idea conjures up, to be sure! Mark, before these honest men, infuriated by his practical jokes, trying to show them what an innocent creature ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson

... the first condition on which he can be kept alive without enslaving somebody else is that he shall produce an equivalent for what it costs to keep him alive, we may quite rationally compel him to abstain from idling by whatever means we employ to compel him to abstain from murder, arson, forgery, or any other crime. The one supremely foolish thing to do with him is to do nothing; that is, to be as idle, lazy, and heartless in dealing with him as he is in dealing with us. Even if we provided ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw

... sole survivors of the day of judgment, will, with resurrected bodies, possess the purified earth. The lengths to which Mormon preachers have dared to go in illustrating this view find a good illustration in a sermon by arson Pratt, printed in the Deseret News, Salt Lake City, of August 21, 1852. Having promised that "farmers will have great farms upon the earth when it is so changed," and foreseeing that some one might suggest ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn

... laws. He had no religion; Christ to him was a pitiful weakling, a historic victim of the same system that still crucified those who fought the established order. In his new world there would be no churches and no laws. He advocated bloodshed, arson, sabotage of all sorts, as a means ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... Christians. One need merely step out on one's balcony to see the reflection of a fire somewhere in the heavens. Now and then in clear nights I have counted the reflections of as many as five. Contempt of judges and laws—that's what it is! And that has taken such hold of these scoundrels that arson has become a kind of diversion.—But they had better go slow. Just a little patience, ladies and gentlemen! We know the tracks! We are on the right scent! And the people in question will have a terrible awakening when, quite suddenly, discovery ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann

... I could bear. So I put every one of them in the pit, and then, as I thought I heard someone coming, got in myself and pulled down the stone. But, Mr. Quatermain, soon afterwards the enemy added arson to murder and pillage, and the whole place began to blaze. I could hear the fire roaring above and a little later the ashes covered the exit so that I could no longer lift the stone, which indeed grew too hot to touch. Here, then, I sat all night in the most suffocating heat, very much afraid, Mr. ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard

... not abandon hope and accept the situation at its face value, as irremediable. Upon this was she firmly determined: the night was not to pass unmarked by some manner of attempt to escape or summon aid. She even found herself willing to consider arson as a last resort: the hotel afire would make a famous torch to bring assistance from the mainland. Only ... she shrank from the attempt, her soul curdling with ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance

... we. We had our fire—the fire the Kaiser lighted. It was arson caused our fire—it was a firebug started it, no spontaneous combustion, as some wad ha' us think. And we called the firemen—the braw laddies frae all the world, who set to work and never stopped till the fire was oot. Noo they've gaed hame aboot their other business. ...
— Between You and Me • Sir Harry Lauder

... have a Winchester shouldered muskets, shotguns, and other firearms. Warrants of arrest against the Tollivers on charges of murder, arson, and various other crimes and misdemeanors were issued and the date set for the arrest of the men was ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas

... man!" he seems to make answer, "what simplicity in you to think so! If you have not broken one commandment, let us see whether we cannot convict you of the breach of another. If you are not a swindler or forger, you are guilty of arson or burglary. By hook or by crook you shall not escape. Are you to suffer or I? What does it matter to you who are going off the stage, to receive a slight additional daub upon a character so deeply stained already? But think of me, the immaculate lover ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman

... courted their favor. The judges, dependent for their offices not only on "the labor vote," but, to obtain it, on the approval of the press and the politicians, boldly set aside the laws against conspiracy and strained to the utmost tension those relating to riot, arson and murder. To such a pass did all this come that in the year 1931 an inn-keeper's denial of a half-holiday to an under-cook resulted in the peremptory closing of half the factories in the country, the stoppage ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce

... of bed, so a rocket was produced and fired through the open window. The bombardment had the desired effect, but it also set the house on fire, and the joker's father was called on to make good the damage. Then the police took the matter up, and the culprit got several weeks' imprisonment for arson, after which he returned to the University and resumed his interrupted studies. There was no question of rustication, as the court simply inflicted the penalty laid down in the Code, and there was no other authority that had power to interfere ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough

... devious type of rustic could not live under her. The neighbours round declared that the Lady Mary Kemp's farm was a hotbed of disorder. I expect it was, too; three of our men were hung up at Canterbury on one day—for horse-stealing and arson.... Anyhow, that was my mother. As for me, I was under her, and, since I had my aspirations, I had a rather bitter childhood. And I had others to contrast myself with. First there was Rooksby: a pleasant, well-spoken, amiable young squire of the immediate neighbourhood; ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer

... and distant, as the crow flies, some thirty-five to forty miles, lies the village of Paia, which for high crimes and misdemeanours, including murder, rapine, and arson, it was considered necessary to punish. Now punishment in the days of Cavignari not unusually meant waking up some fine morning to find that before breakfast it was either necessary to meet the Guides in a pitched battle, or to submit quietly to the demands of Government, and expiate the crimes committed. ...
— The Story of the Guides • G. J. Younghusband

... old Parvis's fam'ly I reckon," said the captain, "kept a dry-goods store in New York city, and realised a handsome competency by burning his house to ashes. Same name, anyhow. David Polreath, Unchris'en Penrewen, John Tredgear, and old Arson Parvis." ...
— A Message from the Sea • Charles Dickens

... pilfering, fraud, theft, occasionally arson or manslaughter. One man, however, was arraigned for murder with highway robbery, and a woman for the most ignoble traffic, which ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... offences committed yearly, in which the Police are unable to get any clue, the offenders having succeeded in eluding altogether the vigilance of the Law. For instance a celebrated outlaw has only recently been apprehended in Central India after several years of successful and daring robbery, arson, mutilation and murder. Indeed in many parts of India there are predatory tribes and communities of thieves who have to be perpetually under Police surveillance, and who are brought up from their infancy to thieving ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker

... had been through the domestic mill in its every phase. They had had cooks, and cooks, and cooks, and maids, and maids, and maids, plus other maids; they had been face to face with arson and murder; Mrs. Brinley had parted a laundress armed with a flat-iron from a belligerent cook armed with an ice-pick, and twice the ministers of the law had carried certain irate women bodily forth with the direst of threats lest they should return later and remove ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs

... hungry tiger might look at a lamb that was being taken away to get a little riper. "I cannot object to a reasonable continuance," he said sourly. "And I don't deny that you will need all the defense you can get. The case is an atrocious one, and I propose to do my small part toward putting down arson and riot in this unhappy town. You will appear two weeks ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch

... that all religions have been made by men for men and through men. I do not contend for the superiority of other Bibles, I simply protest against the wrong in ours. One wrong cannot excuse another. That murder is worse than arson does not make a hero of the rascal who fires our homes. If Allah were more cruel than Jehovah, that would be no palliation of the awful crimes of the Old Testament. That slaves have better clothes than savages cannot make noble traffic in human blood. A choice of evils ...
— Men, Women, and Gods - And Other Lectures • Helen H. Gardener

... requisite number of jurors to form a court was not forthcoming for the August term. The Government thought that they could not, without impropriety, put off taking any steps against these persons till November. They were, therefore, arrested last week; all except one, who was committed for arson, were at once bailed by the magistrates; and he too was bailed the day after his committal by one of the ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin



Words linked to "Arson" :   fire-raising, combustion, arsonist



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