Online dictionaryOnline dictionary
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Polity   Listen
noun
Polity  n.  (pl. polities)  
1.
The form or constitution of the civil government of a nation or state; the framework or organization by which the various departments of government are combined into a systematic whole.
2.
Hence: The form or constitution by which any institution is organized; the recognized principles which lie at the foundation of any human institution. "Nor is possible that any form of polity, much less polity ecclesiastical, should be good, unless God himself be author of it."
3.
Policy; art; management. (Obs.)
Synonyms: Policy. Polity, Policy. These two words were originally the same. Polity is now confined to the structure of a government; as, civil or ecclesiastical polity; while policy is applied to the scheme of management of public affairs with reference to some aim or result; as, foreign or domestic policy. Policy has the further sense of skillful or cunning management.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |
Add this dictionary
to your browser search bar





"Polity" Quotes from Famous Books



... with regard to the views of the abolitionists, which I now, however, heartily embrace, inasmuch as I think that from the moment the United States Government assumed an attitude of coercion and supremacy towards the Southern States, it was bound with its fleets and armies to introduce its polity with respect to slavery, and wherever it planted the standard of the Union to proclaim the universal freedom which is the recognised law of the Northern United States. That they have not done so has been partly owing to a superstitious, but honourable ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble

... Christianity has been intimately united to the powers of the earth. Those powers are now in decay, and it is, as it were, buried under their ruins. The living body of religion has been bound down to the dead corpse of superannuated polity: cut but the bonds which restrain it, and that which is alive will rise once more. I know not what could restore the Christian Church of Europe to the energy of its earlier days; that power belongs to God alone; but it may be the effect of human ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville

... founded the State on a vast basis, and deeply implanted virtue; and Our subjects, by their unanimity in their great loyalty and filial affection, have in all ages shown these qualities in perfection. Such is the essential beauty of Our national polity, and such, too, is the true spring of Our educational system. You, Our beloved subjects, be filial to your parents, affectionate to your brothers, be loving husbands and wives, and truthful to your friends. Conduct yourselves with modesty, and be benevolent to all. Develop your intellectual ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

... author of the "Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity" (1593), a defense of the Anglican Church against the Puritans and notable also as a ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin

... for him; he had never undergone it, and he never felt its value. He was an artist in social construction; and if right ideas, or the suggestion of right ideas, sometimes came into his head, about history, about human progress, about a stable polity, such ideas were not the products of trains of ordered reasoning; they were the intuitional glimpses of the poet, and consequently as they professed to be in real matter, even the right ideas were as often as ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 10: Auguste Comte • John Morley

... suggestive ideas. A great and systematic thinker, AUGUSTE COMTE (1798-1857), who was associated with Saint-Simon from 1817 to 1824, perceived the significance of these ideas, and was urged forward by them to researches properly his own. The positivism of Comte consists of a philosophy and a polity, in which a religion is involved. The quickening of his emotional nature through an adoring friendship with Mme. Clotilde de Vaux, made him sensible of the incompleteness of his earlier efforts at an intellectual reconstruction; he felt the need of worship and of love. Comte's philosophy proceeds ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden

... Brethren. He led their services in the Temple, and sometimes preached for them when it came their turn to occupy the house which they shared with the other sects. Hingston was a Methodist, but perhaps because their sects were so akin in doctrine and polity their difference made no division between the friends: Enraghty little and fierce and restless, Hingston large and kind and calm. What they joined in saying prevailed in questions of public interest; those who yielded to their wisdom liked to believe ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells

... complete grand manner when nature absolutely compelled. The goose had not formally beaten him, but neither had he formally beaten the goose. The battle was drawn, and this meant that Darius had a slight headache, a feeling of heavy disgust with the entire polity of the universe, and a disinclination for food. The first and third symptoms he hid as far as possible, from pride: at breakfast he toyed with bacon, from pride, hating bacon. The children knew from his eyes and his guilty ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett

... a family long respectable in the Cherokee Nation. It is customary for those ignorant of the Indian social polity to speak of all prominent Indians as "chiefs." Her family had no pretension to chieftaincy, but was prominent and influential; some of her brothers were afterward members of the Council. She could not speak English; but, in common ...
— Se-Quo-Yah; from Harper's New Monthly, V. 41, 1870 • Unknown

... rights clearly defined, and known and understood by the reader of American political history. Subject to the restrictions of the national Constitution, they have the right to establish, regulate, and control their internal police and entire polity so far as it affects the persons and property subject to their jurisdiction; to regulate trade, commerce, contracts, marriage, the acquisition, possession, control, and disposal of real and personal property; also the assessing and ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden

... occupations constraining them to a precise form in all their thoughts, they come to connect inseparably the idea of their own advantage with that of the death and torture of others. It is manifest that the object of sane polity is directly the reverse; and that laws founded upon reason, should accustom the gross vulgar to associate their ideas of security and of interest with the reformation, and the strict restraint, for that purpose alone, of those who ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... over them. But if we so act as to array the Bible against our social economy, they must fall. Nothing ever yet stood long against Christianity. Those who say that religious instruction is inconsistent with our peculiar civil polity, are the worst enemies of that polity. They would drive religious men from its defence. Sooner or later, if these views prevail, they will separate the religious portion of our community from the rest, and thus divided we shall become an easy prey. Why, is it not better that Christian ...
— Clotel; or, The President's Daughter • William Wells Brown

... conclusion, we inquire as to the relation of the state itself to its individual members, we find the Roman polity equally remote from the laxity of a mere defensive combination and from the modern idea of an absolute omnipotence of the state. The community doubtless exercised power over the person of the burgess in the imposition of public burdens, and in the punishment of offences and ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... the Canterbury Gate up Merton-lane, we pass on one hand Corpus Christi, founded in the reign of Henry VIII., where Bishop Sewel, author of "The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity," and Richard Hooker, a Protestant whom even a Pope praised, were bred; on the other, Oriel, where studied Walter Raleigh, one of England's greatest men, a poet and philosopher, soldier and statesman, mariner and historian; not guiltless, ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney

... these principles had been asserted with peculiar strength, or carried through with special consistency, or associated pre-eminently with the other graces of a Christian church, such as a ritual more impressive to the heart of man, or a polity more symmetrical with the structure of English society. Once having unfolded from philosophic grounds the primary conditions of a pure scriptural church, Phil. might then, without blame, have turned sharp round upon us, saying, such ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey

... its right to compel or require obedience to such laws, on the part of other nations, within their own territorial sovereignty. On the contrary, every nation has an exclusive right to regulate persons and things within its own territory, according to its sovereign will and public polity." ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster

... document in the history of Scotland. If any proof were needed that the revolt against the ancient Church was no ill-considered act of irresponsible men, we assuredly possess that proof in this extraordinary book. Though in its primary intention the scheme of its ecclesiastical polity, it is in fact the draft of a "republic," under which a nation should live its life on earth and prepare itself for heaven. It not only prescribes a creed, and supplies a complete system of church government: it ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various

... himself as a man with the larger view of citizenship, a critic of public affairs, and, in a measure, therefore, an item of that public opinion which moulded governments. Hence he had a finger, though but a little finger, in the destiny of nations and in the polity—a grand word that!—of national councils. He wrote frequent letters, thus, to the lesser weekly journals; these letters were sometimes printed; occasionally—oh, joy!—they were answered by others like himself, who referred to him as 'your esteemed correspondent.' As yet, however, his ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood

... civilisations. But, as culture advances, human development becomes so complex that we must refrain from attempting to pursue, even in summary, its many outgrowths. The evolution of morality, of art, of religion, of polity, and of literature would each require a whole volume for satisfactory treatment. All that we can do here is to show how the modern world and its progressive culture are ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe

... convictions are consecrated into a creed which it is a sacred duty to believe, experience is but like water dropping upon a rock, which wears it away, indeed, at last, but only in thousands of years. This theory was and is the central idea of the Jewish polity, the obstinate toughness of which has been the perplexity of Gentiles and Christians from the first dawn of its existence; it lingers among ourselves in our Liturgy and in the popular belief; and in spite of the emphatic censure of Him after whose name we call ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude

... Walter Raleigh's "History of the World," must have given little Anne her first suggestion of life outside of England, while Buchanan, the tutor of King James, had made himself the historian and poet of Scotland. Bacon had just ended life and labor; Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity was before the world, though not completed until 1632, and the dissensions of the time had given birth to a "mass of sermons, books of devotion, religious tracts and controversial pamphlets." Sermons abounded, those of Archbishop Usher, Andrews ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell

... Germanic use and wont, is possessed of a clearness of self-consciousness, a hard and positive clearness of understanding, such as is to be found nowhere else in the Middle Ages and very rarely at all in any polity. ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker

... toward her beauty bent Admiringly. In those primeval days The aristocracy that won respect, Sprang not from wealth alone, but laid its base In goodness and in virtue. Thus she held Her healthful influence in society Without gainsaying voice. The polity Of woman's realm,—sweet home,—those inner cares And countless details that promote its peace, Prosperity and order, were not deem'd Beneath the highest then, nor wholly left To hireling hands. This science she upheld, And with ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney

... House in its stead. To the founders of this city, the glory of God was not a thing to be furthered, or even typified, by any work of men's hands; but the salvation of men's souls, they thought, could be best achieved in a well-ordered democratic polity. Their descendants have of late years taken to decorating their places of worship, and Trinity Church (by H.H. Richardson), and the new Old South Church, are ambitious and beautiful pieces of ecclesiastical architecture. But the old Old South Meeting-House, the ecclesiastical centre ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer

... and HER triumph; but his Turkophobia is no less her creation: "England is stricken with incapacity because you have stirred up the seething caldron that boils under Gladstone's skull, putting in diabolical charms and poisons of theology to overturn the structure of English polity:" she will be able, he thinks, to tell her government that Gladstone is doing his best to break up ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell

... the able exponent of his peculiar views of ecclesiastical polity, Hugh Miller at once attained a first rank among contemporary editors. Many persons who were unconcerned about the Scottish Church question, or by whom his sentiments on that subject were disapproved, could not withhold an expressed admiration of the singular power ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... inspiration. In fact, all nations who have reached any advanced degree of religious development have approached the idea of monotheism, but it remained for the Hebrews to put it in practice in their social life and civil polity. It became the great central ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar

... fact cut into his brain for all time, that "the wood spurge has a cup of three." In some such mood of troubled thought, flung perhaps full length on the turf, have we not as unconsciously and intently watched a little ant, trudging across our prostrate form, intent upon its glorious polity: a creature to which we, with our great spiritual world of thought and emotion and will, have no existence except as a sudden and inconvenient upheaval of parti-colored earth to be scaled, of unknown geological formation, but wholly worthless as having no bearing upon the one great end of their ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 822 - Volume XXXII, Number 822. Issue Date October 3, 1891 • Various

... exaggerate. Yet the conduct of drunkards even at home is always matter for anxiety; and at home our populations are not armed from the highest to the lowest with revolvers and repeating rifles, neither do we go on a debauch by the whole townful—and I might rather say, by the whole polity—king, magistrates, police, and army joining in one common scene of drunkenness. It must be thought besides that we were here in barbarous islands, rarely visited, lately and partly civilised. First and last, a really considerable ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson

... to savage virtue dear. That won of yore the public ear, Ere Polity, sedate and sage, Had quench'd the ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott

... not understand Greek, I have rendered somewhat paraphrastically in the vernacular:—"No man can doubt but that the education of youth ought to be the principal care of every legislator; by the neglect of which, great mischief accrues to the civil polity ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding

... Lamentations of Jeremiah, and Songs collected out of the Old and New Testament. This Paraphrase on David's Psalms was one of the books that Charles I. delighted so much to read in: as he did in Herbert's Divine Poems, Dr. Hammond's Works, and Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity, while he was a prisoner in the ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber

... constitutions, their inveterate and now, as it were, inborn reverence for the Constable's Staff; two quite immense attainments, which England had to spend much blood, and valiant sweat of brow and brain, for centuries long, in achieving;—and what new elements of polity or nationhood, what noble new phasis of human arrangement, or social device worthy of Prometheus or of Epimetheus, yet comes to light in America? Cotton crops and Indian corn and dollars come to light; and half a world of untilled land, where populations that respect the ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle

... to see myself translated thus, from a poor creature to a creator; for now must I create an intolerable sort of lies, or my present profession loses the grace: and yet the lie, to a man of my coat, is as ominous a fruit as the fico. O, sir, it holds for good polity ever, to have that outwardly in vilest estimation, that inwardly is most dear to us: so much for my borrowed shape. Well, the troth is, my old master intends to follow my young master, dry-foot, over Moorfields to London, this morning; now, I knowing ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson

... and the substitution of another in its place; and by adducing, in fine, what he considers to be irrefragable proofs of the expediency, merely as it regards the parent country, of adopting the measures which he has proposed, he hopes that he shall eventually occasion an alteration of polity, by which both the parties concerned will be equally benefited. He has not, however, presumed on a contingency which it is thus reasonable to believe cannot be either doubtful or remote; but has restricted himself to an enumeration of the inducements ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth

... another quarter of a century. But Russian morality is of a much higher character than it was, and the members of the reigning house are models of decorum, and know how to defer to opinion. The nobles, too, are men of a very different stamp from their predecessors of 1762 and 1801. The Russian polity is no longer a despotism tempered by the cord. Fighting the good fight with something of a Puritanical perseverance, the Czar was enabled to triumph over all opposition to his preliminary project; and on the 3d of March, (N.S.,) 1861, the "Imperial Manifesto" emancipating ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various

... consists in the historical explanation of conduct or of art as a part of anthropology, and seeks to discover the conditions of various types of character, forms of polity, conceptions of justice, and schools of criticism and of art. Of this nature is a great deal of what has been written on aesthetics. The philosophy of art has often proved a more tempting subject than the psychology of taste, especially to minds which ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana

... every tradition of our past. In my opinion, the people are not fit to govern, and you will find it so. In the impious attempt that is being made to reverse what I conceive to be the divinely appointed polity and law of God, disaster must be the ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady

... a Cambridge master of arts and sometime fellow of Christ's College, issued in 1681 Melampronoea, or a Discourse of the Polity and Kingdom of Darkness, Together with a Solution of the chiefest Objections brought against the Being of Witches. Hallywell was another in the long list of Cambridge men who defended superstition. He set about to assail the "over-confident Exploders ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein

... the gay streets on one side and the studious quarter on the other, typifies and concentrates for him the associations of the French capital; and what a complete symbol of Venice—its canals, its marbles, its mysterious polity, its romance of glory and woe—is a good photograph of the Bridge ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various

... far from denying it," said Carlton; "but all systems have their defects; no polity, no theology, no ritual is perfect. One only came directly and simply from Heaven, the Jewish; and even that was removed because of its unprofitableness. This is no derogation from the perfection of Divine ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman

... we extend, or however moderately we confine, the sense of the word, no politician will, I presume, contend that it is to pervade in an equal degree, and be, with the same extent, enjoyed by, every member of society; no such polity having been ever found, unless among those vile people just before commemorated. Among the Greeks and Romans the servile and free conditions were opposed to each other; and no man who had the misfortune to be enrolled under the former could lay any claim to liberty ...
— Journal of A Voyage to Lisbon • Henry Fielding

... themselves new settlements by the banks of the Garonne and the Ebro. Their leader was that Ataulfus whose truly statesmanlike reflections on the unwisdom of destroying the Roman Empire and the necessity of incorporating the barbarians with its polity have been already quoted. There, in the south-western corner of Gaul and the northern regions of Spain, we must for the present leave the Western branch of the great Gothic nationality, while our narrative ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin

... Cromwell and of Gardiner, rivals though they were. Cromwell is the first public man known to have been a student of Machiavelli's writings; and the first to denounce them was his enemy, Reginald Pole. It is the advent of a new polity. Gardiner believed in it, thinking that nothing else could save Catholicism after the mismanagement of the Church in Germany. And it is the dominant note of the following ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton

... Order of the Shakers," printed at Hanover, New Hampshire, in 1853, has come into my hands. Elkins gives some details out of his own experience of Shaker life which I believe to be generally correct, and which I quote here, as filling up some parts of the picture I have tried to give of the Shaker polity and life: ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff

... whole, singularly informal and unprofessional, and by no means the literature of the "man of letters," as we understand him. Certain great instances there had been of literary structure or architecture—The Ecclesiastical Polity, The Leviathan—but for the most part that earlier prose literature is eminently occasional, closely determined by the eager practical aims of contemporary politics and theology, or else due to ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater

... In a genial yet invigorating climate, in a land where breezes from the mountain and the sea were mingled, the versatile Greeks produced by physical training that vigor and grace of body which they so much admired; and they developed the civil polity, the artistic discernment, and the complex social life, which made them the principal source of modern culture. Their moral traits are not so admirable. As a race they were less truthful, and less marked for their courage ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher

... O heaven, that She, whose presence hath effected This change in me, may suffer most late change In her admired and happy government: May still this Island be call'd Fortunate, And rugged Treason tremble at the sound, When Fame shall speak it with an emphasis. Let foreign polity be dull as lead, And pale Invasion come with half a heart, When he but looks upon her blessed soil. The throat of War be stopt within her land, And turtle-footed Peace dance fairy rings About her court; where never may there come Suspect or danger, ...
— Every Man Out Of His Humour • Ben Jonson

... most to the young carpenter's disadvantage was, first, the reserve and sternness of his natural disposition, and next, the fact of his not being a church-communicant, and the suspicion of his holding heretical tenets in matters of religion and polity. ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... "like a true Nathanael who feared no guile" (as his biographer, Isaac Walton, writes), was entrapped into a marriage which "brought him neither beauty nor fortune." The first editor of his great work, /The Ecclesiastical Polity/, was a Corpus man, and it was only fitting that the Anglican Revival of the nineteenth century should receive its first impulse from the famous Assize Sermon (in 1833) of another ...
— The Charm of Oxford • J. Wells

... own time to drub its old foe; but the point at issue was, whether Austrian or Sardinian ideas should predominate in the government of Italy. Austria's purpose never could be accomplished so long as a constitutional polity existed in the best, because the best governed and the best organized, of all the Italian States; and Sardinia's purpose never could be accomplished so long as Austria was in a condition to dictate to the Italians the manner in which they should be ruled. A war between the two nations ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various

... immigration play any important part. Almost the entire body of this tradition belongs to the English stock; it is the English population which, together with the language, has imposed on other elements of American life its polity, society, ...
— Current Superstitions - Collected from the Oral Tradition of English Speaking Folk • Various

... the Church of Israel, 248 Christian Church also made up of associated congregations, 249 The Apostles act upon the principle of ecclesiastical confederation, 250 Polity of the Christian Church borrowed from the institutions of the Israelites, 251 Account of the Sanhedrim and inferior Jewish courts, ib. Evidences of similar arrangements in the Christian Church, 253 ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen

... slain at fixed intervals. The object in all such cases is manifestly to secure that the incarnation of divinity shall always be in the prime of his vigour, and shall never know decay. It is impossible, no doubt, to say that such a feature belonged to the Minoan religious polity; the evidence is not such as to admit of certainty, yet it is not unlikely that in a custom similar to this lies the interpretation of the main ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie

... existence, of what was once the most opulent and enlightened part of the great European family. Rome, in the meantime, warned by that fearful danger from which the exterminating swords of her crusaders had narrowly saved her, proceeded to revise and to strengthen her whole system of polity. At this period were instituted the Order of Francis, the Order of Dominic, the Tribunal of the Inquisition. The new spiritual police was everywhere. No alley in a great city, no hamlet on a remote ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... shout for rights, with rapine in their soul! Who can, with patience, for a moment see The medley mass of pride and misery, Of whips and charters, manacles and rights, Of slaving blacks, and democratic whites, Of all the pyebald polity that reigns In free confusion o'er Columbia's plains? To think that man, thou just and gentle God! Should stand before thee with a tyrant's rod, O'er creatures like himself, with soul from thee, Yet dare ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope

... or figures, or metaphysical reasoning, was the sort of talk he most delighted in, so no kind of conversation pleased him less, I think, than when the subject was historical fact or general polity. "What shall we learn from that stuff?" said he. "Let us not fancy, like Swift, that we are exalting a woman's character ...
— Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. - during the last twenty years of his life • Hester Lynch Piozzi

... little flock of His followers in the world, gave them no other instruction for their mutual relationship? He did not instruct them about institutions and organisations, about orders of the ministry and sacraments, or Church polity and the like. He knew that all these would come. His one commandment was, 'Love one another,' and that will make you wise. Love one another, and you will shape yourselves into the right forms. He knew that they needed no exhortations such as ecclesiastics would have put ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren

... our own! The nation is in it! In form a series of chants, in substance it is an epic of America. It is distinctively and utterly American. Without model, without imitation, without reminiscence, it is evolved entirely from our own polity and popular life. Look at what it celebrates and contains! hardly to be enumerated without sometimes using the powerful, wondrous phrases of its author, so indissoluble are they with the things described. The essences, the events, the objects of America; the myriad, varied landscapes; the teeming ...
— Walt Whitman Yesterday and Today • Henry Eduard Legler

... polity what is seemly; justice weighs and decides, polity surveys and orders; justice refers to the individual, ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou

... glories and the possibilities of Athens as he alone could give. Commencing his address with a eulogy on the ancestors and immediate forefathers of the Athenians, he proceeds to show the latter "by what form of civil polity, what dispositions and habits of life," they have attained their greatness; graphically contrasting their institutions with those of other states, and especially with those of the Spartans, their ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson

... among them—the Pope of Rome was the right one, a Pope outside of Rome was no Pope at all. Every human creature in the village was an Armagnac—a patriot—and if we children hotly hated nothing else in the world, we did certainly hate the English and Burgundian name and polity in that way. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... his constitution being almost wholly suppressed) exclusively ethical,—the "spiritual form" of inward or intellectual light, in all its manifestations. He represents all those specially European ideas, of a reasonable, personal freedom, as understood in Greece; of a reasonable polity; of the sanity of soul and body, through the cure of disease and of the sense of sin; of the perfecting of both by reasonable exercise or ascsis; his religion is a sort of embodied equity, its aim the realisation of fair reason and just consideration of the truth ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater

... these shall be embodied, we must discover for ourselves in each age. It is the norm of our life with God; but it is not a standard fixing our scientific views, our theological opinions, our ecclesiastical polity, our economic or political theories. It shows forth the spirit we should manifest towards God and towards one another as individuals, and families, and nations; "and where the Spirit of the ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin

... Dundas was easily effected. The deputy sheriff, confronted with the problem of satisfactorily accounting for the death of a man who had committed no offence against public polity, was no longer formidable. His errand had been the arrest of a horse-thief, well-known to him, and he had no interest in pursuing a fugitive, however obnoxious to the law, whose personal description was so different from that of ...
— The Phantoms Of The Foot-Bridge - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)

... monarchy. What the age of Pericles was in the history of the Athenian democracy, what the age of the Scipios was in the history of the Roman Republic, that was the reign of Louis XIV in the history of the old monarchy of France. The type of polity which that monarchy embodied, the principles of government on which it reposed or brought into play, in this reign attain their supreme expression and development. Before Louis XIV the French monarchy has evidently not ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson

... muscles in pulling men out of their pits, the more dexterous, powerful, and altogether desirable it will be, because the world will need it, and it will no longer appeal only to those who prefer its form of worship or have a bias towards its particular church polity. The law of demand and supply should be recognized as applying equally to the church as to other agencies. The desire to be needed, to find work, and not merely to be a big party product can alone develop communions ...
— What the Church Means to Me - A Frank Confession and a Friendly Estimate by an Insider • Wilfred T. Grenfell

... he discusses the subject in a tentative spirit, as if vaguely hoping that more might, through some discovery in method, be accomplished by means of doctrine. But in the "Republic" his permanent persuasion is shown. He there bases his whole scheme of polity, as Goethe in the second part of "Wilhelm Meister" bases his scheme of education, upon a primary inspection of natures, in which it is assumed that culture must begin by humbly accepting the work of Nature, forswearing all attempt to add one ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... hereafter on the national being, my thoughts on an Irish polity, are not to be taken as an attempt to deal with more than a few essentials. I offer it to my countrymen, to start thought and discussion upon the principles which should prevail in an Irish civilization. If to readers in other countries the thought appears primitive or elementary, I would like ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell

... will not stay to hear what I say!" cried Tant Sannie. "There, take your Polity-gollity-gominy, your devil's book!" she cried, flinging the book at his head with ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner

... called the second generation of Protestant reformers, the great leader was John Calvin. By his writings, and by his directive and administrative work, he exerted a strong influence upon the reformed churches in his own day and upon the theology and polity of later times. He was born in France in 1509, and while still in early manhood, having become familiar with classical learning, with law, and especially with theology, he ardently embraced the Protestant faith and began to preach ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various

... libraries in the United States, and has therefore been able to compose his learned works in theology, history, &c. under advantages but seldom enjoyed by our authors. His chief productions are, Apostolical Succession, 1842; Presbytery and not Prelacy the Scriptural and Primitive Polity of the Church, 1843; Ecclesiastical Republicanism; Ecclesiastical Catechism; Claims of the Free Church of Scotland; Life and Character of Thomas Chalmers, with Personal Recollections; Nature and Functions of Ruling Elders; Nature and Functions of Deacons; The Rite of Confirmation examined; ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various

... besides, and imagine their great prosperity not to have proceeded from the emulation of particular men, but from the virtue of their popular form of government, not considering the frequent seditions and civil wars produced by the imperfection of their polity." Where, first, the blame he lays to the heathen authors, is in his sense laid to the Scripture; and whereas he holds them to be young men, or men of no antidote that are of like opinions, it should ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington

... invincible; and if Socialism be at all a practicable rule of life, there is every chance that our grand-children will see the day and taste the pleasures of existence in something far liker an ant-heap than any previous human polity. And this not in the least because of the voice of Mr. Hyndman or the horns of his followers; but by the mere glacier movement of the political soil, bearing forward on its bosom, apparently undisturbed, the proud camps of Whig and Tory. If Mr. Hyndman were a man of keen humour, which ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson

... national affairs, this great government may be broken; but in most of the essential liberties and rights which government is the agent to establish and protect, the seceding State has no revolution, and the remaining States can have none. This arises from that refinement of our polity which makes the States the basis of our instituted labor. Greece was broken by the Persian power, but her municipal institutions remained. Hungary lost her national crown, but her home institutions remain. South Carolina may preserve her ...
— American Eloquence, Volume III. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various

... that of a gardener in clearing a patch of waste ground. If he relaxes his efforts to maintain the state of art within the garden, weeds will overrun it and the state of nature will return. So the human race is doomed to a constant struggle to maintain the state of art of an organized polity in opposition to the state of nature; to substitute as far as possible social progress for cosmic ...
— Proportional Representation Applied To Party Government • T. R. Ashworth and H. P. C. Ashworth

... inconceivable that the people of the United States should play no part in that great enterprise. To take part in such a service will be the opportunity for which they have sought to prepare themselves by the very principles and purposes of their polity and the approved practices of their Government ever since the days when they set up a new nation in the high and honorable hope that it might in all that it was and did show mankind the way to liberty. They cannot in honor withhold the service to which ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff

... minority by the majority would be an exceedingly capable man; where the judgment of the sovereign intervenes there is no such security. If, however, there are three parties, the primary condition of a cabinet polity is not satisfied. Under such circumstances the only way is for the moderate people of every party to combine in support of the government which, on the whole, suits every party best. In the choice of a fit minister, if the royal selection ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee

... century earlier conceived the mission of England in India to lie in the training of the Indian people to govern themselves, and for the first time an attempt was made to appraise generously but fairly the position of the Western-educated classes and the part they have come to play in the Indian polity. The passage is worth quoting in full, as the constitutional changes effected on the lines recommended by the Report were to give them the opportunity to prove the stuff they were made of as the ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol

... history; while those of a later date surround their hero with a halo of extravagant admiration. Alexander Knox, a personal friend of Wesley's, thus writes of him: "How was he competent to form a religious polity so compact, effective and permanent? I can only express my firm conviction that he was totally incapable of preconceiving such a scheme. * * * * That he had uncommon acuteness in fitting expedients to conjunctures ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, - Volume I, No. 9. September, 1880 • Various

... excuses, he was occupied in pleading his own cause by flattering communications to the Queen, 'whose fame was spoken of throughout the world.' He wished to study the wisdom of her government, that he might know better how to order himself in civil polity. He was most urgent that her Majesty would give him 'some noble English lady for a wife, with augmentation of living suitable.' If she would give him his father's earldom, he would make her the undisputed sovereign of willing subjects in Ulster; he would drive away all her enemies, save her from ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin

... constitute the generations that are ahead will look back to us, either at those who serve them or at those who betray them. Will any man in such circumstances think it worthy to stand and not try to do what is possible in so great a cause, to save a country, to purify a polity, to set up vast reforms which will increase the happiness of mankind? God forbid that I should either be daunted or turned away from ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty

... Association regarding self-help is not theoretical, but practical, may be seen in the statement of Rev. Dr. Beard concerning the work in the South, before the National Council for 1895. He says: "We are realizing also that the independent methods of Congregational polity develop self-help. These churches each year are bearing a larger part of their own support. When it is remembered that formerly their preachers were seldom paid anything, it can be understood that this new way of church life is full ...
— American Missionary - Volume 50, No. 9, September, 1896 • Various

... government exists by the consent of the governed. It recognizes the existence of the Monroe Doctrine. In a word, it recognizes every principle and precedent, whether natural or historical, which has from the beginning lain at the foundation of our American polity. It does not attempt the hypocritical contradiction in terms, of pretending to elevate a people into a self-sustaining condition through the leading-string process of "tutelage." It appeals to our historical experience, applying to present conditions the lessons of Hayti, Mexico, and Venezuela. ...
— "Imperialism" and "The Tracks of Our Forefathers" • Charles Francis Adams

... East Indians will increasingly claim, as the Japanese are now claiming, the right to decide for themselves the forms of polity and the types of ritual which they will choose ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones

... observes, that "This wonderful philosopher explored and developed the true foundations of human knowledge, with a sagacity and penetration unparalleled in the history of mankind." What Clement VIII. applied to the eight books of Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity, may well apply to the writings of Bacon:—"there is no learning that this man hath not searched into. His books will get reverence by age, for there is in them such seeds of eternity, that they will continue till the last fire ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton

... Nation, wasted of its Villages and People, as William Rufus, serv'd part of Kent, to feed his Deer? Good God! what a Scandal are we growing, to all the Kingdoms of the Earth, that set up for a regulated Government, or a sensible equal Polity? Surely, Tom, Men with common Sense, and common Industry, might make something else of this fertile Country, than a wild solitary Extent of Pastures; and that Men and civilized Creatures, might thrive here as well as Beasts and Barbarians; and ...
— A Dialogue Between Dean Swift and Tho. Prior, Esq. • Anonymous

... of one kind and another, for which Deacon Pratt's house was always the place, not counting the sociables which Jack attended with unfailing regularity. They would not, any of them, have been quite regular without Jack. Indeed, many a question of grave church polity had been settled only after it had been submitted to and passed upon in meeting by Jack. "Is not that so, Jack?" was a favorite clincher to arguments which, it was felt, had won over his master. And Jack's groping paw cemented a treaty of good-will and mutual concession that had helped ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis

... the Protestant Party. Defection of the radicals: the Anabaptists. Defection of the intellectuals: Erasmus. The Sacramentarian Schism: Zwingli. Growth of the Lutheran party among the upper and middle classes. Luther's ecclesiastical polity. Accession of many Free Cities, of Ernestine Saxony, Hesse, Prussia. Balance of Power. The Recess of Spires 1529; ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith

... They declared that they were entitled to life, liberty, and property, and to the rights and immunities of free and natural born subjects within the realm of England. They denied the right of the British Parliament to legislate in cases of "taxation and internal polity," but "cheerfully consent to the operation of such Acts of the British Parliament as are bona fide restrained to the regulation of our external commerce." They protested against "the keeping up a standing army in these colonies in times of ...
— Formation of the Union • Albert Bushnell Hart

... beginning of his preface, page iv, he says, "The Church of England being established by acts of parliament, is a perfect creature of the civil power; I mean the polity and discipline of it, and it is that which maketh all the contention; for as to the doctrines expressed in the articles, I do not find high church to be in any manner of pain; but they who lay claim ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift

... the Republic, that it cannot be fairly estimated without taking them into consideration, nor can the disuse of these holidays (of which I have heretofore spoken) be appreciated in all its import, without particular allusion to their number and nature. They formed part of the aristocratic polity of the old commonwealth, which substituted popular indulgence for popular liberty, and gave the people costly pleasures in return for the priceless rights of which they had been robbed, set up national pride in the place of patriotism, and was as well satisfied with a drunken joy in its subjects ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells

... and cleverness lead to success. And success is to be attained through these, either in separation, or combined—namely, conciliation, gift, sowing dissensions, chastisement, and sight. And, O chief of the Bharatas, polity hath for its root diplomacy; and diplomacy also is the main qualification of spies. And polity, if well judged conferreth success. Therefore, in matters of polity the counsels of Brahmanas should be resorted to. And in secret affairs, these should not be consulted,—namely, a woman, a sot, a boy, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... that it was prelacy, not primitive episcopacy, the thing, not the name, that the reformers contended against, and, if the Catholic Church and the national Clerisy were (as both parties unhappily took for granted) one and the same, contended against with good reason. Knox's ecclesiastical polity (worthy of Lycurgus), adopted bishops under a different name, or rather under a translation instead of corruption of the name [Greek: epaskapoi]. He would have ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge

... was, where not actually challenged, silently ignored. Nor did the assertion admit of denial; for, looking back through the vista of threescore years, of the principles of what may be called "public polity" then advanced as indisputable, few to-day meet with general acceptance. To review the record from this point of view ...
— 'Tis Sixty Years Since • Charles Francis Adams

... enough is it to the moral and intellectual nature of Man, when the authority of the Church is doubted: or rather, this is the first downward step. Not to believe that Christ bequeathed to His Church a Divine form of polity: not to believe that He set officers over His Kingdom, of which He is Himself the sole invisible Head: not to believe that He invested His Apostles with authority to delegate to others the Commission He had Himself conveyed to them; and that, by virtue ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon

... young French envoy, smiling and bowing to Tito, "to think that her affections must overrule the good of the State, and that nobody is to be beheaded who is anybody's cousin; but such a view is not to be encouraged in the male population. It seems to me your Florentine polity is much weakened ...
— Romola • George Eliot

... be in the capital of a State. In it are gathered a great proportion of the best books in each department of literature and science, while indefatigable efforts have been made to enrich it in whatever relates to American history and polity. Its reading-room is freely opened to the public during many hours daily. But a State library should never be made a library of circulation, since its utility as a reference library, having its books always in for those ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford

... of the customs of the squatters with the provisions of the pre-emption and homestead acts reveals the truth that the latter are largely compilations of the former. These American principles of agrarian polity are ...
— History of the Constitutions of Iowa • Benjamin F. Shambaugh

... of the Patriarchs, of which the effective truth is visible to this day in the polity of the Jewish and ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin

... as if it were the most natural thing in the world; and on her part,—such was the contagion of his simplicity,—Miriam heard it without anger or disturbance, though with no responding emotion. It was as if they had strayed across the limits of Arcadia; and come under a civil polity where young men might avow their passion with as little restraint as a bird pipes its note ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... attempts at reformation in the Church, large and small, had failed, as had those of the early fifteenth century to reform its government, leaving the Church as thoroughly mediaeval in doctrine and in practical religion as it was in polity. It was the one power, therefore, belonging to the Middle Ages which still stood unaffected by the new forces and opposed to them. In other directions the changes had been many; here nothing had been ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY

... playing with ambiguities, nor indulging in any of the vices to which spiritualising interpretation of Scripture leads, but it is simply grasping the central idea of the words of my text. Rightly understood they lead us to this: 'The death of Christ was the destruction of the Jewish Temple and polity, and the raising again of Christ from the dead on the third day was the raising again of that destroyed Theocracy and Temple in a new and nobler fashion.' Let us then look for a moment, and it shall only be for a moment, at ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren

... institutions as the ordeal and duel; not only did it justify (and in the opinion of some still justifies) the wars of religion and the use of force in religious matters generally; not only was it the accepted national polity of such communities as the Vikings, the Barbary States, and the Red Indians; but it is still, unfortunately, the polity of certain European states. But the idea is a survival and—and this is the important point—an admission of failure to understand where right lies: to "fight it out" is the remedy ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell

... article of the Constitution of the United States which declares that "Congress shall make no law respecting a religious establishment." The bill enacts into and establishes by law sundry rules and proceedings relative purely to the organization and polity of the church incorporated, and comprehending even the election and removal of the minister of the same, so that no change could be made therein by the particular society or by the general church of which it is a member, and whose authority it recognizes. This particular church, therefore, ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 1: James Madison • Edited by James D. Richardson

... not intended by the ancient historians, in referring all these complicated arrangements of the Roman civil polity to the enactments of Romulus, to convey the idea that he introduced them at once in all their completeness, at the outset of his reign. Romulus continued king of Rome for nearly forty years, and instead of making formal and positive enactments, he may have gradually ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott

... pretended that the General Government had the power in their relations with the Indians to control or oppose the internal polity of the individual States of this Union, and if such was the case under the Articles of Confederation the only question on the subject since must arise out of some more enlarged power or authority given to the General Government ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, - Vol. 2, Part 3, Andrew Jackson, 1st term • Edited by James D. Richardson

... drinking-water; or those who daily predict the fall of Britain. We pay them for the pain they inflict, pay them, and wince, and hurry on. And truly there is nothing that can shake the conscience like a beggar's thanks; and that polity in which such protestations can be purchased for a shilling, seems no scene for an ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... poetry, accordingly, written when the Florentine democracy was young, vigorous, and mischievous, there is no chord of sympathy with the polity of his native place. On the contrary, the whole magnificent "Commedia" is a De profundis chanted out of an oppressed and scornful bosom, a fiery protest, an excoriating satire against the liberty upon which the Commonwealth prided itself. Florence ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various

... off on me that Proteus-dream the Church, which in every man's mouth has a different meaning? In one book, meaning a method of education, only it has never been carried out; in another, a system of polity,—only it has never been realised;—now a set of words written in books, on whose meaning all are divided; now a body of men who are daily excommunicating each other as heretics and apostates; now a universal idea; now the narrowest and most exclusive ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley

... This magnificent polity—his, ours—must, doubtless, one day, share the common fate, and where it goes down, the star of Washington must set with it, and his name pass, an unheeded word, into the dead annals of the obsolete ages. But O! not yet—say ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick

... Jerusalem of the West. Little Holland, since she shook off Papistry, hath no persecuting polity like the other nations. And natural enough, for 'tis more a ship than a country. Half my old friends have drifted thither—'tis a sad drain for our ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... Turks. I shall have to deal, therefore, on broad lines, with the historical facts—laying greater stress only upon the three fundamental epochs of Rumanian history: the formation of the Rumanian nation; its initial casting into a national polity (foundation of the Rumanian principalities); and its final evolution into the actual unitary State; and shall then pass on to consider the more recent internal and external development of ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth

... you by suggesting that, logically, the Americans should be what the Altrurians are, since their polity embodies our belief that all men are born equal, with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; but that illogically they are what the Europeans are, since they still cling to the economical ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells

... other things that people hide only to show them Chiefly knew himself to be mortal by this act Dearness is a good sauce to meat Each amongst you has made somebody cuckold Eat your bread with the sauce of a more pleasing imagination Evade this tormenting and unprofitable knowledge Feminine polity has a mysterious procedure Few men have made a wife of a mistress, who have not repented it First thing to be considered in love matters: a fitting time Friend, the hook will not stick in such soft cheese Give the ladies a cruel contempt of our natural furniture Guess at our ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Essays of Montaigne • David Widger

... youth, in familiarizing it with generous and virtuous sentiments, did them peculiar honour; and their maxims and discourses, as recorded by historians, prove that they were much accustomed to profound reflection on the principles of civil polity, morality, religion and philosophy. ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian

... of this once proud and energetic, but now worn-out and enfeebled, oligarchy: so incapable was that hoary polity of contending with the youthful vigour ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart

... his youth, honourably regarded by naval men as an intrepid and skilful navigator. Lord Spencer, the head of a family eminently distinguished for the great administrators whom it has furnished for the furtherance of British polity, did a far wiser thing than attempting to block French researches, from suspicion, jealousy, or fear of consequences. He entertained the suggestion of Sir Joseph Banks, ordered the fitting out of ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott

... the poet-prophet of Irish agriculture, bases his whole conception of a desirable polity for the Irish State upon cooperative communities, and considers cooperative societies as a prerequisite to rural organization. After describing the marked economic and social changes which have taken place in a typical Irish community ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson

... the perils of a public discussion could be avoided—a form of controversy fatal, for the most part, to the peace of the unlearned. In fact, no radical change was absolutely required in the ancient order or in ecclesiastical polity. Not even the pontifical authority itself need necessarily be abolished; for it was the desire of the Lutheran party, so far as possible, to retain all the accustomed forms. In fine, he begged Du Bellay to exhort the monarchs of Europe to concord while yet there was room left for ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird

... 'the more gentlemen, ever the lower books of subsidies.' It is odd enough as an historical precedent, that, while the fathers of New England were laying deep in religion, education, and freedom the basis of a polity which has substantially outlasted any then existing, the first work of the founders of Virginia, as may be seen in Wingfield's 'Memorial,' was conspiracy and rebellion,—odder yet, as showing the changes which are wrought by circumstance, that the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... century will have to record the marvellous fact that while in the reign of Queen Victoria there was initiated, formulated, and methodised an entirely new cosmogony, its most powerful and highly-gifted man of letters was preaching a polity and a philosophy of history that would have better harmonised with the time of Queen Semiramis. . . . Long before he launched his sarcasms at human progress, there had been a conviction among thinkers that it was not the hero that ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol

... I am aware that I shall be obliged to draw more largely on the reader's attention, than so immethodical a miscellany as this can authorize; when in such a work (the Ecclesiasical Polity) of such a mind as Hooker's, the judicious author, though no less admirable for the perspicuity than for the port and dignity of his language,—and though he wrote for men of learning in a learned age,—saw nevertheless occasion to anticipate and ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... the precedents of the past, the spirit of our people, the theory of our civil polity and the rights of individual man succeed, and make headway against free speech, and put it in jeopardy, it would convulse the very frame-work of society. There would be no time for a revolution—there would be ...
— Conflict of Northern and Southern Theories of Man and Society - Great Speech, Delivered in New York City • Henry Ward Beecher

... to turn back from the Gospel, with its spiritual order and its hopes of things not yet seen, to the outworn Dispensation, with its externally majestic circumstances of glorious ritual and imposing shows of polity and power. They would need again and again to open the soul's ears and eyes, and steadfastly to recollect, against all appearances, that we "are come unto the Mount Sion," if they were to resist the magnetic forces which drew them back towards ...
— Messages from the Epistle to the Hebrews • Handley C.G. Moule

... at all prepared at present to attempt anything like a digest of them. That would require a lifetime; and no small part of the task, after marshalling the evidence, would be to agree upon terms which would be intelligible to ourselves and yet not misleading. To take polity alone, are we to understand that any kind of Government resembling that of human societies obtains among them? When we talk of Queens or Kings of the Fairies, of Oberon and Titania, for example, are we using a rough translation of a real something, or are we telling the mere truth? Is there ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett

... two feet broad, and will contain seven or eight men, who navigate them as swiftly as our boats. In manners, these people resemble beasts more than men, for they tear human bodies in pieces, and eat the raw and bloody flesh. They have not the smallest spark of religion, neither any appearance of polity or civilization, being in all respects utterly brutal, insomuch that if they have occasion to make water, they let fly upon whoever is nearest them. They have no knowledge of our arms, and would even lay their hands on the edges of the Dutchmen's swords; yet are exceedingly cunning, faithless, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr

... important branch of national polity has been impeached, arraigned, and brought to stand its trial before the bar of public opinion, it is satisfactory to know that the subject has been thoroughly investigated, since a searching investigation alone can excuse a verdict, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various

... secondly, the educational value of democracy is so great that it may be held to counterbalance many defects. Mill decides in favour of democracy mainly on the ground that 'it promotes a better and higher form of national character than any other polity,' since government by authority stunts the intellect, narrows the sympathies, and destroys the power of initiative. 'The perfect commonwealth,' says Mr. Zimmern,' is a society of free men and women, each at once ruling and being ruled,' It is also fair to argue that monarchies do not ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge

... expense of prerogative. Hagerman and Boulton, too, had for years lent themselves to the purposes of the Executive. It was not singular that these persons should feel as though their own claims to preferment had been passed over in favour of Judge Willis, a stranger to Canada, her institutions and her polity. Nor was it wonderful that their deportment towards the stranger should, in spite of themselves, be influenced by the feeling. Judge Willie was not long in discovering that some sentiment of this sort was in the air, but he does not appear to have made sufficient allowance for it, and ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent

... perfunctory, peripatetic, periphery, persiflage, perspicacious, perspicuity, pertinacious, pharmaceutic, phenomenal, phlegmatic, phraseology, pictorial, piquant, pique, plagiarize, platitudinous, platonic, plebeian, plenipotentiary, plethora, pneumatic, poignant, polity, poltroon, polyglot, pontifical, portentous, posterior, posthumous, potent, potential, pragmatic, preamble, precarious, precocious, precursor, predatory, predestination, predicament, preemptory, prelate, preliminary, preposterous, prerequisite, prerogative, presentiment, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor

... the accomplished and trustworthy Lecky, 'was Catholicism so free from domineering and aggressive tendencies as during the Pontificates of Benedict XIV and his three successors.' This covers a period extending from 1740 to 1775; and we know that cycles of ecclesiastical polity never close abruptly. The Catholic was first to perceive that 'when lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentler gamester is ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy

... Possibly they might have done it not so well, had their energies been less concentrated on the special task which employed their intellects—if they had been called upon to turn their attention to important changes in the ecclesiastical polity, or to new schemes of Church extension. Faults, blunders, shortcomings, are not to be excused by unforeseen good ultimately involved in them; yet it is, at all events, an allowable and pleasant thing to consider whether good may not ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton

... the distant northern sea! These were the tributary fountains, that, as time went on, swelled into the broad confluence of modern time. What was new in 1776 was the transformation of thought into actual polity. ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein

... from Egypt, it is in the constructive statesmanship that laid the foundations of the Hebrew commonwealth that the superlative grandeur of that leadership looms up. As we cannot imagine the Exodus without the great leader, neither can we account for the Hebrew polity without the great statesman. Not merely intellectually great, but morally great—a statesman aglow with the unselfish patriotism that refuses to grasp a sceptre or ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various

... Browning in his youth admired—a good orator and sound analytic expositor, though not a great or independent thinker. Osborne Gordon had recommended him to read Hooker, and he caught the tone and style of the "Ecclesiastical Polity" only too readily, so that much of his work of that winter, the more philosophical part of vol. ii., was damaged by inversions, and Elizabethan quaintness as of ruff and train, long epexegetical sentences, and far-sought pomposity of diction. It was only when he had waded through the chaos which ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood

... by the Oxford Press; Selections by Grosart, in Elizabethan Library; Raleigh's Last Fight of the Revenge, in Arber's Reprints; Life of Raleigh, by Edwards and by Gosse. Richard Hooker's works, edited by Keble, Oxford Press; Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, in Everyman's Library, and in Morley's Universal Library; Life, in Walton's Lives, in Morley's Universal Library; Dowden's Essay, in ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long

... imperial command—that is, be a part of the British navy. There is one more step—namely, to dispose of all colonial military force in the same common-sense way, and then we have a politically united empire. But we are "constitutional" or representative in our polity, so that something else is still wanted. In short, the unity of the empire requires two things. First, that all its force be under one executive, and, next, that the colonies be proportionately represented in that executive. The Cabinet seems to me the adaptable body ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth

... that almost every species (as we see with nearly all our domestic productions) varies sufficiently for Natural Selection to pick out and accumulate new specific differences, under new organic and inorganic conditions of life, whenever a place is open in the polity of nature. But looking to a long lapse of time and to the whole world, or to large parts of the world, I believe only one or a few species of each large genus ultimately becomes victorious, and leaves modified descendants. To give an imaginary ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin

... of great men! Could some of these the originators of new beliefs, of new methods in Art, of new systems of state and ecclesiastical polity, of novel modes of practice in medicine, and the like.—"revisit the pale glimpses of the moon," and look upon the streams of blood and misery that have flowed from fountains they have unsealed, they would skulk back ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various

... will even the laws were swayed;—whilst at the same time the singular spectacle was exhibited amidst all this confusion of the flourishing of commerce, and the protection and encouragement of letters and arts. Never was the commercial spirit so well reconciled to the nobler principles of social polity as in Florence. It tended there to union and permanence and elevation,—not as the overbalance of it in England is now doing, to dislocation, change and moral degradation. The intensest patriotism reigned in these communities, but confined ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge

... of Rome and of the world Jovius Augustus was more than this. Alike in the history of politics and in the history of art, he has left his mark on all time that has come after him, and it is on his own Spalato that his mark has been most deeply stamped. The polity of Rome and the architecture of Rome alike received a new life at his hands. In each alike he cast away shams and pretenses, and made the true construction of the fabric stand out before men's eyes. Master of the Rome world, if not King, yet ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various

... The Irish polity finds its fellow nowhere in the world. It is a Government responsible neither to King nor people. It is not a democratic Government, nor an autocratic Government, nor even an oligarchical Government. It is a Government hag-ridden by forty-one administrative Boards, ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill

... Judging from his early letters, this latter consummation was at one time far from unlikely; but the older and more earnest he grew, the more definite became his creed, and the more intense his affinity for spiritual Christianity. In ecclesiastical polity he never was a partisan, and for piety his attraction was always more powerful than for mere theology. But in that essential element of vital Christianity, a profound and adoring attachment to the Saviour of men, the orthodoxy of Doddridge was never gainsaid. Had ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various

... Bill which doubles the electorate and admits over six million women to the franchise. All these things are dear to the antiquary, the historian, and (perhaps we should add) the pedant, as witnessing to the unbroken continuity of our constitutional forms, though the substance of our polity has been altered beyond ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell

... certainly is that his works so appealed to later generations as to have been preserved, and thereby posterity has been enabled to get some knowledge, however inadequate, of the history of the Jewish polity during its last two hundred years—between the time of the Maccabees and the fall of the nation—which would otherwise have been buried in almost unrelieved darkness. And at the same time he has preserved a record of some interesting ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich

... admirable provisions for the security of justice; and, in the degree of civil liberty which it accorded to the Roman inhabitants of the country, far transcended those of most of the other barbarians of the north. [4] In short, their simple polity exhibited the germ of some of those institutions, which, with other nations, and under happier auspices, have formed the basis of ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott

... The beings whom the Christians can win over—a patch-work medley of loathsome Barbarians—let them wear out their lives as they choose! We are Greeks—the thinking brain, the subtle and sentient soul of the world. The polity, the empire, that we shall found on the overthrow of Theodosius and of Rome shall be Hellenic, purely Hellenic. The old national spirit, which made the Greeks omnipotent against the millions of Darius and Xerxes, shall live again, and we will keep the Barbarians at a distance as a ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... "striking a light," when I rub the match on the match-box. "Forgive me urging such simple facts by such simple illustrations and such simple experiments. The facts I am endeavouring to bring before you are illustrations of principles that determine the polity of the whole material universe." Friction produces heat. Here is a little toy (cracker) that you may have seen before (Fig. 23). It is scientific in its way. A small quantity of fulminating material is placed between ...
— The Story of a Tinder-box • Charles Meymott Tidy

... principles by which a nation or state is governed,' etc. No doubt this is one of the meanings of the word. No doubt government, considered with reference to its quality or the manner of its constitution, does often signify a system of polity, a determinate organization and distribution of the supreme powers of the state. But this is not its 'ordinary' meaning—either in the sense of its being the most correct and proper, or the most frequent ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various

... vanity?—of one of the leading nations of the earth. Americans regard Federalism with pardonable partiality. They are the original inventors of the best Federal system in the world, and Federalism has made them the greatest of all free communities. A polity under which the United States has grown up and flourished, and fought the biggest war which has been fought during the century, and come out of it victorious, and with renewed strength, must, it is felt, be a constitution suited for all nations who ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey

... the pomp of trifles to behold: Proud peers—a nation's polity unrolled— Customs, pursuits—its clans, and how they fight, Slight things I labour; not for glory slight, If Heaven attend and Phoebus hearken me. First, then, for site. ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... fecundity; no perpetual gloom, or unceasing sunshine; nor are the nations, here described, either void of all sense of humanity, or consummate in all private and social virtues; here are no Hottentots without religion, polity or articulate language; no Chinese perfectly polite, and completely skilled in all sciences; he will discover, what will always be discovered by a diligent and impartial inquirer, that, wherever human nature is to be found, there is a mixture ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson

... affected: though his egoism was clothed in the finest feelers, he did not suspect a similar surface in others. His daughter, as part of himself, came within the normal range of his solicitude; but she was an outlying region, a subject province; and Mr. Orme's was a highly centralized polity. ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton

... interests of the ship and of the crew,—not by laying down rules, but by making his art a law,—preserves the lives of his fellow-sailors, even so, and in the self-same way, may there not be a true form of polity created by those who are able to govern in a similar spirit, and who show a strength of art which is superior to the law? Nor can wise rulers ever err while they observing the one great rule of distributing justice to the citizens with intelligence and skill, are able to ...
— Statesman • Plato

... not an undigested, imperfect, and crude scheme of liberty, which may gradually be mellowed and ripened into an orderly and social freedom; but that it is so fundamentally wrong as to be utterly incapable of correcting itself by any length of time, or of being formed into any mode of polity of which a member of the House of Commons could ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... subordinate to a European nation. They were retarded in their advances by relations and compromises with other nations. The Anglo-Saxon, when translated to the wilds of America, needed only a stopping-place in order to found a peculiar and exclusive polity, which should enable him to march ever onward in his aggressions ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson

... or ought to last, which does not recognise and accept the principle that Governments derive all their just powers from the consent at the governed. . . . No nation should seek to extend its polity over any other nation or people, but every people should be left free to determine its own policy, its own way of development, unhindered, unthreatened, unafraid, the little along with ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin

... doing the work in the name of a divine, crucified, risen Christ? If so, "Forbid him not." We must not expect all Christians to repeat the same creed or to enjoy the same ritual or to accept the same polity or to employ the same methods of work. We should remember the word of the Master, "He that is not against ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman

... the paramount character of the ecclesiastical polity and the majesty of the theocratic principle, it became necessary to ascend to the origin of the Christian Church, and to meet in a spirit worthy of a critical and comparatively enlightened age, the position of the descendants ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli

... POLITY.—The Means of National Defence best suited to the character and condition of a Country, with a brief Account of those adopted by ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck

... There was as much poetry and romance: the merry laugh enlivened the newly opened fields, and rang through the bordering woods as loud, jocund, and unrestrained as in these older and more crowded settlements. It is true that their theology was austere, and their polity, in Church and State, stern; but, in their modes of life, there were some features which gave peculiar opportunity to exercise and gratify a love of social excitement of a pleasurable kind. Let me mention some ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham



Words linked to "Polity" :   organization, government, disposal, authorities



Copyright © 2024 Dictionary One.com