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Proletariat   Listen
noun
Proletariat  n.  The indigent class in the State; the body of proletarians.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Proletariat" Quotes from Famous Books



... Marxism - the political, economic, and social principles espoused by 19th century economist Karl Marx; he viewed the struggle of workers as a progression of historical forces that would proceed from a class struggle of the proletariat (workers) exploited by capitalists (business owners), to a socialist "dictatorship of the proletariat," to, finally, a classless society - communism. Marxism-Leninism - an expanded form of communism developed by Lenin from doctrines of Karl Marx; Lenin saw imperialism as the final ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... perhaps even of succeeding centuries, will be to make democracy a safe form of government for the world. This can be done only by a far more general extension of educational opportunities and advantages than the world has as yet witnessed. In the hands of an uneducated proletariat democracy is a dangerous instrument. In Russia, Mexico, and in certain of the Central American Republics we see what a democracy results in in the hands of an uneducated people. There, too often, the revolver instead ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY

... this seemed to be an occasion where unnecessary talking fell under interdiction; for that matter, Rellihan possessed only a vocabulary to use in talking down to the proletariat; he was debarred from telling these dignitaries to "shut ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day

... Niagara in his ears. Music of all kinds that could be tortured from brass, reed, hide or string, fought in the air to grain space for its vibrations against its competitors. But what held Blinker in awful fascination was the mob, the multitude, the proletariat shrieking, struggling, hurrying, panting, hurling itself in incontinent frenzy, with unabashed abandon, into the ridiculous sham palaces of trumpery and tinsel pleasures, The vulgarity of it, its brutal overriding of all the tenets of repression and taste that ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry

... just beginning to flare; where children swarmed in the close heat, wallowing along the gutters, dodging teams and cars, as they essayed to play, setting off a few premature firecrackers and mocking the police—all in all, leading the ugly, unnatural, destructive life of all children of the city proletariat. ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England

... hundred million francs. But she not only loses six hundred millions, she fails to create with that money manufacturing or agricultural products, which represent a loss of twelve hundred millions; for, if the manufactured product were not double in value to its cost price, commerce could not exist. The proletariat actually deprives itself of six hundred millions in wages. These six hundred millions of dead loss (representing to a stern economist a loss of twelve hundred millions, through lack of the benefits of circulation) explain the condition of inferiority in which our commerce, our merchant service, ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac

... abroad, has been no more than a symptom in Spain. Such men even as Angel Guimera, the dramatist, a Catalan separatist who has been under surveillance for years, or Pere Aldavert, who has suffered imprisonment in Barcelona because of his opinions, while they speak for the proletariat, nevertheless have had scant sympathy for Ferrer's ideas. It would be interesting to know just to what extent these commend themselves to Pablo and Emiliano Iglesias and the professed ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja

... agitation, all the far-reaching advances gained by force of laws and not of arms, had constituted at Rome a single people and created a true Roman nation. There were now at Rome only rich and poor, nobles and proletariat. With intelligence and ability a plebeian could aspire to the magistracies and thence to the senate. Why should not the Italians be allowed the same privilege? It was neither just nor equitable nor even prudent ...
— Public Lands and Agrarian Laws of the Roman Republic • Andrew Stephenson

... of the most powerful auxiliaries of prostitution. I do not wish to be sentimental, nor to give too much weight to the well-known statement that a poor woman prostitutes herself to appease her children's hunger, or her own. No doubt this happens among the oriental Jews and among the proletariat of large towns, but it is, ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel

... is, when Germany thought that "the day" had dawned, the war came. Then the voluntary principle manifested its proper fruits. We found ourselves suddenly called upon to confront the supreme crisis of our fate with a gigantic proletariat untrained and unarmed, and with a diminutive army (below even its nominal strength), wholly inadequate to the magnitude of its tasks. What were the consequences? They were these: First, that our devoted ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw

... literature, quite unintentionally, by providing me with a job. Whilst the Edison Telephone Company lasted, it crowded the basement of a huge pile of offices in Queen Victoria Street with American artificers. These deluded and romantic men gave me a glimpse of the skilled proletariat of the United States. They sang obsolete sentimental songs with genuine emotion; and their language was frightful even to an Irishman. They worked with a ferocious energy which was out of all proportion to the actual result achieved. Indomitably resolved to assert their republican ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw

... hope you won't!' he said, with unusual emphasis. 'Let the proletariat attend to the affairs of the proletariat. They don't need ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins

... delights and lived laborious days." They have lived humbly and frugally, in order to accomplish greater things. They have supported themselves by their hand labour, until they could support themselves by their head labour. Some may allege that this is not justifiable—that it is a sin against the proletariat to attempt to rise in the world,—that "once a cobbler always a cobbler." But, until a better system has been established, the self-application of individuals is the only method by which science and knowledge can be conquered, and the world ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles

... mammal holding the political views of Denis Kearney, a notorious demagogue of San Francisco, whose audiences gathered in the open spaces (sandlots) of the town. True to the traditions of his species, this leader of the proletariat was finally bought off by his law-and-order enemies, living prosperously silent and dying impenitently rich. But before his treason he imposed upon California a constitution that was a confection of sin in a diction of solecisms. The similarity between ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce

... the proletariat is? They are the men who have collectively an affection for peace and a horror for war. The chauvinists, the nationalists, &c., are men who have collectively an affection for war and carnage. When they feel, however, over their heads the menace of conflicts, or wars which may put an end to ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various

... of privation and sweating, only joined up very slowly with the general propositions I was making about life. We could become splendidly eloquent about the social revolution and the triumph of the Proletariat after the Class war, and it was only by a sort of inspiration that it came to me that my bedder, a garrulous old thing with a dusty black bonnet over one eye and an ostentatiously clean apron outside the dark ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells

... crush, posse, multitude, number, mass, throng, horde, host, troop, bevy, knot, assembly, confluence; populace, rabble, commonalty, mob, proletariat, riffraff, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... ignorant of art in a very different way though. This man seemed to mean, "I know nothing of it, and it's quite superfluous, still it may be admitted in a well-ordered state." He seems, however, to think very little about Petersburg and comme il faut: he once even called himself one of the proletariat. 'We are working people,' he said; I thought if Dmitri had said that, I shouldn't have liked it; but he may talk about himself, he may boast if he likes. With me he is very attentive; but I kept feeling that a very, very condescending superior ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev

... workers, an ideal to which they must strive, a myth as inspiring as the belief of the early Christians in the Second Coming of Christ, which, although quite a false belief, contributed largely to the success of the early Church. "Strikes," says Sorel, "have engendered in the proletariat the most noble, the most profound, the most moving sentiments they possess. The General Strike groups these in a composite picture, and by bringing together, gives to each its maximum intensity; appealing to the most acute memories of particular conflicts, it colours with an intense life ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn

... infamy is endured in a town is a piece of barbarity and injustice, the more so as it could be easily removed by a police notice requiring every whip cord to have a knot at the end of it. It would do no harm to draw the proletariat's attention to the classes above him who work with their heads; for he has unbounded fear of any kind of head work. A fellow who rides through the narrow streets of a populous town with unemployed post-horses or cart-horses, ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer

... above all, catholic in her tastes, her gaunt arms, painted blood red, were open alike to the murderer and the thief, the aristocrats of ancient lineage, and the proletariat ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... aimless discontent. The schools have produced, according to Bismarck, ten times as many overeducated young men as there are places to fill. The thirst for culture has produced a great, hungry, intellectual proletariat. The forces of darkness are still strong, and it seems sometimes as if the Middle Ages will swallow up everything won by modern struggles. The Liberal wonders at moments if he be not really fighting against ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various

... ascertain the images called up by the terms "the people," "the masses," "the proletariat," "the peasantry," by many who theorize on those bodies with eloquence, or who legislate without eloquence, we should find that they indicate almost as small an amount of concrete knowledge—that they are as far from completely representing the complex facts summed up ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot

... up their own expressive form of society, and when this process had been completed we find still an aristocracy, though rapidly changing in the quality of its personnel and in the sense of its relationship to the rest of society; a servile class, the proletariat, enormously increased in proportion to the other social components; and two new classes, one the bourgeoisie, essentially non-producers and subsisting largely either on trade, usury or management, and the pauper, ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram

... political theorists. The "social compact." ... Popular sovereignty. 3. Religious dissenters. 4. Industrial elements. a. The Industrial Revolution. Resulting in exportation, markets, and laissez-faire doctrines. b. The bourgeoisie (employers) ... The Third Estate. c. The proletariat ... Unorganized labor elements. C. The Revolutionary Period, 1789-1800. 1. Triumph of bourgeoisie over feudal aristocracy in France, 1789-1791. Limited monarchy. Mirabeau. 2. Increasing influence and rise to control of France of the Parisian proletariat. The Republic ... The Terror ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper

... we might get, by way of counterpoise to the voting power of a bare and overwhelming proletariat, the worthier and far sweeter voices of those who have virtues and excellences of various kinds to recommend them,—so that if the lowest constituent counts for one, the highest may add up to six or eight. And thus, while no one of the mob ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... Land as we conceive it, the classes which are now the bearers of German culture will lose almost everything, while the gain of the proletariat will be scarcely visible. And yet for the sake of this scarcely visible gain we must tread the stony path that lies before us. Willingly and joyfully shall we tread it; for out of this, at first, dubious conquest of equal rights for all men will grow the ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau

... of Mars. Anyhow he left the table with the impression that the Earl of Mountshire was the most powerful noble in England and that his hostess and her cousin, Lady Auriol, regarded the Royal Family as upstarts and only visited Buckingham Palace in order to set a good example to the proletariat. ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke

... circulars and his advertisements in the country newspapers where he was traveling. So now Peter was penned in a corner and compelled to fix his attention upon "The A. B. C. of Socialism," or "Capital and Proletariat," or "The ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair

... extinguished forever. For this people is already permanently cloven into a higher and a lower class: in its industry as much as its army. Its employers are, in the strictest and most sinister sense, captains of industry. Its proletariat is, in the truest and most pitiable sense, an army of labour. In that atmosphere masters bear upon them the signs that they are more than men; and to insult ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton

... York, I set up type, I wrote articles, and once in a while I addressed meetings on the East Side. But even before I left London I had read a book on Syndicalism by one of the great Frenchmen, and after a while I began to realize that the proletariat would never get anywhere ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... but day by day more lucidly, that one could not take one's stand, for satisfaction of desire, on the money which one happened to have but which the majority bitterly and emptily lacked. Some common way there had to be, some freedom all might grasp, a liberty not for the bourgeois only, but for the proletariat—the poor, the sad, the gay proletariat, who also grew old and lost their dreams, and had not the wherewithal to drug their souls, unless indeed they drank much liquor, and that is but a poor ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay

... of life, where vice and crime and misery abound, comes the Byron of the twentieth century, the poet of the vagabond and the proletariat, Maxim Gorky. Not like the beggar, humbly imploring for a crust in the name of the Lord, nor like the jeweller displaying his precious stones to dazzle and tempt the eye, he comes to the world,—nay, in accents of Tyrtaeus this commoner of ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky

... except that of Italy. Meanwhile, of the Reichsrath, the members of the Right and the Slav majority had left Vienna and announced a meeting of the diet at Bruenn for the 20th of October; all that remained in the capital was a rump of German radicals, impotent in the hands of the proletariat and the students. The defence of the city was hastily organized under Bern, an ex-officer of Napoleon; but in the absence of help from Hungary it was futile. On the 28th of October Windischgraetz began his attack; on the 1st of November he was ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various

... honest, I tend rather to politics. Have I never told you that I take a leading part on the Continent in the great Class War now raging? And, by the way, has anyone let you know that it is only a matter of time before the present order of society is closed down, the rule of the proletariat established and people like Charles set on to clean the streets ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 29th, 1920 • Various

... the man may now be permitted to fall to its natural level. Finally, when the growth of population has made land so dear that common laborers in freedom cannot save enough to buy farms, the occasion for slavery and serfdom lapses. Laborers may now be freed to become a wage-earning proletariat, to take their own risks. An automatic coercion replaces the systematic; the labor stimulus is intensified, but the stress of the employer is diminished. The laborer does not escape from coercion, but merely exchanges one of its forms ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips

... taint.' Of the four great Labour Parties, he proceeded to recommend the P.S.D. as the most promising for David's purposes. 'Not the Bolshewiki faction,' he added, 'but the Menshewiki. Recruits might also be found in the Proletariat ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill

... their means some solution of the great economic evils of the modern world might be found, which should avoid injustice either to the capitalist or the wage-earner. He had a burning hatred of injustice and tyranny, which made him anxious to see the horrors of the modern proletariat system mitigated and destroyed; but combined with this there was a very deep sense of the need of acting on principles universally valid, and a distrust of any merely emotional enthusiasm which might, in the future, ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... he, 'I don't suppose that anywhere in the world you could find three cormorants with brighter ideas about down-treading the proletariat than the firm of Peters, Satan and Tucker, incorporated. We have sure handed the small consumer a giant blow in ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry

... brutalizing atmosphere. Society is thus bound to remain divided into two hostile camps, and in such conditions freedom is a vain word. The Radical begins by demanding a greater extension of political rights, but he soon sees that the breath of liberty leads to the uplifting of the proletariat, and then he turns round, changes his opinions, and reverts to repressive legislation and government ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin

... Utopias, as the interests of the proletarians were in absolute conflict with those of other classes, and these differences could only be settled by international class warfare. Nevertheless with that fear of the proletariat which has always characterized the democrats of revolutionary Freemasonry, Dr. Kallos declared later that "the social revolution must take place without bloodshed."[690] The Karolyi regime was the direct outcome of these illusions, and as in all ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster

... Council of Workmen's Delegates has issued an appeal to the proletariat, which contains the following striking passage: We shall defend our liberty to the utmost against all attacks within and without. The Russian revolution will not quail before the bayca ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 11, 1917 • Various

... prosperity of our export trade at this period; and conversely, the prosperity of our export trade was necessary to the existence of the new inhabitants. Capitalism is the cause of our dense population; and the proletariat would infallibly cut their ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge

... The year 1886, therefore, was one of general agitation throughout the United States. With rapidity and enthusiasm the movement spread. Presently it took on a radical character. Realizing it to be at basis the first national awakening of the proletariat, progressive men and women of every shade of opinion hastened forward to support it and direct it into one of opposition, not merely to a few of the evils of wage slavery, but to what they considered the fundamental ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers

... mob rule in America are over," Golding declares. "It was no easy matter to wean the people of the fallacious idea that a proletariat could manage ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams

... chair over the humour of Jane Austen; to me she is the dullest lady that ever faithfully photographed the trivial. Years ago I happened to be crossing Putney Bridge, in a frock-coat and silk hat, when a passing member of the proletariat dug his elbows in his comrade's ribs and, quoting a music-hall tag of the period, shouted "He's got 'em on!" whereupon both burst into peals of robustious but inane laughter. Now, if I had turned to ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke

... tracts of the Old World, her brand-new method of colonization would surprise her older contemporaries in a similar task. She has been the first to teach Asiatics the doctrine of equality of races—a theory which the proletariat has interpreted by a self-assertion hitherto unknown, and a gradual relinquishment of that courteous deference towards the white man formerly observable by every European. This democratic doctrine, suddenly launched upon the masses, is changing their character. The polite ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman

... admitted that he had never heard of Shelley, whose name he confused with Max O'Rell's, which Dr. Mittyford deemed an error. Then, Pater's window. The doctor shrugged. Oh well, what could you expect of the proletariat! Swinging his stick aloofly, he stalked to the Bodleian and vouchsafed, "That, sir, is the AEschylus Shelley had in his ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis

... among whom were the Toomeys, occupied the several rows of reserved chairs and smiled tolerantly upon the efforts of the performers, and the proletariat stamped and whistled through its teeth and cracked peanuts, a man muffled to the ears by the high collar of a mackinaw coat, his face further concealed by the visor of a cap and ear-laps, rode to the top of the bench, drew rein and looked down upon ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart

... Rise of the Money Power. Ascendancy of the bourgeoisie over the nobility, clergy, and proletariat. Class wars. Regulation of ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith

... loose. His face is keen and sharp: his mouth thin: his cheeks are shrunken: his arms and legs are long and he has a curious way of stuffing his clenched fists into his trousers pockets. Some one has called him the Mirabeau of the Australian Proletariat. Certainly he looks it. He has a nervous energy almost beyond belief. By birth, temperament, experience and point of view he is a firebrand, but with this difference: he is a Human Flame ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson

... I came, are you? This is Saturday. Times have changed. Maybe you don't know. Proletariat's ...
— Stubble • George Looms

... Well, Heaven was looking out for its own; it was not in the nature of things that a Pachuca should be trampled in the dust by the proletariat! Patiently, one after another, he tried the keys—ah, the right one at last! He turned it and the door opened. Pachuca chuckled delightedly; it pleased his whimsicality to think that so apparently unsurmountable a difficulty should be solved in so ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall

... that this answer of his will satisfy any but the most bigoted Britain, I am content. Another question I would ask. Does not Mr. Allen think that if the capitalistic classes, who leave their burdens to be borne by the unhappy proletariat, were abolished wars would immediately cease? Does he not know that recently it was proved in Germany that the Krupps were found to be promoting war scares in France in the interests of their own infernal trade? And lastly does not history prove ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor

... are quite honest about their purpose—the transfer of power and property by murder and robbery from the bourgeoisie to the proletariat. If a member of the proletariat is so mad that he refuses or hesitates to act his part in this scheme, then those who have been called by the force of events to assume a dictatorship on his behalf are entitled to ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward

... nobly of its duty in the grave task of protecting the city of Warsaw against the onrush of the Russian troops. The sons of wealthy families fought shoulder to shoulder with children of the proletariat. The sight of these step-children of Poland fighting for their fatherland stirred the heart of Ostrovski, and he subsequently wrote: "This spectacle could not fail to make your heart ache. Our conscience bade us to attend to the betterment ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow

... gendelettre pamphleteers. According to the author of the Monography, the pamphlet is the brochure masterpiece; and he himself is its most illustrious exponent. The Abbe de Lamennais does not know how to speak to the proletariat. He is not Spartacus enough, not Marat enough, not Calvin enough; he does not understand how to storm the positions of the ignoble bourgeoisie ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton

... Society's world as a monarch walks among the proletariat, to receive homage and return to places where a monarch has ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck

... intended by this statement. An aristocracy is in a manner the intellect of the social system, as the middle classes and the proletariat may be said to be its organizing and working power. It naturally follows that these forces are differently situated; and of their antagonism there is bred a seeming antipathy produced by the performance ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac

... right people." They confessed that, in the beginning, they had fought shy even of each other, lest one of them should develop a hideous susceptibility and impart the taint. There were points at which they both might have touched the aristocracy of journalism; but they had had no dealings with its proletariat or its demi-monde. Below these infernal circles they had discerned the fringe of the bottomless pit, popularity, which he, the Master, told her was "the unclean thing." So that in nineteen hundred and ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair

... essentially bourgeois and doctrinaire character of the present Liberal party. The intimate touch with the masses which in the days of its ascendancy, prior to 1884, the party enjoyed has been lost, and more and more the proletariat is looking to the Socialists for propagation of the measures required for social and ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg

... these stirring proletariat sentiments right vigorously. But Higham did not applaud. Rice and the women were in the canoe. Higham had gone back to the picnic site for an overlooked cushion. On returning toward the beach, he had found the Master and Lad standing ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune

... he had ceased to present quite so commanding a figure to the proletariat as he had presented when first he was called in to save the situation. Of this he was probably quite aware himself, and it is a great mistake to suppose that he was indifferent to public opinion or even to the opinion of the Press. By that time, moreover, he was probably ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell

... mining stock board of directors resembles a municipal board of public works. And the world knows now, if it did not in 1918-19, that the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic was, and is, a highly centralized tyranny, frankly called by its own leaders "The Dictatorship of the Proletariat." The Russian people prayed for "a fish ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore

... an invitation for you, Colonel." He was in one of his gently sparkling moods. "Get into your armor asinorum, for we fare forth to make contest with tinsel and gauze. In other words, we mingle with the proletariat. We go to see Margaret Anglin and Henry Miller in that superb and realistic Western libel, ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming

... sites of Caesar's colonies were selected for their commercial value, and that the citizens of Rome should cease to be rulers of the Mediterranean basin could never have entered into Caesar's mind. The colonists were in many cases veterans who had served under Caesar, in others members of the city proletariat. We possess the charter of the colony planted at Urso in southern Spain under the name of Colonia Julia Genetiva Urbanorum. Of the two latter titles, the first is derived from the name of Venus Genetrix, the ancestress of the Julian ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... street car. It switches from subject to subject just like that. It begins with the wonderful retail markets of San Francisco, and then changes abruptly to all sorts of sociological problems, then before we know it gives us a beautiful marine view, and then drops us down where the proletariat lives, then up to the homes of the rich and mighty, and ...
— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey

... are not sated yet and still for more are hungering Will find Vol. II. describe how E. gave cause for scandal-mongering. Vol. III. narrates how R. became enamoured of a fairy at A ball, was robbed of all his wealth and joined the proletariat. How E. washed clothes to earn her bread, while R. reclined in beery ease Upon his bed, will be exposed in Vol. IV. of this series. And further volumes show exactly what was worst and best in E., And ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 21st, 1920 • Various

... mass of cloth-capped humans who, at certain hours of the day, flood the streets of Bludston, and swarm on the roofs of clanging and shrieking tramcars, and on Saturday afternoons gather in clotted greyness on the football ground. He might have been sober and industrious-the proletariat of Bludston is not entirely composed of Buttons-but he would have taken the colour of his environment, and the world outside Bludston would never have heard of him. Paul, however, differed greatly from the little Buttons. They, children of the grey cap ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke

... of the social sciences, it is self-evident that the prolonged rule of the proletariat in Russia in defiance of nearly the whole world must be regarded as a product of Russian life, past and present. In fact, the continued Bolshevist rule seems to be an index of the relative fighting strength of ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman

... civilization of Russia. Crossing that bridge we passed from one philosophy to another, from one extreme of the class struggle to the other, from a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie to a dictatorship of the proletariat. ...
— Russia in 1919 • Arthur Ransome

... said; "I expect you to profit by associating with the survivors of our good American society—people such as one could once meet everywhere when I was young, but who have been destroyed by the invasion of the proletariat. You are in the last citadel of good-breeding. By the way, find out, if you can, if any of the Bombo connection are extant; as through them I should like, if possible, to establish a chapter of the Scions in South Carolina. Have you, met a Miss Rieppe, a decidedly striking young woman, who says ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister

... slender, frail, scholarly-looking man with a black beard and black-rimmed spectacles, said a few words in Russian, and then he talked for an hour in broken English, explaining how the Russians had won their way to freedom, and now would use it to set free the rest of the proletariat. And then came Comrade Schultze, of the Carpet Weavers' Union, assuring them that there was no need to go to war with Germany, because the German workers had been shown the way to freedom, and would follow very soon; Schultze knew, because his brother was editor of ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair

... the peasant courts one hears, 'Two hundred lashes or stand us a bucket of vodka.' Oh, this generation has only to grow up. It's only a pity we can't afford to wait, or we might have let them get a bit more tipsy! Ah, what a pity there's no proletariat! But there will be, there will be; we are ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... the Roman Proletariat.—This is the Panem et Circenses policy. Mr. Hodgkin appears to think that in this direction lies the main danger ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring

... that the Loyalists drew their strength from the upper classes in the colonies, while the revolutionists drew theirs from the proletariat. There is just enough truth in this to make it misleading. It is true that among the official classes and the large landowners, among the clergymen, lawyers, and physicians, the majority were Loyalists; and it is true that the ...
— The United Empire Loyalists - A Chronicle of the Great Migration - Volume 13 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • W. Stewart Wallace

... end, but the end is the contentment of the people governed. Nor has the liberty of those governed anything to do with the form of government. Monarchical England is just as free as Republican America, and the Bolshevists have demonstrated ad oculus to the whole world that the proletariat exercises the ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin

... State, in its final form, will have withered away. Therefore, the communist realizes that the State cannot be abolished in the manner visualized by anarchists, but that it must be used, that is, the proletariat must be raised "to the position of ruling class," for the purpose of expropriating the capitalists and putting an end to the exploitation of the producing class. The State is not abolished. Only its capitalist form is abolished. The State dies out in the hands of the workers when ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff

... horticulturist who devotes himself to roses, or dahlias, or heart's-ease, or geraniums, and pays no attention to the plants his fancy has not selected, so this young La Rochefoucault-Liancourt gave himself to the workingmen, the proletariat and the paupers of the faubourgs Saint-Jacques and Saint-Marceau. The strong man, the man of genius at bay, the worthy poor of the bourgeois class, he cut them off from the bosom of his charity. The heart of all persons with a mania is like those boxes with ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac

... of poetic words. It should react upon his metrical vocabulary to its beneficial expansion, by taking him outside his aristocratic circle of language, and keeping him in touch with the great commonalty, the proletariat of speech. For it is with words as with men: constant intermarriage within the limits of a patrician clan begets effete refinement; and to reinvigorate the stock, its veins must be replenished ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson

... tosses even with the modern fever of unrest. It has its bourgeoisie, its proletariat, its radicals, but also a city-beautiful association and a rather captious sanitary league. Lately a visiting radical, on the occasion of a certain patriotic celebration, expressed a conventional wish to spit upon the abundantly displayed ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson

... coming as often as twice every three years, is the pearl-fishery. It interests everybody not living in mountain fastnesses, and appeals irresistibly to the hearts of the proletariat. Tricking elephants into captivity may be the sport of grandees, but the chance to gamble over the contents of the humble oyster of the Eastern seas invites participation from the meekest plucker of tea-buds on Ceylon's hill-slopes to the lowliest coolie in Colombo. Verily, the pearl-fishery ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield

... turned man, finds himself sickening with his prize in his hands and looks about him for some clue to the meaning of the mad world in which he has succeeded without satisfaction. Sam McPherson, after a futile excursion through the proletariat in search of the peace which he has heard accompanies honest toil, settles down to the task of bringing up some children he has adopted and thus of forcing himself "back into the ranks of life." Beaut McGregor, refusing a handsome ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren

... imperfect as they may have been, had none the less sufficed to create new economic conditions. On the one hand, a well-to-do middle-class, recruited almost entirely from non-aristocratic strata, sprang up; on the other, an industrial proletariat. Maxim Gorki emerged from this environment: and as a phenomenon he is explained by this essentially modern antithesis. He flung himself into the literary movement in full consciousness of his social standing. And it was just this self-consciousness, ...
— Maxim Gorki • Hans Ostwald

... vision may have to wait for its hour of influence until the proletariat comes into its own. And it does indeed seem as if between the triumph of the proletariat and the triumph of the aesthetic sense there were an intimate association. It is precisely because these two philosophers have so completely neglected the aesthetic sense that their speculations ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys

... consider good substituted for the present go-as-you-please anarchy; a gradually increasing flow of wealth from China to the investing countries, the chief of which is America; the development of a sweated proletariat; the spread of Christianity; the substitution of the American civilization for the Chinese; the destruction of traditional beauty, except for such objets d'art as millionaires may think it worth while to buy; the gradual awakening of China to her exploitation by the foreigner; and one ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell

... the course of a heated debate Mr. Joshua Dredgwood, M.P., said that, in spite of the Parliament Act, the House of Lords still dominated the situation. If there was a General Election next week it would be fought on a cry of the Proletariat against the Peers. The entire Liberal Party rose to its feet and cheered the speaker for seven minutes, waving hats, order papers ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 8, 1914 • Various

... plebeian in early Rome; the king and the burghers, with the nobles in the Middle Ages; later on, the king and the nobles with the bourgeoisie; and today the struggle is on between the triumphant bourgeoisie and the rising proletariat. By 'proletariat' is meant the class of people without capital which sells its ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London

... at last in the course of his ten miles' drive to scanning once more the copy of the Times which he had brought with him from the south. The news of various strikes and industrial arbitrations which it contained had already enraged him; and enraged him again as he looked through it. The proletariat, in his opinion, must be put down and kept down; that his own class began to show a lamentable want of power to do either was the only public matter that ever really troubled him. So far as his life was affected ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... had broken Jess Willard's cheek-bone out in Ohio. Over in Europe the usual number of children had swollen stomachs from starvation, and the diplomats were at their customary business of making the world safe for new wars. In New York City the proletariat were being "disciplined," and the odds on Harvard were generally quoted at five to three. Peace had come down in earnest, the beginning ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... in many cases hereditary in their family, and by the beginning of the sixteenth century they were confronted with the more or less veiled and more or less open opposition of the smaller guildsmen and of the newest comers into the city, the shiftless proletariat of serfs and free peasants, whom economic pressure was fast driving within the walls, owing to the changed ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax

... all a mere accident that the Bund, the strongest organization of the Jewish proletariat, will have nothing to do with the nationalistic agitation. The social and economic motives for concerted action or separation are of far more vital influence than ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various

... rake the loyalist Swiss and Germans with a murderous fire. The foreign troops fight to the last. They are killed or overwhelmed as the victorious commonalty take possession of the Square. Danton who has directed the proletariat is the popular hero. ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon

... be a Socialist, too. You wouldn't mind, would you, Daddy? They're quite different from Anarchists; they don't believe in blowing people up. Probably I am one by rights; I belong to the proletariat. I haven't determined yet just which kind I am going to be. I will look into the subject over Sunday, and declare my principles ...
— Daddy-Long-Legs • Jean Webster

... thousand copies were quickly sold. Pot-Bouille portrayed the lower bourgeoisie and their servants. Au Bonheur des Dames treated of the great retail shops. La Joie de Vivre came in 1884. Germinal told of mining and the misery of the proletariat. L'Oeuvre pictured the life of artists and authors. La Terre portrayed, with startling realism, the lowest peasant life. Le Reve, which followed, was a reaction. It was a graceful idyl. Le Reve was termed "a symphony in white," and was ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola

... I exclaimed. 'Our reception, Maharajah? I think you misunderstand. We are two ordinary English ladies of the proletariat, accustomed to the level plain of professional society. We ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen

... district of southeast Saxony, may see for himself a population lacking in size, vigor, and health, noticeably so indeed. Education at one end turning out an unwholesome, "white-collared, black-coated proletariat," as the Socialists call them; and industry and commerce, which even tempt the farmer to sell what he should keep to eat, at the other, are making serious inroads upon the health and ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier

... most amusing reading in the volume—used all the arts of chicanery to deceive Europe as to their real intentions and to defeat the efforts of England—on whose neutrality they confidently counted—to secure a peaceful settlement. Though primarily addressed to the German proletariat, Herr KAUTSKY'S book has its value for ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 25th, 1920 • Various

... of philanthropists the proletariat had learned to say in many languages, that "the injury of one is the concern of all." Their watchwords were brotherhood, sacrifice, the subordination of individual and trade interests, to the good of the working classes, and they were moved by ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams

... which to bound the influences of the Restoration. Now, as a matter of fact, there is something arbitrary about any date. The influences at work during the previous period went steadily on. The heathen raged, and the people imagined a vain thing. The great proletariat hated witches as much as ever. But the justices of the peace and the itinerant judges were getting over their fear of popular opinion and were refusing to listen to the accusations that were brought before them. The situation was in some respects the same as it had been in the later seventies ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein

... ability for leadership. When that comes about, the Republic will be in danger, because the permanence and usefulness of the Republic rests upon the controlling influence of men of intelligence, experience, patriotism and character. This array of a proletariat against intelligent and successful leadership produces factionalism in society. Factionalism is a class spirit which will sacrifice the interest of the whole to the interest of the class. It sometimes permeates a majority, but more frequently a minority. ...
— Ethics in Service • William Howard Taft

... was among the bitterest grievances of the peasantry, and the good Bishop, who had lately roused himself from his habitual indolence to oppose the threatened annexation of the Caccia del Vescovo. One and all proclaimed their ardent sympathy with the proletariat, their scorn of tyranny and extortion in high places; and if the Marchioness, on her return home, ordered one of her linkmen to be flogged for having trod on her gown; if Pievepelago the next morning refused to give audience to a poor devil of a pamphleteer ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton

... Under the pretext of trying to help the working classes, it is necessary to oppress the large landowners with taxation in all its severity. When these possessions will thus gradually be transferred into our hands, the whole labor of the Christian proletariat will become for us a new source of tremendous profits. Since the Christian Church is one of our most dangerous enemies, we must work tirelessly to weaken its influence, and in order to accomplish this, it is necessary to use all our efforts ...
— The History of a Lie - 'The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion' • Herman Bernstein

... been four inquests, all upon the bodies of air-raid victims: a road-man, his wife, an orphan baby—all belonging to the thick central mass of the proletariat, for a West End slum had received a bomb full in the face—and Lady Queenie Paulle. The policemen were stolid; the reporters were stolid; the proletariat was stolid; the majority of the witnesses were stolid, ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett

... be a reception committee to rout out the old beldames, little children, and the bed-ridden: it is hand-shaking gone mad. We shake hands with every soul on the voting-list of Good Hope, to say nothing of minors, suffragettes, and the unfranchised proletariat, before at last we are rescued by smiling Miss Gaudet and dragged in to one of the sweetest homes in ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron

... and laughed savagely. "You'll make no terms with the Black Caesar," he said. "This is the reign of the proletariat. The bourgeois must die! ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various

... up the existing conditions. A great deal of help was given, always just on the borders of starvation; and more and more men had to apply for it. It did not rob them of their rights as citizens, but made them a kind of politically kept proletariat. ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo

... few great ideas were to be striven for: "We must be One People," "Canada must be Perfectly Independent:" "There must be No Proletariat" ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair

... he is aroused to the knowledge of his degrading position, he is likely to rebel in the most healthy but brutal manner, so much so that the aesthetic reformer shrinks back from the consequences of the propagation of his own ideas. Of course, the brutality of the proletariat is not nearly so subtle as that of the aristocracy, and it takes some cleverness to discover that the latter is brutality at all. It requires time and patience to drive into the thick heads of the workers that they are downtrodden, and that their oppressors are worthless parasites. ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood

... dear chap: beginning with the idealists and the theorising Jews, and after them your nicely-bred gentlemen, and then perhaps, your profiteers and Rothschilds, and ALL politicians, and ending up with the proletariat," said Argyle. ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence

... to Mr. Bingley-Spyker that all the members of the Tribunal were shouting together. On the whole he gathered that he had not improved his position. He had been "attacking the proletariat." ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • Various

... understand the growing doubt, the class prejudice—nay, class hatred the failure of trust and the increasing tension and uneasiness between employer and employed. He and I are agreed that the tribulations of the present time can be traced to two disasters only—the lack of goodwill—as shown in the proletariat, whose leaders teach them to respect nobody, and the weakening hold of religion as also revealed in the proletariat. Now, to combat these things and set a good example is our duty—nay, our ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts

... poverty; the former say that poverty leads to drink. I can only wonder at their either of them being content with such simple physical explanations. Surely it is obvious that the thing which among the English proletariat leads to poverty is the same as the thing which leads to drink; the absence of strong civic dignity, the absence of an ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton

... literally given. It would have been extremely embarrassing to the Managing Committee and all the office-bearers, and would have, I fear, deeply exasperated and offended the occupants of those family pews; but fortunately this difficulty never did occur. The proletariat of Marylebone had not the sense or the courage, or the profanity, which you will, to hit upon this mode of warming themselves. The real congregation embraced none of the unwashed multitude. Its value in mere velvet, silk, lace, trinkets, and furs was something amazing, and the amount these ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant

... Athens, but above the ruined ramshackle port of Salonica, once a fair city, but now facing the sea with almost a mile of fire-devastated streets. The refugees are confined to their huts, and are under a sort of military control. All the people are proletariat, and ought never to have been taken on board ships and brought to Greece. A few would have been killed by Bolsheviks, but not so many as will die here by disease. They cannot help Russia outside of Russia, and it is beyond ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham

... toast-list one of the humorous vocal quartets which were designed to relieve the seriousness of the programme, was interrupted by the formidable sound of the governed proletariat beyond the walls of the Town Hall. And Edwin's memory, making him feel very old, leapt suddenly back into another generation of male glee-singers that did not disport humorously and that would not have permitted themselves to be interrupted by the shouting of populations; ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett

... century. Frejus embraces pleasure-seeking, industries, fish, flowers, and soldiering. Mermaids, delightfully reminiscent of the Lido and Abbazia in garb, dive from the end of the mole into a safe swimming-pool; children of the proletariat in coarse black tabliers, who have not left sandals and white socks on the beach behind them, fish for crabs; naval aviators start hydroplanes from an aerodrome beside the Roman amphitheater; fishermen, of olive Mediterranean complexion, dry copper-tinted ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons

... their collective title, La Comedie Humaine, in 1842. He would exhibit human documents illustrating the whole social life of his time; "the administration, the church, the army, the judicature, the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, the proletariat, the peasantry, the artists, the journalists, the men of letters, the actors, ... the shopkeepers of every degree, the criminals," should all appear in his vast tableau of society. His record should include scenes from private life, scenes from Parisian, provincial, political, ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden

... proletariat's car." She rolled the r surprisingly. "Do you suppose he comes out here to corrupt those poor devils without making them pay for being corrupted? ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown

... automobiles that brought the guests from the station or from the estates up and down the valley. They were, for the most part, trades-people from the little towns—San Mateo, Redwood City—or the wives of the proletariat—or the servants of the neighboring estates. But, although, they grumbled and envied, they made no attempt to force their way in; it was only the light-fingered gentry the police at the great iron gates ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... fact. Its task once terminated, the proletariat had been bled, supposedly as a measure of hygiene. The bourgeoisie, reassured, strutted about in good humor, thanks to its wealth and the contagion of its stupidity. The result of its accession to power had been the destruction of all intelligence, ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans

... for this is certain, no secure civilization can be built in the South with the Negro as an ignorant, turbulent proletariat. Suppose we seek to remedy this by making them laborers and nothing more: they are not fools, they have tasted of the Tree of Life, and they will not cease to think, will not cease attempting to read the riddle of the world. By ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois

... probably the demand for a higher form of entertainment, resulting from a refinement of the public taste, rather than the result of the many exposures, that finally relegated the Fire-eaters to the haunts of the proletariat. ...
— The Miracle Mongers, an Expos • Harry Houdini

... chroniclers of the fourteenth century, are in truth of high importance; but in comprehensiveness of thought and in the rational development of the story, none will bear comparison with the Florentines. The rule of the nobility, the tyrannies, the struggles of the middle class with the proletariat, limited and unlimited democracy, pseudo-democracy, the primacy o? a single house, the theocracy of Savonarola, and the mixed forms of government which prepared the way for the Medicean despotism all are so described that the ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt

... whole the great mass of the servile population worked entirely within the households and on the estates of the rich, and did not interfere to any sensible degree with the labour of the small freeman. As has been justly observed by Salvioli,[78] never at any period did the Roman proletariat complain of the competition of slave labour as detrimental to its own interests. Had there been no slave labour there, the small freeman might indeed have had a wider field of enterprise, and have been better able to accumulate a small capital by undertaking work for the great families, ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler

... penny paper that Lightener bought, the paper with leanings toward the proletariat, the veiled champion of labor. ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland

... tossed in the latrinae. Yet, as competitors were needed, and moreover as he, singly, could fill neither a stage nor a track, it was the nobility of Rome that he ordered to appear with him. For that the nobility never forgave him. On the other hand, the proletariat loved him the better. What greater salve could it have than the sight of the conquerors of the world entertaining the conquered, ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus

... have been treated to accounts written by well-meaning ladies and gentlemen who have assumed clever disguises and have gone out to work—for a week or a month—among the proletariat. But can we thus learn anything new of the fundamental problems of working men, working women, working children? Something, perhaps, but not those great central problems of Hunger and Sex. We have been told that only ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger

... lancet (at this word he glanced at Markelov, but the latter did not stir). He then turned to Nejdanov and began speaking of himself in no less glowing terms than the distinguished correspondent Kisliakov, saying that he had long ago ceased being a fool, that he fully recognised the rights of the proletariat (he remembered this word splendidly), that although he had actually given up commerce and taken to banking instead with a view to increasing his capital, yet only so that this same capital could at any given moment be called upon for the use... for the use of the cause, that is ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev

... demoralized and desperate, and the idlers, becoming demoralized and worthless, who think themselves a privileged class, born with a right to live in everlasting idleness upon the toil of those who are not thus well born. This division into the aristocracy, the proletariat, and the middle class struggling to become the aristocracy, does not make a republic. It is an ancient falsehood and injustice established by absurd laws of inheritance (as absurd as the Hindoo castes), which have cursed the world, and will continue to curse ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various

... leads to a crowded and fertile urban population, the extension of slavery, and all the resultant evils. It was a foretaste of what was seen during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when a sudden industrial expansion led to an enormously high birth-rate, a servile urban proletariat (that very word indicates, as Roscher has pointed out, that a large family means inferiority), and a consequent outburst of misery and degradation from which ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis

... and kindly. They were glad that the Gods of the Soil of Han were to be worshipped now, and those of Ts'in disthroned; and that the Ts'in edicts were annulled;—as they were with one important exception: those relating to literature. A cultureless son of the proletariat himself. Han Kaotsu felt no urge towards resurrecting that; and perhaps it was as well that the sleeping dogs should be let lie awhile. The wonder is that the old nationalities did not reassert themselves; but they ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris

... where they are counted. Moreover, since they are now, as we have seen, competing against one another for the right to live, none of the concessions are made to them now that were of old made to the group of them, but they count, and are judged, individually, amongst the millions of the English proletariat. "Inferiority" has come into their lives; it is expected of them to treat almost everybody else as a superior person. But the cruellest indignity of all is that, although we regard them as inferiors, we still look to them to admire and live up to our standards; and they are to conform to our civilization, ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt

... decided to cable and await orders in Copenhagen; Palla, to sail for home on the first available Danish steamer; Ilse, to go to Stockholm and eventually decide whether to volunteer once more as a soldier of the proletariat or to turn propagandist and carry the true gospel to America, where, she had heard, the ancient liberties of the great Democracy ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers

... sword. Witness the peasantry of Russia! Even in America so great a prophet as Henry Ward Beecher foresaw a tragic day when the bivouac of capital would be set against the camp of labor. And lesser seers are not lacking who freely predict, even for our democratic land, a desperate rebellion of a proletariat of poverty against an aristocracy ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association

... for all dancers, compulsory vegetarian diet, and the exclusive use of the balalaika, Mr. Ploffskin was of opinion that a Bolshevist Ballet might be safely organised so as to satisfy the artistic aspirations of the proletariat and counteract the pernicious influences of the pseudo-Ethiopian style affected by the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 21, 1919. • Various

... spite of the stones, intellectual and political, that have been thrown at them, salvation is of the Whigs. When I speak thus of the Whigs I do not, of course, mean Whiggism of the Whig aristocracy as represented by modern Tory historians, or by the parasitic sycophants of a militant Proletariat. I mean true Whig principles—the principles of Halifax, of Somers, of Locke, of Addison, and of Steele—the principles of the Bill of Rights and of "the Glorious Revolution of 1688";—the Whiggism which had its origin ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey

... to deprive yourself and your companions of my help, you will not quote the Bible, that sop thrown by the church to their slaves, to me," she said venomously. "I am a woman of the proletariat!" ...
— The Solar Magnet • Sterner St. Paul Meek

... human power and its failure to satisfy human want. The nineteenth century brought with it the factory and the factory slavery of the Lancashire children, the modern city and city slum, the plutocracy and the proletariat, and all the strange discrepancy between wealth and want that has disfigured the material progress of the last hundred years. The rising splendor of capitalism concealed from the dazzled eye the melancholy spectacle of the new industrial poverty ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock

... the burden of Jim Crow. Along with white citizens they were given better schooling, a major factor in improving status. The mass migration also meant that this part of America's peasantry was rapidly joining America's proletariat. The wartime shortage of workers, coupled with the efforts of the Fair Employment Practices Committee and other government agencies, opened up thousands of jobs previously denied black Americans. The number of skilled craftsmen, foremen, and semiskilled workers ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.

... stranger who came was dependent upon hospitality; but there were soft-footed and tactful ushers, who would find one a seat, if one were a presentable person. The contingency of an unpresentable person seldom arose, for the proletariat did not swarm at the gates of St. Cecilia's. Out of its liberal income the church maintained a "mission" upon the East Side, where young curates wrestled with the natural depravity of the lower classes—meantime cultivating a soul-stirring tone, and waiting ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair

... naturalists of America are decidedly opposed to the extermination of the grizzly bear. They feel that the wilds of North America are wide enough for the accommodation of many grizzlies, without crowding the proletariat. A Rocky Mountain without a grizzly upon it, or at least a bear of some kind, is only half a mountain,—commonplace and tame. Put one two-year-old grizzly cub upon it, and presto! every cubic yard of its ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday

... phrases which lingered in my mind for weeks. Side by side with every jest was a bitter sigh, for he, too, had been deeply moved by new social ideals, and we talked much of the growing contrasts of rich and poor, of the suffering and loneliness of the farmer, the despair of the proletariat, and though I could never quite get him to perceive the difference between his program and ours (he was always for some vague socialistic reform), he readily admitted that land monopoly was the chief cause of poverty, and the first injustice to be destroyed. "But you must go farther, much ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland

... reliable man, whose political activity was founded upon practical reality rather than theory and who was hostile to the exploitation of principles popular with the ordinary run of Socialist party leaders, but not always truly beneficial to the proletariat. Hence he was held in higher esteem by the trades union than by the party. He usually had a young man in his home who not only enjoyed room and board at moderate price, but, if he had a good head, was trained by Hoeflinger in class-consciousness and a practical knowledge of the ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various

... possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes, directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat. ...
— The Communist Manifesto • Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

... has its origin in the oppression of the artisan class by the new aristocracy, the bourgeoisie. Factory owners and millionaires have taken the place of the noblesse of last century. And the sufferings of the proletariat, peasant and artisan alike, have increased with their numbers. Freedom has taught the myriads of workers new desires. Heightened intelligence has given them the power to contrast their own wretchedness with the seeming happiness of others, and a standard by which to measure their own degradation, ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb

... the Tube; when the office was full of shouting men, when strange figures dived in and out and banged doors like characters in an old farce, and Harold, the proud office-boy, lost his air of being on the point of lunching with a duke at the club and perspired like one of the proletariat. On these occasions you could not help admiring Joe, even if you hated him. When a man is doing his own job well, it is impossible not to admire him. And Joe did his job well, superlatively well. He was everywhere. ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse

... made up of the aristocracy of Rome, an aristocracy of both plebeians and patricians, ruled with unyielding sway, and the common people never obtained full possession of their rights and privileges. Civil strife continued; the gulf between the rich and the poor, the nobility and the proletariat representing a few rich political manipulators, on the one side, and the half-fed, half-mad populace, on the other, grew wider and wider, finally ending in civil war. In the midst of the strife the republic passed away, and only the coming of the imperial ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar

... sent this indelicate ultimatum. The resourceful host, however, warded off the danger and placated the rebellious drivers by inviting them to an improvised little banquet of pates de foie gras, dry champagne, and other delicacies. The general temper of the proletariat remained unchanged. Tales of rebellion still more disquieting were current in Paris, which, whether true or false, were aids to a correct diagnosis of ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon

... We are not betraying the proletariat of England and France. They are our friends. But the alliance with the French and English Capitalistic Governments was made not by us but by our own Capitalistic Government, which is ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole

... were a lot of heartless villains, so that made the slaves good and virtuous innocents. That was your real, fundamental, mistake. You know, Obray, the downtrodden and long-suffering proletariat aren't at all good or innocent or virtuous. They are just incompetent; they lack the abilities necessary for overt villainy. You saw, this afternoon, what they were capable of doing when they were given an opportunity. You know, it's ...
— A Slave is a Slave • Henry Beam Piper

... favourite of Caesar, and was named in his will. Marcus seems to have been a man of worth after his fashion; a patriot of the narrow Roman type, reproduced in later days by Fletcher of Saltoun, whose ideal republic was an oligarchy, and who did not shrink from proposing to settle the proletariat difficulty by making the common people slaves. This is quite compatible with the fact revealed to us in the letters of Cicero, that Brutus was implicated, through his agents, in the infamous practice of lending money to provincials at exorbitant interest, ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith



Words linked to "Proletariat" :   labour, labor, class, social class, worker, labor force, socio-economic class, working class, lumpenproletariat, prole, stratum



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