"Legislating" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the high trusts which the people of the United States have confided to you, of legislating for their common welfare, it gives me pleasure to congratulate you upon the happy condition of our beloved country. By the favor of Divine Providence health is again restored to us, peace reigns within our borders, abundance crowns the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 3: Andrew Jackson (Second Term) • James D. Richardson
... of the American Colonization Society, on the first of January, 1817. The labours of the Society were greatly facilitated by the laws of the Union, which left to each State the uncontrolled power of legislating for itself on the subject of slavery. The members of the Society had therefore merely to address themselves to the humanity and understanding of the slaveowners, in order finally to attain their purpose. The progress of moral truth, however slow, is always certain, and the issue ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... of the Colonies, as I have hinted elsewhere, would not have raised the hue and outcry that they did against these measures, had it not been for one thing, which to them, as Englishmen, was all in all; to wit, the right of taxing themselves, and legislating or making laws for themselves through persons of their own choosing, called representatives. And this is, my little folks, what is meant by taxation, and legislation by representation, in a nation. You will do well to bear this in mind continually; for it is the very keystone to the arch ...
— The Farmer Boy, and How He Became Commander-In-Chief • Morrison Heady
... this remarkable speech are in a strain of feeling so youthful and romantic, that they seem more fit to be addressed to one of those Parliaments of Love, which were held during the times of Chivalry, than to a grave assembly employed about the sober realities of life, and legislating with a view to the infirmities of ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... followed your out-going made action necessary. Well, the new railroad was to be constructed through the plantation, and I worked with all the energy I could to forget. You see what you did for me, Katrine! And at every turn, circumventing, obstructing, legislating against me, urging me on by mental friction, was Dermott McDermott. Am I tiring you?" he ...
— Katrine • Elinor Macartney Lane
... electoral methods fail to yield a fully representative House, and if, in consequence, the House cannot satisfactorily fulfil its double function of affording an adequate basis of support to the Government which springs from it, and of legislating in accordance with the nation's wishes, the resultant dissatisfaction and instability must give rise to a demand for their improvement. The House of Commons must ...
— Proportional Representation - A Study in Methods of Election • John H. Humphreys
... centralization through the courts, legislators are useful, for they cannot be forced to serve capitalism. But government must be carried on and mayors and judges are practically under the control of higher authorities—in the new commission plan of government, they even do the legislating. In the words of the New ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... be interpreted in two ways; not necessarily consistent with each other. It means sometimes simply the diminution of the sphere of law and the power of legislators, or, again, the transference to subjects of the power of legislating, and, therefore, not less control, but control by self-made laws alone. The Englishman, who was in presence of no centralised administrative power, who regarded the Government rather as receiving power from individuals than as delegating the power of a central body, took liberty mainly ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... business, and is constantly watching the proceedings of both Houses, vibrating between them like an animated pendulum,' said I. 'Oh,' said Jones, 'he is a member of the Third House!' Here was a new thing to me. I evidently had not learned all the machinery of legislating. I asked for an explanation, and soon learned that the 'Third House' consisted of old ex-members of either House or Senate, broken-down politicians, professional borers, and other vagrants who had made themselves familiar with the modus operandi of legislation, and who negotiated for the votes ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... civilisation are the outcome of diseased brains and nerves, and that self-control and vigour are the results of nature rather than nurture. All this is now steadily in sight. The aim is personal freedom, the freedom which shall end where another's freedom begins; but we recognise now that it is no use legislating for social and political freedom, if we allow the morally deficient to beget offspring for whom moral freedom is an impossibility. And perhaps the best hope of the race lies in ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of legislating respecting this class of persons, the new treaty provides that we "may not absolutely prohibit" their coming or their residence. The Chinese commissioners gave notice in the outset that they would never agree to a prohibition of voluntary emigration. Notwithstanding ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 8: Chester A. Arthur • James D. Richardson
... distrust has led to the encumbering of modern state constitutions by a great variety of minute limitations upon legislative power. Many of these constitutions, instead of being simple frameworks of government, are bulky and detailed statutes legislating upon subjects which the people are unwilling to trust the legislature to deal with. So between the new constitutions, which exclude the legislatures from power, and the Referendum, by which the people overrule what they do, and the Initiative, by which the people legislate in their place, ...
— Experiments in Government and the Essentials of the Constitution • Elihu Root
... habits and feelings of the people to be governed; who, disregarding the old and most true adage, summum jus summa injuria, omits to take into his calculations the expediency of his actions when legislating for a nation which he is in the daily habit of weighing in his private affairs. The art or science of government are phrases in common use; but they would be void of meaning if all that is requisite be to ascertain the strict right or power, and then unswervingly to ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... for the Millennium, I think,' replied the Owl. 'They have been legislating now for a considerable time, but it hasn't come yet. It is late. We expect, however, that it will arrive when the New Democracy is in power. There has been a good deal of annoyance with the Established Church lately for not telegraphing ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... last week, among them the one legislating out of office most of the able-bodied post-quarter-masters and commissaries. There is much anxiety to learn the nature of the communication he intends laying before Congress in a few days, and for the reception ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... addressed your Lordships early in the debate, adverted to the state of the Jews in France, I entirely agree with the illustrious Duke near me, and the right reverend Prelate, that this country is not bound to follow the example of foreign nations in legislating for any portion of the community. But it ought not to escape attention, that Buonaparte, in legislating for the Jews, did not go the full length of this bill; and before he did anything for them, he ordered a strict inquiry ...
— Maxims And Opinions Of Field-Marshal His Grace The Duke Of Wellington, Selected From His Writings And Speeches During A Public Life Of More Than Half A Century • Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington
... is the Imperial Parliament, or Reichsrath, sitting at Vienna, legislating for the territories of the Austrian Empire which do not belong to the Hungarian Crown. The Emperor appoints the Austrian or Imperial Ministry, who are responsible to the Imperial Parliament, and need the support of the Reichsrath; it ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... matters as roads and poor relief, leaving the local governments with little authority in these directions. On the other hand, where the supervisor system exists, the towns and villages have chief authority in legislating upon these matters, and the county assists or takes only such part as it finds ...
— Our Government: Local, State, and National: Idaho Edition • J.A. James
... Mr. Harrison kept his position, a close observer of all that transpired. I am very much in error, if, before leaving that sink of iniquity, he was not fully satisfied as to the propriety of legislating on the liquor question. Nay, I incline to the opinion, that, if the power of suppression had rested in his hands, there would not have been, in the whole state, at the expiration of an hour, a single dram-selling establishment. The goring of his ox had opened his eyes to the ...
— Ten Nights in a Bar Room • T. S. Arthur
... a cup of your good hot tea, and some of our good home living, is what I want. It's a tiresome business, this legislating!" ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... BEST.—I will tell you what I am bound to tell the jury. I shall tell them that we have nothing to do here with what may be expedient, we are not legislating here—the question is whether this is a ...
— A Sketch of the Life of the late Henry Cooper - Barrister-at-Law, of the Norfolk Circuit; as also, of his Father • William Cooper
... a class of citizens whom the legislating majority sought to deprive of exclusive privileges, which they had possessed for ages, and to bring down from an elevated station to the level of the ranks of the multitude, it is probable that the minority would be less ready to comply with its laws. But as the United States were colonized ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... bribery, tells the Nation that is governed by it a piece of singular news. Bribery: have we reflected what bribery is? Bribery means not only length of purse, which is neither qualification nor the contrary for legislating well; but it means dishonesty, and even impudent dishonesty;—brazen insensibility to lying and to making others lie; total oblivion, and flinging overboard, for the nonce, of any real thing you can call veracity, morality; with dextrous ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... was accomplished from the close of the war to 1893, makes unreasonable and groundless any distrust either of our financial ability or soundness; while the situation from 1893 to 1897 must admonish Congress of the immediate necessity of so legislating as to make the return of the conditions ...
— Messages and Papers of William McKinley V.2. • William McKinley
... "Mr. Balfour, I have never known of a body of men capable of legislating for the generation ahead, and in some cases those who attempt to legislate even for their own generation are not thought ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... effecting their direct objects, good government and good legislation; and as educating the nation more or less extensively, by affording to a greater or less number of persons practical lessons in governing and legislating." ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... was equal to the greatest of memories. Next is the figure of the apostle of liberty, Charles Sumner, the echo of whose voice still seems to linger in the arches of the Capitol. To those of us who remember him, he seems, as Disraeli said of Richard Cobden, 'still sitting, still debating, still legislating' in the Senate Chamber. ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... existence and maintenance of a slave population in the South be one of these huge dilemmas or paradoxes is a question that any English or Northern abolitionist is about as capable of determining, as he would be of legislating for Mangolian Tartary. ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... accede to the increased demand; the "grand meschief du poeple" consisted in this, that the tillers of the soil should have dreamt of asserting themselves in any way whatever. Moreover, when it came to legislating against the mutinous labourers, King and Parliament, while sternly setting their faces against the rise in wages, do not take the twenty-third year of the King as the standard year by which to settle what the normal rate of wages should be. They go ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... indefinite and occasional, makes the tracing of the growth of legal institutions from their rudiments no less vitally important, though it makes it none the easier. The history of authority is a strictly kindred topic. Legislating and judging on the one hand, and governing on the other, are different aspects of the same general function. In accordance, then, with the order already indicated, law and government as administered by the political society in the person of its representatives, chiefs, elders, ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... hold office, or the duty to pay taxes or serve in the army or navy? In these various ways the state is no less functioning politically for the benefit of the people than when coercing recalcitrant citizens, warning or fighting other nations, or legislating in its congressional halls. Its opportunity to regulate the social interests of its citizens is almost illimitable, for while a written constitution may prescribe what a state may and may not do, those who ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... Washington, near Vienna in the State of Virginia. These incidents were not in themselves of special importance, but they indicated an aggressive energy on the part of the Confederates, and foreshadowed the desperate character which the contest was destined to assume. Congress found itself legislating in a fortified city, with patrols of soldiers on the streets and with a military administration which had practically superseded the civil police in the duty of maintaining order and protecting life. The situation was startling and serious, and ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... principle. To this doctrine I heartily subscribe. But surely in matters not moral, in questions of erudition or of antiquarian speculation, or of historical research, we are under a different rule. Here, and in similar cases, it is our business, I conceive with Solon legislating for the Athenians, to contemplate, not what is best in an abstract sense, but what is best under the circumstances of the case. Now the most important circumstances of this case are—that the memory of young ladies must be assumed as a faculty of average ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... &c.' A little later, in 1540, an act was passed 'touching the exorbitant prices of wine, salt, and timmer.' The provisions that follow are somewhat curious, and rank among the most barefaced instances of a class legislating, not only for its own interest, but its own enjoyment. In the first place, the provosts and bailies—supposed to be always excellent judges of good cheer—are to fix a low and reasonable price at which the wines and other commodities are obtainable. When ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal Vol. XVII. No. 418. New Series. - January 3, 1852. • William and Robert Chambers
... which broke under his feet accumulated his strength, and piled up a solid mound which raised him to wider usefulness and clearer vision. He could not become a master workman until he had served a tedious apprenticeship. It was the quarter of a century of reading thinking, speech-making and legislating which qualified him for selection as the chosen champion of the Illinois Republicans in the great Lincoln-Douglas joint debates of 1858. It was the great intellectual victory won in these debates, plus the title "Honest ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... people none the less. The Legal Member had built, and bolstered, and embroidered, and amended that Bill till it looked beautiful on paper. Then the Council began to settle what they called the 'minor details.' As if any Englishman legislating for natives knows enough to know which are the minor and which are the major points, from the native point of view, of any measure! That Bill was a triumph of 'safe-guarding the interests of the tenant.' One clause provided that land should not be leased on longer terms than five ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... declared that "If the maxim advanced by the advocates of the protecting duty system will justify Congress in assuming, or rather in empowering a few capitalists to assume, the direction of manufacturing labor, it also invests that body with a power of legislating for the direction of every other species of labor and assigning all occupations whatsoever to the care of the intelligence of mercenary combinations"—and ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... was a collection of poems, under the divisions of the Fang, the Y, and the Sung, which it was the business of the Grand, Music-Master to teach the musicians of the court. It may be accepted then, that the duke of Ku, in legislating for his dynasty, enacted that the poems produced in the different feudal states should be collected on occasion of the royal progresses, and lodged thereafter among the archives of the bureau of music at the royal court. ...
— The Shih King • James Legge
... a Spirit of Laws,' observes our Professor, 'so could I write a Spirit of Clothes; thus, with an Esprit des Lois, properly an Esprit de Coutumes, we should have an Esprit de Costumes. For neither in tailoring nor in legislating does man proceed by mere Accident, but the hand is ever guided on by mysterious operations of the mind. In all his Modes, and habilatory endeavours, an Architectural Idea will be found lurking; his Body and the ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... constitutional government on the soil of the New World is an interesting experiment, and has yet to be tested. There are various disturbing elements in Canada, of which we have little experience in England; the principal one being the difficulty of legislating between what, in spite of the union, are two distinct, nations, of different races and religions. The impossibility of reconciling the rival, and frequently adverse claims, of the Upper and Lower Provinces, has become a very embarrassing question. The strong social restraints, and the generally ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... is not legislating for England or the United States, but for mankind. Is then the interest of a Turk the same with that of the girls who compose his harem? Is the interest of a Chinese the same with that of the woman whom he ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... less than in legislating for a state, there should be constant reference to great principles, if only from the exceeding difficulty of foreseeing, or appreciating, the results in detail of ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps
... your realm, how could I but admire yourself and all these your disciples? there they were, legislating for the perfect life, holding out hands of help to those that would reach it, commending all that was fairest and best; fairest and best—but a man must keep straight on for it and never slip, must set his eyes unwaveringly on the laws that you have laid ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... and concord, administering justice, defending and encouraging such as are and do good, the civil magistrate should be found promoting the interests of true religion; not by dictating to the Church of God, or legislating in it, but by countenancing with his civil sanction all its ordinances, by exerting his influence in her outward support and defence against all external enemies, and by keeping from places of power and trust in the nation all hostile to her interests. He should employ his power on its behalf; ...
— The Ordinance of Covenanting • John Cunningham
... whether for good or ill, hence the immense importance of their having right views on all questions of public interest and some knowledge of the requirements of practical politics. But their power to-day is wholly irresponsible and hence dangerous. Lay on them the responsibility of legislating, with all the criticism and odium of a constituency and a party, in case they make some blunder, and you render them wiser in judgment and more deliberate in action. To secure this large disfranchised class as allies to one of the leading ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... had to delegate legislative powers to other bodies than colonial legislatures; and county councils, borough councils, district councils, and parish councils share with it in various degrees the task of legislating for the country. They can, of course, only legislate, as they can only administer, within the limits imposed by Act of Parliament; but their development, like the multiplication of central administrative departments, indicates the latest, but not the final, stages in the growth and specialization ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... intrinsically wrong, God would not have legislated about it in such ways; for granting, if you please, the untenable distinction about his 'not appointing' slavery, but 'finding it in existence' and legislating for it, what necessity could there have been for making such a law as that relating to the boring of the ear, rather than giving the slave his wife and children and suffering ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... particular state are binding upon persons in other states. It does mean, however, that the courts of each state shall endeavor to give the same force to the laws of a neighboring state as those laws would have in the courts of the legislating state. ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson
... was announced of more practical importance in legislating for mankind, than is contained in this passage. The doctrine is somewhat obscurely stated, and not with the precision which in general distinguishes the French writers; but the import of it seems ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... himself and others better must become a miniature legislator—must study the general principles of law, morality, and education. The conception of [Grek: politikae] with which he opened the Ethics would serve as a guide to a father educating his children as well as to the legislator legislating for the state. Finding in his predecessors no developed doctrine on this subject, Aristotle proposes himself to undertake the construction of it, and sketches in advance the programme of the Politics in the concluding sentence of the Ethics ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... the Government can discharge the clear and unquestionable duty of establishing foreign mail facilities, only by paying liberal prices for the transport of the mails for a long term of years, by creating and sustaining an ocean postal system, by legislating upon it systematically, and by abandoning our slavish dependence ...
— Ocean Steam Navigation and the Ocean Post • Thomas Rainey
... the landed proprietors, are alone responsible for this state of things; and to speak honestly, I believe many of you know it. I have been charged with saying out-of-doors that this House is a club of land-owners legislating for land-owners. If I had not said it, the public must long ago have found out that fact. My honorable friend the member for Stockport on one occasion proposed that before you passed a law to raise the price of bread, you should consider how far you had the power ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... our sons—for white men,—and we want the nigger out of our way: we neither want him there as a slave or freeman, as in either case his presence tends to degrade labor." This is not all. Nearly every slave State is legislating the free colored men out of their bounds, as a "disturbing element" which their people are determined no longer to tolerate. Here, then, is the result of the efforts of the free colored man to sustain himself in the ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... government. [Applause.] Let us go back to the days in which I was taught to write, when the copybook bore a text taken from Poor Richard—"Industry and frugality lead to wealth," or "Who by the plough would thrive, himself must either hold or drive,"—there was not anything said in those days about legislating a boy into wealth or comfort or ease, especially at the expense ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... the same spirit with the Maryland law which we have before quoted. They have continued to treat them as an inferior class, and to subject them to strict police regulations, drawing a broad line of distinction between the citizen and the slave races, and legislating in relation to them upon the same principle which prevailed at the time of the Declaration of Independence. As relates to these States, it is too plain for argument, that they have never been regarded as a part of the people or ...
— Report of the Decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, and the Opinions of the Judges Thereof, in the Case of Dred Scott versus John F.A. Sandford • Benjamin C. Howard
... If; on the other hand, the great mass of the nation had been indifferent, with regard not merely to forms, but to religion itself, we should not have seen the outward show of piety in the highest ranks; we should not have seen a house of commons legislating in favor of Edward's liturgy, and a nation turning to worship in their vernacular tongue. Nothing but a widely diffused spirit of piety can account for the character of those miracles of literature which made the days of Elizabeth glorious, and which are stamped with nothing more strongly than ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... me it was altogether the pleasantest mode of legislating that had ever been devised. He was now perfectly master of his own time, and in fact, he was making out a set of charts for the Leaplow marine, a task that was likely to bring him in a good round sum, as pumpkins were cheap, and ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... wives and daughters of Pittsburgh obtain the passage, by the city council, of an ordinance causing the arrest of every man found in the streets after 9 o'clock in the evening, and the law will then be equal in its operation. This legislating upon the behavior of one sex by the other exclusively, is one-sided and despotic. Give both sexes a ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... generally admitted by the citizens of all the states, that we deem it unnecessary to adduce arguments for their proof. A favourable occasion for circumscribing these evils, and discountenancing this injustice, is, we conceive, now offered to Congress, in the power and opportunity of legislating for the newly acquired ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... House was already standing up; had been standing for an hour; and before a third of it had found out what the President had been saying, he had proclaimed the adoption of the motion! And only a few heard that. In fact, when that House is legislating you can't tell it from ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... these legislating philosophers are too sublimely extensive to take in the wrongs or sufferings of contemporary individuals; and not being able to disguise, even to themselves, that they create much misery at present, they promise incalculable ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady |
