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Absolutism   Listen
noun
Absolutism  n.  
1.
The state of being absolute; the system or doctrine of the absolute; the principles or practice of absolute or arbitrary government; despotism. "The element of absolutism and prelacy was controlling."
2.
(Theol.) Doctrine of absolute decrees.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Absolutism" Quotes from Famous Books



... VII: cf. note Fernando, p. 34, 5. Ferdinand welcomed the intervention of the French in Spain to support him in his absolutism against the advanced party, which clamored for constitutional liberties. The French expedition (1823) was completely successful, the resistance being so slight that the French describe the invasion ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon

... Giffards and Duchesnays of the future, where their descendants could becomingly receive fealty and homage. (foi et homage) from their feudal retainers. There was, however, nothing here to remind one of the lordly pageantry of other times—the days of absolutism—of the dark era, the age of lettres de cachet, corvees, lods et ventes, and other feudal burthens, when the flag of the Bourbons floated over the fortress of New France. In 1846, at the time of my visit, in vain would you have sought in the farm yard ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine

... than even he knew. Alone with his bruised ambitions, his hectored egoism, his watery aims. Alone and plotting the ruin of those who had dared bid him halt in his mad, destroying career. Alone, this high priest of the caste of absolutism, of the old individualism which is fast hurrying into the realm of the forgotten. Alone, and facing a new century, with whose ideals his own were utterly, ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... concern and astonishment at the lands already wasted and almost without inhabitants. I have read with great pain the Lord Lieutenant's speech at Belfast, aspersing the country as disloyal and threatening them with greater tyranny. The people are disloyal, to a system of oppression and absolutism which neither they nor their fathers were able to bear; but I believe from my heart that they are more loyal to Her Majesty than their oppressors are, for the system has made them oppressors. Only notice, from Mr. Smith's evidence at the ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall

... democracy responsible for them, the inexorable logic of events is contradicting each and every assertion based on these notions, and proving that the American struggle is, after all, the ever-recurring one in human affairs between right and wrong, between labour and capital, between liberty and absolutism. When such an issue comes to be presented to the people of Great Britain, stripped of all the disguises which have been thrown over it, it is not difficult to predict at least which side it will ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams

... people were suffering from the clergy, the nobility, and their aristocratic governors that he incited them to discontent with their humble lot in life, to unrest, and to open rebellion against their magistrates. At another time he became the spokesman for the most pronounced absolutism and despotism. He turned suddenly against the very people whose cause he had so signally championed, and who hailed him as their prophet and leader. When the poor, downtrodden people needed him most, Luther cowardly deserted them, and by frenzied utterances excited the nobility to slay the ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau

... feudalism itself and its history. This system gave to the baron opportunities which might be dangerous under a ruler who could not make himself obeyed, but there was nothing in it inconsistent with the practical absolutism exercised by the first of the Norman kings and by the more part of his immediate successors. Feudalism brought in with itself two ideas which exercised decisive influence on later English history. I do not mean to assert that these ideas were consciously held, or that ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams

... grant ourselves moral holidays, they can only be provisional breathing-spells, intended to refresh us for the morrow's fight. This forms one permanent inferiority of pluralism from the pragmatic point of view. It has no saving message for incurably sick souls. Absolutism, among its other messages, has that message, and is the only scheme that has it necessarily. That constitutes its chief superiority and is the source of its religious power. That is why, desiring to do it full justice, I valued its aptitude ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James

... is an age of progress. Wars of succession are no more. Absolutism must forever hang its head. Fling a glance at France; peer into Prussia, Vox populi is the voice of the King, and the voice of the king is therefore vox Dei. When a king speaks for his people he must speak sooth; what he says of other peoples ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 19, August 6, 1870 • Various

... later experiences have their roots in this period. During these ten years, the issue between Cubans who sought a larger national and economic life, and the Spanish element that insisted upon the continuance of Spanish absolutism, had its definite beginning, to remain a cause of almost constant friction for three-quarters of a century. The Spanish Constitution of 1812, abrogated in 1814, was again proclaimed in 1820, and again abrogated in ...
— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson

... the pressure of a stern necessity, between civil and military life, and between the rights and duties of each. The power of the magistrate, jealously limited in the city, was enlarged to absolutism for the preservation of discipline in the field. But the distinction between the king or magistrate and the general, and between the special capacities required for the duties of each, is everywhere of late growth. We may say the same of departmental distinctions altogether. The ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith

... faithful wife and comfort, as a wife should be, to Sir Isaac. In return for that consideration and to ensure its continuance Sir Isaac came great distances from his former assumption of a matrimonial absolutism. She was to be granted all sorts of small autonomies,—the word autonomy was carefully avoided throughout but its spirit ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells

... youth of splendid hope, for he must have been entering upon manhood in 1848 when kings, remembering their brother of France, went about with an uneasy crick in their necks; and perhaps that passion for liberty which passed through Europe, sweeping before it what of absolutism and tyranny had reared its head during the reaction from the revolution of 1789, filled no breast with a hotter fire. One might fancy him, passionate with theories of human equality and human rights, discussing, arguing, fighting behind barricades in Paris, ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham

... absolute rule, founded a constitutional government and distributed the lands among the people. After the Kamehamehas came King Lunalio, who ruled but one year, and Kalakaua, who ruled from 1874 to 1891 and showed such a disposition to return to absolutism that the people were in constant dread for their liberties and lands. It was only by a revolt of the people that they regained their rights, forcing him to grant them a new constitution and their former ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... should be so, for the whole course of French history since the thirteenth century had led up to the absolutism of Louis XIV. During the early ages of feudalism France had been distracted by the wars of her kings against rebellious nobles. The virtues and firmness of Louis IX {2} (1226-70) had turned the scale in favour of the crown. There were still to be many rebellions—the ...
— The Fighting Governor - A Chronicle of Frontenac • Charles W. Colby

... be supposed, however, that her self-will was a passionate, moody absolutism. She had outgrown that, and was too well-bred ever to show much temper. The tendency of her mature purposes and prejudices was to crystallize into a few distinct forms. With the feminine logic of a narrow mind, she made her husband ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe

... notwithstanding the time spent by him in religious exercises, and in his favorite diversion of experimenting with clocks and watches, he remained an attentive observer of public affairs. Political and religious absolutism was the main article in Philip's creed. He was more thoroughly a Spaniard in his tone and temper than his father, who was born in the Netherlands, and always loved the people there, as he was loved by them. Philip ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher

... that they had improved him.[221] But these differences did not prevent the action of Hobbes on Rousseau. It resulted in a curious fusion between the premisses and the temper of Hobbes and the conclusions of Locke. This fusion produced that popular absolutism of which the Social Contract was the theoretical expression, and Jacobin supremacy the practical manifestation. Rousseau borrowed from Hobbes the true conception of sovereignty, and from Locke the true conception of the ultimate seat and original of authority, and of the two together he made ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley

... accepted on what was at best but an indirect valuation; and now and then she had a frightened doubt as to the independence of her own convictions. That innate sense of relativity which even East Onondaigua had not been able to check in Claudia Day had been fostered in Mrs. Keniston by the artistic absolutism of Hillbridge, and she often wondered that her husband remained so uncritical of the quality of admiration accorded him. Her husband's uncritical attitude toward himself and his admirers had in fact been one of the surprises ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton

... of strong journalists, journalists of the Harden type for example. The dynasty tends to become degenerate, so that the probability of either some gross scandals or an ill-advised reactionary movement back to absolutism may develop a crisis within a few years of the peace settlement. The mercantile and professional classes will join hands with the social democrats to remove the decaying incubus of the Hohenzollern system, and Germany will become a more modern and larger ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells

... English nation, weakened by the Wars of the Roses and tired of a contest that possessed little interest for the masses, was not unwilling to submit itself without reserve to the guidance of a strong ruler provided he could guarantee peace both at home and abroad. Practically speaking, hitherto absolutism had been unknown. The rights that had been won by the barons on the plains of Runnymede were guarded jealously by their descendants, and as a result the power of the king, more especially in regard to taxation, was hedged round by several restrictions. But during the long ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance • Rev. James MacCaffrey

... isolation of the throne; the lonely grandeur of one who can hardly have a friend, since he can never have an equal, among those around him. I do not wonder that a tinge of melancholo-mania is so often perceptible in the chiefs of that great House whose Oriental absolutism is only "tempered by assassination." But an Earthly sovereign may now and then meet his fellow-sovereigns, whether as friends or foes, on terms of frank hatred or loyal openness. His domestic relations, though never secure and simple as those of ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg

... Scripture. What it was meant to mean, one cannot doubt, or by whom it was inserted. The 'Chancellor,' or whoever else transcribed those laws in Latin, was, of course, a cleric, priest or monk. From his hand comes the first hint of arbitrary power; the first small blot of a long dark stain of absolutism, which was to darken and deepen through centuries ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley

... immediately followed the success of the insurrection in England and the execution of Charles I. The provocation was the same in the two nations; the result highly different. In both cases it was a revolt against the tyranny of the court and the attempt to establish absolutism. But the difference in results lay in the fact that England had a single parliament, composed of politicians, while France had ten parliaments, composed of magistrates, and unaccustomed to handle great questions of public ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris

... the fact is so plain that he who runs may read, that they would have been vastly greater but for a malignant influence which has met the elements of progress, even on these shores. Disengaged from the opposing influences which surrounded them in Europe—from the spirit of absolutism, of hereditary aristocracy, of ecclesiastical despotism, from the habits, the customs, the institutions of earlier times, more or less rigid, unyielding on that account, and hard to change by the new forces, disengaged from ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... Germany. The military caste (of which the naval and all government bureaus are branches) has organised the nation for war with the efficiency of the managers of a great American corporation. The government is an absolutism. No Jew can become an officer. Officers of crack regiments do not go to the homes of persons in any kind of business. A business man is called a "Kaufmann," as we speak of a house painter. Some tame professors are paid by the State to give an ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard

... civilization, based on knowledge and reason rather than force. To this end the Church had interposed her authority against barbarian force, and had slowly won the contest. Almost of necessity the Church had been compelled to insist upon her way, and this type of absolutism in church government had been extended to most other matters. The Bible, or rather the interpretations of it which church councils, popes, bishops, and theological writers had made, became authoritative, and disobedience or doubt became sinful in the eyes ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY

... Jela[c]i[c] was empowered to defend the monarchy and bring back the historical rights of the Triune Kingdom and the Serb Vojvodina. The dynasty and the monarchy survived, but Jugo-Slav hopes and the promises they had received were unfulfilled or soon withdrawn, as for instance the Vojvodina in 1861. Absolutism reigned supreme from 1849 ...
— The Russian Revolution; The Jugo-Slav Movement • Alexander Petrunkevitch, Samuel Northrup Harper,

... absolutism, slavery, and the bloody penal code; they were the resolute opponents of every political or social reform; and they had their reward from the nation outside parliament. The Bishop of Bristol had his palace sacked and burnt; ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair

... defiance, for Donald Finch was an obstinate man, with a man's love of authority, and a Scotchman's sense of his right to rule in his own house. But while he talked much about his authority, and made a great show of absolutism with his family, he was secretly conscious that another will than his had really kept things moving about the farm; for he had long ago learned that his wife was always right, while he might often be wrong, and that, withal her soft words and gentle ...
— Glengarry Schooldays • Ralph Connor

... the effect of this becomes still more dangerous, when it is attempted to carry it out under the name of democracy,—American democracy! In this manner it serves the despotic ends of European despots: they point to the freest government in the world for examples of their own absolutism, shield their autocracy beneath its democracy, and with it annihilate the rights ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams

... alliance,—the solitary Orleans King, the shadowy Republic of '48, and the imperial government, all have endeavored to do something to elevate France, to win for her new glories, and to regain for her her old position. The expedition into Spain, in 1823, ostensibly made in the interest of Absolutism, was really undertaken for the purpose of rebaptizing the white flag in fire. Charles X. and M. de Polignac were engaged in a great scheme of foreign policy when they fell, the chief object of which, on their side, was the restoration to France of the provinces of the Rhine,—and which Russia ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various

... monarch and his satellites? Unfortunately for the cause of order and quiet, there will always be found certain tough lumps, in the shape of rebellious or non-conformist men, which refuse to be melted in the strong solvents or ground up in the swift mills of Absolutism. Government must look after these impediments. If they are positively dangerous, they must be destroyed or removed. If only suspected, or known to be powerless or inactive, they must at ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various

... has seen FLINK's surprise, gets up). Listen to me! Suppose we had a king who said: "Either you help me to establish a democratic monarchy—purged of all traces of absolutism, purged ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson

... oppressing and oppressed classes. But in order to oppress a class, certain conditions must be assured to it under which it can, at least, continue its slavish existence. The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern laborer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the progress of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population ...
— The Communist Manifesto • Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

... Absolutism in the Church, is approved. But they add a correction in reference to confession, namely, that the regulation headed, Omnis Utriusque, be observed, and that both annual confession be made, and, although all sins cannot be enumerated, ...
— The Apology of the Augsburg Confession • Philip Melanchthon

... for speculation on these grounds is indicated by the heroes of Bakounin. He always meant to write the story of Prometheus, and he never spoke of Satan without an admiration that approached adoration. They were the two unconquerable enemies of absolutism. He was "the eternal rebel," Bakounin once said of Satan, "the first free-thinker and emancipator of the worlds."[2] In another place he speaks of Proudhon as having the instinct of a revolutionist, because "he adored Satan and proclaimed anarchy."[3] In still another ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter

... the movement in that direction in the south. The emigre Count of Provence, the next younger brother of Louis XVI., who had assumed the title of regent, desired the government to allow him to enter the town. As the emigres aimed at the restoration of absolutism it would have been fatal to the hopes built on the movement in the south in favour of a constitutional monarchy to have granted his request, and it would have been unfair to the Toulonese who stipulated for the acceptance of the constitution of 1791. Besides ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt

... to the English view, sprang also the great intellectual movement of the age. Voltaire visited the England of Addison and Pope; Montesquieu studied the English Constitution of 1689; and these two men were the writers who overthrew absolutism in Europe, who paved the way for the epoch of Revolution that was to follow. Montesquieu's Persian Letters, satirizing French society, appeared as early as 1721. Voltaire's sarcasms and witty sneers got him into trouble with the French Government as early as 1715. He was ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various

... in himself an independent sovereignty. If logically carried out, there could be no such crime as treason, there could be no state, and no public authority. This new theory transfers to society the sovereignty which that asserted for the individual, and asserts social despotism, or the absolutism of the state. It asserts with sufficient energy public authority, or the right of the people to govern; but it leaves no space for individual rights, which society must recognize, respect, and protect. This was the grand defect of the ancient Graeco-Roman ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson

... the Czecho-Slovak struggle for the re-establishment of their independence. The movement was at first literary, and only in the forties became political. It was a continuous struggle against reaction and absolutism, and if the Czecho-Slovaks to-day can boast of an advanced civilisation, it is only owing to their perseverance and hard endeavours, and not because of any good-will on the part of the Austrian Government which put every ...
— Independent Bohemia • Vladimir Nosek

... harmony nor peace in connection, nations themselves wear the human form, and must, therefore, realize the various states of infancy, youthfulness, and manhood—of germ, growth, and fruitage. This is true of whatever national form. Nationalities founded upon the principles of absolutism, embody and express the same laws and conditions. Their principle of supreme external authority is first a condition of germination, then of growth or labored effort toward maturity, and lastly of fruitage, in which the whole form is matured ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various

... with which vast Parisian crowds view riots and revolution and the various phases of alternate anarchy and absolutism may be easily and naturally accepted by the actors in these living dramas as tacit if not positive approval. The professional patriot does not perform to empty seats, and the few hundred hired assassins of the public peace and private liberty would be out of a job but for the hundred ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray

... nobles have lived upon the crumbs of royal favor, and if on some rare occasions they have ventured to place themselves in opposition to the monarch, it has not been in the cause of the nation, but of the foreigner, or of clerical absolutism. The nobility can never be regarded as an historical element: it has furnished some fortunate Condottieri, powerful even to tyranny, in some isolated town; it has knelt at the feet of the foreign emperors who have passed the Alps or crossed the sea. The original stock being ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various

... heretics. It was on the ground of this latter theory that the University of Paris, then the first university in Europe, had just appealed from the Pope to a General Council. In Germany opinions were on the whole divided between this and the theory of Papal absolutism. Again, the view that neither the decisions of a Council nor of a Pope were ipso facto infallible, but that an appeal therefrom lay to a council possibly better informed, had already been advanced with impunity by writers of the fifteenth century. The only point as to which no doubt was expressed, ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin

... in a manner absolutely defying all the speculations of human reason.[7] The biographer of Frederick apparently finds no inscrutable force at all, but only will, tenacity, and powder kept dry. There is a vast difference between this and the absolutism of the mystic. ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley

... Court-Martialing that raged at Division Head-quarters. Mechanical in its movements, not unfrequently malignant in its designs, officer after officer, earnest in purpose, but in some instances perhaps deficient in detail, had been sacrificed to an absolutism that could order the charges, detail the Court, play the part of principal witness for the ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong

... Hanoverian envoy at St. Petersburg, discovered that Russian civilization is "merely artificial," and first published to Europe the short description of the Russian Constitution,—that it is "absolutism ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett

... of absolutism in the man, his uncompromising severity, his command of the situation regardless of cost, sorrow or suffering to other men, is seen in his realistic physiognomy. We study these facts more and more, ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel

... is it was an absolutism, marked by luxury, display, and taxation so heavy as to amount almost to oppression. Its luxuriousness and display are illustrated by his seraglio, which included seven hundred wives (1 Kings xi. 3); and its despotic nature is seen in such acts as his ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various

... at his will. There were parlements, too, but to mention them without explanation would be only to let the term mislead, for they were not representative bodies or parliaments in the ordinary sense: their powers were chiefly judicial and they were no barrier in the way of the steady march to absolutism. The political structure of the Bourbon realm in the age of Louis XIV and afterwards was simple: all the lines of control ran upwards and to a common center. And all this made for unity and autocratic efficiency in finance, in war, ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro

... consequently acted most curiously on contemporary thinkers. It meant centralisation, the setting up of a definite force which should control the whole kingdom. It resulted in absolutism increasing, with an ever-widening sphere of royal control. It culminated in the Reformation, which added religion to the other departments of State in which royal interference held predominance. Till then the Papacy, as in some sort "a ...
— Mediaeval Socialism • Bede Jarrett

... approaching the verge of heresy. Just where original sin ceases to be original and becomes acquired,—just where innate ill-desert meets voluntary transgression,—just where moral government raises the standard of rebellion against Absolutism,—just where New Haven theology branches off from ultra Orthodoxy on the debatable ground, the border-land of metaphysics and religion, Dr. Beecher and his brethren were engaged ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various

... phrase from a "Dictionary Of Polite English for Public Purposes" edited by a College graduate at present in the Andamans. True, later it had called him an "overbearing and insane procrastinator"—"an apostle of absolutism"—and, plum of all literary gleanings, since it left so much to the imagination of the native reader,—"laudator temporis acti." But that the was because he had withdrawn his private subscription prior to suspending the paper sine die under paragraph so-and-so of the Act for Dealing ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy

... in 1396 Richard married Isabella, daughter of Charles VI of France, and henceforth seems to have adopted French ideas, and to have made pretensions in the direction of absolutism. He proceeded to arbitrary prosecutions which led to the violent death of several leading nobles. Richard also quarrelled with Henry, son of John of Gaunt, whom as Duke of Lancaster he succeeded in 1399. The ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... idea of creating a class distinct from all other classes, independent of the administration and unaccountable to the voters, fixed and immovable save for causes proven—why, it is, not a step, it is a stride towards absolutism. Such a proposition, like ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various

... She was the bulwark of the Church, against whose adamantine front the wrath of innovation beat in vain. In every country of Europe the party of freedom and reform was the national party, the party of reaction and absolutism was the Spanish party, leaning on Spain, looking to her for help. Above all, it was so in France; and while within her bounds there was a semblance of peace, the national and religious rage burst forth on a wilder theatre. Thither it is for us to follow it, where, on ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various

... that these excesses should produce other excesses, in a contrary direction. Moved by hatred or fear of revolutionary absolutism, nations seek an asylum in governmental absolutism, or they retrograde towards the middle ages, and consider the mutual bond of protection and dependence of that period as the ideal and the realization of true liberty. History is no longer the organic development of social life, and man, like ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher

... the University teacher, and drove out recusants. You must all know something of the purging of the University and the Ministry of Aberdeen by the Covenanting General Assembly of 1640. These deposed Aberdeen doctors may have had too strong leanings to episcopacy in the Church and to absolutism in the State, but they were not Vicars of Bray. The first half of the century was adorned by a band of scholars, who have gained renown by their cultivation of Latin poetry; a little oasis in the desert of Aristotelian Dialectics. It would be needless and ungracious to enquire ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain

... at the period of the congress of Aix-la-Chapelle and of Laybach, when the "Holy Alliance" was combined to arrest all political changes in Europe in the sense of liberty, when they were intervening in southern Europe for the reestablishment of absolutism, and when they were meditating interference to check the progress of free government in America, that Mr. Monroe, in his annual message of December, 1823, declared that the United States would consider any attempt to extend the European system to any portion of this hemisphere ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Ulysses S. Grant • James D. Richardson

... checkered the map of Europe after the imperial Catholic power was rolled southwardly, as they were for the pure interest of Protestantism. The German intellect did eventually gain something from this political result, because it interrupted the literary absolutism which reigned at Vienna; no doubt literature grew more popular and German, but it did not very strikingly improve the great advantage, for there was at last exhaustion instead of a generously nourishing enthusiasm, and the great ideas of the period became the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various

... neither party cared a straw for what it talked about, and mentally swore that, as soon as by means of such stuff they could get places, and fill their pockets, they would be as Jacobite as the Jacobs themselves. As for Tories, no great change in them was necessary; everything favouring absolutism and slavery being congenial to them. So the whole nation, that is, the reading part of the nation, with some exceptions, for thank God there has always been some salt in England, went over the water to Charlie. But going over to Charlie was not enough, they must, or at least a considerable ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow

... natural fears, and they are not altogether the fears of weak and timid men. They will certainly be shared by all tyrants, all persons whose tempers incline to absolutism, all believers in force as the true dynamic of stable social government. To reason with such persons is impossible, because their opinions are the fruit of temper, and are therefore irrational. But even such persons ...
— The Empire of Love • W. J. Dawson

... Wilhelm II, while the rigour of bureaucratic administration, controlled by a monarchical absolutism, continued and was even accentuated, the absence of the able hand of Friedrich the Great soon made itself apparent. As regards external policy, however, Prussia, while allowing territories on the left bank of the Rhine to go ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax

... impregnable by revolution and reaction; this is the only sure ground and basis on which a constitutional form of government can be reared and administered with advantage to every class, repressing alike successfully absolutism and democracy. ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag

... in one day from the teeming workshops twenty thousand fighting men. He met the usual fate of all Spanish patriots, shameful and cruel death. His palace was razed to the ground. Successive governments, in shifting fever-fits of liberalism and absolutism, have set up and pulled down his statue. But his memory is loved and honored, and the example of this noblest of the comuneros impresses powerfully to-day the ardent young ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay

... more chance of stability in this form of government than in those preceding it, and it was evident that it had a more powerful genius at its head, so they rallied round it with confidence and sincerity. The Empire followed, with its inclination to absolutism, its Continental system, and its increased taxation; and the Protestants drew back somewhat, for it was towards them who had hoped so much from him that Napoleon in not keeping the promises of ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... so secure in his absolutism, he had hitherto found it so impossible to shock the feelings of the people or to exhaust the terrified adulation of the senate, that he was usually indifferent to the pasquinades which were constantly holding up his name to execration and contempt. But now[29] he felt that he ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various

... a conflict of principles. The issues could hardly have been better defined, and they were vital. It was a struggle between two civilizations, between reason and brute force, between the principles of Democracy and the creed of Absolutism; and the case was argued with a force, earnestness, and fervor, never before known. No Presidential contest had ever so touched the popular heart, or so lifted up and ennobled the people by the contagion of a great and pervading moral enthusiasm. The campaign for Buchanan, however, was ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian

... declaring that he "never concerned himself to disguise his sentiments, to restrain his passions, or to conciliate the affections of those who might possibly have been one day his subjects. Relying on the victory which had been apparently declared for absolutism, inflexible in his persuasions, and unbending in his demeanor, the Duke treated popular opinion with a ferocity of contempt which could scarcely be surpassed at St. Petersburgh or Warsaw. In his pleasures he asserted the license of an Orleans or a Stuart, and although in this respect he wanted not ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various

... don't believe a word of!" cried Beulah, appropriating the last as a lunge at her favorite absolutism. Rising, she placed her drawings in the portfolio, for the sun had crept round the corner of the gallery and was ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans

... in modern history—the Germanic and the Romanic races. The Germanic races tend to personal liberty, to a sturdy individualism, to civil and to political liberty. The Romanic race tends to absolutism in government; it is clannish; it loves chieftains; it develops a people that crave strong and showy governments to support and plan for them. The Anglo-Saxon race belongs to the great German family, and is a fair exponent ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various

... nor the army are the real bulwarks against foreign aggression, but the national character. The downfall of Austria and of Prussia was practically decided by the first great battle. The nations yielded without further struggle. Strangers to freedom, crushed by military absolutism, the prostration of each and all to an irresponsible despot had paralysed individual energy. Spain, on the other hand, without an army and without a ruler, but deriving new strength from each successive defeat, first taught Napoleon that he was not invincible. And the same spirit of liberty ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson

... wrote as he did he was probably not aware that his years of residence in the "garden" had indeed accustomed his ear to some un-Roman sounds.[6] Octavian was of course not unaware of the advantage that accrued to the ruler through the Oriental theory of absolutism, and furtively accepted all such expressions. By the time Vergil wrote the Aeneid the Roman world had acquiesced, but then, to our surprise, Vergil ceases to ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank

... seconded by the clergy, through the close connection with canon law which was in force in Germany. German emperors and territorial lords also favoured Roman law because they saw how well suited it was to absolutism; they liked to engage jurists trained in Italy, especially if they were doctors of both canon and Roman law. Nor did the German people object. From the fourteenth century many schools of jurisprudence were established ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker

... and he knew that republics are not created by fiat. He believed the tendency toward republicanism to be irresistible, but he believed also that there must be intermediate stages in the transition from monarchy. Absolutism is succeeded by constitutionalism, and that by parliamentarism, and that in the end must be succeeded by a republicanism that will free itself from all the traditional forms of symbol and ceremonial. He had also a special belief that the smaller peoples were better fitted for development ...
— Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson • William Morton Payne

... final. This disposition to govern his circle co-existed, however, with the most lavish appreciation of every good quality displayed by the members of it, and all the little uneasiness to which his absolutism may sometimes have given rise was much more than removed by constantly recurring acts of good-fellowship,—indeed it was forgotten in the presence ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine

... of the United States, although its organization violated many of the rules which were observed in the organization of the American union. It was inevitable that a union spontaneously developed from a group of sovereign monarchies, with their traditions of absolutism, would be very different from one in which the members, like the states of the American union, had previously been ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson

... observed that in that age of growing absolutism, both spiritual and temporal, only a skilful Thomistic scholar could have discerned the limits to the legitimate exercise of the royal authority which Las Casas so clearly perceived and so boldly defined in the very presence of the ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt

... spirit of Treitschke and Bernhardi, which glorifies war as an end instead of holding it in abhorrence as an evil thing? Properly speaking militarism is a school for the people and an instrument to further political ends. But in the patriarchal absolutism of a military monarchy, militarism exploits politics to further its own ends, and can create a situation which a democracy freed from junkerdom ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish

... bourgeois he was a liberal in politics and religion; for the people he was a democrat who hated the Restoration, loved equality more than liberty, and glorified the legendary Napoleon, representative of democratic absolutism. In the history of politics the songs of Beranger count for much; in the history of literature the poet has a little niche of his own, with which one may be content who, if he had not in elder years supposed himself the ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden

... Dufferin, in 1883, was almost apologetic to his countrymen for abstaining from an act of political folly. He pleaded strenuously for delay in the introduction of parliamentary institutions into Egypt, on the ground that our attempts "to mitigate predominant absolutism" in India had been slow, hesitating, and tentative. He brought poetic metaphor to his aid. He deprecated paying too much attention to the "murmuring leaves," in other words, imagining that the establishment of ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring

... not assembled for three-quarters of a century; but representatives of the people met in 1789, in spite of the opposition of the king. The extreme of license followed the extreme of absolutism. The king opposed the Constituent Assembly, for this body changed its name several times, till the political conflict ended in the death by the guillotine of Louis XVI., and later by the execution of his queen, Marie ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various

... that intelligence was the best weapon a man could carry, and so education, in a very stinted form, was encouraged. This was a fatal blunder on the part of the rulers, for as soon as the mind was unfettered the shackles began to fall from the body, and the days of absolutism were numbered. The spirit of knowledge, once released from its imprisonment, became a dominant power in the world, and as time went on the people demanded a voice in the management of affairs. In this ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan

... a yachting expedition, Grandcourt had no intention to get rid of her; on the contrary, he wanted to feel more securely that she was his to do as he liked with, and to make her feel it also. Moreover, he was himself very fond of yachting: its dreamy do-nothing absolutism, unmolested by social demands, suited his disposition, and he did not in the least regard it as an equivalent for the dreariness of the Maremma. He had his reasons for carrying Gwendolen out of reach, but they were not reasons that can seem black in the mere statement. ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot

... angry. He highly disapproved both of Palmerston's policy and of his methods of action. He was opposed to absolutism; but in his opinion Palmerston's proceedings were simply calculated to substitute for absolutism, all over Europe, something no better and very possibly worse—the anarchy of faction and mob violence. The dangers of this revolutionary ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey

... Wyclif to Cromwell and Milton, to Wordsworth and Carlyle. It is this common impulse of the race which Henry VIII relies upon, and because he is in this their leader the English people forgets his absolutism, his cruel anger, ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb

... well as myself it is his manner altogether. Nay, that although he is the first in seniority after Blackwater, the governor treats him with the same distance and hauteur he would use towards the youngest ensign in the service. Such are the effects of his long military habits, and his ideas of the absolutism of command. Am I ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson

... but her own and had begun in fact the same policy she afterwards developed in Serbia. From that date—1832—the office of Gubernator was abolished. Imitation is the sincerest flattery. The Petrovitches began to model themselves on their patrons, the Tsars, and strove for absolutism. ...
— Twenty Years Of Balkan Tangle • Durham M. Edith

... uncomplainingly and as a matter of course giving nearly one-half of the fruit of their toil for the privilege of living in their own land! When her sovereigns had Tatar blood in their veins and Tatar ideals in their hearts, Russia was on the road to absolutism. All things were tending toward a centralized unity of an iron and inexorable type—a type entirely foreign to the natural free instincts ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele

... that save during the period of vigour immediately following each foreign conquest (such as the Mongol conquest in the Thirteenth Century and the Manchu in the Seventeenth) not only has there never been any absolutism properly so-called in China, but that apart from the most meagre and inefficient tax-collecting and some rough-and-ready policing in and around the cities there has never been any true governing at all save what the people did ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale

... absolutism in Italy was complete. Courts-martial sat all over Italy. Morelli, the officer who had led out the so-called sacred band of Nola, was shot. His followers were expressly excluded from all amnesty acts. An attempted insurrection in Sicily cost the conspirators their lives. Hundreds of persons ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson

... these conflicts, is, through the very ignorance which shields him from all conscious guilt, bound over in the most impotent (though, because impotent and unconscious, the least humiliating) slavery to material circumstance,—a slavery which he cannot escape, and which, during the period of its absolutism, absorbs his very blood, bone, and nerve. To poverty, which the strong man resists, the child succumbs; on the other hand, that affluence of comfort, from which philosophy often weans the adult, wraps childhood ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... ABSOLUTISM, in aesthetics, a term applied to the theory that beauty is an objective attribute of things, not merely a subjective feeling of pleasure in him who perceives. It follows that there is an absolute standard of the beautiful by which all objects can be judged. The fact that, in ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... Revolution of 1830 and the expulsion of Charles X revived the hopes of the liberal party in Spain, which party the bigoted absolutism of the king and his minister had vainly endeavored to exterminate. The liberals saluted that event as a promise that the nineteenth century should see the realization of their aspirations, and the exiled members of the party at once came to France to attempt an invasion of Spain, counting ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk

... with the multitude of the wretched, she would simply be drawing nearer to Christ, thereby securing a new lease of youth and purifying herself of all the political compromises which she formerly was compelled to accept. Without renouncing aught of her absolutism the Church has at all times known how to bow to circumstances; but she reserves her perfect sovereignty, simply tolerating that which she cannot prevent, and patiently waiting, even through long centuries, for the time when she shall again become the mistress ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... The Queen-Mother The Duke of Orleans The justification of Richelieu The Parliaments Their hostilities Their humiliation The policy of Richelieu His services to the Crown His internal improvements His defects of character Necessity of absolutism amid treasons and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord

... antagonisms are democratic as opposed to despotic in any and all shapes. And this idea has become so ingrained in the American mind that it will be difficult to gain credence for the assertion that the terms constitutionalism and absolutism represent the forces or systems which, have really been antagonistic ever since Christianity began to affect and animate ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various

... Imperial Parliament. The cultured Roman Catholics of England and Ireland look with pain and regret at the insensate bigotry and domineering intolerance which made the exposures in County Meath possible. They see in these wild claims of absolutism in the domain of temporal as well as spiritual affairs, a grave danger to all pure religion. They perceive that the revival of the old sectarian passions in Ireland cannot fail to react on Great Britain, and even ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)

... until the American colonies of Great Britain questioned the policy of the mother country toward her all too energetic children. Hobbes' "Leviathan, or the Matter, Form and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil," appeared in 1651, a powerful argument for absolutism, but cast in such a form as to make the [36]writer an unwelcome ...
— The Isle Of Pines (1668) - and, An Essay in Bibliography by W. C. Ford • Henry Neville

... declares that Prussian Militarism has so possessed all Germans that not only their moral but their logical point of view has become distorted, so that they behold nought but virtue in applying science to bring about Mediaeval results. The conflict, he declares, is between absolutism which pretends to be sufficient unto itself and democracy which receives its power from the people, and that the latter must win unless centuries of the power, by revolutions without number, for the benefit of the masses are ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various

... to pass. Far beyond France the movement reached. Canon Trevor says of the wave of revolt against absolutism that ...
— Our Day - In the Light of Prophecy • W. A. Spicer

... not been abolished. The monarch was specifically now a sovereign overlord, but he had not been absolved from his obligations towards his subjects. Hereditary sovereignty per se was not held to signify unlimited dominion, still less absolutism. On the contrary, the magnificent gift of the Danish nation to Frederick III. was made under express conditions. The "Instrument" drawn up by the Lower Estates implied the retention of all their rights; and the king, in accepting the gift of a hereditary crown, did not repudiate ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various

... that, to be sure, this authority of the monarch constitutionally existed in the first United Diet, but accompanied by the wish and anticipation that the unlimited power of the King, without being overturned, might fix the measure of its own limitation. Absolutism primarily demands impartiality, honesty, devotion to duty, energy, and inward humility in the ruler. These may be present, and yet male and female favorites (in the best case the lawful wife), the monarch's own ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke

... the remedy for absolutism lies in calling these same minorities to council. As the king-in-council succeeded the king by the grace of God, so in future democracies the toleration and encouragement of minorities and the willingness to consider as "men" the crankiest, ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois

... done for that of the romantic period, the musical conservatives and traditionalists rallied to him. He was acclaimed by a large public lineal successor of the three great "B's" of music. Quite in the manner that they had once opposed Brahms to the composer of "Parsifal," the partisans of musical absolutism elevated Reger as a sort of anti-pope to Richard Strauss. Whole numbers of musical reviews were devoted to the study and discussion of his art in all its ramifications. Reger seemed on the verge of gaining a place among the immortals. And his publishers placed on the ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld

... which several historians have considered to have been states- general, one of the crown's most intimate advisers, William of Plasian, proposed, against Boniface, a form of accusation which imputed to him, beyond his ambition and his claims to absolutism, crimes as improbable as they were hateful. It was demanded that the Church should be governed by a lawful pope, and the king, as defender of the faith, was pressed to appeal to the convocation of a general council. ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... not yet been called upon to pay the price of its greatness. By the policy of Ferdinand and Ximenez the sovereign had been made absolute, and the Church and Inquisition adroitly adjusted to keep him so. The nobles, who had always resisted absolutism as strenuously as they had fought the Moors, had been divested of all political power, a like fate had befallen the cities, the free constitutions of Castile and Aragon had been swept away, and the only function that remained ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... opportunity thus offered them. "From the moment that a religion solicits the aid of philosophy, its ruin is inevitable," said Heine. "In the attempt at defence, it prates itself into destruction. Religion, like every absolutism, must not seek to justify itself. Prometheus is bound to the rock by a silent force. Yea, Aeschylus permits not personified power to utter a single word. It must remain mute. The moment that a religion ventures to print a catechism supported by arguments, the moment ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones

... reformers, legislators, and politicians, do not desire to exercise an immediate despotism over mankind. No, they are too moderate and too philanthropic for that. They only contend for the despotism, the absolutism, the omnipotence of the law. They aspire only to make ...
— Essays on Political Economy • Frederic Bastiat

... "Thorough." Only three years before, he had been one of the foremost orators in the struggle for the Petition of Right. The dagger of Fenton had turned him from an impassioned patriot and constitutionalist into a vehement upholder of absolutism. His revolt had been little more than a mask for his hostility to the hated favourite Buckingham, and when Buckingham's murder cleared the path to his ambition, Wentworth passed, apparently without a struggle, from the zealous champion ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless

... the ideas of justice and liberty spreading among the people, in spite of the combined efforts of kings, nobles, and clergy. In the year 1789 of the Christian era, the French nation, divided by caste, poor and oppressed, struggled in the triple net of royal absolutism, the tyranny of nobles and parliaments, and priestly intolerance. There was the right of the king and the right of the priest, the right of the patrician and the right of the plebeian; there were the privileges of birth, province, communes, ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon

... among the earliest and staunchest advocates of catholic emancipation, and that a despotic temper is belied by the whole tone of his speeches. Above all, he is unjustly credited, in the face of direct evidence to the contrary, with being the champion of absolutism in the councils of Europe, the fact being not only that his voice was always on the side of moderation and conciliation, but that Canning himself, on succeeding him, dissociated Great Britain from the holy alliance by taking his stand upon an admirable ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick

... ladies, but M. Paul afterwards told me, these were "des dames," and it was quite proper for them to contemplate what no "demoiselle" ought to glance at. I assured him plainly I could not agree in this doctrine, and did not see the sense of it; whereupon, with his usual absolutism, he merely requested my silence, and also, in the same breath, denounced my mingled rashness and ignorance. A more despotic little man than M. Paul never filled a professor's chair. I noticed, by the way, that he looked at the picture himself quite at his ease, and for ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte

... set over against that of the Yogi quoted above! But is not the good Abbot a little hard on the Westerners? For the full truth is that while the Yogi represents the old Absolutism, the Abbot is feeling his way to a wider and more human world-view. Buddhism has evidently better days in store. Let our views of ultimate Reality be what they may, the nature-mystic's position demands not only that man may hold communion with nature, but that, in and ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer

... of absolutism took its most offensive form in Nicholas's attitude toward Europe. He was the very incarnation of reaction against revolution, and he became the demigod of that horde of petty despots who infest Central Europe. Whenever, then, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne

... enterprise. Be this as it may. It is not our business here to probe the corruption of any particular Government. But we observe that this miserable botch of a monument is to the ruins of the Acropolis, what this modern absolutism, this effete Turkey is to the magnificent tyrannies of yore. Indeed, nothing is duller, more stupid, more prosaic than a modern absolutism as compared with an ancient one. But why concern ourselves with like comparisons? The ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani

... escaped to the British colonies, and became a part of them. The Huguenots would have hailed as a boon the permission to emigrate under the fleur-de-lis, and build up a Protestant France in the valleys of the West. It would have been a bane of absolutism, but a national glory; would have set bounds to English colonization, and changed the face of the continent. The opportunity was spurned. The dominant Church clung to its policy of rule and ruin. France built its best colony ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman

... economic panaceas; but is a positive, aggressive institution for the presentation to our people of the fact that we have in this Democracy a method of doing whatever we wish done, which avoids the necessity for anything like revolutionary action. The objection to Bolshevism is that it is absolutism—as Lenine has said himself, the absolutism of the proletariat. It is an economic government by force, while our Democracy is a government ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane

... of Reconstruction government was accomplished is well-known. The significance of its overthrow is that it marked the arrogant reassertion of the malignant and desperate purpose of the southern oligarchy, trained in the absolutism of slave mastery, to despoil the Negro of the rights of citizenship, and to reduce him to ...
— The Disfranchisement of the Negro - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 6 • John L. Love

... that nothing but a return to the old system could save the monarchy. I need not repeat the details, given to me by my friends, of the advice with which the counter-revolutionists and partisans of absolutism beset the King; for in the idleness that succeeds misfortune, men give themselves up to dreams, and helpless passion engenders folly. The King stood firm, and agreed with his constitutional advisers. The Report on the state of France presented to him by M. de ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... to the civil administration of a State, a Governor could place him beyond the legal reach of the conscripting officers. This provision was a concession to those who looked on Davis's request for authority over exemption as the first step toward absolutism. On the other hand the statute allowed the President a free hand in the scarcely less important matter of "details." Among the imperative problems of the Confederacy, where the whole male population was needed in ...
— The Day of the Confederacy - A Chronicle of the Embattled South, Volume 30 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson

... could expect but little; they consisted of men, the greater part of whom had been either courtiers or employes of the deceased King Ferdinand, who were friends to absolutism, and by no means inclined to do or to favour anything calculated to give offence to the court of Rome, which they were anxious to conciliate, hoping that eventually it might be induced to recognize the young queen, not as the ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow

... political opinions, Schlegel maintained the same grand consistency that characterizes his religious philosophy. He had more sense, however, and more of the spirit of Christian fraternity in him than, for the sake of absolutism, to become a Turk or a Russian; nay, from some passages in the Concordia—a political journal, published by him and his friend Adam Mueller, in 1820, and quoted by Mr Robertson—it would almost appear that he would have preferred a monarchy limited by states, conceived in the spirit ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various

... and a peril and a woe averted from her future. They ruined the trade which was the life-blood of New France; they stopped the current of her arteries, and made all her early years a misery and a terror. Not that they changed her destinies. The contest on this continent between Liberty and Absolutism was never doubtful; but the triumph of the one would have been dearly bought, and the downfall of the other incomplete. Populations formed in the ideas and habits of a feudal monarchy, and controlled by a hierarchy profoundly hostile to freedom of thought, would have remained ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman

... fortune she may sometimes be found to possess an indestructible germ of conscience which sorrow and necessity can develop into active good; but only sometimes. The spoilt woman par excellence understands only her own value, only her own merits and the absolutism of her own requirements; and sacrifice, self-abnegation, and the whole class of virtues belonging to unselfishness are as much unknown to her as is the Decalogue in the original, or the ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous

... 1. Pascal's wager, 5. Clifford's veto, 8. Psychological causes of belief, 9. Thesis of the Essay, 11. Empiricism and absolutism, 12. Objective certitude and its unattainability, 13. Two different sorts of risks in believing, 17. Some risk unavoidable, 19. Faith may bring forth its own verification, 22. Logical conditions ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James

... presses him down. This is the inevitable tendency of all stable social arrangements. Now and again there arises some strong nature that revolts against the influence of conformity which is becoming intolerable,—against the atmosphere of caste or theory; of Egyptian priest or Manchester economist; of absolutism ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman

... rulers; the Feudal System, which had received a mortal blow by the intermingling of the classes and the masses in the era of the Crusades, was threatened, from above, by the movement towards centralisation and absolutism, and from below, by the growing discontent of the peasantry and artisans, who had begun to realise, but as yet only in a vague way, their own strength. In every department the battle for supremacy ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey

... countries: whether Lutheran or Gallican or Anglican, whether completely separated from Rome or retaining a spiritual communion with it, the Church submitted to the principle of cujus regio ejus religio, and became an instrument in the hands of kings for erecting the lay and territorial absolutism on the ruins of the universal church-state. James I spoke for all his kind when he cried out, "No Bishop no King!" The lay prince wished not to destroy the Church, but to use it; the sum of his purpose was to transfer the ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker

... perfectly normal, and it does not in the least impair freedom if, for example, one has personified evil as a living Devil. The error does not lie in this, but in the making absolute these determinate, aesthetic forms of religion. The reaction of the thinking activity against such aesthetic absolutism then undertakes in its negative absolutism to despise the content also, as if it ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz

... Versailles, he saw at once the impiety of allowing such a monument to sink into utter ruin. . . . He determined that the palace of Louis XIV, without losing its individuality, should become a palace of the entire people; and that the bygone spirit of absolutism should give shelter to the spirit of modern liberty. Versailles, therefore, erected as a homage to individual pride, has become, under the Orleans regime, a great national monument—and certainly the most ...
— The Story of Versailles • Francis Loring Payne

... has happened to America since our federal government was converted into a centralized absolutism. The central government in Washington arrogated to itself the unconstitutional power and responsibility of regulating the relationships between private employers and their employees, enacting laws which established "collective bargaining" ...
— The Invisible Government • Dan Smoot

... who believed in the oath of the prince-president, constituted the will of France;—the policy of Napoleon was accepted by many because it was his: it was his, because he knew it would be acceptable to many as the only safeguard against anarchy, and the only form of absolutism that could be substituted for liberty, or ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... that Luther left the emperor's presence a free man, the spell of Absolutism was broken, and the victory of the Reformation secured. The ban of the Pope had fallen; the secular arm had been called to interfere; the machinery of authority strained as far as it would bear. The emperor himself was an unconscious convert to the higher creed. ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude

... outbreak of the present war he again illustrated his spirit of fanatical absolutism, which at times inspires him, ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck

... to fall into the hands of rulers, and to vindicate and maintain the liberties of the subjects in all these things which concern their consciences, persons, and estates." In short, it was a testimony for constitutional government in opposition to absolutism. ...
— Hunted and Harried • R.M. Ballantyne

... genius—reached its high-water mark in Germany in the seventies. But with the unrestrained outbursts of the champions of Storm and Stress the problem was by no means solved; there remained the basic conflict between the idea of personal liberty and the strait-jacket of Frederician absolutism, the conflict between the dynastic and the national idea of the state. Should the individual yield a blind, unreasoned submission to the state as to a divinely instituted arbitrary authority, good or bad, or was the state to be regarded as the conscious ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun

... absolutism was extended also to the New World. Revoking the charter of De Caen the Huguenot merchant, he organised the Company of One Hundred Associates, of which he was himself the head. In return for sovereign ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan

... through a conversion of the race to loyalty and brotherly love; in short, through practical application of the Christian virtues. This change in Galds' point of view was foreshadowed in Alma y vida, where one tyranny (absolutism) is replaced by another (parliamentarism); without soul, "wickedness, corruption, injustice continue to reign among men." In his old age the reformer appeared to renounce his faith in vote or revolution, and to place himself by the side of Tolstoy. The note which rings with increasing ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos

... Moreover, those great popular rights which we now most zealously defend have generally been extorted in the strife of classes and parties, sometimes from kings, and sometimes from princes and nobles. Where there has been no opposition to absolutism these rights have not been secured; but whenever and wherever the people have been a power they have imperiously made their wants known, and so far as they have been reasonable they have been finally secured,—perhaps after angry ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord

... of the human race there can be found no evidence more damming to absolutism and the union of Church and State than is to be found in the degraded, besotted condition of the common people of France immediately proceeding ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard

... accompanied by report after report from the rest of Germany, shaking the old structure of absolutism like the repeated shocks of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... The unchecked absolutism of a Socialist State will hardly be palatable to Socialist workers who have been told that Socialism means freedom, and these see the only solution in the establishment of Anarchism: "The damnable idea of being marshalled ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker

... stedfastly tending; but, at the same time, her sagacity and prudence enabled her to ward off the immediate result. She secured her throne,—she was able to maintain, in the rocking of those movements, her own political and spiritual supremacy,—she made gain and capital for absolutism out of them,—the inevitable reformation she herself assumed, and set bounds to: whatever new freedom there was, was still the freedom of her will; she could even secure the throne of her successor: it was mischief for Charles I. that she was nursing. The consequence of all this was—the ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon

... slang, so little noble, so little serious, so far from tragic! The disappointment had been too sudden and dreadful to leave him with any ears for those tones that went to his mother's heart. He had no pity or sense of the pathos that was in them. He stood in his young absolutism disgusted, miserable. This man his father!—this man! so talking, so thinking. Young Philip stood with his back to the group, more miserable than words could say. He heard some movement behind, but he was too sick of heart to think what it was, until suddenly he felt a hand on his shoulder, ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant

... so unhappily distinguished, the arts flourished, and the spread of political liberty became apparent; although it is equally certain that they were at the same time fatal alike to the aristocracy and to the magistrature; and that they rapidly paved the way to the absolutism of Louis XIV, to the shameless saturnalia of the Regency, and to the dishonouring and degrading excesses of Louis XV, who may justly be said to have prepared by his licentiousness ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe

... principles of absolutism, and not those of a regulated liberty, were to rule in Louisiana. The new French colony was to be the child of the Crown. Cargoes of emigrants, willing or unwilling, were to be shipped by authority to the fever-stricken banks of the Mississippi,—cargoes made up in part ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman

... told, it may be thought that the correspondents' complaints were of no very serious character. That depends on how they are looked at. I have no taste for cavilling or grumbling over events that are past. Surely, however, there is a middle way somewhere to be found between the absolutism of a general in the field, who may gag the correspondents or treat them as camp followers, and the clear right of the British public under our free institutions to have news dealing with the progress of their ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh

... with the line of conduct he has conceived in advance. Already Reardon had spoken with far more bluntness than he proposed; involuntarily, his voice slipped from earnest determination to the note of absolutism, and, as is wont to be the case, the sound of these strange tones instigated him to further utterances of the same kind. He lost control of himself. Amy's last reply went through him like an electric shock, and for the moment he was a mere husband defied by his wife, the male stung to exertion of ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing

... customs of the Bulgarians, especially when they had come under something like a settled government. The nobles seem to have resembled our 'ealdormen' in the very earliest phase of our history, and to have exercised considerable influence, notwithstanding the absolutism of the ruling head. From living only in tents of skins, a practice still adhered to in the warmer months, they built wooden huts in winter. They clothed themselves in long robes, and wore caps which were doffed reverentially ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson

... we are now entering upon—who is it to be fought between? Absolutism and Democracy, perhaps some will answer. Not quite, I think; that contest was practically settled by the great French Revolution; it is only its embers which are burning now: or at least that is so in the countries which are not belated like Russia, for instance. Democracy, ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris

... wants arose, and wisdom and experience warranted, new developments, new adaptations, and daily increasing excellence. The constitutional element once removed, there was no medium between and safeguard against absolutism; on the one hand, and on the other anarchy, or the reign ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell

... even Miss Wodehouse, looking anxiously after them, heard what further words they were that Mr Wentworth said in her ear. "I am for your service, however and wherever you want me," said the Curate, with a young man's absolutism. Heaven knows he had enough to do with his own troubles; but he remembered no obstacle which could prevent him from dedicating all his time and life to her as he spoke. When Lucy reached her own room, she threw herself upon the sofa, and wept like a woman inconsolable; but it was somehow ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant

... journal has attempted any refutation of the charge. It cannot be refuted, for it is true. And be assured, my dear sir, it is no extravagant prediction when I say that the question of Popery and Protestantism, or Absolutism and Republicanism, which in these two opposite categories are convertible terms, is fast becoming and will shortly be the great absorbing question, not only of this country but of the whole civilized world. I speak not at random; ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse

... their way to lunch, even late at night? Are they always out of petrol? I can understand and admire the independence that follows upon overwork; but when was their overwork done? The only tenable theory that I have evolved is that Lord NORTHCLIFFE (whose concurrent rise to absolutism is another phenomenon of my absence) has engaged them all to patrol the streets in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 3, 1917 • Various

... departures, even upon apparent necessity, if condoned or permitted by public judgment is in the establishment of precedents whereby greater and more dangerous infractions of organic law may be invited, tolerated, and justified, till government takes on a form of absolutism in one form or another, fatal to free institutions, fatal to a government of law, and fatal to ...
— History of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, • Edumud G. Ross

... Bayle (d. 1706) and Locke (d. 1704), and both Bayle and Locke, though in different measures, owed their security to the stout valour with which the Dutch defended their own land, and taught the English how to defend theirs, against the destructive pretensions of Catholic absolutism. Of these memories Diderot probably thought no more than Descartes thought about the learning of Grotius or the art of Rembrandt. It was not the age, nor was his the mind, for historic sentimentalism. "The more I see of this country," he wrote ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley

... practice among the people, the origin of which is lost in antiquity. The kings of Castile, of Spain and of Navarre were obliged at their accession, either in person, or by deputy, to swear to observe these fueros; and this oath was really kept. While the cortes were trampled upon and absolutism reigned both in Spain and in France, the Basque fueros were respected; in Spain to the middle of the 19th century and in France down to the Revolution. The fueros thus observed made the Basque provinces a land apart (una tierra ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various

... inquisition, then across Europe and Asia, to the mines of Nertschinsk, in the ever-frozen Altai. We lost all we had on earth; seemingly we were always beaten; but Portugal and Spain enjoy to-day a constitutional regime that is an improvement on absolutism. France has expelled forever the Bourbons, and universal suffrage, spelt now by the French people, is a progress, is a promise of a great democratic future. Germany has in part conquered free speech and ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski



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