Sentence Examples:
Settled by races who had inherited or achieved whatever of constitutional liberty existed in the world, with no hereditary monarch, or governing oligarchy, or established religion on the soil, with every opportunity to avoid all the vices and to better all the virtues of the old polities, the era before which all history had been appointed to prepare the way seemed to have arrived, when the just relations of personal liberty and civil government were to be established forever.
Are we forever to submit to be cheated out of our national rights by an oligarchy as despicable as it is detestable, because it clothes itself in the forms of democracy, and allows us the ceremonies of choice, the name of power, and the permission to register the edicts of the sovereign?
Strongly opposed to the abandonment of the principle of the equality of nations in times of peace I naturally opposed the affirmative guaranty and endeavored to persuade the President to accept as a substitute for it a self-denying or negative covenant which amounted to a promise of "hands-off" and in no way required the formation of an international oligarchy to make it effective.
Were a score of the professional politicians of our land to frame a Constitution for us in full accordance with their own schemes and choice, we would soon find ourselves under an oligarchy of schemers, who cared for the Republic only so far as to secure from it their own fame and emolument.
There is no harm here, but the harm comes, and the odium also, and justly, when an aristocratic government degenerates into an oligarchy of privilege without responsibility, and when socially it is not "superiority in character or quality" but political cunning, opulence and sycophancy that are the touchstones to recognition and acceptance.
The Slovaks are a race whose artistic and musical gifts, whose innate sense of color and poetry have won the sympathy and admiration of all who know them; and their systematic oppression at the hands of the Magyar oligarchy is one of the greatest infamies of the last fifty years.
A suspicion existed that the former aimed at the establishment of an oligarchy: whence their advice was frequently received with jealousy and distrust, and their resolutions were sometimes negatived by the greater number of their inferiors.
Constitution of Carthage Council Magistrates Aristotle, who died about fifty years before the commencement of the first Punic war, describes the constitution of Carthage as having changed from a monarchy to an aristocracy, or to a democracy inclining towards oligarchy, for he designates it by both names.
The multitude remained without leaders in consequence of the material advantages which the governing oligarchy was able to offer to all ambitious or necessitous men of rank, and was satisfied with the crumbs, which in the form of electoral corruption or otherwise fell to it from the table of the rich.
It had not abandoned the idea of resuming the struggle by taking advantage of those complications that might be easily foreseen between Rome and the eastern powers; and, as the failure of the magnificent scheme of Hamilcar and his sons had been due mainly to the Carthaginian oligarchy, the chief object was internally to reinvigorate the country for this new struggle.
Things had already reached such a pass, that the only effective barrier against family rule and its consequences had to be found in a government strictly oligarchical; and this was the reason why even the party otherwise opposed to the oligarchy agreed to restrict the freedom of election.
The decision lay in the hands of the middle party; it was that party which after the fall of Gracchus had, in league with his adherents, protected reform against the oligarchy, and it alone was now able in concert with the oligarchy to set a limit to reform.
For the execution of his task two methods of operation offered themselves; Marius might attempt to overthrow the oligarchy either as -imperator- at the head of the army, or in the mode prescribed by the constitution for constitutional changes: his own past career pointed to the former course, the precedent of Gracchus to the latter.
It was only now, under the incomparably wretched government of the oligarchy, that the solidity and strength with which the statesmen of the fourth and fifth centuries had joined together the stones of their structure were thoroughly put to the test; the building, though shaken in various ways, still held out against this storm.
The Italian communities, compelled severally to choose between their twofold oppressors, already in numerous instances entered into negotiations with him, and caused the political rights, which had been won from the opposition party, to be guaranteed to them by formal separate treaties on the part of the general of the oligarchy.
To the aristocratic ultras this might seem a great concession; Sulla perceived that it was necessary to wrest these mighty levers out of the hands of the revolutionary chiefs, and that the rule of the oligarchy was not materially endangered by increasing the number of the burgesses.
He established the oligarchy on a more independent footing than ever, placed the magisterial power as a ministering instrument in its hands, committed to it the legislation, the courts, the supreme military and financial power, and furnished it with a sort of bodyguard in the liberated slaves and with a sort of army in the settled military colonists.
What a man of conservative views could do to save the old constitution, Sulla did; and he himself had a foreboding that, while he might doubtless erect a fortress, he would be unable to create a garrison, and that the utter worthlessness of the oligarchs would render any attempt to save the oligarchy vain.
The league of the democratic leaders with anarchy had obviously created a breach between the former and the burgesses of the city; and the oligarchy sought, not without at least momentary success, to enlarge this chasm and to draw over the masses to their side.
They have been ruled by an oligarchy, which has first confronted and then coalesced with the moneyed class, and the united orders have been forced to yield theoretical equality to almost the entire nation, while still retaining real authority in their own hands.
From that time, Esther and he became closer and closer companions, and as they more and more formed an oligarchy of two, a rearrangement of parties in the little parliament of home came about, to be upset again as Dot and Mat qualified for admission into that exclusive little circle.
Not until the second number was it revealed that the arch criminals were to be found in the exploiting class, a sinister combination, all-powerful, working to the detriment of the common people; an industrial oligarchy under whose rule the cowed wage slave toiled for his crust of bread.
It seems probable that there was a goodly measure of communism in the control and use of lands (tho not in other things), but this was largely confined to an oligarchy of the favored; whereas the masses lived in subjection, cut off from all but a meager share in the common lands.
The specialized, interdependent structure of civilization with its city control of the hinterland, its products and inhabitants, enabled the city-centered oligarchy to accumulate and concentrate wealth and monopolize power, to skim the cream from the available milk, monopolize the cream, distribute the skimmed milk judiciously and thus perpetuate its ascendancy through generations and centuries.
The net result, in every civilization, has been a ruling oligarchy, self-appointed and self-perpetuating, which has shaped policy, planned and directed administration, exercised authority and lived comfortably and at least semi-parasitically on the backs of the underlying urban and rural masses, sharing its sinecure with its middle class handymen.
From a multitude of local beginnings the struggle for expansion and consolidation led to ever larger aggregations of land, population, capital and wealth concentrated in the hands of an increasingly rich, powerful oligarchy, protected and defended by a military elite pushing itself ceaselessly toward a position from which it could make and enforce domestic policy and order.
Since the principle of private property has been implicit in every known civilization, the ownership of land, capital and consumer goods and services has been a prerogative of the ruling oligarchies, shared by them with their associates and dependents and used as their chief means of establishing and maintaining the "you work, I eat" principal of economic relationships.
It was directed by a central oligarchy and patrolled, defended and extended by a military force unified in theory but in practice grouped around the outstanding personalities and subjected to the vagaries and upsets always associated with power politics in the hands of military backed political despots.
No country can be protected, policed, and have its justice administered without taxes, and the provincials were not paying more, and were often paying much less, as well as paying it in a more just and rational way, than when they were being taxed by their own kings, their own oligarchies, or their own socialistic democracies.
Without doubt, it is hard to say what would have happened if, instead of being governed by the policy of Augustus, the world had fallen into the hands of an adventurous oligarchy like that which gathered around Alexander the Great; but we can at least affirm that the sagacity and prudence of Augustus, which twenty centuries afterward appear as inactivity, did much to avoid such disturbances, the consequences of which, in a world so exhausted, would have been grave.
And this is what disgusts us, that under cover of principles so dear to us all, independence and national honor, these brave men are sent to the battlefield to preserve for a tyrannical and venal oligarchy the right to share amongst themselves, and distribute as they please, the gold which is levied on the work of foreigners.
No one had more faithfully than Burke himself explained why the Whig oligarchy was obsolete; yet nothing would induce him ever to realize that the alternative to aristocratic government is democracy and that its absence was the cause of that disquiet of which he realized that Wilkes was but the symptom.
Both Catholics and Dissenters were excluded from all civil and military offices; the highest posts were generally given to Englishmen born and bred, and the country, Episcopalian only to a fractional extent, was ruled by a narrow Episcopalian oligarchy of wealthy landowners and prelates, who bartered Irish freedom for the place and power of their own families and dependents.
Anyone who reads the debates on the Reform Bill of 1831 will notice that the opposition rested at bottom on a profoundly pessimistic distrust of the people, and on the alleged necessity of an oligarchy vested with the power and duty of "framing laws to meet the vicious propensities of human nature."
A conquered Free City you may of course rule in person, or you may construct an oligarchy to govern for you, but the only safe way is to destroy it utterly, since 'that name of Liberty, those ancient usages of Freedom,' are things 'which no length of years and no benefits can extinguish in the nation's mind, things which no pains or forethought can uproot unless the citizens be utterly destroyed.'
Fearing every noble instinct, hostile to every grand idea, devoted to the material interests of an oligarchy of princes spoiled by a senseless education, of ministers who had sold their consciences, of speculators who subjected and sacrificed everything to gold, the only aim of such a government was to sow division everywhere.
It had happened in several Grecian states that the governing oligarchies, either by quarrels among their own members or by the general bad condition of the people under their government, were deprived of that hold upon the public mind which was essential to their power.
The mass of the people, in despair with their lot, would gladly have seconded him in such an attempt; while many even among the oligarchy might have acquiesced in his personal government, from the mere apprehension of something worse if they resisted it.
The power of the state was now usurped by a factious oligarchy, whose oppressions were more grievous than those of the worst tyrant; they at last became so intolerable, that the commonalty had recourse to arms, and fortified that part of the city which was exclusively inhabited by the plebeians, while others formed a camp on the Sacred Mount at some distance from Rome.
The military oligarchy were thinking not so much of saving the Fatherland as of saving themselves; a settlement which would have been satisfactory to their enemies would have demanded concessions which the German people, trained for forty years to expect an unparalleled victory, would have regarded as a defeat.
The ablest men would do better than the less able, but would have no tendency to displace them; and the ablest and the least able members of the industrial oligarchy alike would instinctively oppose, and would also be in a position to check, the practical development of any competition from without.
The private attachments of one man might easily be satisfied; but to satisfy the private attachments of a dozen, or of twenty men, would occasion a monopoly of all the principal employments of the government in a few families, and would lead more directly to an aristocracy or an oligarchy than any measure that could be contrived.
Had that person's oligarchy died with him, they would have been suppressed; as it is, I am aware of nothing in the manner of his death or of his life to prevent the free expression of the opinions of all whom his whole existence was consumed in endeavoring to enslave.
Systems based on principles as different as theocracy, monarchy, aristocracy, oligarchy, republic, democracy and near anarchy have proliferated freely, along with innovations without end that have sought to combine various desirable features of these possibilities.
Even those who first signalized themselves by opposition to the late King, acknowledged that his government was preferable to the oligarchy and military tyranny that followed; and the Presbyterians felt their horror of Episcopacy abate while contrasting the temperance of established supremacy with the violence of the numerous sects who strove for superiority as soon as the hierarchy was overthrown.
No crusade to redeem Eastern shrines from infidels, no struggle for the privilege of religious freedom, no insurrection for civil independence, has been more holy than this strife against the great curse and its abettors, who seek to make a land of freedom a land of bondage to substitute for a Union of freemen, miserable oligarchies controlled by breeders of slaves.
If then "State Socialism," like the benevolent despotisms and oligarchies of history, sometimes offers the purely material benefits which it brings in some measure to all classes, as a substitute for democratic government, it also favors democracy in those places where the small capitalists and related classes form a majority of the community.
Only instead of an organic order we may have an accidental and arbitrary, an order of the personal type, springing from the dexterity shown in some favorable moment, maintaining itself by force, and seeking to perpetuate itself in some form of hereditary oligarchy.
These dignitaries were appointed by the crown, chiefly from the ranks of the smaller landowners and rural clergy, and as a rule they comprised in practice a petty oligarchy whose conduct of public business was inspired by aristocratic, far more than by democratic, ideals.
The assembly of that island, a planter oligarchy, resented the new law from the mother country as an invasion of their constitutional rights, and stubbornly refused in their exasperation, even after a local dissolution, to perform duties that were indispensable for working the machinery of administration.
How secure this parliamentary oligarchy feels itself to be, when once the elections are over, appears from the absolutely cynical coolness with which the majority goes about what is called the work of 'invalidating' the election of members of the minority.
The qualification of a member of the new oligarchy was simply that he should live near the hall where the Convention met, and should be able to squeeze himself daily into the gallery during a debate, and now and then to attend with a pike for the purpose of blockading the doors.
This is our real offense to European oligarchy, that we will crush this foul rebellion, extinguish the slavery by which it was caused, make the Union stronger and more harmonious, and thus give a new impulse and an irresistible moral influence and power to free institutions.
They even proposed a Constitutional amendment which would have made slavery perpetual in the Republic; but the pampered frenzy of the slave oligarchy defied all remedies, and hurried it headlong into the bloody conspiracy which was to close forever its career of besotted lawlessness and crime.
They could not, as such professionals can in an oligarchy like ours, simply order the electors to vote for any nincompoop who was either rich and ambitious enough to give them, the professionals, money in return for their services, or needy and unscrupulous enough to be their hired servant.
Against the oligarchy combined he was helpless; but his preference for one group of oligarchs over another was still an asset, and he let it clearly be understood that such influence as he possessed would be exercised unreservedly in favor of any group that would undertake to punish the American rebels.
Such a class he wished to create in America, to connect closely, as the English oligarchy had connected itself closely, with the great moneyed interests, and to entrust with the large powers which in his judgment the central government of the Federation needed.
With strong natural sense, and rare force of will, he found himself, when first his mind began to open, a fatherless and motherless child, the chief of a great but depressed and disheartened party, and the heir to vast and indefinite pretensions, which excited the dread and aversion of the oligarchy then supreme in the United Provinces.
Under all these circumstances, it cannot be doubted, for a moment, that had Catiline and his friends entertained any real desire of ameliorating the condition of the masses, of extending the privileges, or improving the condition, of the discontented and suffering plebeians, they could have overturned the ancient fabric of Rome's world-conquering oligarchy.
Venice is usually conceived as an oligarchy: she was so during a period less than the half of her existence, and that including the days of her decline; and it is one of the first questions needing severe examination, whether that decline was owing in any wise to the change in the form of her government, or altogether, as assuredly in great part, to changes in the character of the persons of whom it was composed.
Kruger's methods and his ruthless military oligarchy were disapproved even by his own countrymen, and more especially by his own countrywomen, who now began to mistrust the continual story of Boer victory, and asked pitifully for permission themselves to seek for fathers, sons, and brothers from whom they never heard.
These natural changes, from a monarchy, primitive and just and limited, to an oligarchy of nobles, and the gradual subversion of their power by wealthy and enlightened citizens, and then the rise of demagogues, who became tyrants, have been illustrated in all ages of the world.
She no longer was the leader of dependent allies, submitting to her dictation in all external politics, serving under the officers she appointed, administering their internal affairs by oligarchies devoted to her purposes, and even submitting to be ruled by governors whom she put over them.
Strike out of our history the crimes of slavery, strike out the crimes, unparalleled for ferocity and brutality, committed by an oligarchy in its attempt to overthrow universal suffrage, and we may safely challenge for our national and State governments comparison with monarchy or aristocracy in their best and purest periods.
Slavery serves as a basis, as a nurse, for the most infamous and abject aristocracy or oligarchy that was ever built up in history, and any, even the best, the mildest, and the most honest oligarchy or aristocracy kills and destroys man and self-government.
The central offices, where news and propaganda were dramatized, were in another building, but as everything from that source had to pass the reviewing officer, a trusted member of the oligarchy himself, in his locked and guarded office, this did not introduce any danger of the wrong information going out to the public.
Sharp-featured, with a wire-drawn manner of efficiency and resolution about them, they had constituted almost another race among this practically enslaved people, maintaining for themselves a tolerable position despite the opposition of the oligarchy.
By this he meant the real principles by which the events of 1688 could be philosophically justified, when purged of all their vulgar and interested associations, raised above their connection with a territorial oligarchy, and based on reasoned and universal ideals.
Had not this power been given to the general government, the majorities in each state might have converted the state governments into oligarchies, aristocracies, monarchies or despotisms, that should not only have trampled upon the minorities, and defeated their enjoyment of the national constitution, but also introduced such factions and feuds into the national governments, as would have distracted its councils, and prostrated its power.
Her commercial policy was one of most irrational and intolerable restriction and repression; and till the end of Spanish rule on the American continent, the whole political power was retained by the court at Madrid, and administered in the colonies by an oligarchy of home-bred Spaniards.
Whenever we find a body of primitive law possessed as a class tradition by a political oligarchy it is likely to be thought of in this way just as a body of like tradition in the custody of a priesthood is certain to be thought of as divinely revealed.
The structure of the Confederate Government, practically a military despotism, founded on the enforced servitude and sale of human beings, reared and upheld by the lives, the fortunes, and the constrained or misguided energies of a deluded and chivalrous people, to feed the vain ambition of an oligarchy, was toppling to the ruin that six months later overwhelmed it.
Succeeding the Heroic Age, there followed the "storm and stress" period in Greek life, when monarchies were overturned and gave place to oligarchies, and they, in turn, to tyrannies; when commerce was developing, colonies were being sent out to distant parts of the Mediterranean, and the aristocratic classes were enjoying the results of wealth and travel and the interchange of social courtesies.
The power of the oligarchy, which resulted from the Revolution of 1688, and the unbounded corruption by which, for seventy years afterwards, their power was maintained, has been less the subject of observation or censure by subsequent writers, for the very obvious reason that the popular party, who had gained the victory at the Revolution, were during all that period in power, and they have been in no hurry to expose or decry these degrading, but to them most profitable, abuses.
He curtailed the enormous privileges of the nobility, abolished the power of the Senate, made laws on his own authority; in a word, he changed the constitution of the country, hitherto an oligarchy, and forced the States to invest him with absolute power.
Then follows the treatment of oligarchy, democracy, commonwealth and tyranny, and of the various powers of government (?), and independent investigation of revolution, and of the means of preserving states (?), and a further treatment of democracy and oligarchy, and of the different offices of the state (?), and finally a return to the discussion of the right form of constitution (?, ?).
The sooner the power in this country is transferred from the landed oligarchy, which has so misused it, and is placed absolutely in the hands of the intelligent middle and industrious classes, the better for the condition and destinies of this country
An Irish government of sectarian ascendancy and oligarchy combined, controlled, and held in precarious subordination to the government of Great Britain by intrigue and corruption, had ended in murderous and ruinous conflict of political parties, social classes, and religious sects.
If he defends the action of a native oligarchy against the leaders of the populace, he does so by an explanation (more or less explicit) that the oligarchy is more truly national, that is more truly communal, than the engineered expression of opinion of which the demagogues (as he will call them) have been the mouthpieces.
Here the object of the insurgents was in most cases to break down the local oligarchy, who engrossed all municipal office and oppressed the meaner citizens; but in less numerous instances their end was to win charters from lords (almost always ecclesiastical lords) who had hitherto refused to grant them.
"Whence it follows that you wish to substitute the bourgeois oligarchy, the privilege of the franc, for our aristocracy?"
It is a universally received axiom, that the foundation of a republic must be in the information of its people; and that whilst the monarchical governments of other countries may be successfully administered by an oligarchy of intelligence, a government like our own cannot be carried on without an extensive diffusion of knowledge amongst those who have to select its very machinery.
He was a prominent member of the national committees, and addressed an ode to Napoleon the liberator, expecting from the military successes of the French general, not merely the overthrow of the effete Venetian oligarchy, but the establishment of a free republican government.
It now behooves us to take a bold and determined stand in defense of the inalienable rights of ourselves and of our fellow men, and to avenge the multiplicity of wrongs, social and political, which we have suffered at the hands of a villainous oligarchy.
Thus, so far as the public profession of magic affected the constitution of savage society, it tended to place the control of affairs in the hands of the ablest man: it shifted the balance of power from the many to the one: it substituted a monarchy for a democracy, or rather for an oligarchy of old men; for in general the savage community is ruled, not by the whole body of adult males, but by a council of elders.
There were no general synods or councils, no graded hierarchy culminating in a spiritual head, no oligarchy of ministers and elders; but rather a federation of small communities, each being a sovereign unit, and connected with the others solely by the ties of a common faith, common sympathies, and common sufferings.
Freedom of Knowledge is the corollary to Freedom of Thought: in the society of the future no hierarchy or oligarchy of intellect will close its doors upon the masses; none will find delight in either sensuous or intellectual pleasure obtained at the cost of the baser condition of others.
Passing on, with the ease of a man at home in all periods of history, to the dynastic change of 1688, he described the Whig settlement not as a Venetian oligarchy, but as an aristocracy of freeholders, while from the American rebellion of the following century he drew the moral that a revolution with very little provocation may be just, and a democracy of very large dimensions may be safe.
Kings, kaisers, emperors, czars, hereditary aristocracies and oligarchies of every kind, however necessary or useful factors they may have been in certain early stages of the transition from barbarism to civilization, are now recognizable as drags on the chariot wheel of progress.
By the balance of power they understand everything you please: the level of production attained, the degree of differentiation of classes, the number of organized workers, the total funds at the disposal of the trade unions, sometimes the results of the last parliamentary elections, frequently the degree of readiness for compromise on the part of the ministry, or the degree of effrontery of the financial oligarchy.
No king, emperor, or despotic sultan, would dare to extort from his subjects three-fourths of the productions of their toil; yet this oligarchy, composed of men who, from long practice, have come to look upon the people as their vassals, and the fruits of their labor as lawful spoils, demand and receive as their toll from one-half to three-fourths of the entire farm products of the country.
By corrupt legislation and ex parte judicial decisions, it has destroyed all the old republican landmarks, overridden the provisions of the constitution, and substituted for the government prepared for us by our forefathers an oligarchy that rules the land and holds the people at its mercy, and their property as its lawful booty.
The final determination of this question will decide whether we are to live under the republic planned and formed for us by our revolutionary ancestors, or are to submit to the oligarchy shaped for us by recent enactments and decisions in favor of a class of men, who, for the sake of private gain, are overturning and destroying our free institutions.
In seven years it revolutionized the mind of the most intelligent nation of Europe, bent to its will the proudest legislative assembly in the world, prostrated an aristocracy more powerful than the oligarchies of antiquity, and overthrew a system rooted to the earth by the steady growth and fostering culture of centuries.
While preserving its assembly and its town organization, it tended to encourage and develop, even in that fierce democracy, those elements of a conservative party which had been called into existence some years before by the disloyalty and tyranny of the ecclesiastical oligarchy.
There was, however, this difference that, unlike the Lombard cities, the Germans ever acknowledged the supremacy of the emperor, and never developed either into complete oligarchies or democracies, though in their statutes when they were at the height of their power, it was distinctly stated that decisions in important matters did not rest "with the general council, but with the people."
The failure of that and other plots, in Florence and elsewhere, sufficed to prove that the artisans, well employed and protected by the laws, had no concern to upset the orderly and business-like "tyranny" either of one great capitalist or of a prince, in the interest of an oligarchy which would rule no better, which gave them no more of political privilege than did he, and which was less ready than he with public gifts.
There has been traced, though only in outline, his attempts to "be King" as he and his mother understood it, his successful struggle with the Whig oligarchy, the decade when to a great extent he was his own minister, his defeat at the hands of Fox, and his subsequent victory over that statesman, and the appointment as Prime Minister of his favorite, Pitt.
The oligarchy awakened to the danger which threatened it, and at first gradually, and them by more and more open effort, these societies were assailed or suppressed, till they with the death of the great men who founded them, passed out of existence, no one perhaps knowing precisely how.
The princes were resolved to keep their independence, and their plans for unity always implied a governing oligarchy with serious restraint placed on the power of the Emperor; while the Emperors, who would never submit to be controlled by an oligarchy of German princes, and who found that they could not carry out their schemes for an autocratic unity, were at least able to wreck any other.