Sentence Examples:
Every year these scourges of the Archipelago wander in one direction or another, making their rendezvous on some uninhabited island, and carrying devastation to all the small settlements around; robbing, destroying, killing, or taking captive all they meet with.
A convulsion that destroyed the lives of upwards of a million human beings, besides leading to military despotism, and wars which for two-and-twenty years were the scourge of mankind, can never, among well-regulated minds, be spoken of without abhorrence.
Fournier de Flaix, maintaining the same proposition with the same statistical arguments, and admitting that ''alcohol is a special scourge for the individual who indulges in it,'' yet concluded that ''alcoholism is not a scourge which menaces the European race.''
Against wild beasts, or savages like himself, he might prevail by cunning or by strength; but against drought and famine, pestilence and earthquake, he was helpless, and he regarded these scourges as malevolent beings, made like himself, only more formidable.
Yet nature inflicts terrible punishment for the neglect of the appointed and visible warnings and actual premonitory scourges, amongst which are the mosquitoes and the tribes of insects that only breed in stagnant water and live in its noxious exhalations.
In their lives the Magi claim to practice a rigid asceticism, making the earth their bed and subsisting wholly on fruit, vegetables and bread, besides submitting to frequent painful penances from fasting, scourging and the endurance of fatiguing exercises.
Remember that just in proportion as you contribute, by your example, to discourage this species of gambling, just in the same proportion will you contribute to stay the progress of a tremendous scourge, and to enforce the execution of good and salutary laws.
The percentage of civilized men who breathe correctly is quite small, and the result is shown in contracted chests and stooping shoulders, and the terrible increase in diseases of the respiratory organs, including that dread monster, Consumption, "the white scourge."
Bands of outcasts from various nations, who had settled on Spanish territory in the West Indies, at first to forage on the cattle of Hispaniola, organized into pirate crews, and, under the name of buccaneers, became frightful scourges of the commerce of Spain.
The soldiers and marines of the Growler fought bravely, but Colonel Mitchell seeing that resistance was hopeless, retired, scourging the enemy as he withdrew, with well-directed volleys, and strewing the ground with more than two hundred dead and wounded.
Despotic monarchs sincerely anxious to improve mankind are naturally led to endeavor, by acts of legislation, to force society into the paths which they believe to be good, and such men, acting under such motives, have sometimes been the scourges of mankind.
After a short interval the doors were barred, the lights extinguished; and from praying, the congregation proceeded to groaning, crying, and finally, being worked up into a kind of ecstatic fury, applied the scourge to their uncovered shoulders without mercy.
It may be that thus, to a large extent, the propagation of some of the greatest scourges of humanity can be checked, viz.: of tuberculosis, alcoholism, and crime which, as shown previously, flourish on the soil prepared for them by hereditary syphilis.
We have better native chestnuts in this country than any foreign chestnut and the blunder of trying to get something different is costing the country millions of dollars through the scourge of the chestnut blight, which threatens to wipe out the industry.
Although, therefore, some account of its establishment in that kingdom has been already given, it is necessary to enter somewhat more particularly into its origin and progress in that superstitious and afflicted country, where this scourge and disgrace to humanity long existed.
The fire continued to advance majestically, as it were, swallowing up every thing in its way, preceded by countless animals of various kinds, that bounded along with howls of fear, pursued by the scourge, which threatened to overtake them at every step.
The description of the symptoms, and also the various circumstances of horror and distress attending this dreadful scourge, have been derived from Thucydides, who furnished the facts with great accuracy, having been himself a spectator and a sufferer under this calamity.
Captain Burton being still under the influences of this terrible scourge, and very ill, even to absolute prostration, and occasionally wandering in his mind, he gave up his projected plans, and we returned at once to Zanzibar, reaching it on the 6th March.
An instance of death occurring after vaccination is now eagerly seized and commented upon; yet seventy years have not elapsed since this disease might fairly be termed the scourge of mankind, and an enemy more extensive and more insidious than even the plague.
Not satisfied with the weak labor of American slaves; another continent was overrun, to supply stronger hands, and Africa was made to contribute millions of slaves to swell American population, or sink there to premature death under the lashing scourge of cruel tasks.
There are acts of violence that we read of almost every day, wherein the rights of northern men are stricken down, where they are sent back with indignities, where they are scourged, tarred, feathered, and murdered, and no inquiry made as to the cause.
Women as well as men took part in these fanatical exercises, marching about half-naked, whipping each other frightfully, flinging themselves on the earth in the most public places of the towns and scourging their bare backs and shoulders till the blood flowed.
Once, while exhorting his hearers to repent, he scourged his own shoulders so unmercifully with a chain that his audience shuddered and wept; and one man, overcome by emotion, rushed to the pulpit, secured the chain, and, disrobing, flogged himself to death.
The man "continually discontent" is an unfortunate under the scourge of the invisible Powers, and it is with very good reason that people avoid him, for he is condemned to be a disturber of the peace, who, doomed to solitude and suffering, atones for secret misdoings.
Upon this scale, commercial sharpness has an air of patriotism; and I can imagine the man, so far from haggling over the scourge for a few Solomon islanders, prepared to oppress rival firms, overthrow inconvenient monarchs, and let loose the dogs of war.
For this dispute is not like others in philosophy, where the vanquished can only dread ridicule, contempt and disappointment; here, whether victor or vanquished, your opponent has to dread, beside ecclesiastical censure, the scourges, chains and pillories of the courts of Law.
I see in his fat women and shadowy, pathetic girls, his horrible children, half child, half embryo, in all the lascivious monstrous imagery of the privately published designs, the phantasms that from the beginning have defied the scourge and the hair shirt.
In the meanwhile, the two scourges marched towards one another, and the whites and redskins could already calculate with certainty how many minutes were left them, in their last refuge, ere they were buried beneath the waters, or devoured by the flames.
Whomsoever they accused were cast into her peculiar prisons, inaccessible to the inquiries of justice; and it was rumored that the torture of the rack, or scourge, had been inflicted in the presence of a female tyrant, insensible to the voice of prayer or of pity.
It is a public misfortune that the most powerful poet of a nation should not have better understood his role, and that, unlike those Hebrew prophets who scourged because they loved, he should devote himself proudly and systematically to the flattery of his countrymen.
Seven or eight bangs, a rattle, an amazing cluttering and whistling overhead, then the explosions of the little shells, which scarred the opposite hillside in a long row of puffs of brown dust and blue-white smoke, suggesting a lash from a knotted scourge.
The helpless fear caused by the violence of the disease in its earlier days, when the suddenness of its attack on an unprepared people paralyzed comprehension, has given place to knowledge such as we can scarcely duplicate for any of the other scourges of humanity.
A more than mortal air of divinity shines in the countenance of the Redeemer, who, alone and unsupported, throws consternation into a crowd of people intent upon their worldly interests, and with a mere scourge of ropes, from which they fly in the utmost terror.
These have been, in reality, the true scourge of this country; these were the moving desert, the constantly ascending sea, which had already engulfed forests, villages, even towns, under its billows of sand, and driven before it the terrified inhabitants of the coast.
To the French nation belongs the task of preserving the world from this terrible scourge, and of repairing the mischiefs occasioned by the shameful carelessness, or the perfidious malignity of those, who view with indifference the utter destruction of all kinds of liberty.
This scourge appears to be a nervous affection, associated with erythema and degeneration of the skin, and dependent partly on the effect of the sun, especially in spring, and partly on the consumption of unhealthy maize as food; its most usual termination is in dementia.
These he frequently ordered to be scourged or beaten with sticks in the Forum, and then, after he had obliged them to pass through the amphitheater as a public spectacle, commanded them to be sold for slaves, or else banished them to some rocky islands.
A young man in the confessional experienced such horror at his sins that, incensed against himself, and without informing the father, he scourged himself through the streets with such severity that he fell down as one dead, and was considered as such.
As they came riding along beside a wood, a dwarf, who was puffed up like a toad, had tied the horses' tails together, and walked beside them, beating them remorselessly with a four-knotted scourge until they bled, thinking thereby to be doing something wonderful.
The cruel treatment of the insolvent debtors of the state, is attested, and was perhaps mitigated by a very humane edict of Constantine, who, disclaiming the use of racks and of scourges, allots a spacious and airy prison for the place of their confinement.
Whomsoever they accused were cast into her peculiar prisons, inaccessible to the inquiries of justice; and it was rumored, that the torture of the rack, or scourge, had been inflicted in the presence of the female tyrant, insensible to the voice of prayer or of pity.
They dug holes for themselves in the shingle, spread their greatcoats atop, and joked away discomfort even though death stalked among them and the terrible scourge, cholera, they hoped they had left behind them, claimed not a few victims before morning.
These pilgrims, who were often from distant provinces, used to come with bare feet, sometimes with torches in their hands, or bearing heavy crosses, or scourging their bodies, or with a halter around their necks and manacles on their hands, as if they were criminals.
I allude to the loathsome disease, which Heaven has sent as the severest scourge of licentious intercourse between the sexes; and which broke out with all the virulence of an epidemic in almost every quarter of Europe, in a very short time after the discovery of America.
Let a hundred men anywhere be told that if they do not abandon their faith, their homes will be burned, their business ruined, their wives ravished, their children brained, and they themselves scourged and beheaded, and a proportion of them will flinch.
It would surely be the noblest gratification, if in return, at this period, Europe, by extending her benefits and improvements to Egypt and to Greece, could free them from the most cruel scourge of countries, once the most civilized and polished in the world.
It first appeared upon the scene when the country was seething with discontent, the result of the prolonged period of financial and industrial depression that began in 1873 and like a scourge spread rapidly over the country, leaving desolation and gloom in its wake.
Possessed as they are of immense droves of horses should they continue their present predatory and warlike habits, they may in time become a scourge to the civilized frontiers on either side of the mountains, as they are at present a terror to the traveler and trader.
They said, that two giants were seen peeping out of the clouds, and threatening, with terrible countenances, gigantic frowns, and high-sounding words, that they would return next year on the same thirteenth day of July, with a greater scourge than they then felt.
Imprisonment, scourging, flogging, and starvation, were awarded by him without reference to any authority, and only some who were convicted of arson were sent to the town for what was called the gypsy trial, and were then legally condemned to suffer capital punishment.
The cost of these chicks will depend upon the breeding that is behind them, upon whether they are blood-tested to eliminate bacillary white diarrhea (a scourge of young chicks) and the general care that has been taken in the hatchery to produce good, livable chicks.
First, then, upon the first buffalo that appeared in the appointed place, there was seen coming Wickedness, adorned with great art and judgment, who was shown being chased, goaded and beaten by six cavaliers likewise figured most ingeniously as Scourging, or rather, Scourges.
In our large cities, where this insane contempt of health and life is sanctioned by the uniform practice of the God-forgetting multitude, this fell destroyer snatches his prey from the ranks of fashion by scores, and scourges them more fatally than the pestilence.
He made himself a scourge and a pestilence to his country; therefore, beyond all other men, he has become odious, and therefore, historian after historian, as they mention his name, hardly dare, in the service of truth, to say one word to lessen his infamy.
While he allows free play to the predatory instincts of the warriors in raids on other tribes, he guards his own people from the scourge of civil war, to which the ceaseless quarrels of the various districts with each other would otherwise continually give occasion.
The young patricians, under such a system, became the scourge of the state, for nothing remained safe from their violence or their lust, when the monopoly of judicial office by their friends and relatives insured them impunity for every excess, however flagrant or disgraceful.
Some among them, who carried short-handled scourges twisted of several thongs and terminating in bits of lead, detached themselves from time to time from the group, and walked here and there with the uncertain gait of drunken men, casting jeering looks on the prisoners.
There were two grooms, countrymen, who had run away on the onset of the thieves, but came sneaking back again, to be soundly rated by the Prioress, who threatened to send them home again or have them well scourged, but finally laughed and forgave them.
The streets, being only partially paved, can never be perfectly cleaned, and stagnant water remains in the kennels at all seasons; this and the exhalations from the swamps in warm weather, produce that pestilential scourge with which the place is annually afflicted.
She was more than half inclined to this view of the case herself, and the eminent religious authorities who were consulted in the matter advised her to scourge herself without mercy, and to exorcise the figures, both celestial and infernal, which continued to appear before her.
In its progress through the world genius is inevitably scourged and crowned with thorns and done to death; inevitably, I say, for the vast majority of men hate and despise what is superior to them: Don Quixote, too, was trodden into the mire by the swine.
Even now, though the wounded had all been collected, the surgeons had their hands more than full, for typhoid fever and dysentery, those scourges which ever dog the footsteps of an army, had claimed many victims, and these required the most careful attention.
If the accused afterwards persisted in his opinions, he was considered as one committing violence on his own conscience, and treated as an incorrigible heretic and disturber of the peace, and as such banished, imprisoned, scourged, or hanged, as the enormity of his heretical opinions might require.
For near a year he continued to scourge this unfortunate city, by urging the lower classes of people to murder and pillage; till, at the insurrection which took place in the spring of 1793, he was arrested by the insurgents, tried, and sentenced to the guillotine.
The crime of incest is by no means unknown among them; rum, the greatest scourge and curse of the Indian race, is undoubtedly the principal cause of this dreadful corruption: but is it not strange that religion should have so little effect in reforming their manners?
I need not describe it, save to say that all along the way the condemned, each in a separate cart, were tortured in a revolting manner with scourges, razors, and red-hot pincers, so that several succumbed to their sufferings before reaching the pyre intended for them.
Strictly speaking, this terrible scourge cannot be said to be in any sense a disease peculiar to warm climates, for the one climatic condition that appears to check the course of epidemics of this disease is extreme heat, which always moderates their virulence as long as it lasts.
The physicians say that that is because the malignity of the distemper is abating, wherefore men scarce fear it now, and come freely abroad, not in despair, as they did when it was so virulent a scourge, but because they fear it so much less than before.
These phenomena being often attended by the destruction of the results of laborious industry, and even of human life itself, it became a matter of urgency to devise means whereby the anger of the preternatural powers might be appeased, and a cessation of the successive scourges effected.
When he learned that he was sitting in a wretched corner of an irregular house, with a felon, who had so lately been scourged and banished as a swindler and impostor, his modest nature took the alarm, and he was shocked, instead of being moved with pity.
Some were further on, where the white furies lash like living whips, and scourge and sting and scurry; and there the pilgrims were hardly visible, for the waters swept over them like a veil, and they looked in their weirdness and muteness like martyr ghosts.
Horace Greeley, with all his professions of purity, justice and humanity, will shield an anti-slavery thief at every peril of his conscience, and scourge the thieves of all other parties like Tacitus, or Diogenes, and so will the leaders of the American and Democratic parties.
It was the beginning of the month of October, and some sharp frosts had rid the land of mosquitoes and gnats, which during the hot season abound in myriads near watercourses and beneath the leafy arches of the virgin forest, being one of its worst scourges.
The obedient provinces, thus scourged and blasted for their obedience, were not advised to improve their condition by joining hands with their sister States, who had just constituted themselves by their noble resistance to royal and ecclesiastical tyranny into a free and powerful commonwealth.
"Each bench had before superintended, or left to its inferior officers, the construction of its own scourges, which varied according to accident or caprice; nor could it ever be ascertained by the mere number of lashes ordered what degree of pain the culprit was likely to have suffered."
The officers of the companies from behind, with scourges, flogged every man, constantly urging them forward, so that many of them falling into the sea, perished, and many more were trampled alive under foot by one another; and no regard was paid to any that perished.
The king, deserted by his troops, and detested by his people for having brought so terrible a scourge upon them by his reckless conduct, now sued for peace; but King Richard would give him no terms except dethronement, and this he was forced to accept.
This exterminating scourge is said to have been introduced by Captain Cook, and many of the contemporaries of those who fell victims to it, are still living; and the deep furrows which remain in some of their countenances, shew how narrowly they escaped the same premature destiny.
He doubled his fasts, wore a hair shirt, slept on the bare ground, scourged himself with assiduity and ardor; became the confessor of Queen Isabella, and therefore of great political importance, inasmuch as she followed his counsel, not alone in things spiritual, but also in things temporal.
She knew the contrast the girl must be drawing, between the bright little meal, with its simple service and clever talk, and those dreary formal dinners at home when old Anthony sometimes never spoke at all, or again used his caustic tongue like a scourge.
The other was known to be one of the most formidable scourges of mankind, capable at its worst of hideous disfigurement and ruinous hereditary transmission, but not at all so common as the more trifling ailment, and alleged by some authorities to be dying out like typhus or plague.
I could pile anecdote on anecdote upon the same melancholy theme, but my heart sickens as I record them; and that which I have just narrated will sufficiently demonstrate the improbability of this terrific scourge ever being expelled the country by the precautionary measures of the natives.
He commanded that the strait should be scourged with three hundred lashes, and that a set of fetters should be let down into it as a farther punishment: moreover Herodotus had heard, but does not believe, that he even sent irons for the purpose of branding it.
Large herds of deer had been allowed to overrun the country and become a scourge to the industrious peasants, who were compelled to look on quietly while the animals, protected by law, grazed without hindrance over their cultivated fields, or suffer the heaviest penalties if they resisted.
Their cowls were snatched off, and bandied about, their hats crushed over their ears, their veils stuffed in their mouths to stifle their outcries, their rosaries converted into scourges; and the laughter when a string of them passed to the doors was long and loud.
If threats and persuasions proved ineffectual, he had often recourse to violence; the scourge and the rack were called in to supply the deficiency of argument, and every art of cruelty was employed to subdue such inflexible, and, as it appeared to the Pagans, such criminal, obstinacy.
Without some such system of preliminary notification no adequate statistics can be collected as to the prevalence of venereal diseases in New Zealand, and no conclusion could be arrived at in the future as to the effect of the whole or any part of the program for combating these scourges.
The gentlemen listened attentively, and traced the sounds to the stranger's room, the door of which they instantly burst open, and found him upon his knees in bed, in the act of scourging himself with the most unrelenting severity, his body streaming with blood.
Overhead a few dim, hazy stars shivered on the ragged skirts of trailing gray clouds, and the ceaseless rustle of the shuddering poplars formed a mournful accompaniment to the muttering of the ocean, whose weary waves were sobbing themselves to rest, like scourged but unconquered children.
I do not know when I ceased, if ever I did cease, to wince at some of his pronunciations, but with time they ceased to present themselves as crimes for scourging, and came to be regarded as misfortunes, as penalties that must be endured for seeing him and enjoying him.
While, for this purpose, they are binding him, on Defendant crying out, "I am a Roman citizen," the binding ceases, no scourging commences: the next day he is released, and the "chief priests and all their council" are "sent for," and Defendant is "set before them."
The King has long been deeply impressed with the ravages of consumption and other forms of tuberculosis, and when, comparatively recently, an association for the prevention of this terrible scourge was established, he not only became its president, but took an active part in its deliberations.
And so they did, and in a short time he was led back to the place from whence he came, there to be put to the worst death that could be thought of; for the scourge, the sword, and the stake brought Faithful to his end.
He was betrayed by a disciple and taken before the priests and afterwards before Pilate, who ordered him to be scourged and crucified, and beneath his cross the multitude passed, wagging their heads, inviting him to descend if he could detach himself from the nails.
Regarding war, as did all lads of my age, rather as a stage for the display of gallantry and prowess than as the dreadful scourge it really is, I wished for nothing better than that I should soon have an opportunity of serving under the brave admiral.
The king, steeped in pollution, a fanatic and a hypocrite, exhibited himself to his subjects bareheaded, barefooted, and half naked, scourging himself with a whip, reciting his prayers, and preparing the way, by the most ostentatious penances, to plunge anew into every degrading sensual indulgence.
And the country has been wont to relieve itself of its redundant squalor by famines which sweep its table lands, and by pestilences, which, having depopulated its towns, take to themselves wings, invade distant nations, cross wide oceans, and scourge every part of the world.
He begins by declaring to the assembled priests and elders that neither he nor Herod has found any fault in the man; and then, as a means of compromise and conciliation, makes the monstrous proposal that he will first scourge and then release the prisoner.
The criminal law of the empire, with its arbitrary courts, its secret procedure, its elastic law of treason, and its practice of torture, was the scourge of Europe till it was encountered and overthrown by the jury system, a characteristic offspring of the Teutonic mind.
Grant that the tiger is a scourge, a pest, a nuisance, a cruel and implacable foe to man and beast; pile all the vilest epithets of your vocabulary on his head, and say that he deserves them all, still he is what opportunity and circumstance have made him.