United States or Australia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
For this purpose have been brought into play, on the widest scale, that of the whole kingdom, all the means and resources of wealth, station, and power; with the utmost recklessness of equity, honor, and even humanity; deluding the ignorant, corrupting the venal, and intimidating and punishing the conscientious: insomuch that the nominally conceded right or privilege is practically reduced to an inconsiderable proportion of its pre-estimated worth; while aristocratic tyranny has rendered it to many of the most deserving to possess it no better than an inflicted grievance.
He looks around upon every other country of the earth, where he discovers superstitions of the most hateful and degrading kind, darkening all the prospects of the human being, and corrupting his moral nature in its very source.
He had plied the beadle's wife with sophistical reasoning and subtlety. It was difficult to resist his corrupting influence. And as for Mme. Cantinet a lean, sallow woman, with large teeth and thin lips her intelligence, as so often happens with women of the people, had been blunted by a hard life, till she had come to look upon the slenderest daily wage as prosperity.
If this piece of idle talk is good for anything, it is only as an admission by men, of the corrupting influence of power; for that is certainly the only truth which the fact, if it be a fact, either proves or illustrates. And it is true that servitude, except when it actually brutalizes, though corrupting to both, is less so to the slaves than to the slave-masters.
It must be something new and masterly that must succeed. The idea of seducing America from her independence, or of corrupting her from her alliance is a thought too little for a great mind, and impossible for any honest one, to attempt.
When Sir Robert Walpole said, 'All those men have their price, he pointed to the men who called themselves 'patriots." "Bravo!" cried Travers. "Sir Robert Walpole showed his love for his country by corrupting it. There are many ways besides bribing for corrupting a country," said Kenelm, mildly, and that was Kenelm's sole contribution to the general conversation.
The army of Frederick the Great is ready for war, and yet it remains idle and looks on quietly while the insatiable conqueror is penetrating farther and farther into the heart of Germany; while he is scattering broadcast the seeds of treachery, discord, and mischief; while he is persuading the German princes to turn traitors to Germany; while he is poisoning and corrupting the hearts of the people and degrading their characters to such an extent, that the sense of fidelity, honesty, and constancy will soon become extinct in Germany, and all the Germans will be nothing but a horde of slaves, who will be happy if this tyrant does not apply the lash too often to their backs, and who will kiss his feet, so that he may step at least mildly and gently on their necks!
And the Vicomtesse, on her side, listening to the ring of sincerity in Gaston's voice, while he told of his youthful troubles, began to understand all that grown children of five-and-twenty suffer from diffidence, when hard work has kept them alike from corrupting influences and intercourse with men and women of the world whose sophistical reasoning and experience destroys the fair qualities of youth.
It exposed the legislature to the temptation which individuals and corporations seeking valuable concessions readily took advantage of for their own gain. It thus brought into active operation those forces which have been the chief factor in corrupting both state and municipal government.
It sends children out into the world with undeveloped reasoning faculties, and equipped with the barest elements of knowledge, and thus makes them not only void of self-reliance, but easy victims of all the corrupting influences of social life.
Word Of The Day