United States or Jersey ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
That field, however, established his military fame, and paved the way for his subsequent usurpations. The conquests of Caesar in Western Europe are unique in the history of war, and furnish no parallel. Other conquests may have been equally brilliant and more imposing, but none were ever more difficult and arduous, requiring greater perseverance, energy, promptness, and fertility of resources.
Great and encouraging is the reflection that there is a resource left us against the arrogant usurpations of despotic power; that its best-contrived plans against the liberty of mankind may be frustrated; that resolute opposition can weaken even the outstretched arm of tyranny; and that heroic perseverance can eventually exhaust its fearful resources.
There is next, as after 1789 in France, the total collapse, not from below and among the people, but from above and through the army, a worse collapse than in France, prolonged for fifty years of anarchy, civil wars, local usurpations, ephemeral tyrannies, urban seditions, rural jacqueries, brigandage, famines, and invasions along the whole frontier, with such a ruin of agriculture and other useful activities, with such a diminution of public and private capital, with such a destruction of human lives that, in twenty years, the number of the population seems to have diminished one half.
The usurpations and acts of the rebels were considered not legal acts, but nullities. Out of the dreary distance and the dark I stretch forth praying palms yet not to pray; Hands fold themselves for heaven, while mine, alas! Are sundered held your way.
With them there is no compromise. All other governments are usurpations, which justify and even demand resistance. Their principles always go to the extreme. They who go with the principles of the ancient Whigs, which are those contained in Mr. Burke's book, never can go too far.
Parliament, in fact, is not mentioned at all. Jefferson would not even acknowledge its existence, referring to it instead as "others" who have joined with the king in these "repeated injuries and usurpations."
But the rebellions vassals could not maintain their usurpations without the aid of their own dependants, whose assistance they were compelled to purchase by new concessions. At the same time the church became powerful through pious usurpations and donations, and its abbey lands and episcopal sees acquired an independent existence.
Precedents of the new organization. In practical operation. Anterior usurpations of the public power. Spontaneous bodies under the Ancient Regime and during the Revolution. Ruin and discredit of their supports. The central power their sole surviving dependence. Unfortunately, in France at the end of the eighteenth century the bent was taken and the wrong bent.
Thus did he stimulate the martial fanaticism of a warlike and heroic people with the promise of future happiness. What a monstrous expediency, worse than all the combined usurpations of the popes! And what was the result? I need not point to the successive conquests of the Saracens with such a mighty stimulus. They were loyal to the truth for which they fought.
"And certain it is, that this Kingdom hath been best governed, and peace and quiet preserved, when both parties, that is, when the justices of the temporal courts and the ecclesiastical judges have kept themselves within their proper jurisdiction, without encroaching or usurping one upon another; and where such encroachments or usurpations have been made, they have been the seeds of great trouble and inconvenience."
Word Of The Day