United States or Ukraine ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It seems scarcely justifiable to assign to any particular point of time the "Ballade sent to King Richard" by Chaucer; but its manifest intention was to apprise the king of the poet's sympathy with his struggle against the opponents of the royal policy, which was a thoroughly autocratical one.
It is good for man that he should feel himself at some time unshackled and autocratical, that he should say, This I do, because it is prescribed to me by the conditions without which I cannot exist, or by the election which in past time I deliberately made; and this, because it is dictated by the present frame of my spirit, and is therefore that in which the powers my nature has entailed upon me may be most fully manifested.
The Parliament of which Chaucer was a member was the assembly which boldly confronted the autocratical tendencies of Richard II, and after overthrowing the Chancellor, Michael de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, forced upon the king a Council controlling the administration of affairs.
Before the establishment of the state government, there was a judiciary created by an autocratical edict of General Riley; and a pamphlet, extracted and translated from the Mexican Constitutional laws of 1836, constituted the Corpus Juris Civilis of the Territory of California. The remainder of the law was made up of the judge's ideas of equity, and of the law he had read before leaving home.
The rapid advances that had been made toward the concentration of the governing power in the autocratical form, limited still more the means of popular observation and the vigor of the popular check upon the supreme authority.
Word Of The Day