half-effectual

Updated: June 13, 2025

With most of the household troubles which occupy so exaggerated a space in the letters and journals of both papering, plastering, painting, deceitful or disorderly domestics general readers have so little concern that they have reason to resent the number of pages wasted in printing them; but there was one common grievance of wider and more urgent interest, to which we must here again finally refer, premising that it affected not one period but the whole of their lives, i.e. their constant, only half-effectual struggle with the modern Hydra-headed Monster, the reckless and needless Noises produced or permitted, sometimes increased rather than suppressed, by modern civilisation.

John Nichol - Thomas Carlyle