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Updated: May 8, 2025
The acts of demagogues, the conservative disgust at licence, the jealousy of rival nobles, the venality of military leaders, threw daily fresh stumbling-blocks in his heroic path.
Several of these sources of fallacy may be illustrated by a ludicrous example. A traveller from the continent has represented the venality of the British House of Commons to be such, that, whenever the minister of the Crown enters the house, there is a general cry for "places."
At Rome, while Assessor to the Count of the Italian Bounty Office, he had to resist an attempt to bribe him, and by doing so risked losing his appointment, and, no doubt, something worse too. Official venality and dishonesty were evils so deeply rooted, that he himself nearly succumbed. He wanted some books copied, and he had the temptation to get this done at the charge of the Treasury.
And yet in thus favouring his relatives and friends, let us not accuse De Witt of base motives or of venality.
"We had to climb to the limb to cut the body down. "The outside newspapers made a good deal of the affair. I was charged with indifference, with cowardice, with venality. Some journals even declared that I had instigated the lynching and participated in it, and said that I ought to be hanged. "I did not mind this much.
Such is the infirmity of human nature that few individuals can be safely trusted with despotic power; accordingly we find no Captain-General whose administration will bear the test of rigid examination. Indeed, the venality of a majority of these officials has been so gross as to have passed into a proverb.
The other great lords, highborn and highly titled as they were and served at their banquets by hosts of lackeys on their knees Nottinghams, Northamptons, Suffolks were, after all, ciphers or at best, mere pensioners of Spain. For all the venality of Europe was not confined to the Continent.
But Clarendon did not know that it would soon be unnecessary to go to France for an example of shameless venality. The time was not far distant when Charles, having got rid of his irksome Mentor, was himself to fill his own coffers by accepting a bribe more infamous than that which he vainly tried to persuade his prouder servant not to reject with scorn and contempt.
The acts of demagogues, the conservative disgust at licence, the jealousy of rival nobles, the venality of military leaders, threw daily fresh stumbling-blocks in his heroic path.
The yellow-lined faces of the American engineers told their own tale, although they had no longer to contend with the fearful mortality from yellow fever which, together with venality and corruption, effectually wrecked Ferdinand de Lesseps' attempt to pierce the Isthmus in 1889.
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