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Body politic   /bˈɑdi pˈɑlətˌɪk/   Listen
Body politic

noun
1.
A politically organized body of people under a single government.  Synonyms: commonwealth, country, land, nation, res publica, state.  "African nations" , "Students who had come to the nation's capitol" , "The country's largest manufacturer" , "An industrialized land"






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"Body politic" Quotes from Famous Books



... this change is already recognized as necessary. So in political science, the actual working of the body politic needs to be taught, and this is too often neglected for explanatory theories and a special interpretation. A single elementary course in chemistry, physics, or biology presupposes two or three more courses ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper

... may be seen everywhere. It increases the public excitement attending the death of the people's idol. There is a ferment of the whole body politic. ...
— David Lockwin—The People's Idol • John McGovern

... was still a considerable party in favour of the Union, although the treason of Renneberg had hitherto prevented both city and province from incorporating themselves in the body politic of the United Netherlands. Within the precincts were five hundred of Verdugo's veterans under George Lanckema, stationed at a faubourg called Schuytendiess. In the city there was, properly speaking, no garrison, for the citizens in the last few years had come to value themselves ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... there are also called his body. But no church here, though never so famous, must be taken for that of which mention was made afore. [13]As Christ then has a body mystical, which is called his members, his flesh, and his bones (Eph 5:30), so he has a body politic, congregations modelled by the skill that his ministers have in his word, for the bearing up of his name, and the preserving of his glory in the world against Antichrist. In this church, order and discipline, for the nourishing up of the true mystical body of Christ, has been placed from the foundation ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... and partially for the good of the country. These people here exist as an undigested foreign mass. They must be digested and absorbed into the body politic. They must be taught our ways of thinking and living, or it will be a mighty bad thing for us in Western Canada. Do you know, there are over twenty-five thousand of them ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor

... mighty Sarpedon fell, where Hector lay slain by the sword of Achilles. Heaven forbid that our national sun, that rose so fair, should go down in blood, and shroud our temple of Liberty in everlasting night! To avert such a catastrophe let us reform, and do our duty as individuals. The safety of any body politic depends on the conduct of the individuals that compose it. And God grant that these dissentions may cease, that political peace and harmony may become perfect, and our government may stand immoveable on its basis, like the rock that ...
— Twenty-Four Short Sermons On The Doctrine Of Universal Salvation • John Bovee Dods

... libellers. A State institution ought to be considered the pride, not the shame of the State; and if we falsify such institutions, the disgrace is ours, not theirs. If slavery, however, is a blemish, a blot, an eating cancer in the body politic, it is not our fault if, by holding it up, others should see in the mirror of truth its deformity, and shrink back from the view. We have not, and we intend not, to use any weapons against slavery, but the moral power of truth and the force of public opinion. If we enter the ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... knees," he said, "not to mingle that which the law, in its wisdom, has separated. We live in two worlds,—society and heaven. Each has its own way of salvation; but as to society, is it not obeying God to obey the laws? Christ said: 'Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's.' Caesar is the body politic. Dear, let us forget ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac

... Ulstermen, Nationalists, and other bodies, giving up the attempt to convert democracy and to secure their ends through the sovereign agency of the democratic State, are taking direct action, are proclaiming rival authorities to the State, and are threatening the very existence of the body politic. The outlook is ominous, and it needs to be steadily faced. The present moment, moreover, is peculiarly favourable for its consideration. For the sudden and unexpected return of extreme national danger has once again quickened in our midst the idea of the State, ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw

... A feeble; attenuated old man, who wore the Rebel uniform, if such it could be called, stood by without showing any sign of intelligence. It was cutting very close to the bone to carve such a shred of humanity from the body politic to make a ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... despatch, commend me to the county burying. The body politic is busy and has no time to waste on an inert human body. It does its duty to its own interest and to the pauper dead when the body is dropped with all celerity into the ground. The county is philosophical: it says, "Poor devil, the ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar

... being a body politic incorporated in the empire, complained thereof to the emperor, who sent over persons of great quality to mediate an accommodation, but they could effect nothing. Then the queen caused a proclamation to be published that the easterlings or merchants of the Hans should be entreated and used ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various

... was the signal for an outbreak, for which I was wholly unprepared, and one which proved the existence of an eating cancer of discontent in the body politic. Under the smooth surface of society lay a mass of moral disease, which suddenly broke out into an eruption of complaints, from those who felt themselves oppressed by the old Saxon and ecclesiastical laws under which one-half the people of the ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm

... and man which have stolen the respectable name of Conservatism. A question which cuts so deep as the one which now divides the country cannot be debated, much less settled, without excitement. Such excitement is healthy, and is a sign that the ill humors of the body politic are coming to the surface, where they are comparatively harmless. It is the tendency of all creeds, opinions, and political dogmas that have once defined themselves in institutions to become inoperative. The vital and formative principle, which was active during ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... component parts of the Italian body politic, with the addition of numerous petty principalities and powers, adhering more or less consistently to one or other of the greater States. The whole complex machine was bound together by no sense of common interest, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds

... from them thought wrong: and whoever thought wrong, and obstinately persisted in not being convinced and converted, was a flagrant violator of the inestimable liberty of conscience, and a corrupt and infestious member of the body politic, and deserved to be lopped off and cast into the fire. The consequence of all which was a fiery persecution of divers ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving

... only as the inevitable climax to this evolution that they believed the "dictatorship of the proletariat" would be achieved. In other words, the proletariat would be composed of the overwhelming majority of the body politic and social. That is very different from the Bolshevist attempt to set up the dictatorship of the proletariat in a land where more than 85 per cent, of the people are peasants; where industrial development is behind the rest of the world, and where dictatorship of the proletariat ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo

... upon Bodley's France Madame Darmesteter, writing in the Contemporary Review, July, 1898, points out that even so well informed an observer of French life as the author of that remarkable book failed to appreciate the steadying influence exercised upon the French body politic by the network of voluntary associations, the syndicats agricoles, which are the analogues and, to some extent, the prototypes, in France of our agricultural societies in Ireland. The late Mr. Hanbury, during his too brief career ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett

... eternal truths. (64) For instance, we must say of Moses that from revelation, from the basis of what was revealed to him, he perceived the method by which the Israelitish nation could best be united in a particular territory, and could form a body politic or state, and further that he perceived the method by which that nation could best be constrained to obedience; but he did not perceive, nor was it revealed to him, that this method was absolutely the best, nor that the obedience of the people in a certain strip of territory would necessarily ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part I] • Benedict de Spinoza

... which organisms have been developed. The ligaments which bind the tendons of our feet or the valves of our blood vessels are the ingenious enterprises of individual cells who saw a want, felt that they could supply it, and have thus won themselves a position among the old aristocracy of the body politic. ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler

... quarters a disposition to create distempers in this body politic. Men are even uttering slanders against the United States as if to excite her. Men are saying that if we should go to war upon either side there will be a divided America—an abominable libel of ignorance. America is not all of it vocal just now. It is vocal ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... the share which belongs to each man, and the share which does not belong to him but to the body politic, expressed in a reciprocal concession, upon each side, for the good of the state—that dream of governmental idealism has never yet been attained, even in free America, to say nothing of Germany, France, England or Russia, and men will continue ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel

... somewhat modified constitutes the life-principle of Korea, of Japan, and of their less advanced cousins who fill the vast centre of the Asiatic continent. From the emperor on his throne to the common coolie in his hovel it is the idea of kinship that knits the entire body politic together. The Empire is one great family; the family is ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell

... king in the Capetian line, who completed this work of emancipation by recognizing the communes as free cities, and bestowing franchises clearly defining their rights. By this act the body of the manufacturing class, or burgesses, was recognized as a part of the body politic, and was enfranchised. ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele

... separated him from it. The Czar then on the throne was Ivan IV. Wassiliewitch, called the Terrible. For some time before this, the Russians had shaken off the Tartar yoke, and Ivan had united all the petty rival principalities in one body politic, of which the power was already becoming considerable. The situation of Russia, exclusively continental, far from any frequented sea, isolated from the rest of Europe, of which it did not yet form part, so much were its habits and manners still Asiatic, promised ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne

... him, a girl spoke of the "purple perfume of petunias," and a man used the phrases, "body politic," and ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers

... fault of theirs, it was not the work of any devil—it was simply because of the "surplus value". they represented. If weaker nations were conquered and "civilized", that, too, was for "surplus value". And these epidemics of "graft" that broke out upon the body politic—they were not accidental or sporadic things, and they were not to be remedied by putting any number of men in jail; they were to be understood as the system whereby an industrial oligarchy had rendered impotent a political democracy, and had fenced it ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair

... of letters, baptized by the novelist gendelettres—one of the few words coined by Balzac which have become naturalized—may be divided into several categories. First, there are the publicistes, occupied in scratching the pimples of the body politic. From these pimples they extract a book which is a mystification. Not far removed from the publicistes are the chief managing editors and proprietors general, big wigs who sometimes become prefects, receivers general, or theatrical directors. The type of this class is glory's porter, speculation's ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton

... very political corruption which they themselves cause and want and profit from; they are the fine fellows who come together in their solemn conclaves and resolve this and resolve that against "law-defying labor unions," or in favor of "a reform in our body politic," etc., etc. A glorious crew they are of excellent, most devout church members and charity dispensers; sleek, self-sufficient men who sit on Grand Juries and Trial Juries, and condemn the petty thieves to conviction carrying long terms of imprisonment. ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers

... grave political consideration, affecting the interests of the entire body politic, and the question of the success and stability of our national institutions, there is another consideration coming home closely and individually to each man's personal interests. Where the law of trial by jury prevails, every citizen, whether educated or ignorant, takes part in the administration ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart

... course adorned. The ordinary trades and handicrafts practised in the East no doubt flourished in the country. A brisk import and export trade was constantly kept up, and promoted a healthful activity throughout the entire body politic. Babylonia is called "a land of traffic" by Ezekiel, and Babylon "a city of merchants." Isaiah says "theory of the Chaldaeans" was "in their ships." The monuments show that from very early times the people of the low country ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 4. (of 7): Babylon • George Rawlinson

... the human nature of the Bantu is no whit different from the human nature of the Europeans then it is a fair question to ask why the two races should not be able to live together in liberty, equality and fraternity as people of one nation or body politic. It is because human nature is governed by laws which, unlike the laws of mathematics, cannot be laid down with certainty that we find ourselves unable to give a positive answer to this question. ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen

... living soul; earthling; party, head, hand; dramatis personae [Lat.]; quidam [Lat.]. people, persons, folk, public, society, world; community, community at large; general public; nation, nationality; state, realm; commonweal, commonwealth; republic, body politic; million &c (commonalty) 876; population &c (inhabitant) 188. tribe, clan (paternity) 166; family (consanguinity) 11. cosmopolite; lords of the creation; ourselves. Adj. human, mortal, personal, individual, national, civic, public, social; cosmopolitan; anthropoid. Phr. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... Thee that at some future, but no distant, day the evil which now invests the body politic shall not only have been arrested in its progress, but wholly eradicated ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various

... plasters and palliatives. Some men are still talking of preventing the spread of the cancer, but leaving it just where it is. They admit that, constitutionally, it has now a right to ravage two-thirds of the body politic—but they protest against its extension. This in moral quackery. Even some, whose zeal in the Anti-Slavery cause is fervent, are so infatuated as to propose no other remedy for Slavery but its non-extension. Give it no more room, they say, and it may be safely ...
— No Compromise with Slavery - An Address Delivered to the Broadway Tabernacle, New York • William Lloyd Garrison

... States power has been disseminated with admirable skill for the purpose of interesting the greatest possible number of persons in the common weal. Independently of the electors who are from time to time called into action, the body politic is divided into innumerable functionaries and officers, who all, in their several spheres, represent the same powerful whole in whose name they act. The local administration thus affords an unfailing source of profit and interest to a vast number ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville

... contended that enforcement of the acts brought about "an immediate paralysis of all the authority and power of the State government by military force; * * * [which was divesting the State] of her legally and constitutionally established and guaranteed existence as a body politic and a member of the Union." The Supreme Court dismissed the suit for want of jurisdiction, holding that for a case to be presented for the exercise of the judicial power, the rights threatened "must be rights ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin

... rests. It is not only the negation of the sanctity of the family and the destroyer of the purity of the home, as I have already pointed out, but it is also the derider of the sacredness of the individual, the slow but sure disintegrator of the body politic, the dry-rot of nations, before which the mightiest empires have crumbled into dust. The lagoons of Venice mirror it in the departed grandeur of her palaces, overthrown by the licentiousness of her merchant princes. The mute sands that silt up the ruins of old empires are ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins

... social, political, and industrial distinctions that had been maintained among the whites under the old order of things. But was this to be the settled policy of the government? Was it a fact that the incorporation of the blacks into the body politic of the country was to be the settled policy of the government; or was it ...
— The Facts of Reconstruction • John R. Lynch

... State had ceased to be the feudal monarchy—the ramification of contributory courts and camps—of the crude days of William the Conqueror and his successors. The Norman lords and their English dependants no longer formed two separate elements in the body politic. In the great French wars of Edward III, the English armies had no longer mainly consisted of the baronial levies. The nobles had indeed, as of old, ridden into battle at the head of their vassals and retainers; but the body of the force had been made up of Englishmen serving for ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward

... into all their lives. Though everything seemed just the same as when he had left Old Place, everything was different, both in a spiritual and material sense. The War had made a deep wound, nay, far more than one wound, in the spiritual body politic of Old Place. And it was of a very material thing that Betty Tosswill thought first, and most painfully, this morning. This was the fact that from having been in easy circumstances they were now ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes

... and, being in a manner shut out from all other modes of employment, naturally devoted themselves to commerce. In this way they soon became prosperous, and their numbers increased so rapidly, that in the year 697 they made application to the Emperor to be elected into a body politic, and obtained authority to elect a chief, to whom they gave the name of Duke or Doge. The town, continuing to increase, gradually extended its buildings to the adjacent islands, and, at the same time, acquired considerable tracts of territory on the mainland, then inhabited by the Veneti, from ...
— The Merchant of Venice [liberally edited by Charles Kean] • William Shakespeare

... land wherein each one receives the well-merited reward of toil. Justice was not in the body politic. Tyranny, extravagance and bankruptcy on the part of the ruling class had wiped out the margin of plenty. Black ruin seemed to impend for all. It was a case of starve—or unite against the rulers and oppressors of society. Danton, the thunderer ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon

... of property* by appropriating to public uses such portions of it as are needed for the maintenance, convenience, and well-being of the body politic. This is done, in the first place, by taxation, which—in order to be just—must be equitable in its mode of assessment, and not excessive in amount. As to the modes of assessment, it is obvious that a system which lightens the burden upon the rich, and thus presses the more heavily ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody

... authorities, but those personally interested (3) in the several companies of youths to take serious pains so that no single individual of them should by an act of craven cowardice find himself utterly rejected and reprobate within the body politic. ...
— The Polity of the Athenians and the Lacedaemonians • Xenophon

... additional vigour, are, on the contrary, enfeebled by being intrusted to one hand, what arguments can be used for allowing to the will of a single being a weight which, as history shows, will subvert that of the whole body politic? And this brings me to my grand objection to monarchy, which is drawn from (THE ETERNAL NATURE OF MAN.) The office of king is a trial to which human virtue is not equal. Pure and universal representation, by which alone liberty can be secured, cannot, I think, exist together ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth

... knowledge, it is most unfriendly to that individuality, independence, and purity, without which republican governments rapidly sink into decay. It was probably in this view that Mr. Jefferson said, great cities were sores upon the body politic. Needful for the purposes of commerce, required for the exchanges on which agricultural and manufacturing industry depend for their prosperity,—they are not evils which we could desire to see ...
— Speeches of the Honorable Jefferson Davis 1858 • Hon. Jefferson Davis

... Clarendon himself does so) chose a text in his Bible as a motto for his chapter on politics; and religion, in short, reached unto every place, and, like Elisha stretched on the dead child, (to use one of Jeremy Taylor's characteristic illustrations), gave life and animation to every part of the body politic. But years rolled on; and the original impulse given at the Reformation, and augmented at the Rebellion, to undervalue all outward forms, has silently continued to prevail, till, with the form of godliness, (much of it, up ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 382, July 25, 1829 • Various

... one-third its intelligence and progress; we shall contribute one-third to the business and industrial prosperity of the South, or we shall prove a veritable body of death, stagnating, depressing, retarding every effort to advance the body politic. ...
— Up From Slavery: An Autobiography • Booker T. Washington

... which you are to admit. What is a State in the sense of the Constitution? It is not a State in the general—but a State as you find it in the Constitution. A State, generally, is a body politic or independent political society of men. But the State which you are to admit must be more or less than this political entity. What must it be? Ask the constitution. It shows what it means by a State by reference to the parties to it. It must be such a State as Massachusetts, Virginia, and the ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various

... principally suited to one great market. Her commerce, instead of running in a great number of small channels, has been taught to run principally in one great channel. But the whole system of her industry and commerce has thereby been rendered less secure, the whole state of her body politic less healthful than it otherwise would have been. In her present condition, Great Britain resembles one of those unwholesome bodies in which some of the vital parts are overgrown, and which, upon that ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey

... where people exist under unwholesome conditions, has some such phenomenon. In Palermo we have the traditional Mafia—a state of mind, if you will, ineradicable and all-pervasive. Naples festers with the Camorra as with a venereal disease, its whole body politic infected with it, so that its very breath is foul and its moral eyesight astigmatized. In Paris we find the Apache, abortive offspring of prostitution and brutality, the twin brother of the Camorrista. In New ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train

... ethnological study. I refer to the political equality of man, and to that race absorption to which I have alluded,—that belief that any foreign element introduced into the American social system and body politic would speedily be absorbed therein, and in a brief space thoroughly assimilated. In this all-important respect I do not hesitate to say we theorists and abstractionists of the North, throughout that long anti-slavery discussion which ended ...
— 'Tis Sixty Years Since • Charles Francis Adams

... Honourable Bob Stables, who can make warm mashes with the skill of a veterinary surgeon and is a better shot than most gamekeepers. He has been for some time particularly desirous to serve his country in a post of good emoluments, unaccompanied by any trouble or responsibility. In a well- regulated body politic this natural desire on the part of a spirited young gentleman so highly connected would be speedily recognized, but somehow William Buffy found when he came in that these were not times in which he could manage that little ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens

... however, originally conceived by the moving spirit, James Oglethorpe, as an asylum for poor men, especially those imprisoned for debt. To realize this humane purpose, he secured from King George II, in 1732, a royal charter uniting several gentlemen, including himself, into "one body politic and corporate," known as the "Trustees for establishing the colony of Georgia in America." In the structure of their organization and their methods of government, the trustees did not differ materially ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard

... out of any ecclesiastical court within the realm or without, or by pretence of any spiritual jurisdiction or otherwise, contrary to the laws of the realm, should inquiet or molest any person or persons, or body politic, for any of the said lands or things above specified, should incur the danger of Premunire, and should suffer and incur the forfeitures and pains contained in ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude

... treason; and he also thought it wise to send over to Clovelly for Bijah Bixby, a lieutenant in that section, to come and look over the ground and ascertain by his well-known methods how far the treason had eaten into the body politic. Such was Jake's ordinary procedure when the bombs were fired, for Mr. Wheeler was nothing ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... which they act. He had been nineteen years a soldier—a man 'under authority,'—one obedient to another's will, subservient to strict discipline, with scarcely a free agency himself, and yet, during that long probation, he had been a useful member of the body politic, sustained a fair reputation, and as he admitted himself, been a contented and happy man. He returned home his own master, and older by twenty years. Alas! it was a fatal free agency for him, for time had not brought ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne

... understood the serious evils which had been injected into the body politic and strongly applied himself to the task of confiscating the great estates. One of his first proposals was to urge upon the Lords of Trade the restriction of all governors throughout the colonies from granting ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus

... would have been intolerable to any people less busy than the people of that time. For political corruption in a vigorous body politic is not, as pessimists would have us believer an indication of incipient decay, but only an indication that a busy people are willing to pay that price to be left alone, to be relieved of the administration of their public affairs, When they ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White

... see and to watch for a great many thousands, than that of a private person; how much more then ought a philosopher to form and fashion, to rectify and cure the soul of such a one, who is (if I may so express it) to inform the body politic,—who is to think and understand for so many others, to be in so great measure the rule of reason, the standard of law, and model of behavior, by which all the rest will square and direct their actions? Suppose a man to have a talent at finding out ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch

... population; upon the German bureaucrats who do not consider themselves the servants of the public, but look upon the public as their servant, and whose spirit of meanness and corruption is so characteristic of the Austrian body politic; finally, the dynasty relies upon the Catholic hierarchy who hold vast landed property in Austria and regard it as the bulwark of Catholicism, and who through Clericalism strive for political power rather than for the religious welfare ...
— Independent Bohemia • Vladimir Nosek

... of the Supreme Court of the United States, carried up from Vermont, Spaulding vs. Preston, 21 p. 9, towit: "If any member of the body politic instead of putting his property to honest uses, converts it into an engine to injure the life, liberty, health, morals, peace or property of others, he can, I apprehend, sustain no action against one who withholds ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation

... contiguous to each other, there arises a new set of duties among the neighbouring states, suitable to the nature of that commerce, which they carry on with each other. Political writers tell us, that in every kind of intercourse, a body politic is to be considered as one person; and indeed this assertion is so far just, that different nations, as well as private persons, require mutual assistance; at the same time that their selfishness ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume

... observe little of their construction, unless there is something singular or fine in their appearance. The common parts are unobserved, yet as important as the small words used in the common construction of language, the vehicle of thought. As the apostle says of the body politic, "those members of the body, which seem to be more feeble, are necessary;" so the words least understood by grammarians are most necessary in the ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch

... hospital accommodations at Scutari for more than a thousand men. Errors, follies, and vices on the part of individuals there doubtless were; but, in the general reckoning, they were of small account— insignificant symptoms of the deep disease of the body politic— to the enormous ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey

... nigger! These are pretty principles for a southerner to maintain! Why, sir, if such doctrines were advocated in the body politic they would be incendiary to southern institutions. Just educate the niggers, and I wouldn't be an editor in the south two days. You'd see me tramping, bag and baggage, for the north, much as I dislike it! It would never do to educate such a miserable set of ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams

... frequented fashionable watering-places. She was much exercised by the existence of the "social evil"; she belonged to and, for her, subscribed heavily to a society professing to alleviate, if not to cure, this distressing ailment of the body politic. She was the honorary secretary of a vigilance committee, whose operations extended to the neighbouring towns of Trowton and Devizeton. The good woman was ignorant that the starvation wages which her husband's companies paid were directly responsible ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte

... great benefactor in this field. York Minster holds many tombs of men, of whom some were blessings to their fellow-beings, while some were but "solemnly constituted impostors" and parasites upon the body politic; yet, to this hour, that great temple has received no consecration by a monument to the man who did more to alleviate human misery than any other who has ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... tyranny by tax ("Remember the Boston Tea Party!"); loose divorce laws; fraternal lodges; "promiscuous enfranchisement"; water fluoridation; and so on. These were but a few of the cancers, he screamed, that must be ruthlessly excised from the body politic so that a lean, clean Euramerica might face the Arch-Enemy ...
— Telempathy • Vance Simonds

... a member of the body politic; he alone has the right of voting in the assemblies of the Roman people, of serving in the army, of being present at the religious ceremonials at Rome, of being elected a Roman magistrate. These are ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos

... France into them. So far the republics have gone to pieces and France has survived. So intense is her vitality, so tough appears to me to be the old traditional fibre in many parts of the French body politic, that before the great chapter of the Gesta Dei per Francos can be safely assumed to be finally closed, a good many more milliards will have to be spent on that State Establishment of Irreligion and Disestablishment of God which the 'true Republicans' ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert

... have played a part analogous to that of the Romans in the Old World; but there is no real similarity between the two cases. The Romans acquired their mighty strength by incorporating vanquished peoples into their own body politic.[50] No American aborigines ever had a glimmering of the process of state-building after the Roman fashion. No incorporation resulted from the victories of the Iroquois. Where their burnings and massacres stopped short of extermination, they simply took tribute, ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske

... would follow from it; till then let us be content to work and pray, and lay our hand to the wheel wherever we can find a spoke to grasp. Corruptio optimi est pessima; the national Church as it ought to be is the soul and conscience of the body politic, but a man whose body has the direction of his conscience we do not commonly consider in the most ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude

... matters not how great the need of the change produced by it, is as such an enormous evil, a serious, and sometimes, fatal disease of the body politic, is self-evident. The injury to morals which the spectacle of victorious wrong almost always produces can be healed, as a rule, only in the following generation. Where law has been once trampled on, ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher

... followed the line of the main street, witnessing the rejoicings called forth by this anniversary of American Independence. The feeling of the community at large could only be guessed at, since it made no sign; but if the body politic of Buffalo might be considered fairly represented by some hundred or so of active urchins who were congregated in a square near the centre of the main street, nothing could be more ardent than this city's gratitude, for these delegates ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power

... distant and often rude regions, where their cheapening competition in the fields of bread-winning toil brings them into collision with other labor interests. While welcoming, as we should, those who seek our shores to merge themselves in our body politic and win personal competence by honest effort, we can not regard such assemblages of distinctively alien laborers, hired out in the mass to the profit of alien speculators and shipped hither and thither as the prospect of gain may dictate, as otherwise than repugnant to the spirit ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Volume 8, Section 2 (of 2): Grover Cleveland • Grover Cleveland

... to Great Britain, at the end of his official service, comes to Massachusetts on an interesting errand. He comes to deliver to the lineal successor of Governor Bradford, in the presence of the representatives and rulers of the body politic formed by the compact on board the "Mayflower," Nov. 11, 1620, the only authentic history of the founding of their Commonwealth; the only authentic history of what we have a right to consider the most important political transaction that has ...
— Bradford's History of 'Plimoth Plantation' • William Bradford

... certain rights were conceded to a few, to the prejudice of the many; no, I am using it to express the social circle of the governing class. But throughout creation Nature has confined the vital principle within a narrow space, in order to concentrate its power; and so it is with the body politic. I will illustrate this thought of mine by examples. Let us suppose that there are a hundred peers in France, there are only one hundred causes of offence. Abolish the peerage, and all the wealthy people will constitute ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac

... is an epitome of the world—society. Discipline is everywhere considered indispensable to the individual. Far more is it so to the world of society. Anarchy and revolution are no more efficient for the body politic than for the individual. Growth, slow and gradual, aggregation of power and wisdom through the education and enlightenment of its individual members, is the only safe and sure way ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield

... under which they sailed had no force in the territory of the Plymouth Company, they united themselves by the so-called "Mayflower compact," November 11, 1620, into a "civill body politic," and promised "submission and obedience to all such ordinances as the general good of the colony might require from time to time." Under the patent John Carver had been chosen governor, and he was now confirmed in that office under ...
— England in America, 1580-1652 • Lyon Gardiner Tyler

... The noble body politic of England is surely yet so sound and healthy and vigorous as to go through any crisis for the cure of any local disease, any partial decay, without danger to the whole; though not, perhaps, without difficulty and suffering ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble

... earlier years, in a series of senatorial efforts which in themselves would bring immortality by challenging comparison with the efforts of any statesman in any age. He exorcised the demon which possessed the body politic, and gave peace to a distracted land. Alas! the achievement cost him his life. He sank day by day to the tomb his pale but noble brow bound with a triple wreath, put there by a grateful country. May his ashes rest in peace, while ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln

... rights in the struggle for existence. This is no sentimental duty. The firm basis of government is justice, not pity. These are matters of justice. There can be no equality or opportunity, the first essential of justice in the body politic, if men and women and children be not shielded in their lives, their very vitality, from the consequences of great industrial and social processes which they can not alter, control, or singly cope with. Society must see to it that it does ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various

... North American colonies to the parent state; how Ireland, cursed by the domination of race over race, and of religion over religion, remained indeed a member of the empire, but a withered and distorted member, adding no strength to the body politic, and reproachfully pointed at by all who feared or envied the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... into flame. Class conflicts cause wars and selfish ambitions have often embroiled nations; in fact, war is like a boil, it indicates that there is poison in the blood. Christ is the great physician whose teachings purify the blood of the body politic ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan

... the slaves of despots. Nor can we say that their satisfaction was without solid grounds. The boasting about English freedom implied some misunderstanding. But it was at least the boast of a vigorous race. Not only were there individuals capable of patriotism and public spirit, but the body politic was capable of continuous energy. During the eighteenth century the British empire spread round the world. Under Chatham it had been finally decided that the English race should be the dominant element in the new world; if the political connection had been severed by the bungling of his successors, ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen

... body, but is himself no organ, and as by the central unity of his life-energy is able to rush the white corpuscles to any part that is wounded or poisoned, so the general will, the community-self of the social democratic state, is beginning to direct all the healing agencies in the body politic to the rescue of the unfortunate. Such beneficence and benevolence, systematized and alert, is more than civilization. It is Christianity, it is the doing unto the least of one's fellow-men what self-interest prompts one never to do; but its power is equal to ...
— Is civilization a disease? • Stanton Coit

... rights. It matters not that the spirit of the contract may have evaporated amidst the miasma of luxury. That is a violation of civil society; and members are justified in reverting at once to the primitive ideal. If the existence of the body politic be endangered, force may be used: "Whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be constrained to do so by the whole body; which means nothing else than that he shall be forced to be free." Equally plausible and dangerous was his teaching as to the indivisibility of the general will. Deriving ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose

... the force of the classes and professions; the just and useful force of the local authorities in their various orders and places. Never was the great problem more securely solved, which recognizes the necessity of a paramount power in the body politic to enable it to move, but requires for it a depository such that it shall be safe against invasion, ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph

... change has come over the country since this book was originally written. The nation is passing from the gristle into the bone, and the common mind is beginning to keep even pace with the growth of the body politic. The march from Vera Cruz to Mexico was made under the orders of that gallant soldier who, a quarter of a century before, was mentioned with honor, in the last chapter of this very book. Glorious as was that march, and brilliant ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper

... ought rather to be trusted to the wise. These laws, I say, might have such effect as good diet and care might have on a sick man whose recovery is desperate; they might allay and mitigate the disease, but it could never be quite healed, nor the body politic be brought again to a good habit as long as property remains; and it will fall out, as in a complication of diseases, that by applying a remedy to one sore you will provoke another, and that which removes the one ill symptom produces others, while the strengthening one part of the ...
— Utopia • Thomas More

... suffering is diminished; but that is, perhaps, the least thing. Cleanly and economical habits are formed; domestic occupations are increased; more persons live through the working period of life; and a class is formed low down in the body politic who are attached to something, for a man who has the tenancy of a good house to lose, is not altogether destitute. And under what circumstances is all this done? By the more influential classes taking a kindly concern in a matter in ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps

... enunciated the constitutional principle that sovereignty is vested in the "King in Parliament". "We," he declared to the Commons, "at no time stand so highly in our estate royal as in the time of Parliament, wherein we as head and you as members are conjoined and knit together in one body politic, so as whatsoever offence or injury during that time is offered to the meanest member of the House, is to be judged as done against our person and the whole Court of Parliament."[725] He was careful to observe himself the deference to parliamentary privilege which he exacted from others. It ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard

... the body politic appears to be to humanise, and assist in the progressiveness of, the animal man;—but the problem is so complicated with contingencies as to render it nearly impossible to lay down rules for the formation of a state. And should we be able to form a system of government, which should ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge

... the arts brought about by the Renaissance, and which Francois I had the intelligence to appreciate and encourage, and the somewhat greater sense of security in the body politic, combined to give to this court, and to the wealthy citizens of the capital, such extravagant luxury of dress and ornament that even this pleasure-loving monarch felt constrained to promulgate sumptuary ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton

... understandable instance, was beginning to absorb large tracts of many other racial fields of memory, and to share the experience of Scandinavian and Russian and German and Italian, of Polish and Irish and African and Asian members of the body politic, and that all these widening tracts of remembered racial experience interacting upon one another under the tremendous pressure of our nervous, keen, and eager industrial civilization had set up a new chaos in many creative minds. I said that Mr. Anderson and the others, half consciously ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... problem: "What makes a people one?" Neither blood, nor territory, nor language, but only the fact of being more or less compactly organized in a political society, will be found to yield the unifying principle required. Once the primary constitution of the body politic has been made out, a limit is set up, inside of which a number of fairly definite forms of grouping offer themselves for examination; whilst outside of it various social relationships of a vaguer kind have also to be considered. Thus, amongst ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett

... in our body politic is the press-agent, the advertising specialist, and astute propagandist. I wonder if you know that, when we declared war against Germany, the reason was not to make the world safe for democracy, for there are only two real reasons why wars are ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne

... territory formerly called the Province of Massachusetts Bay do hereby solemnly and mutually agree with each other to form themselves into a free, sovereign, and independent body politic, or State, by the name of ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis

... merely a question of slavery; in the last analysis this institution was hardly more than an incident. Slavery has ceased to exist, but even to-day the Problem is with us. The question was rather what was to be the final place in the American body politic of the Negro population that was so rapidly increasing in the country. In the answering of this question supreme importance attached to the Negro himself; but the problem soon transcended the race. Ultimately it was the destiny of the United States rather ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley

... have read history to little purpose. Sir, this alarming discontent is not the growth of a day or of a year. If there be any symptoms by which it is possible to distinguish the chronic diseases of the body politic from its passing inflammations, all those symptoms exist in the present case. The taint has been gradually becoming more extensive and more malignant, through the whole lifetime of two generations. We have tried anodynes. ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... have been best in the long run that the European races should displace the aborigines of the New World, but it is a melancholy reflection upon ' go ye into all the world and preach the gospel unto every creature,' that no tribe of American Indians has yet been absorbed into the body politic. Many a white man has let himself down into savage life and habits, but no tribe of aborigines has yet come up to the requirements, the honours, and the delights of European civilization. Like the tall wild grass before the prairie-fire, ...
— Thomas Hariot • Henry Stevens

... Turks it still survived: for even in the Trojan aera, and in the pre-Trojan or Argonautic aera, already (and perhaps for many centuries before) the nominal kingdoms were virtually republics, the princes being evidently limited in their authority by the 'sensus communis' of the body politic almost as much as the Kings of Sparta were from the time of Lycurgus to the ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey

... the heads of houses being embarrassed, and not well knowing what to do, the king found it necessary again to interpose. He was unwilling, as he said, to violate the constitution of the university by open interference, "considering it to exist under grant and charter from the crown as a body politic, in the ruling whereof in things to be done in the name of the whole, the number of private suffrages doth prevail." "He was loth, too," he added, "to show his displeasure, whereof he had so great cause ministered unto him, unto the whole in ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude

... Israelites in Egypt, and the wonders wrought for their deliverance, proclaim the reason for such a law at such a time—when the body politic became a theocracy, and reverently waited for the will of God. They had just been emancipated. The tragedies of their house of bondage were the realities of yesterday, and peopled their memories with thronging horrors. They had just witnessed God's testimony against oppression in ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... with nobody. But the only reason why this ball has to be mentioned is because of something that happened immediately after, quite unconnected either with the about-to-be-linked or the about-to-be-separated lovers—something which takes us back to those underground workings of the body politic which his Majesty was only now beginning fully ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman

... itself, and was never again renewed in a manner so formidable. From this period, Louis, relieved of all danger from England by the Civil Wars of York and Lancaster, was engaged for several years, like an unfeeling but able physician, in curing the wounds of the body politic, or rather in stopping, now by gentle remedies, now by the use of fire and steel, the progress of those mortal gangrenes with which it was then infected. The brigandage of the Free Companies [troops that acknowledged no authority except that ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott

... it was evident that the war could not last much longer. The danger past, the Colonial aversion to pay Union expenses and to obey the orders of Congress became daily stronger. The want of a "Crisis," as a corrective medicine for the body politic, was so much felt, that Robert Morris, with the knowledge and approbation of Washington, requested Paine to take pen in hand again, offering him, if his private affairs made it necessary, a salary for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various

... the cultured professions. They fail to perceive that the influence of these men would have a refreshing and invigorating effect upon the whole life of the people. They miss the need of some such transfusion of "vulgar blood" into the higher forms of the body politic. They cannot admit that it is these very parvenus who are the founders of new families and a new civilisation. Nor that many chasms must for ever be left yawning. They do not appreciate the peculiar pride which Gorki expresses in this romance, in such a classic ...
— Maxim Gorki • Hans Ostwald

... pouring out the wine; you 'aven't got the brass in times like these. I dare say you've noticed, sir, that the times is favourable for bringing out the spots on the body politic. 'Ere's 'ealth!" ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... right than Plato—sin is the expression of individuality and is not wholly bad—the State is made up of individuals, and if you suppress the thinking-power of the individual, you will get a weak and effeminate body politic; there will be none to govern. The whole fabric will break down of its own weight. A man must have the privilege of making a fool of himself—within proper bounds, of course. To that end learning must be for all, and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard

... could accidentally succeed, would not the mischief exceed the benefit of it? How great the sacrifices, in how many ways, by which it would be preceded and followed! how many wounds, open and secret, would it inflict upon the body politic! And, if it fails, which is to be expected, then a double mischief will ensue from its recognition of evils which it has been unable to remedy. These are your deep misgivings; and, in proportion to the force with which they come to you, is the ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman

... depend for its maintenance upon citizens of merely negative virtue, nor can it expect the sympathy of scheming politicians to whose plans and power it is in direct opposition. Its dependence must be solely upon the willing services and financial support of those members of the body politic who are animated by the spirit of Washington, and who believe that in matters affecting the highest interests of our free institutions, such as civic virtue and civic fidelity, formation is better than re-formation, and that to constantly maintain salutary political ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various

... confided the vindication of the public rights and the redressing of the public wrongs. It has been often asked by some of these critical observers, How is it that, when great crimes or misdemeanours are to be punished, when the bold and daring offender is to be brought to justice, when the body politic is the offended party, when the minister honours a supposed offender with his notice in the shape of criminal proceedings, and the government condescends to prosecute—how is it, it has been asked on such occasions, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various

... charter. They are equivalent with franchises. Blackstone says that franchise and liberty are used as synonymous terms. And after enumerating other liberties and franchises, he says: "It is likewise a franchise for a number of persons to be incorporated and subsist as a body politic, with a power to maintain perpetual succession and do other corporate acts; and each individual member of such a corporation is also said to have ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster



Words linked to "Body politic" :   developing country, dominion, rogue state, suzerain, estate, great power, ally, renegade state, world power, power, commonwealth country, rogue nation, political entity, superpower, city-state, sea power, estate of the realm, political unit, Tamil Eelam, foreign country, the three estates, major power, Eelam, city state, Reich



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