The Project Gutenberg Project

The presentation of gifts on Christmas day was an English custom of very great antiquity; so great that, in 1419, the practice had become much corrupted, and the abuse had to be sternly repressed.

- John Ashton, A Righte Merrie Christmasse!!! The Story of Christ-tide (1894) [full text]

These preparations and appropriations resulted in two treaties made at Fort Harmar, January 9, 1789, one with the Six Nations, and the other with the Wiandot, Delaware, Ottawa, Chippewa, Pottawatima, and Sac Nations, wherein the Indian title of occupancy is clearly acknowledged. That the government so understood and recognized this principle as entering into the text of those treaties is evidenced by a communication bearing date June 15, 1789, from General Knox, then Secretary of War, to President Washington, and which was communicated by the latter on the same day to Congress, in which it is declared that—

The Indians, being the prior occupants, possess the right of soil. It cannot be taken from them, unless by their free consent, or by right of conquest in case of a just war. To dispossess them on any other principle would be a gross violation of the fundamental laws of nature, and of that distributive justice which is the glory of a nation.

- Charles C. Royce, Cessions of Land by Indian Tribes to the United States: Illustrated by Those in the State of Indiana: First Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution (1879) [full text]

Dean Swift, full of wit and penury, writing from his London lodging to Stella in her comfortable Irish home, breaks into frequent outbursts at the scantiness of his comforts. One October, when removed to Windsor, he is particularly tried by the severity of the autumnal weather, but the terms in which, addressing a well-bred woman, he expresses his discomfort are striking, as showing the strange vicissitudes that language may undergo. “It grows bloody cold,” he writes—and one may well imagine the chilled extremities of the reverend Dean—“it grows bloody cold, and I have no waistcoat.”

- Julian Sharman, A Cursory History of Swearing (1884) [full text]

It was what is called a literary and theatrical club, the Scufflers. It was literary in so far that the majority of its members lay down at night with unrealised dreams of authorship. It was theatrical to the extent that many a one was the possessor of an unacted drama coiled up in his breast coat-pocket, and was to be seen surging about managers’ doors, only waiting the glance of favour to fall upon author and manuscript.

- Julian Sharman, A Cursory History of Swearing (1884) [full text]

Some idea of the fecundity of the old poet in the matter of expletives is conveyed by the catalogue of oaths culled from the ‘Satyre of the Three Estaitis’ and added to Chalmers’ edition of Lindsay, published in 1806. The list is as follows:—

“Be Cokis passion.
Be Godis passion.
Be Cok’s deir passion.
Be Cok’s tois.
Be God’s wounds.
Be God’s croce.
Be God’s mother.
Be God’s breid.
Be God’s gown.
Be God himsell.
Be greit God that all has wrocht.
Be him that made the mone.
Be the gude Lord.
Be him that wore the crown of thorn.
Be him that bare the cruel crown of thorn.
Be him that herryit hell.
Be him that Judas sauld.
Be the rude.
Be the Trinity; Be the haly Trinity.
Be the sacrament; Be the haly sacrament.
Be the messe.
Be him that our Lord Jesus sauld.
Be him that deir Jesus sauld.
Be our Lady; Be Sainct Mary; Be sweit Sainct Mary; Be Mary bricht.
Be Alhallows.
Be Sanct James.
Be Sanct Michell.
Be Sanct Ann.
Be Sanct Bryde; Be Bryde’s bell.
Be Sanct Geill; Be sweit Sanct Geill.
Be Sanct Blais.
Be Sanct Blane.
Be Sanct Clone; Be Sanct Clune.
Be Sanct Allan.
Be Sanct Fillane.
Be Sanct Tan.
Be Sanct Dyonis of France.
Be Sanct Maverne.
Be the gude lady that me bare.
Be my saul.
Be my thrift.
Be my Christendom.
Be this day.”

- Julian Sharman, A Cursory History of Swearing (1884) [full text]

In endeavouring to chronicle the amenities of the British “damn,” we believe we are dealing with a monosyllable possessing a remarkable fund of application. […] It has been said by one of the sprightliest of Frenchmen, that a foreigner might conveniently travel through England with the assistance only of this one particle of speech.

- Julian Sharman, A Cursory History of Swearing (1884) [full text]

When I reached the house, I went in directly to Miss Betsey. I found her in great distress; and she cried out as soon as she saw me, “Oh, Mary! my father is going to sell you all to raise money to marry that wicked woman. You are my slaves, and he has no right to sell you; but it is all to please her.”

- Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself (1831) [full text]

From the date of the splendid victory of Omdurman, 2nd September 1898, may be reckoned the creation of a vast Soudan empire. At so early a stage, it is idle to speculate whether the country will be held as a British possession, or as a province of Egypt. “The land of the blacks,” and their truculent Arab despoilers, has the intrinsic qualities that secure distinction. Given peace, it may be expected that the mixed negroid races of the Upper Nile will prove themselves as orderly and industrious as they are conspicuously brave. Whoever rules them wisely, will have the control of the best native tribes of the Dark Continent, the raw material of a mighty state.

- Bennet Burleigh, Khartoum Campaign, or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan (1898) [full text]

Thus have the mobs of this country taken the lives of their victims within the past ten years. In every single instance except one these burnings were witnessed by from two thousand to fifteen thousand people, and no one person in all these crowds throughout the country had the courage to raise his voice and speak out against the awful barbarism of burning human beings to death.

Men and women of America, are you proud of this record which the Anglo-Saxon race has made for itself? Your silence seems to say that you are. Your silence encourages a continuance of this sort of horror.

- Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mob Rule in New Orleans: Robert Charles and His Fight to Death, The Story of His Life, Burning Human Beings Alive, Other Lynching Statistics (1900) [full text]

Foreign Office,
November 2nd, 1917.

Dear Lord Rothschild,—

I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty’s Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet:—

“His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.

Yours sincerely,
Arthur James Balfour.
(Times, November 9, 1917.)

- Lucien Wolf, Notes on the Diplomatic History of the Jewish Question (1919) [full text]

He latinised his name from Robert Fludd into Robertus à Fluctibus, and began the promulgation of many strange doctrines. He avowed his belief in the philosopher’s stone, the water of life, and the universal alkahest; and maintained that there were but two principles of all things,—which were, condensation, the boreal or northern virtue; and rarefaction, the southern or austral virtue.

- Charles Mackay, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1852) [full text]