Word: rigidity
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Dates: during 1880-1889
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Brutal, gashed, and swollen faces; wide gaping mouths, which opened for the last time to utter the death-shriek, and are now fixed forever in rigid agony; jagged, discolored teeth, sunken cheeks, knitted brows, dead, sodden eyes, awful contortions, ghastly smiles, hideous leers, faces of men and faces of women, faces of the young and faces of the old, faces which reek with the slime of years of vice and misery and despair; faces which Dante, groping among the damned, might have dragged from hideous, steaming depths of Lethean mud, and flung forth to front the unwilling...
...savage blow, no ear heard the victim's shriek, as he was flung from the parapet. The night was deaf, and the darkness was blind, and nothing remained to tell the story but the clotted handful of the murderer's hair which the police took next morning from the rigid fingers of his victim. A bulky and heavy sack, stained crimson, is silently brought to the river side at dead of night, and its contents are dropped noiselessly into the stream. What these contents are, let us not too curiously inquire. If the fishes leave anything, we shall probably hear...
...course of study was inadequate to fit a man to meet the demands of our modern civilization, and, in consequence, its curriculum was modified to correspond to the requirements of to-day by introducing the feature of a generous amount of elective work in place of the rigid course of study prescribed under the old regime...
...Rigid Constitution gains in influence by age, and its permanency is shown by the fact that amendments carried in the legislature are usually rejected by the mass of the people The magic of self-love increases the respect felt for it ; but it is weakened by becoming a less adequate expression of the growing people's needs. The two great defects of the American Constitution are the absence of a uniform law of marriage, and the method of electing a president ; but so complicated is the machinery for altering the constitution that a reform in these points is hardly possible...
Common people relish definiteness in a constitution, and the more rigid it is the better it is suited to the democratic mind, and by being rigid avoids two democratic dangers, disrespect for a minority and for fixed rules. Is there a progress from rigidity to flexibility ? The time comes in a democracy when the people are completely masters, and do not value restrictions. The tendency to rigidity will therefore stop, and a larger authority be given the executive. A rigid constitution is an absolute necessity in a federation ; but a semi-international compact of England and her colonies had better...