Millinery

“ An American religious sect, whose founder, William Miller, prophesied the millennium or first judgment of the world by Christ and His angels to take place on 23rd February 1843. Many of his followers went mad through excitement as this date approached. Subsequent days assigned for the fulfilment of the prophesy proved alike misleading.
Milliner. A corruption of Milaner, after the city of Milan, which at one time set the fashion throughout Europe for elegance and taste not only in matters of dress, but of art. A milliner is one who deals in hats, feathers, and ribbons. ”

“ There's nothing in the world I like better than to hear of such large numbers — millions, trillions — that gives one something to think about. — Upon my soul, that's quite a lot, a thousand million, more or less.
Leander
As the numbers increase, so human intelligence expands. ”

“ How many seasons had rolled away, how many millions had returned to the dust from which they sprung, before the kernels had swelled into the forest giants levelled for that structure;—what labour had been undergone to complete the task;—how many of the existent race found employment and subsistence as they slowly raised that monument of human skill;—how often had the weary miner laid aside his tool to wipe his sweating brow, before the metals required for the completion had been brought from darkness;—what thousands had been employed before it was prepared and ready for its destined use! ”

“ One million is a large number! "If you had a million shillings to count one by one, and did it as fast as you could for ten hours a day, it would take a fortnight; and the million shillings would weigh nearly five tons, or be a heavy load for a railway truck." ”

“ Every day I fixed my thoughts upon another million; and, as all who know anything about the million-mania will tell you, the act of fixing the thought upon a million, when one has earned the right to acquire millions, makes that million yours, makes all who stand between you and it aggressors to be clawed down and torn to pieces. ”

“ A student in a library of a thousand volumes, an officer before his regiment of a thousand men upon parade, may have a pretty clear idea of the units as well as of the totals; but when we come to a thousand times a thousand, or a thousand times a million, all view of the units, for most men, probably for every man, is lost: the million for the grown man is in a great degree like the hundred for the child. ”

“ The detachment who had commenced the answer, being in this way relieved, retired to their dinners.
‘It’s a gey lang answer,’ said the schoolmaster, ‘isn’t it?’ Mac looked black. ‘Better take a seat; you will appreciate the children’s intelligence much better.’
It was then close on three o’clock, and still the children kept on singing ‘Millions of millions of millions.’
‘Wonderful children,’ I remarked. ‘How many more times will they say “Millions of millions of millions”?’ I inquired. ”

“ The twenty-five millions without the gates gazed at the hundred thousand within, and the more they gazed the louder and more bitter became their comment, the dimmer and the more tawdry did the glitter of it all appear to them, and the weaker and more half-hearted became the attitude of the one hundred thousand as they attempted by insolence and superciliousness to maintain the pose of their inherited superiority. ”

“ This is rare logic and arithmetic, and not a little curious as natural history. A plain person now would have supposed that if the produce doubled itself in ten, and the people only in a hundred years, the people would not increase quite so fast as the produce, seeing that at the end of the first century the population would be multiplied but by two, the produce by one thousand and twenty-four. But these are the discoveries of genius! Why does Miss Martineau write, except to correct our mistaken notions and to expound to us the mysteries of "the principle of population." ”

“ THE ultimate triumph of the metric system may be regarded as safe, beyond peradventure; no event still in the future is more certain. A universal system of weights, measures, and currency, is an imperative demand of advancing civilization; and this particular solution is worthy of the great problem, fit for all countries and for all time. It has the start, the prestige, the substantial merits, the already large adoption, which insure universality. ”

“ Suddenly her eyes rested on Rudyard Byng, and something in the rough power of the head arrested her attention, and the thought flashed through her mind: "How wonderful to have got so much at thirty-three! Three millions at thirty-three—and millions beget millions!"
... Power—millions meant power; millions made ready the stage for the display and use of every gift, gave the opportunity for the full occupation of all personal qualities, made a setting for the jewel of life and beauty, which reflected, intensified every ray of merit. ”

“ Yo’ may build a mill, but bigger men will build bigger mills, and the bigger mills will swallow up the less, and thou and thy son, and even Mary yonder may be fain, thou in thy old age and they in their prime, to take wage at another’s hand, and to do a hireling’s task in another’s mill. ”

“ As to duration and the way in which it affects your view of the human history, what is really the difference to your imagination between infinitude and billions when you have to consider the value of human experience? ”

“ A very civil native, named Muncherjee, who calls himself a milliner, has, I am informed, very frequently well-chosen investments to dispose of, but upon my visits I have seen nothing wearable in the shape of bonnets and caps. An English milliner resides in his neighbourhood, who possesses both skill and taste, and makes up her silks and gauzes after the best French models ”

“ We should feel dumbfounded if the new calculation were to be a matter of millions, but actually we are to imagine a magnification to the extent of billions. This sounds almost like a fable when expressed in words. But a million is related to a billion in about the same way as a fairly wide city street to the width of the Atlantic Ocean. Our Mont Blanc sinks to insignificance. In the above calculation it would have to be replaced by a mountain 50 million miles high. ”

“ We would be outshone in New York by none!
To win a million is to taste blood. The million-mania—for, in a sense, I’ll admit it is a mania—is roused and put upon the scent, and it never sleeps again, nor is its appetite ever satisfied or even made less ravenous. ”

“ Mankind will repay with interest their long-accumulated debt: the Anchorite that was scoffed at will be worshipped; the Fraction will become not an Integer only, but a Square and Cube. With astonishment the world will recognise that the Tailor is its Hierophant and Hierarch, or even its God. ”

“ See now, not the mass of the people, for we all know that it is a proverb and a bitter jest to speak of the “down-trodden million.” We know that, down to our own time, a principle never had so fair a chance to pervade the mass of the people, but that we must solicit its illustration from select examples. ”

“ All these figures, friend Barbicane, are savants' figures, which reach the ear but say nothing to the mind."
"But they are obliged to have recourse to figures."
"No. It would be much better to compare. A billion signifies nothing. An object of comparison explains everything. Example—When you tell me that Uranus is 76 times larger than the earth, Saturn 900 times larger, Jupiter 1,300 times larger, the sun 1,300,000 times larger, I am not much wiser. ”

“ To comprehend the meaning of these figures, it is necessary to observe that a quintillion is to a billion as a billion is to unity; in other words, there are as many billions in a quintillion as there are units in a billion. ”

“ James Williams sat a girl in a loose tan jacket and a straw hat adorned with grapes and roses. Only in dreams and milliners’ shops do we, alas! gather grapes and roses at one swipe. This girl gazed with large blue eyes, credulous, when the megaphone man roared his doctrine that millionaires were things about which we should be concerned. ”

“ With my million safely achieved, I looked about me as a conqueror looks upon the conquered. A thousand dollars saved is the first step toward a competence; a million dollars achieved is the first step toward a Crœsus ”

“ Eleven thousand two hundred millions; it will frighten none but a retail philanthropist. What is it but eight hundred millions for each of fourteen years? Now eight hundred millions—what is that, to average it, but one little dollar a head for the population of the planet? ”

“ In the 'Black Century' we lost five hundred millions, and before the conclusion of the second century from then our population had almost reached its present enormous number, for the size of our planet, of over five thousand millions. ”

“ For a while we felt that Milly was on the verge of being lost to us.
It was our love of the Unerring Artistic Adjustment of Nature that inspired us. We could not give her over to a lumberman, doubly accursed by wealth and provincialism. We shuddered to think of Milly, with her voice modulated and her elbows covered, pouring tea in the marble teepee of a tree murderer. No! In Cypher’s she belonged—in the bacon smoke, the cabbage perfume, the grand, Wagnerian chorus of hurled ironstone china and rattling casters. ”

“ Yet it is only three days since Million and I went down to Chancery Lane together to interview the old lawyer person on the subject of her new riches. I shall never forget that interview. I shall never be able to forget the radiant little face of Million at the end of it all, when the kind old gentleman offered to advance her some of her own money "down on the nail," and did advance her five pounds in cash—five golden, gleaming, solid sovereigns! ”

“ Some of these great folks are really well-bred, some of them are only purse-proud and assuming,—but they form a class, and are named as above in the common speech.
It is in the nature of large fortunes to diminish rapidly, when subdivided and distributed. A million is the unit of wealth, now and here in America. ”

“ These one billion five hundred millions will be all gathered together into one thronging assemblage, and not they only, but also, in addition, the two hundred generations of men who have preceded us, and those generations—how many we know not, God knoweth—that will still live in the earth between these days and the last general judgment. ”

“ Nobody hangs by me. But my mill is standing idle, and I blame it on your wife. Am I alone in that? Go round and ask. Where are the mills? Where are the young men that should be working? Where is the currency? ”

“ They had money and land, and their prosperity increased year by year more and more. But ill-luck comes like a thief in the night, as their wealth had increased so did it again decrease, year by year, and at last the miller could hardly call the mill in which he lived, his own. ”

“ To compute our want of small change by the number of souls in the kingdom, besides being perplexed, is, I think, by no means just. They have been reckoned at a million and a half; whereof a million at least are beggars in all circumstances, except that of wandering about for alms; and that circumstance may arrive soon enough, when it will be time to add another ten thousand pounds in copper. ”

“ If an attempt were made deliberately to construct a medley of weight and measures as a burlesque, for sensible practical people to make sport of, it may be questioned whether such a farcical hypothetical medley would be more illogical, incoherent or cumbersome than our own. Yet it would seem that ours is not worse than the old French, or German, or Austrian, systems that preceded the metric system in those countries, respectively. ”

“ In answering you I am really using those weapons by which alone you say you can be defeated, and which are I confess equally applicable to your measure and to mine, I mean the argument of the non-existence of any measure of absolute value. There is no such thing; your measure as well as mine will measure variations arising from more or less labour being required to produce commodities, but the difficulty is respecting the varying proportions which go to labour and profits. ”

“ The first means that in a population of a million and a half, very nearly, if not quite, half a million persons were driven, or chose, to beg for food, or to accept it in charity at some period of the eight years, if not during the whole of it. ”

“ It has not fared much otherwise with higher kinds of steam. The opinion of the million was the terror of the world, and it was attempted, either to dissipate it, by amusing nations, or to pile it over with strata of society, — a layer of soldiers ”

“ As the practical proof, accordingly, would naturally be proportionate to the cluster of his attributes, one arrived at a scale that he was not, honestly, the man to calculate. Who but a billionaire could say what was fair exchange for a billion? ”

“ Her words carried a sort of strong conviction. I seemed suddenly to see an immense machine—unconcerned, soulless, but all its parts made up of bodies of men: a great mill grinding out the dust of centuries ”

“ Introduce the metric system, and there would be an upheaval—the tailor, the bootmaker, dressmaker, butcher, baker, anyone and everyone engaged in trade; everyone who is a buyer, who is a seller, would have to revise not only his arithmetic but his appliances. ”

“ But it is enough to have shown the reader that, despite Mill’s contention to the contrary, the calculation is one which is based on the simplest and most indisputable principles, and that not only in a theoretical, but in the most strictly practical sense, what great men produce, when they co-operate with average men by directing them, is the amount or degree in which the total result produced exceeds or excels that which was produced by average men when unaided, and would be again produced by them were the great man’s aid withdrawn. ”