Word: pleading
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Dates: during 1870-1879
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Anyhow, I am bound by my thirteen years' personal experience of the actual and possible dangers, discomforts, and disasters connected with attempts at "mixing things" in intercollegiate boat-race management, to plead as eloquently as I can against the rowing of any such race on the Thames during the seven days which precede June 30, 1879. Without pretending to assert that the rowing of it there at that time would necessarily and inevitably confuse and upset the arrangements for the Harvard-Yale race of a few days later, I do insist most vigorously that it would have a strong tendency...
...public speaking in the Boston Latin School and at the speaking for the Boylston Prizes, much to the credit of the former. Now that so few are to speak compared with former years, and those few are to be selected by reason of their excellence, none can plead the length and dulness of the exercises as an excuse for staying away...
...vain they plead...
...After that changes can be brought about only by personal application to the Dean. These regulations will be enforced to the letter, and as the Dean has taken particular pains to have the change generally known, no one who fails to comply with the law will be permitted to plead ignorance as an excuse...
Secondly, unnecessary cruelty must be avoided. Surely, in these days of compassion it needs not to plead for this principle; it will at once be approved by all true artists. I thought at first that the rule should read "all cruelty"; but it is clear that the art of murder, like that of medicine (in the matter of vivisection), sometimes demands the infliction of pain; cruelty, in this sense, is not always avoidable. For instance, in that admirable and truly Gothic bit of art related by De Quincey, - the killing of the baker, - no inconsiderable amount of distress...