A low or downcast state

Usage examples of degradation.

FELLOW-CITIZENS:--When the General Assembly, now about adjourning, assembled in November last, from the bankrupt state of the public treasury, the pecuniary embarrassments prevailing in every department of society, the dilapidated state of the public works, and the impending danger of the degradation of the State, you had a right to expect that your representatives would lose no time in devising and adopting measures to avert threatened calamities, alleviate the distresses of the people, and allay the fearful apprehensions in regard to the future prosperity of the State.

After a few moments of calm, thinking I should take him by surprise, I extended my hand, but I drew back terrified, for I fancied that I had recognized in him a man, and a degraded man, contemptible less on account of his degradation than for the want of feeling I thought I could read on his countenance.

If they could feel their own degradation, they would be much to be pitied, for by their own fault at last no one will believe them even when by chance they speak the truth.

My erotic inconvenience made me very uncomfortable, my mind felt deeply the consciousness of my degradation, and I did not possess a groat!

My landlord did the honours of the table, and thought it no degradation to make his guests pay for the meal.

It was designed to keep him from being murdered in a public cell where drunkenness, fornication, starvation and every form of despair and degradation did not preclude a peculiar loyalty to the King of England.

In this latter case, as long as the rate of subsidence and supply of sediment nearly balance each other, the sea will remain shallow and favourable for life, and thus a fossiliferous formation thick enough, when upraised, to resist any amount of degradation, may be formed.

My readers must not forget that in Portici I was on the point of disgracing myself, and there is no remedy against the degradation of the mind, for nothing can restore it to its former standard.

Self-pollution, or onanism, is one of the most prolific sources of evil, since it leads both to the degradation of body and mind.

Instantly, I was sure this was some client, and that her shame and degradation was now so great she had taken to plying her trade in her own house, for all to see.

Only when intensive degradation of new materials is required do we make use of a hot sylvinite solution to which magnesium bromide is added.

After fourteen stormy years the two friends, who more than any others were responsible for the launching of the Third Retch, for its terror and its degradation, who though they had often disagreed had stood together in the moments of crisis and defeats and disappointments, had come to a parting of the ways, and the scar-faced, brawling battler for Hitler and Nazism had come to the end of his violent life.

I can scarcely bear to review the times to which I allude: the moral degradation, blent with the physical suffering, form too distressing a recollection ever to be willingly dwelt on.

These figures are for arable land and do not include the general erosion and degradation of lands all over the earth from human activities such as deforestation, overgrazing, fire, and other injudicious human occupancy.

I, your author, ventured from the fertile climes of our glorious state in the forty-third year of this century to perform my duties as an American in the South Pacific, and will carry to my grave the scenes of cruelty and human degradation I witnessed there, in surroundings as paradisaical as any this globe can offer.