uttermost

Yes, the Home Rule Crisis, which according to eminent Oxford historian Robert Blake strained Britain’s incrementally constructed democratic institutions “to the uttermost limit,” was the long-tail result of conflict in Ireland, the perennial stone in the British Empire’s shoe.

"If they dare to come out in the open field and defend the gold standard as a good thing, we shall fight them to the uttermost, having behind us the producing masses of the nation and the world," declared former Rep. William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska.

In Shackleton’s time, the hardiest adventurers — those strivers to the uttermost — made journeys to the poles.

The headstone placed at Shackleton’s grave site bears a quotation it attributes to Robert Browning: “I hold that a man should strive to the uttermost for his life’s set prize.”

Then that too is gone, all pain, all desire, only a great emptiness is left, like the sky, like a well in drought, and it is now that the strength drains from your limbs, and you try to rise and find you cannot, or to swallow water and your throat is powerless, and both the swallow and the effort of retaining the liquid tax you to the uttermost.