self-operative

Now there is nothing mysteriously potent about the forms and names of democratic institutions that should make them self-operative.

Socialism As It Is A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement William English Walling

The court held that this was a standard of voting which on its face was in substance but a revitalization of conditions which when they prevailed in the past had been destroyed by the self-operative force of the Thirteenth Amendment.

The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 Various

It is these who become "motive grinders," dig genius out of the earth like spuds and goobers, and achieve perpetual motion by making the universe a self-operative machine needing neither key nor steam generator to "make it go."

The Complete Works of Brann the Iconoclast, Volume 1. 1898

At that time it was generally supposed that the constitutional provision in regard to duelling was self-operative, and that any person who either sent or accepted a challenge, or acted as a second to one who thus offended, would _ipso facto_ be disqualified from afterwards holding any public office.

Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California with Other Sketches; To Which Is Added the Story of His Attempted Assassination by a Former Associate on the Supreme Bench of the State Stephen Johnson Field 1857

Christianity has no conception of any such thing as a holy virtue wrought out and maintained by a responsible agent, acting from his own center, as a self-centered and merely self-operative force, — holy virtue it conceives, even apart from sin, to be the drinking out of God’s fullness, receiving and living in his deific impulse, and having even its finiteness complemented by

Sermons for the New Life. 1802-1876 1876