If, in deference to an anonymous mandate, he relinquished his holding, he and those who depended on him were outcasts and wanderers; if he retained or accepted it, his life might be the forfeit, but subsistence was secured; and in poor and lawless countries, the means of living are more valued than life.
From a biography of Lord George Bentinck, this passage explains the desperate calculus of survival for Irish peasants facing agrarian violence.
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Then it was that, the memory of the past and the hope of the future blending together, all men seemed to mourn over this untimely end, and there was that pang in the public heart which accompanies the unexpected disappearance of a strong…
But the human mind cannot contemplate the idea that the most important deed of time could depend upon human will.
They baffle the forethought of statesmen, and control even the apparently inflexible laws of national development and decay.
Those who have treated of the agrarian crimes of Ireland have remarked, that the facility with which these outrages have been committed has only been equalled by the difficulty of punishing them.
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