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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