The 19th Century: A History

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Harper, 1880 - 83 pages
 

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Page 15 - ... paid a license of a hundred pounds for the privilege of putting him to death. His whole property is then immediately taxed from 2 to 10 per cent. Besides the probate, large fees are demanded for burying him in the chancel ; his virtues are handed down to posterity on taxed marble ; and he is then gathered to his fathers, — to be taxed no more.
Page 24 - But it may be that I shall leave a name sometimes remembered with expressions of goodwill in the abodes of those whose lot it is to labour and to earn their daily bread by the sweat of their brow, when they shall recruit their exhausted strength with abundant and untaxed food, the sweeter because it is no longer leavened by a sense of injustice.
Page 15 - If a man injured Westminster Bridge, he was hanged. If he appeared disguised on a public road, he was hanged. If he cut down young trees; if he shot at rabbits; if he stole property valued at five shillings ; if he stole anything at all from a bleachfield ; if he wrote a threatening letter to extort money; if he returned prematurely from transportation, — for any of these offences he was immediately hanged.
Page 37 - ... had been reduced to yarn for thousands of years, the same rude contrivance used in ancient Mycenae and Troy by Homer's heroines. There are men alive to-day, whose mothers, like Solomon's virtuous woman, laid their hands to the spindle and distaff, and knew no other way. William Fairbairn, an eminent mechanic, states that "in the beginning of the century the human hand performed all the work that was done, and performed it badly.

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