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They would have cheated, loved, and despised a more easy landlord, and his property would have gone to ruin, without either permanently bettering their interests or their morals.

He, therefore, took especial care that they should be convinced of his strictness in punishing as well as of his desire to reward.
'Where the offender was tenant, and the punisher landlord, it rarely happened, even if the law reached the delinquent, that public opinion sided with public justice.

In Ireland it has been, time immemorial, common with tenants, who have had advantageous bargains, and who have no hopes of getting their leases renewed, to waste the ground as much as possible; to break it up towards the end of the term; or to overhold, that is, to keep possession of the land, refusing to deliver it up.
'A tenant, who held a farm of considerable value, when his lease was out, besought my father to permit him to remain on the farm for another year, pleading that he had no other place to which he could, at that season, it being winter, remove his large family.