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Agrarian   Listen
adjective
Agrarian  adj.  
1.
Pertaining to fields, or lands, or their tenure; esp., relating to an equal or equitable division of lands; as, the agrarian laws of Rome, which distributed the conquered and other public lands among citizens. "His Grace's landed possessions are irresistibly inviting to an agrarian experiment."
2.
(Bot.) Wild; said of plants growing in the fields.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Agrarian" Quotes from Famous Books



... on Sir Gerald Malloring's Worcestershire property may or may not have any significance as a symptom of agrarian unrest. We shall watch the upshot with some anxiety. Certain it is that unless the authorities are prepared to deal sharply with arson, or other cases of deliberate damage to the property of landlords, we may bid good-by to any hope of ameliorating ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... see with my own eyes the position of affairs; which I arranged to do sine die, and after advising them to exercise a temporary patience, I got rid of the deputation without suggesting "that under the existing agrarian dispute they should let their farms to some enterprising Irish tenants ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker

... outside of Prague and Liberic, women taxpayers and those of the learned professions may vote by proxy. Women belong to all the political parties except the Conservative and constitute 40 per cent, of the Agrarian party. They are well organized to secure the full suffrage and are holding hundreds of meetings and distributing thousands of pamphlets. In Bosnia and Herzegovina ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor

... Maconnois district of Burgundy; he gives the number of the Orations of Cicero, which were eight (Ep. IV. 2), and which are generally supposed to have been those for Caecina, Rubirius and Roscius, against Rullus and Lucius Piso, and those relating to the Agrarian Laws. He also found Cicero's two treatises De Legibus and De Finibus. In his Descriptio Ruinarum Urbis Romae he states that he found in the Monastery of Monte Casino, near Naples, Frontinus on the Aqueducts of Rome, and ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross

... at the prospect of it while nine-tenths of their co-religionists are destitute of personal freedom. We must find the solution of Ireland's disaffection in another way, and mainly by a bold handling of the agrarian question, which lies at the root of all. The task before the Unionist party is not a light one. They must crush the Nationalist conspiracy, and uproot the fantastic hopes which unscrupulous men ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)

... represented as an honest field-laborer, working for Farmer Jolly at nine shillings a week. The birth of his manikin baby and the accompanying death of his wife increase his cares past bearing. He thereupon commits three crimes in succession: he applies to Jolly for an increase of pay, he joins the agrarian movement of a year ago, and he attempts to run away and find work elsewhere. He is inexorably, minutely and witheringly punished for these several acts, and at last gets his only chance of comfort in a violent ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various

... The agrarian difficulties of Russia, France, Italy, Ireland, and of wealthy England, show us that ere long the urban and the rural populations will be standing in the same camp. They will be demanding the abolition of that great and scandalous paradox whereby, though production ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly

... upon agrarian principles, the subject of some uneasiness to our hero—The first appearance, but not the ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Frederick Marryat

... prosperity. A cluster of Lodhi villages forms a hotbed of strife and the nearest relations are generally divided by bitter animosities. The Revenue Officer who visits them is beset by reckless charges and counter-charges and no communities are less amenable to conciliatory compromises. Agrarian outrages are only too common in some of the Lodhi villages." [94] The high status of the Lodhi caste in the Central Provinces as compared with their position in the country of their origin may be simply explained by the fact ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell

... I tell you there is no man will give you any help or any encouragement for this day's work. If it was something agrarian now— ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various

... in no degree infected with this fetish worship of the Constituent Assembly. In the first place, there were no guarantees that it really would be called. The breaking up of the army, mass desertions, disorganization of the supplies department, agrarian revolution—all this created an environment which was unfavorable to the elections for the Constituent Assembly. The surrender of Petrograd to the Germans, furthermore, threatened to remove altogether the question of elections from the order ...
— From October to Brest-Litovsk • Leon Trotzky

... to the tribunate by bringing forward his celebrated agrarian law. He proposed that the public lands of Rome, then largely occupied by wealthy men who alone had the money necessary to work them with cattle and slaves, should be reclaimed by the state, divided ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER

... singular that, precisely as in the preceding winter, the deliberate intentions of moderate and competent persons were anticipated and defeated by a partial and premature conspiracy. At the end of February a confederate revealed a project for an insurrection, partly religious and partly agrarian. Placards were to be issued simultaneously in all parts of the country, declaring that the queen's pregnancy was a delusion, and that she intended to pass upon the nation a supposititious child; the people were, therefore, invited to rise in arms, drive out the Spaniards, revolutionise religion, ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude

... what he had seen of the country, and especially the great central plain, in his frequent visits to Ireland, convinced him that the balance between subsistence and population would speedily create a new agrarian question, whatever political schemes were introduced. This was one of] "the only ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley

... Afranius and Q. Metellus Celer B.C. 60, Pompeius, who had brought about their election, attempted to carry a law for the distribution of lauds among his soldiers and the ratification of all his acts during his command. This is the Agrarian Law which was proposed by the tribune Flavius, but opposed by the Senate. (Cicero, Ad Attic. i. 19.) Afranius was, if we may trust Cicero, a contemptible fellow; and Metellus now quarrelled with Pompeius, because ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long

... "We shall have agrarian laws, sir. Your money, sir, and mine—our hard earnings—will become the prey of political robbers, and our children will be beggared to satisfy the envious longings of some pitiful scoundrel ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper

... The Agrarian West Turns to Industry.—Nor was this vast enterprise confined to the old Northeast where, as Madison had sagely remarked, commerce was early dominant. "Cincinnati," runs an official report in 1854, "appears to be a great central ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard

... spite of its small size, is the largest contribution yet given to the agrarian literature of this country. The author, besides being a student of American social conditions, is thoroughly conversant with practical farming, and there is little doubt that the farmer who reads the work will have to admit ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte

... results from their inquiries as best elucidate the character and condition of the Roman people, and explain the most important portion of the history. The struggles between the patricians and plebeians, respecting the agrarian laws have been so strangely misrepresented, even by some of the best historians, that the nature of the contest may, with truth, be said to have been wholly misunderstood before the publication of Niebuhr's work: a perfect explanation of these important ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith

... title of "Practicable Socialism." In April, 1883, Emile de Lavelaye described with alarm the "Progress of Socialism." "On the Continent," he wrote, "Socialism is said to be everywhere." To it he attributed with remarkable inaccuracy, the agrarian movement in Ireland, and with it he connected the fact that Henry George's new book, "Progress and Poverty," was selling by thousands "in an ultra popular form" in the back streets and alleys of England. And ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease

... the Black Killer pursued his bloody trade unchecked. The public, always greedy of a new sensation, took up the matter. In several of the great dailies, articles on the "Agrarian Outrages" appeared, followed by lengthy correspondence. Controversy raged high; each correspondent had his own theory and his own solution of the problem; and each waxed indignant as his were discarded ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant

... obstacle in their way even they missed him. They saw that he was valuable to the State and never expected that he would cause them any serious trouble. When he was suddenly taken away all the possessions of the powerful class were again diminished, so that the promoters of agrarian legislation ravaged at will practically all of Italy. And this seems to me to have been most strongly indicated by the mass of stones that poured down from heaven, falling upon some of the temples and killing men, and by the tears of Apollo. [Sidenote: B.C. 131 (a.u. 623)] For the god wept copiously[47] ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume 1 (of 6) • Cassius Dio

... the rancher's frontier is the fact that in a remote country lacking transportation facilities the product must be in small bulk, or must be able to transport itself, and the cattle raiser could easily drive his product to market. The effect of these great ranches on the subsequent agrarian history of the localities in which they existed ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner

... and give it to them. They wanted Russia to be a constitutional Republic, like France or the United States; or a constitutional Monarchy, like England. On the other hand, the masses of the people wanted real industrial and agrarian democracy. ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed

... general, when the legislator attempts to make a new settlement of such matters, every one meets him with the cry, that 'he is not to disturb vested interests,'—declaring with imprecations that he is introducing agrarian laws and cancelling of debts, until a man is at his wits' end; whereas no one could quarrel with the Dorians for distributing the land,—there was nothing to hinder them; and as for debts, they had none which were considerable or of ...
— Laws • Plato

... of the most fearful tragedies ever enacted in this province, indeed in Canada, took place in the village of Megantic. Our readers are familiar with the agrarian troubles in which Donald Morrison has been figuring for some time past. They have also been apprised that, upon the burning of Duquette's homestead, suspicion at once fell upon Donald. A warrant, charging him with arson, was sworn out against him, and a man named Warren ...
— The Hunted Outlaw - Donald Morrison, The Canadian Rob Roy • Anonymous

... doubled in price every week; everybody was speculating in land; everybody was rich; and everybody was growing richer. The community, however, was torn to pieces by new doctrines in religion and in political economy; there were camp meetings, and agrarian meetings; and an election was at hand, which, it was expected, would throw the ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving

... further of all that. Now, gentlemen, in square-sail brigs and three-masted ships, well-nigh as large and stout as any that ever sailed out of your old Callao to far manilla; this lakeman, in the land-locked heart of our America, had yet been nurtured by all those agrarian .. freebooting impressions popularly connected with the open ocean. For in their interflowing aggregate, those grand fresh-water seas of ours —Erie, and Ontario, and Huron, and Superior, and Michigan, —possess an ocean-like expansiveness, ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville

... murder, and outrage filled the news of every day. Owing to the refusal of the Liberal Government to renew the Peace Preservation Act when they took office in 1880—a disastrous but perhaps intelligible mistake—the Chief Secretary, when we reached Dublin, was facing an agrarian and political revolt of the most determined character, with nothing but the ordinary law, resting on juries and evidence, as his instrument—an instrument which the Irish Land League had taken good care to shatter in his hands. Threatening letters were flowing in upon both himself and my godmother; ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... important legislation of Congress relative to the public domain came from the frontier. A comparison of the customs of the squatters with the provisions of the pre-emption and homestead acts reveals the truth that the latter are largely compilations of the former. These American principles of agrarian polity are products of ...
— History of the Constitutions of Iowa • Benjamin F. Shambaugh

... Congress struck out the section directed against State socialism and adopted a number of propositions leading to that end. Again, at Breslau in 1895, the Germans adopted several State-socialist measures. "At this time," says Paul Kampffmeyer, "a proposition of the agrarian commission on the party program, which had a decided State-socialist stamp, was discussed. It contained, among other things, the retaining and the increase of the public land domain; the management of the State and community lands on their own account; the giving of State ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter

... interior population with predominant agrarian interests were those classes, urban for the most part, whose income was derived from personal rather than real property. Even at this time a capitalist class of no mean proportions existed. No inconsiderable ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson

... of the purse or the sword, compared to that of the spirit, is poor and contemptible. As to lands, you may have agrarian laws, and equal partition. But a man's intellect is all his own, held direct from God, an inalienable fief. It is the most potent of weapons in the hands of a paladin. If the people comprehend Force in the physical sense, how much more do they reverence the intellectual! Ask Hildebrand, or ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... abettors of the Slave trade Bill should think they are too harshly treated in this Poem, let them consider how they should feel if their estates were threatened by an agrarian law; (no unplausible measure) and let them make allowances for the ...
— No Abolition of Slavery - Or the Universal Empire of Love, A poem • James Boswell

... repeated, but was withdrawn after investigation. Marx wrote in a confidential communication to his German friends that Bakunin was an agent of the Pan-Slavist party and received from them 25,000 francs a year. Meanwhile, Bakunin became for a time interested in the attempt to stir up an agrarian revolt in Russia, and this led him to neglect the contest in the International at a crucial moment. During the Franco-Prussian war Bakunin passionately took the side of France, especially after the fall of Napoleon III. He endeavored to rouse the people to revolutionary ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell

... with the most triumphant ingenuity; in the antecedent probabilities of his Pro Milone;[236] in his apology for Muraena's public,[237] and Caelius's private life,[238] and his disparagement of Verres's military services in Sicily;[239] it is observable too in the address with which the Agrarian law of Rullus,[240] and the accusation of Rabirius,[241] both popular measures, are represented to be hostile to public liberty; with which Milo's impolitic unconcern is made a touching incident;[242] and Cato's attack upon the crowd of clients ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman

... reminds us of an old Irish story bearing on the land question, and showing how agrarian difficulties were settled in ancient ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant

... odious burden. His Irish Land Act of 1870 aimed to give the tenant-farmer certain valuable rights in the land which he rented. The result was rather to redouble the cry against "landlordism," with its corollary of agrarian crime. A second Land Act (1881) provided a land court for adjusting rents. Instead of quieting the disorders this indulgent legislation was the signal for a fresh outburst of crime. The Irish Land League was organized to secure the abolition of landlordism, and when ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy

... continence and devotion to scholarly pursuits. Within a year, gardens flourished; within two years herds grazed the grassy slopes; within three years cloth was being woven on looms in the ancient way and most of the homespun arts of an agrarian society had been revived. Men fell sick and men died, but the survivors lived in amity. Harry Collins celebrated his sixtieth birthday as the equivalent of a second-year student of medicine; his instructor being his own son. Everyone ...
— This Crowded Earth • Robert Bloch

... the instruction of young ladies in French and Latin; and John S. Dwight became one of the civilizing forces of his time, by editing the Boston Journal of Music. None of them were the worse for their agrarian experiment. ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns

... countries are drawn up on very much the same principles; the ordinary criminal law is very much the same, and there is very much the same feeling among the population with respect to ordinary crime; in fact, with the exception of agrarian offences, the administration of the law in Ireland is as effective as it is in England. On almost every point the similarity of the criminal law and its administration in the two countries almost amounts to identity, and a comparison of their criminal statistics, in so far ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison

... storm center of all this agitation concerned primarily one thing—the amount which the railroad might fairly charge for transporting passengers and freight. The battle of the people with the railroads for fifty years has been the "battle of the rate." This has taken mainly two forms, the agrarian agitation of the West against transportation charges, and the fight of the manufacturing centers, mainly in the East, against discriminations. Perhaps its most characteristic episodes have been the fight of the "Grangers" and their successors ...
— The Railroad Builders - A Chronicle of the Welding of the States, Volume 38 in The - Chronicles of America Series • John Moody

... close quarters at the institutions for religion and education of the country and at the character of the people.' Philip Pusey was inclined to join them. 'It will not alarm you,' says Pusey, 'if I state my belief that in these agrarian outrages the Irish peasants have been engaged in a justifiable civil war, because the peasant ejected from his land could no longer by any efforts of his own preserve his family from the risk of starvation. This view is that of a ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley

... with large agrarian, mining, and manufacturing sectors, entered the 1990s with declining real growth, runaway inflation, an unserviceable foreign debt of $122 billion, and a lack of policy direction. In addition, the economy remained highly ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... clergymen, and intermediary pimps of substantial position, the institution naturally appealed to the highest sentiments (which is saying extremely little) of a Protestant half-population forced into servility by agrarian conditions. Soon it became self-supporting, and waxed mighty in the land, feeding itself with fresh vendetta from each recurring 12th ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy

... but deeply impregnated with sentiments of hatred and jealousy of the upper classes, and with a determination to 'level' all political distinctions and privileges, and when this is accomplished to proceed to a more equal distribution of property, to an agrarian experiment; for it is idle to suppose that men of this stamp care anything for abstract political theories, or have any definite object but that of procuring the means of working less, and eating and drinking ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville

... chuckled. "Some cultures go through an agrarian stage to reach a technological civilization, and some pass through ...
— Breaking Point • James E. Gunn

... decide on adopting these devices in the name of the public, then they become law." The result was the wretched existence to which the labour class was doomed, "a life so wretched that even a beast's life seems enviable." No such cry of pity for the poor, of protest against the system of agrarian and manufacturing tyranny which found its expression in the Statute-book had been heard since the days of Piers Ploughman. But from Christendom More turns with a smile to "Nowhere." In "Nowhere" the aim of legislation is to secure the welfare, social, industrial, intellectual, ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green

... the times. The courts of justice were the scenes of his earliest triumphs; nor until he was praetor did he speak from the rostrum on mere political questions, as in reference to the Manilian and Agrarian laws. It is in his political discourses that Cicero rises to the highest ranks. In his speeches against Verres, Catiline, and Antony he kindles in his countrymen lofty feelings for the honor of his country, and abhorrence of tyranny and corruption. Indeed, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord

... universal! He could not have been more ignorant of the real sources of the danger that threatened us, if he had been an American who resolutely closed his eyes, and then would not believe in what he would not see. When such a man could make such a mistake, and supposed that we were to perish from an agrarian revolt,—we being then on the eve of a revolt of the slaveholders,—it cannot be matter for wonder that the common European belief was that the United States constituted a pure and perfect democracy, or that most Europeans of the higher classes should ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... hilum not a whit, nothing. 12-14. Flaminius, when tribune 232 B.C., by a vote of the Comitia Tributa (i.e. by a plebiscitum) and against the expressed wish of the Senate (contra senatus auctoritatem) carried an agrarian law for the division of public land in Picenum amongst Roman citizens. 18. laudatio, sc. funebris, the funeral speech. 19-20. in luce ... civium in public and under the gaze ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce

... written me a long account of his own, made out with the precision of a lawyer; and, in addition, he has sent me divers papers, some of which openly contend for what is substantially a new division of property, and what in effect would be agrarian laws." ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper



Words linked to "Agrarian" :   agricultural, rural, farming



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