Read the following excerpt from Irving's A History of New York.
Here then are three complete and undeniable sources of right established, any one of which was more than
ample to establish a property in the newly discovered regions of America. Now, so it has happened in certain
parts of this delightful quarter of the globe, that the right of discovery has been so strenuously asserted--the
influence of cultivation so industriously extended, and the progress of salvation and civilization so zealously
prosecuted, that, what with their attendant wars, persecutions, oppressions, diseases, and other partial evils
that often hang on the skirts of great benefits--the savage aborigines have, some how or another, been utterly
annihilated--and this all at once brings me to a fourth right, which is worth all the others put together--For the
original claimants to the soil being all dead and buried, and no one remaining to inherit or dispute the soil, the
Spaniards as the next immediate occupants entered upon the possession, as clearly as the hang-man
succeeds to the clothes of the malefactor--and as they have Blackstone, and all the learned expounders of
the law on their side, they may set all actions of ejectment at defiance--and this last right may be entitled the
Right by Extermination or in other words, the Right By Gunpowder.
Which device is Irving employing?
O vignette
O aphorism
satire
alliteration
