hardhandedness

alternative hard-handedness

1. uncountableHarshness, strictness.

   Well-to-do citizens, both Reformed and Catholic, also backed down and withdrew their demands, forming a united front to suppress the revolt in the cities, either through hardhandedness or appeasement.

   2004, Albert Blankert, Selected writings on Dutch painting: Rembrandt, Van Beke, Vermeer, and Others, page 45

2. uncountableThe embodiment of working-class virtue; hard-working practicality.

   1 more example

   Coming in among us by hundreds and thousands, as they now are and for years have been, their gentler and fiercer passions, like meadow rivulets and mountain torrents, mixing in with and modifying our own, and their art, science and literature, their hardhandedness and willingheartedness, and their experiences of life generally, giving to and receiving from ours new impulses and new directions, the whole soon flow together in one common stream of Humanity, which will be found irresistible by any barriers that may oppose its course, and inevitably give new and peculiar aspects to the region and the era wherein it holds its way.

   1850, William Davis Gallagher, Facts and Conditions of Progress in the North-west, page 28