every other food, and devour nothing but men for the future.

It is thus that the most powerful or the most wretched, respectively
considering their power and wretchedness as a kind of title to the
substance of others, even equivalent to that of property, the equality
once broken was followed by the most shocking disorders. It is thus
that the usurpations of the rich, the pillagings of the poor, and the
unbridled passions of all, by stifling the cries of natural
compassion, and the as yet feeble voice of justice, rendered man
avaricious, wicked and ambitious. There arose between the title of the
strongest, and that of the first occupier a perpetual conflict, which
always ended in battery and bloodshed. Infant society became a scene
of the most horrible warfare: Mankind thus debased and harassed, and
no longer able to retreat, or renounce the unhappy acquisitions it had
made; labouring, in short merely to its confusion by the abuse of
those faculties, which in themselves do it so much honour, brought
itself to the very brink of ruin and destruction.

Attonitus novitate mali, divesque miserque,
Effugere optat opes; et quoe modo voverat, odit.

But it is impossible that men should not sooner or later have made
reflections on so wretched a situation, and upon the calamities with
which they were overwhelmed. The rich in particular must have soon
perceived how much they suffered by a perpetual war, of which they
alone supported all the expense, and in which, though all risked life,
they alone risked any substance. Besides, whatever colour they might
pretend to give their usurpations, they sufficiently saw that these
usurpations were in the main founded upon false and precarious titles,
and that what they had acquired by mere force, others could again by