ess, to give your lordship some feeling of the effects
of political society. I charge the whole of these effects on political
society. I avow the charge, and I shall presently make it good to your
lordship's satisfaction. The numbers I particularized are about
thirty-six millions. Besides those killed in battles I have said
something, not half what the matter would have justified, but something
I have said concerning the consequences of war even more dreadful than
that monstrous carnage itself which shocks our humanity, and almost
staggers our belief. So that, allowing me in my exuberance one way for
my deficiencies in the other, you will find me not unreasonable. I
think the numbers of men now upon earth are computed at five hundred
millions at the most. Here the slaughter of mankind, on what you will
call a small calculation, amounts to upwards of seventy times the number
of souls this day on the globe: a point which may furnish matter of
reflection to one less inclined to draw consequences than your lordship.

I now come to show that political society is justly chargeable with much
the greatest part of this destruction of the species. To give the
fairest play to every side of the question, I will own that there is a
haughtiness and fierceness in human nature, which will cause innumerable
broils, place men in what situation you please; but owning this, I still
insist in charging it to political regulations, that these broils are so
frequent, so cruel, and attended with consequences so deplorable. In a
state of nature, it had been impossible to find a number of men,
sufficient for such slaughters, agreed in the same bloody purpose; or
allowing that they might have come to such an agreement (an impossible
supposition), yet the means that simple nature has supplied them with,
are by no means adequate to such an end; many scratches, many bruises
undoubtedly would be received upon all hands; but only a few, a very few
deaths. Society and politics, which have given us these destructive
views, have given us also the means of satisfying them. From the
earliest dawnings of policy to this day, the invention of men has been
sharpening and improving the mystery of murder, from the first rude
essays of clubs and stones, to the present perfection of gunnery,
cannoneering, bombarding, mining, and all those species of artificial,
learned, and refined cruelty, in which we are now so expert, and which
make a principal part of what polit