But famines are occasioned not only by natural causes, but by wars; in which mankind, acting in direct opposition to the laws of God and nature, destroy and lay waste the earth, taking every opportunity of reducing to extremity both those whom they call innocent and those whom they call guilty. Thus vast multitudes are reduced to want, to despair, and rendered a prey to grief, terror, and every depressing passion of the human mind; they are exposed to every inclemency of the weather; to the scorching heats of the day, and the chilling damps of the night; in short, to every thing that we can conceive capable of predisposing the body for the reception of diseases of the very worst kind. No wonder therefore that war and pestilence go hand in hand; and, by taking a review of the history of mankind, we shall see, that, always at those times when the nations have been most actively employed in the trade of butchering one another, then, or very soon after, they have been afflicted with pestilence. To begin with the great plague of 767 B. C. which coincides with the rise of the Assyrian empire: Till this time, though there had been numberless wars, yet they were carried on upon a much smaller scale than now, when great empires were to be set up, and when the most distant nations were to be assembled in order to gratify the pride and ambition of an individual. The Assyrians, we know, penetrated into Ethiopia; but how far east or how far west they went, we are not certainly informed. To their wars, however, we may with reason ascribe the desolations occasioned by this first plague. From Thucydides’s account of the plague at Athens, it seems plain that it was occasioned, or at least rendered more violent, by the wars of the Greeks with one another at that time. Had the Carthaginian army staid at home when they went to war with Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse,[34] it is very probable that the pestilence would not have broke out among them. The like may be said of the plague which broke out among them in the time of Marcellus.[35] That in the time of Jugurtha, indeed, is said to have been occasioned by locusts; but, had not vast bodies of men been collected together for the purposes of war, the plague could never have committed such ravages. The plague in the time of Titus could not have been brought from Jerusalem, nor perhaps would it have existed there, had not Titus made war against that city; and so of others. [34] See Sec. i. p. 10. [35] Ibid. p. 12.