Now among Theologians also it is a received opinion, that if in urgent distress, any one shall take from another what is absolutely necessary for the preservation of his own life, the act shall not be deemed a theft. A rule not founded, as some allege, solely upon the law of charity, which obliges every possessor to apply some part of his wealth to relieve the needy; but upon the original division of lands among private owners, which was made with a reservation in favour of the primitive rights of nature. For if those who at first made the division had been asked their opinion upon this point, they would have given the same reason that has just been advanced. Necessity, says Seneca, the great protectress of human infirmity breaks through all human laws, and all those made in the spirit of human regulations. Cicero in his eleventh Philippic, says, that Cassius went into Syria, which might be considered as another's province, if men adhered to written laws, but if these were abolished, it would be considered as his own by the law of nature. In the sixth book and fourth chapter of Quintus Curtius, we find an observation, that in a common calamity every man looks to himself. VII. Now this indulgence must be granted with precautions and restrictions, to prevent it from degenerating into licentiousness. And of these precautions, the first requires the distressed party to try every mode of obtaining relief, by an appeal to a magistrate, or by trying the effect of entreaty to prevail upon the owner to grant what is necessary for his pressing occasions. Plato allows any one to seek water from his neighbour's well, after having dug to a certain depth in his own without effect. Solon limits the depth to forty cubits; upon which Plutarch remarks, that he intended by this to relieve necessity and difficulty, but not to encourage sloth. Xenophon in his answer to the Sinopians, in the fifth book of the expedition of Cyrus, says, "wherever we come, whether into a barbarous country or into any part of Greece, and find the people unwilling to afford us supplies, we take them, not through motives of wantonness, but from the compulsion of necessity."