The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 01 (of 12) — John Shaqi
The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 01 (of 12)Burke, Edmund
Philosophy
The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 01 (of 12)
Burke, Edmund
Great Britain -- Politics and government -- 1760-1820; Political science -- Early works to 1800
much as it would me; and I confess I already feel my eyes ache by
keeping them so long intent on so bloody a prospect. I shall observe
little on the Servile, the Social, the Gallic, and Spanish wars; nor
upon those with Jugurtha, nor Antiochus, nor many others equally
important, and carried on with equal fury. The butcheries of Julius
Caesar alone are calculated by somebody else; the numbers he has been the
means of destroying have been reckoned at 1,200,000. But to give your
lordship an idea that may serve as a standard, by which to measure, in
some degree, the others; you will turn your eyes on Judea; a very
inconsiderable spot of the earth in itself, though ennobled by the
singular events which had their rise in that country.
This spot happened, it matters not here by what means, to become at
several times extremely populous, and to supply men for slaughters
scarcely credible, if other well-known and well-attested ones had not
given them a color. The first settling of the Jews here was attended by
an almost entire extirpation of all the former inhabitants. Their own
civil wars, and those with their petty neighbors, consumed vast
multitudes almost every year for several centuries; and the irruptions
of the kings of Babylon and Assyria made immense ravages. Yet we have
their history but partially, in an indistinct, confused manner; so that
I shall only throw the strong point of light upon that part which
coincides with Roman history, and of that part only on the point of time
when they received the great and final stroke which made them, no more a
nation; a stroke which is allowed to have cut off little less than two
millions of that people. I say nothing of the loppings made from that
stock whilst it stood; nor from the suckers that grew out of the old
root ever since. But if, in this inconsiderable part of the globe, such
a carnage has been made in two or three short reigns, and that this
great carnage, great as it is, makes but a minute part of what the
histories of that people inform us they suffered; what shall we judge of
countries more extended, and which have waged wars by far more
considerable?
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