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138 necessary than what the human body requires for its development, cultivation, and health; and this labour shall cease to be a burden;—for a reasonable being is not destined to be a bearer of burdens.

But it is not Nature, it is Freedom itself, by which the greatest and most terrible disorders incident to our race are produced; man is the cruelest enemy of man. Lawless hordes of savages still wander over vast wildernesses;—they meet, and the victor devours his foe at the triumphal feast:—or where culture has at length united these wild hordes under some social bond, they attack each other, as nations, with the power which law and union have given them. Defying toil and privation, their armies traverse peaceful plains and forests;—they meet each other, and the sight of their brethren is the signal for slaughter. Equipt with the mightiest inventions of the human understanding, hostile fleets plough a way through the ocean; through storm and tempest man rushes to meet his fellow-man upon the lonely, inhospitable sea;—they meet, and defy the fury of the elements, that they may destroy each other with their own hands. Even in the interior of states, where men seem to be united in equality under the law, it is still for the most part only force and fraud which rule under that venerable name; and here the warfare is so much the more shameful that it is not openly declared to be war, and the party attacked is even deprived of the privilege of defending himself against unjust oppression. Smaller associations rejoice aloud in the ignorance, the folly, the vice, and the misery in which the greater number of their brethren are sunk, and make it their avowed object to retain them in this state of degradation, and even to plunge