9. Instances of enormities practised without remorse. But I cannot
see how any men should ever transgress those moral rules, with
confidence and serenity, were they innate, and stamped upon their
minds. View but an army at the sacking of a town, and see what
observation or sense of moral principles, or what touch of
conscience for all the outrages they do. Robberies, murders, rapes,
are the sports of men set at liberty from punishment and censure. Have
there not been whole nations, and those of the most civilized
people, amongst whom the exposing their children, and leaving them
in the fields to perish by want or wild beasts has been the
practice; as little condemned or scrupled as the begetting them? Do
they not still, in some countries, put them into the same graves
with their mothers, if they die in childbirth; or despatch them, if
a pretended astrologer declares them to have unhappy stars? And are
there not places where, at a certain age, they kill or expose their
parents, without any remorse at all? In a part of Asia, the sick, when
their case comes to be thought desperate, are carried out and laid
on the earth before they are dead; and left there, exposed to wind and
weather, to perish without assistance or pity. It is familiar among
the Mingrelians, a people professing Christianity, to bury their
children alive without scruple.
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