Two Treatises Government John Locke - Faculty of Social Sciences ...

40/John Lockethis absolute fatherly power in its height and perfection, and he mighthave showed us in Peru people that begot children on purpose to fattenand eat them. The story is so remarkable, that I cannot but set it down inthe author’s words: “In some provinces, says he, they were so liquorishafter man’s flesh, that they would not have the patience to stay till thebreath was out of the body, but would suck the blood as it ran from thewounds of the dying man; they had public shambles of man’s flesh, andtheir madness herein was to that degree, that they spared not their ownchildren, which they had begot on strangers taken in war: for they madetheir captives their mistresses, and choicely nourished the children theylead by them, till about thirteen years old they butchered and eat them;and they served the mothers after the same fashion, when they grew pastchild-bearing, and ceased to bring them any more roasters.” Garcilassode la Vega, Hist. des Yncas de Peru, 1. i. c. 12.§58. Thus far can the busy mind of man carry him to a brutalitybelow the level of beasts, when he quits his reason, which places himalmost equal to angels. Nor can it be otherwise in a creature, whosethoughts are more than the sands, and wider than the ocean where fancyand passion must needs run him into strange courses, if reason, which ishis only star and compass, be not that he steers by. The imagination isalways restless, and suggests variety of thoughts, and the will, reasonbeing laid afield, is ready for every extravagant project; and in this statehe that goes farthest out of the way, is thought fittest to lead, and is sureof most followers: and when fashion hath once established what folly orcraft began, custom makes it sacred, and it will be thought impudence,or madness, to contradict or question it. He that will impartially surveythe nations of the world, will find so much of their religions governments,and manners, brought in and continued amongst them by thesemeans, that he will have but little reverence for the practices which arein use and credit amongst men; and will have reason to think, that thewoods and forests, where the irrational untaught inhabitants keep rightby following nature, are fitter to give us rules, than cities and palaces,where those that call themselves civil and rational, go out of their way,by the authority of example. If precedents are sufficient to establish arule in this case, our author might have found in holy writ childrensacrificed by their parents, and this amongst the people of God themselvesthe Psalmist tells us, Psalm cvi. 38, “They shed innocent blood,even the blood of their sons and of their daughters, whom they sacrificedunto the idols of Canaan.” But God judged not of this by our