Chewing our neighbor is even better, for it is older Common Law, than
the universal buying of a wife and consequent selling of daughters which
exists even now over far the greater portion of the globe. We take it
that our species began with eating itself without paying for the fare.
Partaking of our neighbor precedes all _lex scripta_, all statute law,
all constitutions. As to ourselves in particular, whose law is the
English law, we know that the Druids sacrificed human beings to their
gods; and every one knows full well, that man, when in gastronomic
contact with the gods, always appropriates the most savory morsels
and the largest portions of the sacrifice to himself, leaving to the
ethereal taste of Jove or Tezcatlipoca the smell of some burnt bones or
inwards. Yet there is no law on record abolishing human sacrifices. We
know, indeed, that some Teutonic tribes, when they adopted Christianity,
positively prohibited the eating of horse-flesh, but no law ever forbade
to honor our fathers and mothers by making them parts of our feasts; so
that no lawyer of the true sort will deny, that, to this day, the right
of sacrificing fellow-men, and the reasonable concomitant of eating the
better portion of the sacrifice, still exists.
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