🔺 WINGS TO IRON

“The most useful and the most fatal instrument in the hand of mankind. For by the aid of iron we lay open the ground, we plant trees, we prepare our vineyard-trees, and we force our vines each year to resume their youthful state, by cutting away their decayed branches. It is by the aid of iron that we construct houses, cleave rocks, and perform so many other useful offices of life. But it is with iron also that wars, murders, and robberies are effected, and this, not only hand to hand, but from a distance even, by the aid of missiles and winged weapons, now launched from engines, now hurled by the human arm, and now furnished with feathery wings. This last I regard as the most criminal artifice that has been devised by the human mind; for, as if to bring death upon man with still greater rapidity, we have given wings to iron and taught it to fly. Let us there- fore acquit Nature of a charge that here belongs to man himself.”

“In the treaty which Porsena granted to the Roman people, after the expulsion of the kings, we find it expressly stipulated, that iron shall be only employed for the cultivation of the fields.”

The Natural History. Pliny the Elder