Definition of "scourge"

On you it rests, whether I quit for ever the neighbourhood of man, and lead a harmless life, or become the scourge of your fellow-creatures, and the author of your own speedy ruin.

1818, [Mary Shelley], chapter II, in Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. […], volume II, London: […] [Macdonald and Son] for Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, & Jones, page 30

What scourge for perjury / Can this dark monarchy afford false Clarence?

c. 1593 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedy of Richard the Third: […]”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, [Act I, scene iv]

America’s poverty line is $63 a day for a family of four. In the richer parts of the emerging world $4 a day is the poverty barrier. But poverty’s scourge is fiercest below $1.25 ([…]): people below that level live lives that are poor, nasty, brutish and short.

2013 June 1, “Towards the end of poverty”, in The Economist‎, volume 407, number 8838, page 11

If they vote, they do not send men to Congress on errands of humanity; but while their brothers and sisters are being scourged and hung for loving liberty, while—I might here insert all that slavery implies and is,—it is the mismanagement of wood and iron and stone and gold which concerns them.

1854, Henry David Thoreau, Slavery in Massachusetts