Chapter IV: Part 4

In view of the great complexity of the land question, the variety of the causes that have led to the depression of agriculture, and the difficulty of forecasting accurately what would be the result of the adoption of any particular reform by any one nation, considered apart from the rest, vegetarians will do wisely in not claiming too much for the system they advocate. But at least it must be admitted that vegetarianism would tend to bring about, in some form or other, that much-desired _return to the land_, which, in the present congested state of our cities and busy centres, is felt to be the best hope of stanching a dangerous wound. The town is at present draining the life of the country, and the tide of emigration is still further sapping the national strength; but if men's thoughts could be turned back from commerce to agriculture, if a healthy love of the soil, of fruit-growing, of market-gardening, could be substituted for the insane thirst for the feverish atmosphere of the town, it is evident that a great step would have been taken towards the cure of the disease. "If the towns renounced flesh-eating," says Professor Newman, "we should see in a single generation, even without improved land-tenure, a tide of migration set the other way—from towns into the country. Rustic industry would be immensely developed. All motive for the expatriation of our robustest youth would, for a long time yet, be removed, and the country might be enormously enriched, not in an upper stratum of great fortunes, but down to the bottom of the community."[42]

Footnote 42:

"Essays on Diet," p. 55.

So, too, Max Nordau, in some notable passages of his _Conventional Lies of our Civilisation_:

"If the soil of Europe were cultivated like that of
Belgium, it could support a population of 1,950 millions
much more completely and abundantly than the 360
millions it now supports so poorly.... Cultivation of
the soil is the despised child of our civilisation.
It hardly takes one forward stride where manufacture
takes a hundred.... Experience teaches us that man's
labour as a general thing can nowhere be employed in a
more lucrative way than in agriculture. If a man should
work over his field with the shovel and spade instead
of the plough, he would find that a plot of ground of
incredibly small size would be sufficient to support
him."

There is yet another peril that would be lessened in proportion to the increase of vegetarianism—the dependence of this country on the importation of food from abroad. "At present," says Mr. W. E. A. Axon, "probably one-half of the population is dependent upon a foreign supply. That England should be, and is, the last country in the world to desire a Chinese wall for the exclusion of foreign commodities, need not blind us to the fact that there may be grave national dangers in the soil of the country providing food for about half its people. A nation of vegetarians would create such a demand that rural England would be, if not a cornfield, yet a vast orchard and market-garden."[43]

Footnote 43:

_Manchester Vegetarian Lectures_, "Vegetarianism and National
Economy." For a clear statement of the present shocking
neglect of agriculture in this country, see "Fields,
Factories, and Workshops," by P. Kropotkin, 1899, where it is
shown that _two-thirds_ of our food-supply is now imported
from abroad.

Enough has now been said to show that the habit of flesh-eating, involving as it does the sacrifice of vast tracts of land to the grazing of cattle, and the consequent starving of agriculture, is far too costly to be justified, in the face of an extending civilisation, unless by a much clearer proof of its necessity than any which its advocates have essayed; in fact, it only remains possible, on its present large scale, through the temporary use of huge pasture-grounds in remote semi-civilised regions which will not always be available. For pastoralism belongs rightly to another and earlier phase of the world's economics, and as civilisation spreads it becomes more and more an anachronism, as surely as flesh-eating, by a corresponding change, becomes an anachronism in morals.[44] It seems, generally speaking, that the foods which are the costliest in suffering are also the costliest in price, whereas the wholesome and harmless diet to which Nature points us is at once the cheapest and most humane.

Footnote 44:

Against the sea fisheries, it may be noted, the same objection
cannot be raised, as they do not diminish, but supplement the
produce of the soil.

DOUBTS AND DIFFICULTIES

We have next to deal with a special class of irregular foemen, the guerillas and Bashi-Bazouks of the flesh-eater's army, whose game it is to waylay and harass the vegetarian movement by a small fire of doubts and difficulties as to what the future has in store. The alarmists they are, whose apprehensive minds are concerned not so much with the rightness or wrongness of the system, as with the anxieties of "what would happen" if the triumph of vegetarianism should be won; and so gloomy are their forebodings as to suggest a probable collapse of the whole fabric of society, if once that great prop and mainstay of civilisation—the habit of eating dead animals—should be disloyally undermined.

Now, at the outset, it should be said that the well-worn method of trying to discredit new principles by "wanting to know" beforehand exactly how everything will happen, is in many cases a foolish and fraudulent device. There are, of course, certain quite legitimate questions, as to the general scope and practicability of any proposed reform, to which reformers must be prepared to make answer before they can expect to prevail, and to such questions vegetarians have a convincing reply; but when the inquisition takes the form of asking for a present explanation of future developments, and for a foreknowledge of details which, in the very nature of things, are unknowable, then it is well to make it clear from the beginning that we will be no parties to any such waste of time. Reasonable foresight is one thing, the gift of prophecy is another; and it is in no wise the duty of those who are working towards a more or less distant goal, to give a precise geometrical survey of their Promised Land.

In the case of vegetarianism the answerable doubts and difficulties fall mostly under two heads, relating first to the alarming discomforts which the loss of flesh-food would entail upon mankind, and secondly to the not less grievous straits to which the animals themselves would be reduced under so misguided a régime. Let us take the selfish view first, as containing, perhaps, a modicum of real feeling, which can scarcely be found in that suspicious concern for the animals. There are some folk, it seems, over whose troubled minds there really _does_ hang, like a nightmare, the alarmist's vision of a world impoverished and dismantled by vegetarianism—a world _sans_ leather, _sans_ bone, _sans_ soap, _sans_ candles, _sans_ manure, _sans_ everything.

ALARMIST: But this is mere trifling. It is idle to
talk of the humanity, the wholesomeness, the economy
of a vegetarian diet, while you are overlooking the
disastrous consequences that stare you in the face. We
may perhaps be able, as you say, to exist without
meat, but what could we do without leather and the
other animal substances on which civilisation depends?

VEGETARIAN: Well, I suppose we should take care _not_ to
be without them, or something just as good.

ALARMIST: How could we do that, if there were no
carcases to supply us with hides, bone, and tallow?
In your devotion to an ideal you seem to forget that
if your principles prevailed, we might wake up some
fine morning to find ourselves confronted by the
dislocation of the boot trade, the bookbinding trade,
the harness trade, and a hundred others. Thousands of
men and women would be thrown out of work, and we should
soon have no boots, no portmanteaus, no soap, no
candles, no knife-handles. It would be a downright
relapse into barbarism.

VEGETARIAN: But, happily, your lurid picture is based on
the false assumption that vegetarianism would come about
by a sudden and instantaneous conversion. That is not
the way in which great changes are accomplished. They
are a matter of years and centuries, not of days and
weeks; and the "fine morning" you spoke of will be a
gradual morning of very extensive duration.

ALARMIST: Well, but that is only putting off the evil
day—it would come at last.

VEGETARIAN: But would not something else have also been
coming meantime? Would not the demand, in this as in all
other usages of life, have produced the corresponding
supply? There is no need, however, to speculate as to
what _would_ happen, because it is happening already.

ALARMIST: What is happening?

VEGETARIAN: The articles which you named are being
supplied in substitutes from the vegetable kingdom.
Slowly and tentatively at first, as is inevitable while
vegetarians are so few in numbers; but vegetarian boots,
vegetarian soap, and vegetarian candles are now in the
market, and as the movement spreads, the demand will be
proportionately greater. So pray do not alarm yourself
about the dislocation of trade, for the whole change,
great as it is, will come to pass imperceptibly, and
will never bring a moment's inconvenience to anyone.
Mankind, as it happens, is not so helpless, so
uninventive, so literally "hidebound," as to let its
progress be dependent on skins, bones, and guts.

There is a good deal of unintended humour, too, in some of the difficulties that are alleged. Thus, vegetarians are often asked how the land could be fertilised without the use of animal manure, it being apparently forgotten that _ex nihilo nihil fit_, and that animals can only return to the land in manure what they have previously taken from it in food; also that by our absurdly wasteful drainage system we are all the time poisoning our seas and rivers with a mass of sewage which would be amply sufficient for the soil. "Let the land," says Mr. William Hoyle, "only receive, in the shape of manure, the sewage and refuse from the teeming population of our towns and villages, in addition to the other means which are applied to it, and let it be properly drained and cultivated, and there is hardly any limit to its power of production."[45]

Footnote 45:

"Our National Resources," 1889.

But it is superfluous to spend time in answering such questions, for their silliness is far in excess of their honesty. For years the opponents of vegetarianism in the press had been asking, "What should we do without leather?" etc.; yet as soon as the substitutes for these articles began to be exhibited at the annual Vegetarian Congress, the note was changed, and the reporters remarked that the exhibition was "not of much interest," until we found the London correspondent of a big provincial paper actually complaining that "the crusade against meat of every kind, _and even against leather_ (at this exhibition they have boots and shoes made of imitation leather), is carrying the reform a little too far." Our critics are hard to satisfy. We are going "a little too far" if we produce a substitute for leather; if we do not produce one, we are not going far enough.

And now, with all becoming gravity, we turn to the second branch of our subject—the disinterested inquiry as to "what would become of the animals" if we ceased to kill them for food. "If the life of animals," says Dr. Paul Carus, "had to be regarded as sacred as human life, there can be no doubt about it that whole industries would be destroyed, and human civilisation would at once drop down to a very primitive condition. Many millions would starve, and large cities would disappear from the face of the earth. But the brute creation would suffer too. There might be a temporary increase of brute life, but certainly not of happiness. Cattle would only be raised for draught-oxen and milk-kine, and they would not die the sudden death at the hands of the butcher, but slowly of old age or by disease."[46]

Footnote 46:

"The Open Court," 1898.

A pathetic picture, indeed! It does not for a moment occur to this sapient prophet of disaster that the adoption of vegetarianism will necessarily be gradual, and further that vegetarians do _not_ hold the life of animals to be "as sacred as human life." To critics who do not even ascertain what the system means before they reject it, and who ignore all consideration of the degrees and relative sacredness of the various forms of life, vegetarianism must naturally seem to be a confused jumble of thought—the confusion, in reality, being altogether on their own side.

ALARMIST: There is another aspect of this question, and
a very grave one. If flesh-eating were abolished, what
would become of the animals?

VEGETARIAN: Yes, let us talk about that fearful
contingency. You think they would be thrown out of
employment, so to speak—would find their careers cut
short, or rather left long?

ALARMIST: It is no joking matter. Would they not run
wild in ever-increasing numbers, and perhaps overrun the
land, or, if food failed them, lie dead and dying about
our roadways and suburbs?

VEGETARIAN: Before I relieve your anxiety on this point,
may I just remark that this second difficulty seems
to counterbalance the former one? If every suburban
householder is likely to have a dead ox against his
garden-gate, we evidently need not fear the failure
of the leather and tallow trade. But once again you
are mistaken. You have overlooked the fact that the
breeding of animals is not free and unrestricted, but
is kept within certain limits, and carefully regulated
by man; so that if the demand for butchers' meat should
gradually decline, there would be no more alarming
result than a corresponding gradual decline in the
supply from the breeder.

ALARMIST: Well, I don't know. I sadly doubt whether
things would balance themselves so comfortably.

VEGETARIAN: Ah, you think that some neglected old
porker, like Scott's "Last Minstrel," would be left out
in the cold.

"For, well-a-day! their date was fled,
His tuneful brethren all were dead;
And he, neglected and oppressed,
Longed to be with them and at rest."

But no; for look at the case of the donkey. We do
not (knowingly) eat donkeys, yet a dead donkey is
proverbially a rare sight. Nor are we overrun with
donkeys—at least, not in the sense referred to.

ALARMIST: Yet I understand that in India, where there is
a reluctance to kill animals, they are often in wretched
plight.

_Vegetarian_: True; but we were talking not of _killing_
animals but of _eating_ them. Vegetarianism is not
Brahminism; we would kill when necessary, whether for
our own sake or the animals', but we would not breed
them in vast numbers in order to kill, nor kill them in
order to eat. Surely the distinction is a clear one?

The attitude of vegetarians towards this subject is indeed plain enough for those who wish to understand it. Regarding the slaughter of animals for food as cruel and unnecessary, they advocate its discontinuance (a process which, if it comes about at all, will, as I have shown, be a gradual one, and will at no point cause any sudden disruption of existing conditions), but this does not commit them to the absurd belief that animal life, in all its various grades, is absolutely sacred and inviolable. Must we not suspect that the apologists of flesh-eating who make these childish alarums and excursions are fain to do so from some inner conviction of the weakness of their own case?

BIBLE AND BEEF

"Bible and Beer" is the title that is sometimes sarcastically applied to the political alliance between churchmen and publicans; and in like manner the dietetic alliance between the "unco' guid" and the butchers may be not inaptly designated as Bible and Beef. When all else fails, the authority of Holy Writ is triumphantly cited by the bibliolatrous flesh-eater as the great court of appeal to which the food question must be carried; and here at least, it is pleaded, there can be no doubt as to the verdict. "It seems to me," wrote Dr. William Paley, more than a hundred years ago, "that it would be difficult to defend this right [to the flesh of animals] by any arguments which the light and order of Nature afford, and that we are beholden for it to the permission recorded in Scripture."[47]

Footnote 47:

"Moral and Political Philosophy."

It is a far cry from the theologian of 1784 to the _Meat Trades' Journal_ of to-day, but from an editorial article we learn that the organ of the butchering trade is animated by the same profound sense of piety. "The great Creator of all flesh," it says, "gave us the beasts of the field, not only for our food, but for other purposes equally as essential to us. The grass must be eaten by our flocks and herds, otherwise the fertility of the soil would vanish. It was a frightful punishment on the Egyptian [_sic_] King that he should be reduced to the level of the beasts of the field and eat grass."[48]

Footnote 48:

November 19, 1892.

Now, waiving the fact that grass is not precisely the diet that vegetarians adopt, and that it is, therefore, no reproach to vegetarianism if Nebuchadnezzar, not being a ruminant, found such a regimen distasteful, we must recognise that there is a widespread idea among religious people that the lower animals were "sent" us as food, and that the practice of flesh-eating has the seal of biblical sanction. In meeting this prejudice, there is a right line and a wrong line of reasoning, both of which have at different times been followed by vegetarian speakers.

The wrong line is to attempt to answer the texts quoted as favourable to flesh-eating by pitting against them other texts as favourable to vegetarianism—a course which not only degrades the Bible into a text-book for disputants,[49] but also surrenders the most sacred claim of the reformed diet—viz., its appeal not to this or to that textual authority, which some thinkers accept and others deny, but to the universal principle of humanity and justice.

Footnote 49:

As in the epigram,

_Hic liber est in quo quærit sua dogmata quisque,
Invenit et pariter dogmata quisque sua_:

which may be freely rendered,

This is the Book, to dogmatists well-known,
Where each man dogma seeks, and finds—his own.

The right line is to show, first, that it is wholly impossible, in the face of modern knowledge and evolutional science, to maintain the old "anthropocentric" idea which regarded man as the sum and centre of the universe, a monarch for whose special benefit all else was created; and, secondly, that the ancient Hebrew scriptures, whatever be their exact significance for Christian readers (a matter with which we are not here concerned), cannot be regarded as affording any clue to the solution of modern problems which have arisen centuries later. It would be no whit more absurd to argue that negro-slavery is justifiable because it was not condemned in the Bible than to claim scriptural sanction for the cruelties of butchery because the Jews were flesh-eaters. And, indeed, such arguments _have_ been advanced by religious people in support of slavery; we read, for example, the following in John Woolman's journal: "A friend in company began to talk in support of the slave-trade, and said the negroes were understood to be the offspring of Cain, their blackness being the mark which God set upon him after he murdered Abel; that it was the design of Providence they should be slaves, as a condition proper to the race of so wicked a man as Cain was."

But it is now time to introduce the textualist in person.

TEXTUALIST: Well, sir, I understand that you advocate
vegetarianism. What sort of a religion is that?

VEGETARIAN: The real sort—the sort that has to be
_practised_ as well as preached.

TEXTUALIST: If it is the real sort, the proof is easy.
Show me the passages in the Book.

VEGETARIAN: I beg to be excused. I do not bandy texts.

TEXTUALIST: What? You can produce no verses in support
of your religion? I thought vegetarians relied on what
they call the "Ten Best Texts," and here I stand ready
to meet them with five-and-twenty better ones.

VEGETARIAN: I am sorry to disappoint you, but I am not
one of the text-quoting vegetarians. I regard all such
methods of reasoning as wholly irrelevant. There is
not the least doubt that the Jews were a flesh-eating
people; indeed, the very idea of vegetarianism (that is,
a deliberate and permanent disuse of flesh-food for
moral and hygienic reasons) was wholly unknown to them.
What, then, can be the use of hunting up Bible-texts
which do not refer, one way or the other, to the point
at issue?

TEXTUALIST: But if it was unknown and unmentioned in the
Bible, what hope for vegetarianism? It perishes like all
else that is unscriptural.

VEGETARIAN: The same hope as for the abolition of
slavery, or any other humane cause that has had birth in
our modern era. We live and learn.

TEXTUALIST: But it is written, "Rise, Peter, kill and
eat." What is your answer to that?

VEGETARIAN: It needs no answer, as you will see if you
study the context.

TEXTUALIST: Then you have not a single text to set
against the injunction with which I confront you?

VEGETARIAN: Not one—unless it be, "Answer not a fool
according to his folly."

To repel texts with texts is a futility to which vegetarians as a body have fortunately not committed themselves, because vegetarianism appeals, without reference to religion, to the common sentiment of humaneness, and numbers amongst its adherents men of every nationality and creed. If biblical vegetarians have engaged in controversy with biblical flesh-eaters, that is their own concern; and we may rest assured that the battle will be a sham one, as the firing is with blank cartridge on both sides.

Apart, however, from such irrational argument, there is a sense in which an appeal may be fairly made to the Bible, as to any other great ethnical scripture or world-literature—that is, to the spirit, as distinguished from the letter, the context as distinguished from the text. That vegetarians, preaching and practising a doctrine of love and humaneness, should quote, "Behold I have given you every herb bearing seed ... to you it shall be for meat," as indicating the ideal primitive diet, and "They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain," as prophetic of the ideal future, is just and appropriate, for such passages, though dealing with poetry rather than fact, are far more suggestive than any textual evidence; and when we come to ask what is the spirit of the New Testament towards such instincts as that from which vegetarianism springs—the desire to increase the happiness and lessen the suffering of all sentient life—it is plain that here, at least, the vegetarian is on unassailable ground.

But the answer to the biblical flesh-eater lies still nearer at hand. For the moment any attempt is made by him to ally the modern religious spirit with the maintenance of the slaughter-house, the incongruity of his position is revealed. Take "grace before meat," for instance, and note the flat impiety of offering thanks to God over the body of a fellow-being that has been cruelly slaughtered for the sake of our "pleasures of the table." As Leigh Hunt has remarked: "It is not creditable to a thinking people that the two things they most thank God for should be eating and fighting. We say grace when we are going to cut up lamb and chicken, and when we have stuffed ourselves with both to an extent that an orang-outang would be ashamed of; and we offer up our best praises to the Creator for having blown and sabred his 'images,' our fellow-creatures, to atoms, and drenched them in blood and dirt. This is odd. Strange that we should keep our most pious transports for the lowest of our appetites and the most melancholy of our necessities; that we should never be wrought up into paroxysms of holy gratitude, but for bubble-and-squeak or a good-sized massacre!"

But why, it may be asked, if the practice of flesh-eating is such as it is here described, do "religious" people acquiesce in it? Why indeed! except that, in these personal matters of every-day life, the religionism of to-day, like the stoicism of old, has a tendency to respect the letter, but disregard the spirit of its principles. The complaint which modern vegetarianism brings against the religious flesh-eaters is that which the humaner philosophy made, centuries ago, against the carnivorous stoics:

"Who is this censor who is so loud against the
indulgence of the body and the luxuries of the kitchen?
Why do they denounce pleasure as effeminate indulgence,
and make so much fuss about it all? Surely it had been
more logical if, while banishing from the table
sweet-meats and perfumes, they had exhibited yet more
indignation against the diet of blood! For as though all
their philosophy merely regarded household accounts,
they are simply interested in cutting down dinner
expenses, so far as concerns the superfluous dainties of
the table. They have no idea of deprecating what is
murderous and cruel."[50]

Footnote 50:

Plutarch, "On Flesh-Eating," quoted in "The Ethics of Diet,"
by Howard Williams.

And so is it nowadays with the champions of Bible and Beef, for, like all formalists, they sacrifice the substance of religion to the shadow, and while for ever quoting the sacred names of justice and loving-kindness, not only oppose those principles when in conflict with their own appetites, but actually base their opposition on the authority of their "scripture." It would be impossible to do the Bible a deadlier wrong than this; for whether it be "inspired" or not, it is by universal consent a great literary monument, and those who profess to reverence it most should be the last to wish to utilise it as a handbook for reactionists—a store from which to draw irrelevant quotations for obstructing the progress of reform.

THE FLESH-EATER'S KITH AND KIN

There is nothing so pleasant as the reunion of long-separated kinsfolk, and it is the cheerful duty of this chapter to exhibit the flesh-eater in what may be called his domestic relationship, to wit, his undoubted, but somewhat forgotten, connection with the cannibal and the blood-sportsman. For, disguise it as he may, he cannot altogether escape the fact that this kinship is a real one. Kreophagist and anthropophagist, butcher and amateur butcher, are but different branches of one and the same great predatory stock. The cannibal and the sportsman are the wicked uncles of the pious flesh-eater, unrespectable descendants from a common ancestry, who have failed to adapt themselves to modern requirements, and, like belated Royalists in a Commonweal, have continued to play the old privileged game when its date is over-past, an indiscretion which has caused them—the cannibal especially—to be ignored as much as possible by their more cautious relatives. We are all familiar with that chapter of "The Egoist" (the "Minor Incident showing an Hereditary Aptitude in the Use of the Knife"), in which the youthful Sir Willoughby Patterne, already an adept at "cutting," is "not at home" to his poor relation, the middle-aged unpresentable lieutenant of marines. "Considerateness dismisses him on the spot without parley." Even such is the attitude of the respectable flesh-eater towards the bloodthirsty cannibal, and in a less extent also towards the devotee of murderous "sport."

But to the student of the food question these antique types have no little interest, as a survival from an earlier and more innocent phase of flesh-eating when the old brutality was as yet untempered by the new spirit of humaneness. They exhibit kreophagy in its extreme logical form—an anachronism, no doubt, and a _reductio ad absurdum_ in the present age—but at least logical, and, therefore, not to be overlooked by those who, in their hostility to food reform, are so fond of appealing to logic.

The sportsman, for instance, is an old-world barbarian born into a civilised era, a representative of the age when flesh-food could only be obtained by the chase, and he is candid enough to avow that he does his killing, not like the butcher, in order to earn a livelihood, but for the brutal reason that he _enjoys_ it. "The instincts of the primeval man," it has been well said, "food-hunting, predatory, self-preserving, re-emerge in the modern: moral sanctions are disregarded, the rights of inferior races are forgotten, and the hunter feels himself, figuratively speaking, naked, savage, bloodthirsty, and unashamed."[51] A butcher he certainly is, but an amateur butcher only, for it can hardly be contended that the preserving of game increases the national food-supply, in view of the fact that pheasants, hares, and even rabbits, are sold at a price far below their actual cost of production, and are thus a direct tax on the public resources. The blood-sportsman, then, is a member of the carnivorous family by another line of descent, which has kept a touch of the rank primitive wildness even to the present day; and this one thing alone can be said in his favour, that when he butchers in sport, he at least does the butchery himself, and does not delegate the filthy task to others. He is his own slaughterman—a mere and simple savage.

Footnote 51:

Robert Buchanan. Preface to J. Connell's "The Truth about the
Game Laws."

Cannibalism, again, is simply flesh-eating, free from those sentimental "restrictions" which Sir Henry Thompson and his fellow scientists deplore, and the cannibal's only fault, judged from the scientist's standpoint, is that he carries out the scientific doctrine not wisely but too well. For this reason every lecture on vegetarianism ought to touch on cannibalism as illustrating a past chapter in the great history of diet—a past chapter as regards the leading and so-called civilised nations, but to this day a present and very instructive chapter in the world's remoter regions, from which we may learn certain lessons as to the feelings, arguments, and fallacies that attend the gradual process of transition from one dietetic habit to another. The flesh-eater generally affects to look on cannibalism as something monstrous and abnormal, a dreadful perversion of taste which has no connection with the civilised meat-diet on which our welfare is supposed to depend; but the real facts show that the truth is quite otherwise, and that the position of the cannibal who is being proselytised to give up his man-eating is in many ways analogous to that of the flesh-eater who is worried by the vegetarian propagandists. The glories of the old English roast beef may be instructively compared with the glories of the old African roast man.

It is amusing to observe that the kreophagist who, on the one side, regards abstinence from flesh food as an absurd delusion is equally confident that cannibalism, on the other side, is an unpardonable infamy, forgetting that many of the excuses that are made for flesh-eating might be made with as much justice for cannibalism also. "Prejudice is strange," says Professor Flinders Petrie. "A large part of mankind are cannibals, and still more, perhaps all, have been so, including our own forefathers, for Jerome describes the Atticotti, a British tribe, as preferring human flesh to that of cattle.... Does the utilitarian object? Yet one main purpose of the custom is utility; in its best and innocent forms it certainly gives the greatest happiness to the greatest number."[52] Nor can it be held that all cannibals are a specially degraded race, for Livingstone and later travellers quote well-authenticated instances to show that tribes addicted to man-eating are sometimes more advanced, mentally and physically, than those which abstain from such diet; and as to the hygienic merits of the regimen, does it not stand on record, in an old English ballad, that Richard Cœur de Lion was cured of a dangerous malady by eating a Turk's head, which was served up to him as the best substitute for pork? The kreophagist at present is able to pass unlimited censure on the cannibal, because the poor savage has not the wit to argue with the civilised man; but if, in these days of University Extension schemes, such a person as a scientific anthropophagist should ever make his appearance, who can say that the position might not be somewhat reversed?

Footnote 52:

For interesting facts concerning cannibalism, see Professor W.
M. Flinders Petrie's article, _Contemporary Review_, June
1897; "The Fall of the Congo Arabs," by Captain Sidney L.
Hinde, 1897; and "The Land of the Pigmies," by Captain Guy
Burrows, 1899.

VEGETARIAN: Let me introduce you, gentlemen. You are
blood-relations, I think, and should have much to say to
each other. The Kreophagist—the Anthropophagist.

KREOPHAGIST: Good morning, uncle. But I cannot admit the
relationship if it is true that you are addicted to the
atrocious habit of cannibalism.

ANTHROPOPHAGIST: How atrocious, nephew? If you eat one
kind of flesh, why should you abstain from another? Are
you aware that they are chemically identical? Pig or
"long pig"—where is the difference?

KREOPHAGIST: Where is the difference? Can you ask me
such a question?

VEGETARIAN: It is uncommonly like the question you have
been asking _me_!

ANTHROPOPHAGIST: Your objection to human flesh is
altogether a sentimental one. You are a food faddist. It
is the universal law of nature that animals should prey
on one another.

KREOPHAGIST: It is not _my_ nature to eat my
fellow-beings.

VEGETARIAN: Why, that is the very same answer that I
made to _you_!

ANTHROPOPHAGIST: And pray, what would become of our
paupers, criminals, lunatics, and sick folk, if we did
not eat them? Would they not grow to a great residuum
and overrun the land? And the missionaries, too—are they
not "sent" us as food? And what right have you to the
name _omnivorous_, if you restrict your diet in this
way? Why "omnivorous"?

The discontinuance of cannibalism marks, of course, an immense step in humane progress, and so long as the kreophagist does not absurdly claim that it is a _final_ step, his case against the anthropophagist is a sure one; but if, while denouncing anthropophagy as a barbarism of the past, he refuses to see that flesh-eating must also, in turn, be replaced by a more humane diet, he lays himself open to a raking fire of criticism. Observe, for example, in view of the historical facts of cannibalism, the absolute helplessness of Sir Henry Thompson's position, when, as an objection to vegetarianism, he argues that "the very idea of _restricting_ our resources and supplies is a step backwards, a distinct reversion to the rude and distant savagery of the past, a sign of decadence rather than of advance." It is true that mankind has, on the whole, largely extended its resources; but it is none the less true that, while it has acquired many new foods, it has abandoned certain old ones. It has advanced, in short, as already stated, by a process not of omnivorism, but of eclecticism, which implies not only acceptance, but rejection—a fact which knocks Sir Henry Thompson's reasoning to atoms.

The power which has condemned cannibalism is that growing instinct of humaneness which makes it impossible for men to prey on their fellow-beings when once recognised as such. A notable passage in one of Olive Schreiner's works may be quoted in illustration:

"In those days, which men reck not of now, man, when
he hungered, fed on the flesh of his fellow-man and
found it sweet. Yet even in those days it came to pass
that there was one whose head was higher than her
fellows and her thought keener, and as she picked the
flesh from a human skull she pondered. And so it came to
pass that the next night, when men were gathered round
the fire ready to eat, she stole away, and when they
went to the tree where the victim was bound, they found
him gone. And they cried one to another, 'She, only
she, has done this, who has always said, I like not the
taste of man-flesh; men are too like me: I cannot eat
them.' Into the heads of certain men and women a new
thought had taken root; they said, 'There is something
evil in the taste of human flesh.' And ever after, when
the flesh-pots were filled with man-flesh, these stood
aside, and half the tribe ate human flesh and half not;
then, as the years passed, none ate."[53]

Footnote 53:

"Trooper Peter Halket."

A strange comment this on the Andrew Wilson formula, that we should eat "that which is likest to our own composition!" For what if we have begun to recognise that the lower animals also are related to us by a close bond of kinship? From our knowledge of the past we form our judgment of the future, and see, with Thoreau, that "it is part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilised."[54]

Footnote 54:

Walden, "Higher Laws."

VEGETARIANISM AS RELATED TO OTHER REFORMS

It is sometimes held by the champions of vegetarianism that reform of diet is the starting-point and foundation-stone of all other reform—a panacea for the ills and maladies of the world. This over-estimate on the part of a few enthusiasts of an unpopular cause is due, presumably, to a revolt from the contrary extreme of depreciation; for a little thought must show us that, in the complexity of modern life, there is no such thing as a panacea for social ailments, and that, as there is no royal road to knowledge, so there is no royal road to reform. It is impossible for vegetarianism to solve the social question, unless by alliance with various other reforms that are advancing _pari passu_—so interlocked and interdependent are all these struggles towards freedom. It has been well said that, "By humanitarians, socialists, vegetarians, anti-vivisectionists, teetotalers, land-reformers, and all such seekers of human welfare, this must be borne in mind—that each of their particular efforts is but a detail of the whole work of social regeneration, and that we cannot rightly understand and direct our own little piece of effort unless we know it, and pursue it, as part of the great whole."[55]

Footnote 55:

The _New Charter_, "The Humanitarian View."

Still more mistaken, on the other hand, is that common prejudice against food reform which would exclude it altogether from the dignity of propagandism, and would limit it to the personal practice of individuals. "There can be no objection," says Dr. Burney Yeo, "to individuals adopting any kind of diet which they may find answer their needs and minister to their comfort; it is only when they attempt to enforce what they practise on others that they must expect to encounter rational opposition."[56] Unfortunately, we have learnt by bitter experience that _rational_ opposition is the last thing we can expect to encounter—as, indeed, is made sufficiently evident by Dr. Yeo's argument. For how could individual vegetarians have ever heard of the new diet except for the propaganda? And why have vegetarians, as a body, less right than teetotalers, socialists, or any other propagandists, not to "enforce," but to _advocate_ their philosophy of diet with the view of ultimately influencing public opinion? This professional attempt to class vegetarianism as an idiosyncrasy, and not a system, is as irrational as it is insincere, and what its insincerity is may be seen from the fact that, though we are told at one moment that "there can be no objection" to individual practice of the diet, yet whenever individuals do attempt to practise it, they meet with the strongest possible objection from the doctors themselves!

Footnote 56:

"Foods in Health and Disease."

Thus it comes about that in this progressive age, and even among those who label themselves "progressives," vegetarianism is so frequently regarded as a mere whim and crotchet, with no practical bearing on the forward movement of to-day. It is a marvel that so many "advanced" journals, which have a good word for a host of worthy causes that are fighting an uphill battle against monopoly and injustice—social reform, land reform, law reform, prison reform, hospital reform, and a hundred more—are dumb as death, or speak only to sneer, when the subject is food reform; and thus lead their readers to suppose that, whereas on all other matters there has been a great change of feeling during the past half-century, on the one matter of diet there has been no sort of progress! Yet they might easily learn, if they made serious inquiry, that the reformed dietetics, so far from being the outcome of mere sentiment about animals, have a past record based as surely on moral and scientific reasoning as that of any cause included in the progressive programme. Vegetarianism is, in truth, _progressiveness in diet_; and for a progressive to scout such ideas as valueless and Utopian is to play the part (as far as diet is concerned) of a reactionist. What is the meaning of this strange discrepancy? It must mean, we fear, that to a large number of our social reformers the reform of other persons is a much more congenial battle cry than the reform of one's self. _Hinc illæ lacrymæ._ They call vegetarianism "impracticable" for the strange reason that, unlike most _isms_, it asks them to do something individually which they know they _could_ do—if they wished! It is impracticable because it does not suit them to practise it.

REFORMER: Let me entreat you; give up this fanciful
scheme of vegetarianism and come and work for social
reform.

VEGETARIAN: Social reform without food reform! Is not
that rather a lame and lop-sided business?

REFORMER: Not at all. When we have so many things to do
we must do the most important ones first.

VEGETARIAN: And what are the most important?

REFORMER: Well, there is international peace and
arbitration. You will admit that our first duty is to
avoid unnecessary bloodshed.

VEGETARIAN: Ah, I see! And the habit of _living_ by
bloodshed doesn't come within your scope!

REFORMER: Then there is the land question, and the need
of relieving the congestion of our crowded cities by the
revival of agriculture.

VEGETARIAN: So, of course, you can't attend to a
diet-system which would bring people back to the land!

REFORMER: There is also the temperance problem—the
terrible evils of the drink crave.

VEGETARIAN: Which would disappear for the most part if
we left off eating flesh.

REFORMER: And the welfare of animals—for to that also I
devote myself. We need some stringent legislation for
the better prevention of cruelty.

VEGETARIAN: We do. But as such legislation would leave
your reformers dinnerless, don't you think you should
revise your dietary meantime? Your reforms are
excellent, I grant you; but what of _self-reform_? Does
not reform, like charity, begin at home?

REFORMER: Well, well; to everyone his taste—reform or
self-reform. I prefer the former; you the latter, I
suppose.

VEGETARIAN: No; that is just where you are mistaken. I
prefer both at once.

Reform _and_ self-reform, not reform _or_ self-reform—that is the true key to the solution of the social question. The work that we can do ourselves is the most wholesome condiment for the work that we can only do through society. And here let me express the hope that, as a matter of policy, vegetarians will stand aloof from all "philanthropic" schemes of _vicarious_ food reform in prisons, reformatories, and workhouses; for there is no surer way of making a principle unpopular than by forcing it on the poor and helpless, while carefully avoiding it one's self. Philanthropists, if they be philanthropists, will practise what they preach; by their practice we shall know them.

To the so-called ethical, no less than to the political, school of thought the question of vegetarianism is unwelcome, obtruding as it does on the polite wordiness of learned discussion with an issue so coarsely downright: "You are a member of an ethical society—do you live by butchery?" But the ethics of diet are the very last subject with which a cultured ethical society would concern itself, and the attitude of the modern "ethicist" towards the rights of animals is still that of the medieval schoolman. The ethicist does not wish to forego his beef and mutton, so he frames his ethics to avoid the danger of such mishap, and while he talks of high themes with the serene wisdom of a philosopher the slaughter-houses continue to run blood. We surmise that the royal founder and archetype of ethical societies was that learned but futile monarch referred to in the epitaph:

Here lies our mutton-loving king,
Whose word no man relies on:
He never _said_ a foolish thing,
And never _did_ a wise one.

So, too, throughout the whole field of hygiene, temperance, and plain living, to ignore vegetarianism is to ignore one of the most potent influences for self-restraint. One is reluctant to quote the late Sir Henry Thompson in any matter that tends to the praise of vegetarianism, in view of the extreme irritability which that distinguished scientist exhibited as regards his sacred text, with which you could never take the liberty of assuming that, when it distinctly said one thing, it did not mean the opposite; yet he _did_ say that "a proportion amounting at least to more than one-half of the disease which embitters the middle and latter part of life, among the middle and upper classes of the population, is due to avoidable errors in diet."[57] If this be so, it is obvious that diet reform (of some sort) is very urgently needed; and I submit that it would be difficult to frame any intelligible scheme of diet reform in which vegetarian principles should play no part, embracing, as they do, all the best features of temperance and frugality. What is the use of for ever preaching about the avoidance of luxuries and stimulants, if you rule out of your system the one dietary which makes stimulants and luxuries impossible? The relation of vegetarianism to temperance, of the food question to the drink question, is that of the greater which includes the less.

Footnote 57:

_Nineteenth Century_, May, 1885.

But it is when we turn from philanthropy to zoophily, and to the questions more particularly affecting the welfare of animals, that the importance of vegetarianism, in spite of the stubborn attempts of the old-fashioned "animal lovers" to overlook it, is most marked. Here, again, I do not share the extreme vegetarian view that food reform is the _foundation_ of other reforms, for I think it can be shown that all cruelties to animals, whether inflicted in the interests of the dinner-table, the laboratory, the hunting-field, or any other institution, are the outcome of one and the same error—the blindness which can see no unity and kinship, but only difference and division, between the human and the non-human race. This blindness it is—this crass denial of a common origin, a common nature, a common structure, and common pleasures and pains—that has alone hardened men in all ages of the world, civilised or barbarous, to inflict such fiendish outrages on their harmless fellow-beings; and to remove this blindness we need, it seems to me, a deeper and more radical remedy than the reform of sport, or of physiological methods, or even of diet alone. The only real cure for the evil is the growing sense that the lower animals are closely akin to us, and have rights.

And here we see the inevitable logic of vegetarianism, if our belief in the rights of animals is ever to quit the stage of theory and enter the stage of fact; for just as there can be no human rights where there is slavery, so there can be no animal rights where there is eating of flesh. "To keep a man, slave or servant," says Edward Carpenter, "for your own advantage merely, to keep an animal that you may _eat_ it, is a lie; you cannot look that man or animal in the face." I am not saying that it is not a good thing that, quite apart from food reform, anti-vivisectionists should be denouncing the doings of "the scientific inquisition," while humanitarians of another school are exposing the horrors of sport, for cruelty is a many-headed monster, and there must at times be a concentration of energy on a particular spot; but I do say that any reasoned principle of kindness to animals which leaves vegetarianism outside its scope is, in the very nature of things, foredoomed to failure.[58]

Footnote 58:

Take, for example, the rule to which some bird-lovers bind
themselves, to wear no feathers but those of birds killed for
food. One is reminded of Thomas Paine's epigram: "They pity
the plumage, but forget the dying bird."

Vegetarianism is an essential part of any true zoophily, and the reason why it is not more generally recognised as such is the same as that which excludes it from the plan of the progressive—that it is so upsetting to the every-day habits of the average man. Few of us, comparatively, care to murder birds in "sport," and still fewer to cut up living animals in the supposed interests of "science," but we have all been taught to regard flesh food as a necessity, and it is a matter, at first, of some effort and self-denial to rid ourselves of complicity in butchering. Herein is at once the strength and the weakness of the case for vegetarianism—the strength as regards its logic, and the weakness as regards its unpopularity—that it makes more direct personal demand on the earnestness of its believers than other forms of zoophily do; for which reason there is a widespread, though perhaps unconscious, tendency among zoophilists to evade it.

Yet that such evasion is a blunder may be seen from the outcry raised against it not by vegetarians only, but by the vivisectionists and sportsmen themselves, who are quick to ask the zoophilists why, if they are so eager for the well-being of the animals, they do not desist from eating them—a question which, however insincere in the mouths of some who propound it, must at least be allowed to be logical. For it is simple truth that though vivisection is a more refined and diabolical torture, and sport a more stupidly wanton one, the _sum_ of suffering that results from the practice of flesh-eating is greater and more disastrous than either, and by being so familiarly paraded in our streets is a cause of wider demoralisation. When one thinks of the aimless and stunted life, as well as the barbarous death, of the wretched victims of the slaughter-house, bred as they are for no better purpose than to be unnaturally fattened for the table, it makes one marvel that so many kindly folk, keenly sensitive to the cruelties inflicted elsewhere, should be utterly deaf and blind to the doings of their family butcher. The zoophilist loves to quote the famous lines of Coleridge:

He prayeth best who loveth best
All things both great and small.

But what kind of "love" is that which eats the object of its affection? There are hidden rocks in that poetical passage which a sense of humour should indicate to the pilot of zoophily.

Our position, therefore, is this—that while we make no exaggerated claim for vegetarianism, as in itself a panacea for human ills and animal sufferings, we insist on the rational view that reform of diet is an indispensable branch of social organisation, and that it is idle to talk of recognising "rights of animals" so long as we unconcernedly _eat_ them. Vegetarianism is no more and no less than an essential part in the highly complex engine which is to shape the fabric of a new social structure, an engine which will not work if a single screw be missing. The part without the whole is undeniably powerless; but so also, as it happens, is the whole without the part.

CONCLUSION